Beat box.
Rhythm-based platformers have a decent niche in the indie space between the notoriously difficult, like the rage-tastic Geometry Dash and The Impossible Game, and the friendlier (but still difficult) Beatbuddy and bit.Trip Runner. Inside My Radio fits more in the latter category, showcased at the Xbox Lounge at GDC 2015 alongside other upcoming Xbox titles like Screamride. For added acclaim, Inside My Radio has received official selections at a host of indie festivals, so it's definitely earned its place.
Framed by a fairly simply story, the game features a green LED square named Taek who just wants to fix his broken boombox. But a dark force is destroying the boombox from within, so Taek is absorbed inside and must revive the music of electro, dub, and disco to bring it back to life. In the short three-level demo, you'll unlock other character like the disco-rific Barry and the funkalicious Roots, but both of them still come in the shape of a square who can bounce and hop along a linear track.
As a rhythm-driven platformer, Inside My Radio is all about timing and nothing works without pressing the appropriate button on the beat. Jumping onto platforms, scaling walls, and slamming into barriers must all be done in rhythm to the background music. Otherwise, the character you control simply fails and typically falls to his doom from mid-air.
The Seaven Studio co-founder, Olivier Penot, mentioned that I was having far less difficulty with the rhythm-based elements, with most players taking a bit of trial and error to become accustomed to the music-driven platforming. Even so, there are plenty of checkpoints (at least in the demo) so falling into a pit or hitting one of the electricity fields isn't as punishing as other games in the genre.
In a certain light, this indie can be seen as a natural extension of Sound Shapes, if a small developer from France took its tools and turned it into a fully-fledged platformer. At various points in a level, you can control various switches and synthesizers, which will change different layers of the soundtrack to your choosing. It doesn't seem to have much impact on the gameplay itself, but it does add an element of user-created uniqueness to the level in the same way that remix tools do in Fantasia: Music Evolved. Otherwise, there will be switches that your character can flip in order to move platforms in specific directions or to form stairs based on an equalizer.
Inside My Radio releases on Steam in Q2 and will be release on Xbox One later.
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GDC 2015
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Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward Preview
First revealed at the 2014 Fan Fest in Las Vegas, Heavensward (pronounced "Heavens-word") will increase the level cap from 50 to 60 and finally introduce Ishgard and Dravania as playable areas for the swathes of fans itching to visit the mysterious islands in the sky. Square Enix won't be stopping there either, creating three new jobs and adding the much-awaited flying mounts, but let's take our time with this information reveal.
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Inside My Radio Preview
Rhythm-based platformers have a decent niche in the indie space between the notoriously difficult, like the rage-tastic Geometry Dash and The Impossible Game, and the friendlier (but still difficult) Beatbuddy and bit.Trip Runner. Inside My Radio fits more in the latter category, showcased at the Xbox Lounge at GDC 2015 alongside other upcoming Xbox titles like Screamride. For added acclaim, Inside My Radio has received official selections at a host of indie festivals, so it's definitely earned its place.
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PlayStation Topping Xbox on Indie Front
Between PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, PlayStation has the upper hand when it comes to independent games, says Mike Rose of tinyBuild Games based on his microtalk at GDC 2015 entitled "The Turning Tide: Independent Game Sales in 2015."
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Valve Partnering With HTC for Steam VR Headset, Vive
HTC announced today that it will be partnering with Valve to create Vive, a virtual reality headset that is built with Valve's Steam platform in mind. The device comes equipped with two 1200 x 1080 displays, each with 90 FPS refresh rates. As one would expect, it supports full 360 degree viewing and tracks head position using gyro sensors and accelerometers. A pair of controllers will be included with the device as well.
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AER Preview
If I had to highlight the most exciting game I saw at GDC on the first day of the con, it would be Swedish game developer forgottenkey's AER, an exploratory game with stealth and puzzle elements built around the idea of flight. The gameplay I saw of AER was very early (it's targeting a 2016 release), and visually sits somewhere between El Shaddai and Okami, with broad gestural shapes and impressionistic visuals.
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Doing Cinematic Games Right
Weise's talk, titled, "Cinematic Games are Dead! Long Live Cinematic Games!" began with a deconstruction of the genre, starting with TRON and the Atari 2600 ET game, showing screenshots of each alongside the films themselves to talk about what he called the "Representational Gap." Specifically, he discussed how the disparity between movie visuals and game visuals had created an arms race, where games were constantly chasing that higher degree of realistic fidelity.
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Building Better Educational Games
While one might assume the best talks at GDC would be those by AAA developers getting into the nitty-gritty of designing their choice aspect of a game, the best talks I attend are usually ones I stumble into to fill gaps in my schedule. This was certainly true of Anne DeMarle's talk, "Breakaway: A Narrative Game's Success at Addressing Gender-Based Violence." DeMarle and her team of student developers at Champlain created a game called Breakaway with funding from the United Nations Population Fund to target the global issue of boys bullying girls, with the goal of reducing gender-based violence. rn rnRead more... -
Project Morpheus Release Window Revealed
Project Morpheus, Sony's virtual reality headset built specifically for PlayStation 4, will release in the first half of 2016, the company revealed at Game Developers Conference 2015.
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Source 2 Engine Announced
During GDC 2015 Valve revealed its new development engine, Source 2, which will be available to developers for free. Like the name implies, Source 2 is the follow-up to Valve's original Source engine, which has been used to power games like Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2.
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Valve Unveils Game-Streaming Box Steam Link
During GDC 2015, Valve announced a new piece of hardware. Dubbed Steam Link, this nifty little set-top box will allow gamers to stream content from their PC, Mac, Steam Machine, etc., so long as it's on the same home network.
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Nvidia Announces New Gaming Console
During its GDC 2015 conference, Nvidia announced a new gaming console it will be adding to its lineup of Shield devices. It's an Android-based machine capable of 4K playback and capture, and packs a Tegra X1 processor with a 256-bit Maxwell GPU and 3GB of memory.
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Magic Duels: Origins Preview
In short, they've listened. Magic 2015: Duels of the Planeswalker was not what fans wanted, with starter deck issues, DLC collection packs, a small selection of cards, loss of many side modes, and a cumbersome user interface. Given a 2.5-star rating by yours truly, it tarnished what was a fairly successful video game adaptation of the reputable card-based game by Wizard of the Coast. But Magic Duels: Origins, the new entry in the series, will undo much of the damage, or so the developers swear.
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Sword Coast Legends Preview
From Dragon Age: Origins to Divinity: Original Sin, the d20-based RPG has been a mainstay in gaming whose flame will hopefully never extinguish. Sword Coast Legends, the upcoming RPG from n-Space and Digital Extremes with a partnership with Wizards of the Coast, plans to continue the tradition of the genre and modernize it by adding a Dungeon Master mode, a mode where one player can guide and challenge a team of players in real-time. It reminds me of a time when I would take out my aggression on poor fools by spawning ogres and cutting their character's feet off for rolling critical failures. Such fun! rn rnRead more... -
Swords & Soldiers II Preview
Ronimo Games is back with the newest game in the Swords & Soldiers series which originally launched in 2009 on WiiWare and later released on PSN, PC, Mac, and iOS. Swords & Soldiers II is a real-time 2D side-scroller strategy game with great artwork and a huge fun factor. Although it shares an art style and general gameplay mechanics with its predecessor, there have been numerous game mechanic tweaks implemented that vastly improve the battle experience as well as two completely brand new factions to play as.
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Amplitude Preview
Playing the upcoming Kickstarted reboot for Amplitude was like visiting an old friend. As I wrote in my Developer Spotlight on Harmonix, I cleared every song on every difficulty for the original 2003 release of Amplitude on PS2, and it's one of the reasons I became smitten with the rhythm genre. So after seeing the Amplitude reboot in the corner of my eye available as a demo at PlayStation's booth at GDC 2015, I knew I couldn't miss out. After all, blasting capsules while flipping between tracks has become one of my best (albeit most useless) skills.
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Fable Legends Preview
It's easier not to think of Fable Legends as having much to do with the Fable series at all apart from the name and the plot. That will make this free-to-play fantasy cooperative asymmetrical multiplayer title (that's a mouthful!) far more understandable, or else you may attempt to make comparisons to main Fable games and tumble into a pit of confusion. Available for demo at GDC 2015 between five players, with one cast as the dungeon-master villain and the other four as party characters, Fable Legends showed that it's well on its way for a polished release. rn rnRead more...
