Happy belated New Year to all our friends and fans on PlayStation Network! This is Tatyana from Creat Studios here but I speak for the whole team when I say that we are incredibly excited to announce our latest game, the minis title Mecho Wars, is coming to the PlayStation Store for €4.99 on January 25th as well as to PlayStation Plus on February 1st at a discounted price. Based on the characters, world, and distinctive visual style crafted by Luc Bernard, Mecho Wars is a turn-based strategy game where you command your troops to expand into enemy territory, control and collect resources, and conquer your enemy’s structures.

Jump into an exciting war between the Winged Crusade and the Landians! The story of Mecho Wars details the rise of the Winged Crusade in the distant land of Divination Deserts. This is not your typical desert, however, as there is plenty of water that separates land masses. To sustain your army capture factories to expand your maximum army support, take-over cities to earn gold from the rich economic hubs, and defeat the enemy by capturing their HQ building while simultaneously defending your own. Don’t forget strategic unit composition and troop positioning as each unit type has its own strengths and weaknesses. The game even features a day/night cycle where the water that normally restricts your movement paths during the day freezes at night, allowing for unexpected skirmishes and ambushes. In addition to the rich, story-driven campaign, the Mecho Wars minis title features a new and extended soundtrack, a special set of individual challenge maps, and remarkable local multiplayer support on a single device for both the PS3 and PSP!

Mecho Wars achieves the perfect balance between the intense competitive strategy of army composition and troop placement and the invitingly casual and leisurely gaming experience lent by its turn-based combat system. The beauty of Mecho Wars is you can spend hours on end formulating the perfect strategy, unit composition, and battle placement tactics to best defeat your foe, or you can take your time and casually complete a turn every once in a while as you eat lunch or watch the news.

Everyone here at Creat absolutely loves playing Mecho Wars and we believe that, if given a chance, it can become one of your favorites as well. Thank you for the continued support you all have given us and we will continue to work our hardest to deliver awesome and ridiculously fun games to you guys. We always value fan feedback so leave us a comment below or get in contact with us on Facebook or through Twitter for all of our latest news and announcements.

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Hi, this is Luigi from Playerthree. We are delighted to announce that our new minis title, Rumble Trucks, is released today. Our previous minis title was the 2D sidescrolling shoot’em up – Apache Overkill, but with Rumble Trucks we decided to do something completely different, a 3D stunt racing game.

Rumble Trucks is not your classic racing game. Playing it feels like a rollercoaster ride: high speed, steep hills, huge jumps.

Big jumps allow for big tricks, perform them and you’ll gain a speed boost, use it wisely and reach the end of level as fast as possible to win a medal. On the way to the finish line don’t forget to collect the stars scattered around the levels as they give you a time bonus.

You’ll be able to choose between nine vehicles with different stats and then race on one of the twenty four levels divided in three worlds. Obviously you will need to unlock the trucks and the levels before being able to play on them.

Reaching the final level in each world unlocks the next world, but those final levels are so tricky that it’s hard enough just trying to get a gold medal and collecting all the stars. It’s a real challenge, but you will enjoy it.

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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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Hello everyone, Nordcurrent is calling! Almost a year ago we released a Minis called Arcade Essentials. The game was very warmly received by the players, so we decided to produce a sequel with 5 new games. So here it is – a Minis called Arcade Essentials Evolution.

As was the case with its predecessor, Arcade Essentials Evolution is a collection of 5 arcade games, remakes of the classic arcade hits of the 80s that we all know. Each game consists of 50 levels, so there is quite a lot of gameplay time here. We made minimalistic visuals with lots of special effects, so that they would feel like we are in real arcades. To get an idea of how it looks like and plays, please check the trailer:

First game is an enhanced version of a game about asteroids. In the beginning, levels are quite easy, however as you progress further, difficulty increases and new bonuses and asteroids types start to appear. For example, there is a bonus that allows you to fly through the planets destroying them as you move forward. There are indestructible asteroids that you cannot shoot. There are bonuses that make you fly faster and many other cool things.

In the next game called Toader, you need to cross the road safely and reach a safe zone. Once safe zone is reached, you need to jump over the floating islands into the top part of the screen. As usual, there are lots of bonuses that improve your characteristics and help you out.

In this game, you need to shoot the worm that is coming from the top of the screen. Each time you hit it – it divides into 2 parts that run in different directions. If any part of this worm comes to the bottom of the screen – that’s it, it’s a game over.

This game was inspired by brick-shooting games, such as Arkanoid and Breakout. The goal of this game is to destroy all the bricks across 50 levels.
And finally:

A Lunar Parking game, where you have to park your spacecraft on specially designated locations. You are challenged with gravitational forces and inhabitants of the planet that are running around.

And that’s all for today. Thanks for reading this and hope you will enjoy this game!

For more information on our games you can visit our website www.nordcurrent.com or our Facebook page on www.facebook.com/Nordcurrent

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Hello Guys, just when you thought it was safe to go back on the blog, here I am again.

Around here, February is minis month and to celebrate this year we’re pulling out all the stops with a fantastic sale on some of our very best minis.

Throughout February we’ll be offering you the chance to grab forty, fantastic minis at only 99p (€1.19) each, so if you’ve never sampled the delights of the minis before, there has never been a better time to jump in with both feet.

February 2nd to February 16th we’ll have 20 titles available at this knockout price and then from February 16th through to March 2nd we’ll be offering 20 more. These minis will include some of our most popular titles and will come in all shapes and sizes, meaning there’s bound to be something for everyone.

Here’s what we’ll be offering from February 2nd until February 16th:

• Monopoly
• Hero Of Sparta
• BREAKQUEST
• Championship Manager 2010 Express
• SPOT THE DIFFERENCES!
• Zombie Tycoon
• Stand O’Food
• Fieldrunners
• 5-in-1 Arcade Hits
• Bowling 3D
• DynoGems
• Echoes
• Red Bull X-Fighters
• Arcade Darts
• VEMPIRE
• Bloons TD
• VT Tennis
• Tehra: Dark Warrior
• Sneezies
• Mahjongg Artifacts

And here are the titles you can grab from February 16th until March 2nd:

• Ice Road Truckers
• YetiSports
• Let’s Golf!
• Pinball Dreams
• Age of Zombies
• Bloons
• Brick Breaker
• Bubble Trubble
• Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess
• Dracula: Undead Awakening
• Vector TD
• This Is Football Management
• Cubixx
• NormalTanks
• The Mystery of the Crystal Portal
• Alien Zombie Death
• 4×4 Jam
• Coconut Dodge
• Aero Racer
• Supermarket Mania

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