Greetings out there in PlayStation land! I’m Mark Tsai, president and co-founder at Magic Pixel Games in Los Angeles, California. Our name’s new, but the team’s not – we’re industry veterans who have worked on many well-loved franchises such as Stephen Spielberg’s Boom Blox and Guitar Hero, among many other titles in our combined resume.

But enough about us – I’m really excited to introduce you to our newest production: Carnival Island. In collaboration with SCEA Santa Monica Studio, we’ve taken three key ingredients and combined them into an endlessly entertaining package:

We’ve taken the physical accuracy of the PlayStation Move motion controller, Magic Pixel’s expertise in motion-controlled gaming, and the fun of the carnival…and rolled them into a truly family-friendly, instantly-accessible experience. It’s all the fun of the fair without having to find parking! Check out the trailer:

Endorsed by Family Friendly Video Games, Carnival Island features more than 35 games and attractions, so there’s surely something fun for gamers of all ages and skill-levels. Play solo in Story mode, or grab your friends and family and play together (side-by-side or one-at-a-time), since the game supports up to four players with up to two motion controllers. Frogbog, Ringtoss, Shooting Gallery and Hoops are just a few of the games you’ll play as you explore the island – and the games get more and more magical as you play. The sky’s the limit!

Carnival Island also includes tons of souvenirs and friends for you to meet. Pets and adorable creatures awaken and cheer you on as you play each attraction bringing life and color back to the island. And as you succeed, the island has many secrets for you to reveal.

We’re really excited for you to try the game and feel proud that we’ve made a game that’s really unlike any other motion-controlled experience, with wonder and magic around every corner.

Carnival Island will be available at your favorite retailer from November 16, 2011. The demo will also be available on PlayStation Network soon.

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If any of you use your television sets for anything other than games, you may have already seen this TV ad which will be running across Europe in the run-up to Christmas.

We have moved away from the usual motion gaming ads you are likely to have seen before (all smiles and bright white living rooms) towards a more stylised and epic narrative approach.

We hope you like it and we look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments.

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Hey there PlayStation Assassins! We’ve got something really special for you today… and it’s exclusive to this fine PlayStation.Blog you are reading right now!

In Assassin’s Creed Revelations, we’re linking our multiplayer and single-player experiences by including our multiplayer characters in the single-player campaign. What we want to show you today is a profile of one of these characters, specifically The Sentinel: a former Assassin who betrayed the Brotherhood to join the Templars. Watch our new video to discover how this vile turncoat will cross paths with Ezio!

You can see from the video that The Sentinel uses techniques in multiplayer that you might expect of an Assassin, killing quickly and quietly. He favors the discreet use of knives and his trusty Hidden Blade to eliminate his targets without alerting any nearby assailants. Of course, he’s not above the occasional flourish of brutality, crushing the life from his targets with a precisely placed stomp… which is always a useful tool for intimidating one’s opponents!

Tomorrow, you’ll all get the chance to step into the role of The Sentinel when Assassin’s Creed Revelations launches. You’ll also be introduced to the new modes and maps that we have added that nobody has ever seen before (even if you were fortunate enough to get into our exclusive PS3 Beta!). Corruption is an all-new mode in which “uncorrupted” players attempt to survive as long as they can against the opposing “corrupted” players looking to kill and thusly corrupt you! This mode is best played on the Souk map, which is a veritable warren of overhangs and tented areas especially designed to obscure predator and prey alike!

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Hi – I’m a game designer at Die Gute Fabrik, a small Indie Studio based in Denmark. We are just about to release our debut on PlayStation Network minis (PS3 and PSP). It’s called “Where is my Heart?”, and it’s about a family of monsters lost in the woods. In the game you have help them find a way back to their home – a mysterious tree with a heart in its branches. The whole story is set in an 8-bit style environment made up of woods, mushroom caves, crystal rock pools, fern fringed creeks and waterfalls.

Nils, our artist, is going to talk more about the concept art and environment design of the game below. As for the game mechanics: the basics play just like a usual platform game, but the world is visually sliced into rectangular fragments (or panels) which are placed on the screen at unexpected locations. With this game mechanic – the messed up way of representation – I attempted to evoke the sensation of being lost. On top of that, the visual slicing also allowed us to add further mechanics to the game. These mechanics make use and build upon the visual confusion caused by the panels. One of these game-play elements is the ‘panel rotation’.

The Rainbow Spirit -one of the monsters- can use this mechanic to its advantage. When the player presses the L and R shoulder buttons of the game controller the Spirit can make the panels spin around the screen center. This allows the Spirit to hop from frame to frame, outside of the physical game world. It’s a bit hard to describe. Looking at the trailer above will fix this – it’s easier to grasp when seen in action. Playing around with the Spirit Rotation was a very satisfying experience to our testers. We spent a lot of effort into making it feel just right. It’ll make the puzzle muscles in your brain as sore as legs after a marathon.

The game is loosely based on an experience I had with my parents three summers ago. We were hiking in the woods near our home. And guess what – we lost our bearings, got really frustrated, and started bickering with each other. That’s the short version of it. The long version entails family issues and the dark sides of personalities. If you’re interested in reading more about the game’s source of inspiration, please go here.

By the way we also had our first review by eurogamer and they gave us 8 out of 10.

I’ll pass on to Nils now, our artist.”

Nils Deneken: Hi, I’m the graphic artist here at Die Gute Fabrik. In 2009, after the first Where is my Heart? prototype was displayed at the Independent Games Festival, Bernhard asked me if I wanted to do the artwork for the game. Already the prototype that Bernhard had submitted to the IGF 2009 had a very distinct art style. Obviously it’s a game that uses pixel graphics and thus refers to games from the creator’s childhood, but it has some aesthetic twists that sets itself apart from the games of yore (and just as much from the games of today).

One visual twist is the representation of the game levels as comic panels. It is one of the basic mechanics of the game which has both a strong influence on the level designs and the visuals of the game. The other distinctive visual element is the bold choice of colors, which is quite unusual for games in general.

While other games tend to use fairly realistic colors to represent their environments, Bernhard chose a strange palette of pastel colors. The grass wasn’t a saturated green, like it is in most game graphics, but a very light green, which seemed to glow almost neon-like in front of the browns and grays of the rocks. The sky was light purple instead of sky-blue and sprinkled with yellow stars that would fade in and out. Then there were the three little monster characters and a big tree with a face, whose emotions were ranging from grumpy to sad. The old tree, the Heartboxes, which the player has to unlock to progress, and Antler Ancestor, which the Brown Monster turns into, seem all to be taken straight from the traditional German fairy tales. The heart boxes remind us of the gingerbread house from Grimm’s “Hänsel und Gretel”, while the Antler is clearly derived from a Bavarian mythical creature called the Wolpertinger. Their representation, however, is more inspired by Japanese anime, games and pictogram culture. The whole strangely coloured mix of Japanese cuteness with German fairytales distinguished it as something very contemporary.

I was excited. It was liberating not having to do world and character concepts from scratch, but to work with the constraints that came with Bernhard’s prototype level concepts, to refine them and build new worlds with that feel and colour palette that he had introduced.

The locations the levels are taking place in are all tied to the overall topic of getting lost in the woods. The environments, even though fantastic with flying platforms and such, are rooted in a moderate climate. They are believable settings for the fiction we created around the three monsters. Besides the forest, I added different kinds of caves to the environments, since they would bring variation to the levels without breaking the overall theme of the game.

Some environment designs required night settings. We decided to have the scenery change into night time, when the Brown Monster transformed into the Antler Ancestor. We aimed for the most satisfying feedback that comes with his transformation, where he would literally step into “the Land of Fireflies”.

When the grey monster transformed, he would open a window into a dark parallel world, the “Land of the Bat”, where he could use different platforms and secret passages, which meant that some levels needed a land-of-the-bat version as well.

The three family characters Bernhard created in his IGF prototype were interesting and had a lot of personality already, but I took the liberty of changing some of them a little to make them more distinguishable from each other and more coherent with the game style at the same time.

For more information about the Artwork of Where is my Heart and other projects, feel free to visit http://gutefabrik.com/.

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It sounds like a good chunk of PlayStation HQ workers will be playing Skyrim this weekend and I’ll be one of them. I’ve created an Elf called Peter and I plan to spend a lot of time sneaking around forests. If you’re playing too this weekend, why not give us a little diary of your first few hours (no spoilers though).

On the topic of Payday: The Heist codes for the PLAY promotion, I’m told that they have all been sent out. If you haven’t received yours then please contact customer services. Click here to find all the contact details you need for assistance.

Here’s your recap:

• Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain Comes To PSN – Releasing an adaptation of the first book in the Fighting Fantasy series on the 9th November 2011, at £3.49/€3.99.
• Uncharted 3 Behind The Scenes: Historical Inspiration – See how Naughty Dog have made the game such a ‘believable’ experience!
• Worms Special Offers Wriggling Onto PSN Tomorrow – Get to know a bit about the Worms titles that are already currently available, and a little insight into what’s coming soon!
• Relive The Experience That Started It All – You could be one of the fortunate early-buyers that receives a free copy of the original Assassin’s Creed with ACR.
• Wipeout 2048 Q&A – This fast-paced combat racer has appeared on every PS console… now it’s preparing to make the jump to PS Vita!
• Medieval Moves Demo Out Today; Full Game Launches Next Week – Get your hands on the awesome Medieval Moves demo, out now on PSt Store.
• Premier Manager 2012 – Out Today! – Makeing its long awaited debut on the PS Network for the amazing launch price of just £9.99 / €12.99.
• Rayman Origins Demo Out Today! – If you like great platformers, Ubisoft Montpellier has prepared a little surprise for you!
• ‘Heads-Up’ Game Store Update 9th November 2011 – Some launches, info, updates and much more!
• The Future Of War: DUST 514-s Rapid Deployment Vehicles – A PS3 MMOFPS coming to PS3 with large-scale vehicle and infantry combat in the EVE Online universe on PC.
• New VidZone 2.0 – Unleashing The True Power Of Music Video! – After doing lots of listening, VidZone debuts a completely new way to experience the wonderful world of music video!
• PlayStation Home: Massive Sodium2 Update – Six new Devilrobot companion items, funky new MyDeco items on sale, your very own Sackboy companion and much more!
• Ken Levine Interview: Taking BioShock From Rapture To Columbia – PS exclusive interview reveals why BioShock is one of the most surprising games of this generation.
• Access Episode 8 – The latest episode of Access for you to enjoy!
• The Weekend Debate: 3D Gaming Thoughts – What are your feelings around 3D gaming?

• Weekend Essentials 100 – One hundred weekend guides, thousands of PlayStation possibilities – here’s your latest unmissable round-up.
• Have you joined Inside PS Vita yet – Discover why it pays to be on the inside track.
• Uncharted: The story so far – Nathan Drake’s globetrotting adventures on PS3 to date, recounted.
• Take a look at the brand new VidZone – The music video service is now better than ever – and it’s completely free.
• Win a PS3 and a copy of EA SPORTS FIFA 12 – Keep your eyes on the ball to grab the latest instalment of the mighty football series.

• Want some tips or help with Skyrim? Here’s 7 things we wish we’d known before we started playing.
• LA Noire director Brendan McNamara is working on 2 new games. The first to be announced in “a couple of weeks”.
• If you want to up your level then you need this: ten games you can platinum trophy in ten hours.
• Having scanned the GTA 5 trailer we’ve compiled a list of what you could be flying in Grand Theft Auto.
• If you’re having trouble adjusting here’s our Battlefield 3 guide for the Modern Warfare player.

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