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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Hi. As the observant among you noticed, both Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky and Persona 2: Innocent Sin are out on the 4th November 2011. Here at Ghostlight we realise that this may put undue strain on all you PSP owners’ wallets. That’s why we’ve created a fantastic deal for you over on the Ghostlight Webstore: the Trails of Innocence Combo Pack, which features the Collector’s Editions of both games, plus a stylish Persona 2 T-Shirt and a rolled A1 Trails in the Sky poster, all for £69.98, saving you a cool £10.

In my last blog I mentioned that there had been a few changes to Persona 2: Innocent Sin since coming to the PlayStation Portable and so I thought I’d tell you a bit more about the improvements that have been made to this classic JRPG. Persona 2: Innocent Sin now features:

• Improved visuals
• A new soundtrack in addition to the original’s soundtrack
• A new intro in addition to the original intro

• The interface has been improved to take advantage of the PSP’s wider display space

You now have the ability to switch between difficulty settings freely within the game.
The new Climax Theatre which includes lots of new optional dungeons and events for players to enjoy.

Of course we can’t forget about the other part of this amazing package

The North American release of Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky has been receiving rave reviews and, at the time of writing, has a rating of 80 on MetaCritic.

Trails in the Sky also features in 1UP.com’s Top 10 PSP games of 2011, with the site commenting that: “Trails in the Sky has a reputation among importers for being a huge, well told tale full of meaty combat and great characters” and on Joystiq Jason Schreier called it the best JRPG you haven’t played yet.

One of the more enjoyable systems in the game is the orbment system which, as well as improving your character’s abilities, is what controls which spells you have access to. Each character has a certain number of slots which are divided into rows, with each character having a different formation. In exchange for quartz you can get orbment fitted in an open slot where the most obvious effect for that an orbment will be listed. These effects range from an improvement to your stats, to gaining special abilities or gaining addition bonuses in battle. However, each orbment also has an elemental value. To decide your spell list, the game works out the total elemental value for an element on each line before using the highest value to decide which spells you can use. To make things slightly more complex, some slots are only able to hold certain types of orbment. I had a lot of fun playing around with various combinations to try and get the bonuses and skills I wanted, while trying to give myself access to the best spells as well.

There’s a lot of gameplay in Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky and my completed save time the first time I played through it was 54 hours 30 minutes and 29 seconds, however I did manage to miss out a few areas and sidequests in that playthrough, so you could easily spend more time in the game than that.

Please head over to our website to find out more about both of these fantastic games.

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We love to be scared. There’s something so primal and universal about fear, and a good horror story can really bring out the best of it, making our hearts race and our minds veer toward the darkest recesses of the human psyche. And we just keep going back for more!

Yet by the same token, horror has become so passe that we barely even react when we encounter imagery of skeletons, zombies, witches, bats, vampires and ghouls. True primal fear is hard to come by in the modern world, and this applies to video games as well. When you hear the term “horror game,” what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? Probably “zombies” since that seems to characterize much of the horror genre nowadays. Most modern horror games assault you with wave after wave of zombies, and you can typically one-shot them back to their graves. They may look scary, but when’s the last time you were actually frightened in a zombie shooter game? Maybe you had an exciting time playing one, and jumped at a handful of startling moments, but the mere fact that you’re able to defend yourself – that you have a means of fighting back – makes just about every entry in the genre less horror than action.

(more…)

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Hi again. I’m back to talk about the latest great JRPG coming to you from Ghostlight, Persona 2: Innocent Sin, which will be released on the 4th November 2011 as a Collector’s Edition for €49.99/£39.99.

For those of you who don’t already know, Persona 2: Innocent Sin is an enhanced PSP remake of the classic PSOne game (which sadly never made it to these shores) and is the prequel to the fantastic Persona 3 Portable. Amongst its many additions and improvements, the remake features a new user interface, new character portraits, an extra difficulty level and the ability to switch between the original soundtrack and a brand new soundtrack. Like the other games in the Persona series, it uses compelling storytelling and a fantastic soundtrack to create a dark twisted atmosphere, where nothing is quite as it seems.

Persona 2: Innocent Sin is set in Sumaru City, which is suffering under a curse that causes any rumour that’s heard by enough people to come true.

One rumour that has spread across the city is regarding the existence of “Joker”, a mysterious being who grants the wishes of anyone who dials their own mobile phone number. Anyone who fails to tell Joker their wish, either because they lack one or refuse to tell, has their “ideal energy” stolen, reducing them to ambition-less shells called Shadow Selves.

The game also allows you to take advantage of this curse, and any rumour that you craft may inexplicably come true. In addition to this, Persona 2: Innocent Sin features a system where the player can choose either to fight or negotiate with (most) demons and even forge contracts with them.

Working on Persona 2: Innocent Sin has been really fascinating from the perspective of a Persona fan that initially discovered the series on PlayStation 2. Persona 2: Innocent Sin is an awesome game, featuring not only brilliantly executed traditional JRPG mechanics, but also the aforementioned ‘rumours’ system which still feels fresh and innovative today.

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Hi again. Today I’m going to talk to you a little about Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky which will be released on PSP in Europe on the 4th November 2011 as a Collector’s Edition for £39.99.

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is the first game in a trilogy of Legend of Heroes games. The story follows the adventures of Estelle Bright, the daughter of Cassius Bright, and his adopted son Joshua, both of whom are junior members of the Bracers Guild, a mercenary group sworn to protect the people of the world.

When their father Cassius, a war hero, leaves on a mission, Estelle and Joshua must take over his work in their hometown. The game’s fantastic dialogue makes this a charming prologue and this charm never disappears as the scope of the story gradually expands from simple beginnings into a tense climax, as the young Bracers must uncover a conspiracy to overthrow the government of Liberl.

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is set in a fantasy world where the combustion engine never caught on due to the Orbal Revolution. Instead, Orbments provide power for everything from magic to telephones and airships.

The game boasts a fascinating combat system where the key to victory is strategically managing the Turn Order using buffs, debuffs and – should you have sufficient SP – interrupts.

The game also features an amazing soundtrack which is available on CD as part of the Collector’s Edition. But, more than anything else, it’s the characters you meet and the sheer quality of the writing and dialogue which have really impressed me.

Despite telling a serious story, Trails in the Sky manages to be the funniest game I’ve played all year, which reminds me…

A little hint before I go: make sure to check every treasure chest twice – you’ll be glad that you did.

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