Nintendo Treehouse Live @ E3 – Affordable Space Adventures
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Videos, Wii U eShop | 0 comments
Off-screen Affordable Space Adventures footage
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Videos, Wii U eShop | 0 comments
More: Affordable Space Adventures, GDC 2014, indie, KnapNok Games, Nifflas, top
Affordable Space Adventures details
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U eShop | 1 Comment
Shacknews published a new preview for Affordable Space Adventures today after getting some hands-on time with the game at GDC. You can find information rounded up from the report – plus a few words from KnapNok co-founder Dajana Dimovska – in our summary below. Shacknews’ full article is located here.
– Take control of a broken-down spaceship
– Ship has endured heavy damage and is stranded on a dangerous planet
– Need to guide it to safety and avoid hazards along the way
– The ship will regain its functionality and slowly regenerate abilities as you play
– Player manually controls all elements of the spaceship’s functions through the GamePad touch screen
– Ex: touch the ignition to activate the ship before flying with the dual control sticks
– More elements of the combustion engine opened up, like thrust engines and stabilizers
– GDC demo lets you switch to an electric engine with its own abilities later on
“Nifflas is the core designer of the spaceship and all the engines. The idea is very inspired by spaceship games in general, but also movies like Star Trek. There was also thinking about properties or engines where we could have different environments, so we came up with this electrical and fuel engine. They’re very different, like one produces heat and one is noisier than the other. We tried to come up with systems that are very different from each other to come up with different kind of gameplay.”
– Stages are straightforward and linear
– Players search for the exit
– Puzzles are tied to the ship’s abilities
– This includes sequences that require aiming with the R button and firing off a beacon to press switches and open doors
– Other puzzles are significantly more dangerous, as hostile robots will begin to litter areas
– You can scan robots to indicate how far their lasers can reach
– Will need to sometimes fly through a robot’s line of sight, but detection is avoidable, as long as certain conditions are met
– Ex: one robot can detect heat, so you have to lower the ship’s thrusters and set the stabilizers to their lowest setting to make sure that they didn’t trigger the robot’s sensors
Affordable Space Adventures screenshots, fact sheet
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Screenshots, Wii U eShop | 1 Comment
KnapNok and Nifflas reveal Affordable Space Adventures for Wii U
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U eShop | 8 Comments
KnapNok Games (Spin the Bottle: Bumpie’s Party) and Nifflas (Knytt Underground) have revealed their collaboration title for the Wii U eShop. Here’s what we know thus far, courtesy of a Gamasutra interview with Nicklas ‘Nifflas’ Nygren and KnapNok’s Dajana Dimovska and Lau Korsgaard:
– Uses the GamePad extensively
– Trying to make “an atmospheric, low-key, very suspenseful game that gets the players excited but a bit scared at the same time, and to have a game where a complex configurable vehicle is fun to figure out and control.”
– Technical stealth puzzles that you don’t see in most games
– Control a lot of the ship with the GamePad touch screen
– Interface will communicate the personality of the spaceship
– Scan enemies and configure the ship to avoid detection
– Ship can overheat
– Action never pauses when the player stares at the second screen
– Will need to pay a lot of attention to the UI
– Get lots of info from it about dangers
– “There will be some shortcuts, but the aim isn’t to not have to look at the UI.”
– “We aim to design puzzles that can be executed elegantly by only changing the ship’s configuration at safe locations with no time pressure.”
– “In occasions where actions need to be made while flying, the player should never have to jump between two different sub-menus.”
– Single-player and local multiplayer
– On using the Wii U hardware:
Lau: This is mostly the GamePad we are talking about here. I think we have seen very few games, also from Nintendo themselves, that actually uses the GamePad in a meaningful way. Hopefully we can show that the Wii U is great, and it can give you experiences you can’t get anywhere else as long as developers dare to design something exclusive for the hardware.
– Nifflas and KnapNok on making the game for Wii U:
Nifflas: I have no idea 🙂 I just want to make a cool game for it!
Lau: Ha ha, yeah, if we wanted to earn money I guess we shouldn’t be in games. It is really hard to make any sensible business rationales in this market. Yes, there are not that many Wii U consoles out there, but does it matter if there are 5 or 10 million units sold when we just need to sell some 10-20-30 thousand copies to be happy? As long as we keep our cost low, I think it is much more important to work on a platform that excites us than to work on the stuff that everybody else is doing.
– Playable at the GDC Play booth PL406 March 19th to 21st and at The Media Indie Exchange March 17th in San Francisco
You can find a whole lot more over on Gamasutra.
