PSN Indies Talk New Games At Fantastic Arcade

Over the weekend at Fantastic Arcade, the showcase of independent games organized by Alamo Drafthouse's Fantastic Fest in Austin, a Sony-sponsored panel of independent PlayStation Network game developers talked about their upcoming titles, including further details on Q Games' Pixeljunk 4am. Q Games is currently at work on Pixeljunk 4am [YouTube], which the studio's Rowan Parker detailed. "The easiest way to describe 4am is less of a game and more of an instrument," Parker said. "We wanted to take the PlayStation Move and do something really different with the way you manipulate space in front of you. You use it as a canvas and basically paint music." The PlayStation Network itself also worked as an inspiration, said Parker at the Gamasutra-attended event, explaining that using the network would help them "bottle and distill the experience of being a DJ." "As you play, you can broadcast live on PSN, and people can jack into your broadcast. The communication is a two way street: we want to capture the feeling of a DJ set, the idea of having an audience is important to us." "It's like how a DJ can 'feed' off the energy of the audience. Viewers can give you a 'thumbs up' while you play, and if you're creating a particular beat at that time, you might think, 'Oh, they like this, let's keep going with it.'" Parker noted that the system currently only allowed "positive feedback." Potentially negative interaction between players is something that Thatgamecompany's Robin Hunicke noted is an issue for her studio, developing the multiplayer-centred Journey. "We want to allow people to collaborate and explore in a way that is really genuine, so we've really had to consider 'griefing,'" she said. To test that, the company played games over and over with each other, taking different potential "player styles" such as "lovers," "fighters," and "soloers." "We discovered that if you're trying to grief someone and they're a "lover," because of the way Journey works they instead view it as positive attention," she said. "But we've also tried to make it always possible to escape a player that's causing problems, even just by walking in another direction." She continued however, "one of the things we're excited about with Journey, as with all of our games, is that it's an experiment. It's the players that will let us know how well we succeeded, and in fact we generally don't talk that much about what we expect from them." Parker also explained the reasoning behind the recent re-naming of Pixeljunk 4am from its original title, Pixeljunk Lifelike. "The game originally evolved from Pixeljunk Eden's natural visual imagery," he said, "but as it evolved it moved away from that into its own visuals and soundscape, prompting the need for a new title." Parker admitted however that Q Games were "struggling" with messaging for Pixeljunk 4am. "It's difficult to communicate how much control the player has over the music; the way in which they use all of the space in front of them in a 'cube' and all of the aspects of the Move in the experience. We've essentially distilled sound-editing software into a motion controller, and that's hard to bring across with screenshots and videos."