Our Favorite Things in 2012

Happy New Year! 2012 was a great year at Pixel and Texel. We spent most of it developing our new title, as well as finishing support for Fara and a few other projects. Any year that we get to spend our days developing games and working on new things is a success. Sometimes it's easy to focus on the future (what are going to make next?!, what should we do?!, etc!), but we are incredibly lucky guys to just be making games TODAY.

Okay, now that we've got all that philosphical junk out of the way, on to some fun lists! Everyone seems to make these at the end of the year, and we always enjoy reading/discussing/disagreeing with them. So, without further ado, here are things that we loved in 2012!

**Note, Andrew's list are things that actually came out in 2012. Brett's are just things he liked, because, well, he tends to wait until holidays and birthdays for his games, so he is usually a year behind. Also, he is grumpy and likes what he likes, dangit. Regardless of the year!**

Andrew's List:

Games: 

Sound Shapes (Vita) -Brilliant platforming design. THE reason to own a Vita.

The Walking Dead (PS3) -Probably the best story in a game ever. Not sure how much gameplay is really there, but I didn't care.

Persona 4 Golden (Vita) -Completely addicting, strange and engrossing. I ended up caring more about the daily life of Inaba than actually fighting through dungeons.

Resident Evil Revelations (3DS) -The best Resident Evil game this year (and I actually liked 6!). Tense, gripping survival horror.

True Skate (iOS) -I love this game. It is basically just a sandbox to play in (with a virtual skateboard), but I played it until my fingers cramped. The skateboard just "feels" right.

Music: 

High on Fire - De Vermis Mysteriis -Amazing sludge metal from the best metal band around.

Gemma Hayes - Let It Break -Brave, ethereal songwriting from Ireland. 

Tanlines - Mixed Emotions -This album was sorta trendy. But I really like it a lot. Synthesizers, beat heavy, great lyrics.

Hard Girls - Isn't It Worse -The best punk album of the year. Passionate and real. I cannot stress enough how good this is.

Sharks - No Gods -The Clash meets something newer. Absolutely great songs.

Movies:

Moonrise Kingdom -Probably the best Wes Anderson film in a long time. A great intersection of drama, comedy and surrealism.

The Dark Knight Rises -A fitting end to the trilogy. Some people didn't like it. These people also don't like good things.

The Cabin in the Woods -Incredible horror/comedy/parody. The last 15 minutes are amazing.

Bernie -Jack Black is so, so good in this one. It also nails the feeling of small town Texas.

Jeff Who Lives at Home -A beautiful, life affirming movie. Jason Segal's best.

Brett's List: 

Games

Skyrim (Xbox 360) *You don't finish Skyrim (But I killed Alduin)

Journey (PS3) *Beat this 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Xbox 360) *Beat this

Sound Shapes (Vita)

Letterpress (iOS)

Music

*Warning!* There is some dubstep, but the list is rather eclectic (Brett's Hypemachine Profile):

http://hypem.com/brett_estabrook

Movies 

Dark Knight Rises

Django Unchained

Looper

Avengers

Moonrise Kingdom

Anime I Got Into:

Steins;Gate 

Ghost in the Shell

Darker than Black 

Black Lagoon

Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom

Cowboy Bebop

Kickstarter Shout Out! - We Did It!

Hey everyone! We wanted to update our blog with a big thank you to everyone who supported our Kickstarter campaign. You guys were incredible and helped us exceed our goal! So here's a shout out to everyone that backed us (sorted by Kickstarter name):

Iron Tier:
Cindy Au, Adam, Adrian K.

Copper Tier:
Craig Snyder, Ben Crowley, Andy Thorington ,orangeman, Curtis Melroe

Bronze Tier: 
Colin Foote, jonkrusell, Rathanak Loeung, Gruesom Grimp, timothy locke, Justin Ng

Silver Tier:
Derek Rundgren, Andy Cope, Brian, Daniel Ragusa, Benedikt Betz, Julien Feraud, Debby Fleming, Josias Valdez, Sarah, Chad Woyewodzic, Kirt Dankmyer, Alan Gerding, lannie.poo, Benjamin Seiler, David Lovely, Jeff Martini, Chuck Lawton, brian papa, Stephan Szabo, Jasmine Choinski, Robert Smith, Chris O'Connor, Rob Klingenberger, Michael Ryan, Payne Eifert, mwuenschel, Ryan Mock, Steve Wilson, Jeff Snider, Martin Tuxen Grandeville, Michael Jacob, Patrick, Kyle McLauchlan, AndreasH, Peter Por, Jonathan Morris, Michael David Johas Teener, Michael Atchison, Tom Hollett, Tom Meier, Masa, James Schirmer, Kent O Hudson, jwalk2515, Shola Akinnuso, Steven King @madrogue, Justin Brede, Palenoue, Brian Jardine

Gold Tier:
Matt Johnston, Heath Morrison, Ben Lewis, Graham, Anne, Lauren, J. Kyle Pittman, Billy Nolen, David Johnson, James Layfield, fbrocks, Joshua Beale, Cynthia Shotwell

Platinum Tier:
David Pittman, Kim Pittman, Jah Raphael, Mary R Proctor, Lane Roathe, Symptomless Coma, Mike Edwards, Sarah Edwards, Justin Cash, Karen D Edwards, Susan K Edwards, Justin Lloyd, Ken Tabor, Skip Hirvela,  Elaine and Gary Wilson

Rare Earth Tier:
William and Mariette Estabrook, Will and Nicole Estabrook, Pam and Richard Strickland, Robert Edwards

Maximum Tune-age: Your Game Needs Music!

Ableton Live WorkspaceFirst off, we'd like to apologize for the lack of frequent posting in our development blog. We've been working on the game very hard as of late, so it has left little time for updates. But, never fear! We promise to hop on every now and again to share our thoughts as the game continues to come together.

Texel recently completed development on the sound system for our game, so lately we have been implementing sounds and I've been writing some music for the game. I thought I'd share a little about this process, as it's been some of the most fun I've had working on our project! First off, I primarily use Ableton Live for my writing, and recommend that anyone with interesting in recording check it out! I've used Logic, Protools, etc. in the past but I really prefer Live and the way it seamlessly lets you try out different compositions. It's fairly user-friendly and there's some great documentation online for getting started with it.

As far as the style of music in our game, I knew that I wanted it to be reminiscent of past classics like Zelda or Ys, but I didn't want to completely ape the chiptune style. I also really enjoy symphonic scores in games, so I decided to incorporate a mix of string samples with old school synthesized sounds (primarily square and triangle wave). So far I've been quite pleased with the results, except for one major issue. Due to our desire to squeeze the maximum performance from our game, we decided to go with 22 kHz, mono .ogg files for our music. Initially, this lower quality did not make too much of a difference (many of the monosynth style sounds I use have quite a bit of noise anyway), but my string samples were really suffering. In order to alleviate the issue, I have had to make sure to stay within a certain "safe" range for my notes (nothing too high or low), as well as avoid too much violin in string sound. As a result, I think I've been able to get pretty good results.

The final thing I'd like to mention in relation to our music is the mastering process. I can't stress enough how important it is to spend some time mastering your music, and trying out different settings with whatever mastering software you use (I'm using some that came with Live). The difference between different levels of compression is pretty amazing, so its worth experimenting some especially when working with music that eventually gets crunched down to 22kHz mono. For instance, I have found that using triple compression (usually a technique used in the loudness war) works well for dealing with our limitations. Additionally, it really helps to have all music at a similarly normalized level, so you don't have to spend all day fixing levels in the game engine itself.

As a final note, we'll make the music from the game available as a full album once the game is released, so be on the lookout!

What's Old is New: Finding the Retro/Modern Balance

Recently, The Smithsonian American Art museum unveiled the winners of a 2012 exhibition that will display videogame art. Out of the 240 nominees, 80 were chosen, and, for the most part (uh....I'm looking at you Battle for Middle Earth II) the choices were sound. Because videogame art seems to be getting a lot of press lately, I thought it would be a great time to discuss the art style for our forthcoming game.

Before starting our project, I thought a lot about how our game should look. We knew it was going to be 2D and I knew that I wanted it to have retro inspired look. However, with Texel's engine, we could do a lot more than simply draw sprites or tiles (as I mentioned in one of our earlier posts), so I also knew that I wanted to incorporate some more modern aspects (like particle effects). The final piece of the puzzle was the fact that the entire game world would be one, large single canvas.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the world should be a highly rendered, painterly environment. With the ability to work on such a large canvas, and no need for repetition, this was a natural choice. Next, I needed to determine the look of the painting. The past few games I've worked on focused more on layer styles in Photoshop, mixed with clean design and occasional cartoon exaggeration. I love this sort of style, but I knew for our game I wanted to try something different, so I opted for a super saturated, detailed oriented look. Also, I made sure to paint from a predetermined palette for each world area, so all of the colors would feel unified. Working in this way has been really enjoyable, and I've loved trying to pack as much detail into every screen as I can.

Once my first area (a beach and a forest) were complete, I began to think about how the characters in the game should be portrayed. My initial impulse was to paint them in the same style as the background, but this yielded terrible results. The main issue was that the characters meshed too much with their surrounding environment, and the whole thing started to feel muddy. Without the ability to easily tell environment from character, I worried the gameplay would suffer.

At this point, I started thinking about past games I've played, in particular The Secret of Mana (which can be found in the gallery at the top of this post). This Super Nintendo classic used outlines around all of its character sprites to differentiate them from the world. As a test, I took my test character, drew a hard black outline around him and placed him on top of my world canvas. The effect was a success, as an easy distinction between the character and the world became apparent. The only remaining issue was that the highly painted character looked out of place with a black outline, which was more reminiscent of classic games (try this site out for great examples of old school pixel art). I tried redrawing him with a more retro inspired flavor and found it not only unified him with the black outline, but the different style helped him stand out from the world even more.

As time wears on and I draw more characters for the game, and look at my completed environments, I feel that I have developed an art style that is beautiful without intruding on gameplay. Because in the end, the game's art style should compliment the game design. After all, that's what makes a video"game" fun, and video"art" something you were forced to talk about in your college art history class.