Simon Anderson of D-Pad Studio is finishing up development on the studio’s debut title, the much anticipated Owlboy, but in a new interview he delves into the past of his career and the influences that went into the game and his notorious pixel art.

Alongside Fez, Owlboy is a 2D platformer that has been in development for a quite a few years now and we’re still chomping at the bit in anticipation. Hopefully (touch wood) it will be released some time this year, D-Pad have said that the game is now in the final stages of development so there’s a strong possibility of such a miracle happening. Last year’s demo was all well and good but we need more! Oh and if you haven’t checked out said demo, then you’re crazy and need to do so right now – grab your download here.

Anyway, we’re here to tell you about a very interesting interview conducted with Simon Anderson who is the main chap behind Owlboy. Talking to Pixel Art Guild, Simon goes in detail about his upbringing and initial interest in pixel art and how he experimented by making his own gifs and sprites to move about as if playing a game. He then goes on to how he turned this into a career – having bad luck at university meant he went on to work in illustration and advertising, before landing a role on Contra 4.

The latter half of the interview really focuses in on picking out the many titles that influenced Simon and his work – Breath of Death, Zelda and Megaman for example. Lastly he gives some advice to aspiring pixel artists, which is mainly him saying to do lots of art when you can for anyone and show it everywhere.

He finishes up with a little story about Owlboy and how its style came to be, here’s a snippet:

“Owlboy was really a mishmash of things that I wanted to do at the time. It was triggered by a thought experiment I did on Super Mario 3. I thought it would be interesting to reverse Mario’s flying ability so instead of making you glide, you would fly higher every time you pushed a button. That developed into the idea of finding floating islands with people. People that might not speak your language. I imagined you could communicate using expressions, which later evolved into the main character being a mute.”

We’re hoping that Owlboy will arrive for PC and Xbox Live sometime this year – we’ll let you know any more as soon as we do.

You can find out more information on Owlboy over on the official website.

It’s been over a month now since the Indie Underdog Pack launched over on on 8-Bit Funding, but proceedings are now drawing to a close. Just under 48 hours now remain in which to get your hands on the pack and, in an attempt to bolster its last-minute sales, the developers involved have cut the minimum asking price from $5 to just $1.

If you weren’t yet aware, that means that you’re potentially receiving six full games for a single US dollar. For clarity’s sake, here’s another quick rundown of the title on offer:

• Animal Blast (Virtanen)
• Caveman Craig: SE (Parabox Games)
• Lazy Brain Games Compilation
• Koya Rift (SunnyKatt)
• Potion Master (Epic Vessel Games)
• Magi (MoaCube)

If you want to make a last-ditch attempt to jump on the Indie Underdog bandwagon, head over to its official website.

“You spend far too much on those silly video games! When I was your age, we spent all our time outdoors! Our parents didn’t even expect to see us between breakfast and dinner time! We just went out and explored the countryside and fields!”

This is something I heard a great many times when I was younger, and something my little brother still hears on a fairly regular basis. The trouble is, the issue is a lot more complex and multi-faceted than your parents and the mainstream media would like to believe. For a start, there are decreasingly fewer opportunities to just “go out and explore”, even for the kids who want to. Now, I’m not suggesting for even a second that roads and houses and general urban infrastructrual  development is a bad thing, but the fields and forests our parents knew just aren’t there to be explored, and this is actually a pretty tragic phenomenon that has had some less than obvious implications with regards to video games.

In the beginning people went out and experienced things; they went hillwalking, mountain-climbing, caving, or even just walked around what rural scenery was available to them. Many of them were touched or moved by the things they discovered, and some of them came back and made video games inspired by these experiences.

In the world of today, unless you live in some fantastically untapped study of the world, you can’t just go out and do that, no matter how much you want to. Now as an adult this is less of an inconvenience because, should you want to, you can probably drive to one of these such places, but as a child however, you can’t.

So now, in truth, kids are turning to video games instead, and here’s where the mainstream media are getting it wrong.

There will always be kids who are lazy, and will be perfectly happy to sit in front of a video game console and play all day and all night between fistfuls of Doritos.

Those kids are not the problem, those kids have always existed, and contrary to popular belief, video games will not and have not change(d) their behaviour in any way shape or form.

The frightening and rarely discussed problem is the kids who have the driving urge to explore, to discover, to experience; the kids who want to do all of those things their parents did, but can’t, because the world just isn’t the way it was thirty years ago.

Those kids are turning to video games as an alternative, and the damage is being done because video games are are becoming an ever more preferable alternative to the real world. It’s in the nature of video games to want to lose yourself in the experience, but players were always intended to come back from the worlds they were exploring; you were never meant to stay in wonderland forever, no matter how wonderful it was. Video games can teach kids a lot, The Legend of Zelda taught a lot of people about the pursuit of love and staying strong in the face of adversity, Pokémon taught a lot of people about growing up and the unknown challenges life holds, and these are fantastic, beautiful things to teach children, but he consequence of total obsession with  non-existent worlds is mental illness, and that’s the terrible truth of the matter.

I know. As a kid growing up in a suburban nook of a slightly dangerous, slightly backwater part of Britain, the possibility to explore just wasn’t there. I couldn’t go out and have my own adventures, I couldn’t climb trees and cross rivers and throw stones into lakes without the guidance and protection of my parents, and even then the ever-present “Don’t climb that tree, you’ll fall!”, “Don’t cross that river, you’ll get wet!”, and “Don’t throw stones into the lake, if everyone did that there’d be no stones left and the lake would be full of them!” made sure that any dreams of such experience were never realised at all, and I was very bored and very unhappy.

So my father let me play video games. He didn’t know – and couldn’t have known – the effect this would have on me as a child, and was probably never really aware of how reliant I became on the games.

I became strange and introvert. I didn’t fit in with other kids. When I was at school, I drew pictures of characters from the video games I played instead of working, but teachers and other kids didn’t like it, and were always keen to voice their dislike, so I became unhappier still.

It took me a long time to adjust properly, probably until I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and in truth I still am and probably always will be a slightly strange introverted guy who gets a little too caught up in video games. The trouble is that I’m one of the lucky ones, my lack of any secrecy about my obsession meant there was an awful lot of pressure on me to change my behaviour, and somehow, I was able to.

Not everyone is under these pressures. An awful lot of kids are perfectly happy to keep their reliance on video games secret, or perhaps aren’t even aware of it themselves.

We are watching a generation of such kids grow up poorly adjusted, misunderstood, and afraid of the real world.

There are no fields anymore; it’s time to look at other solutions.

After having released Fez after five years of development, Polytron Corporation are getting a lot of reported bugs in the game which they are deeming “pretty serious” and intend to take action to fix them as soon as they can.

As with most games, bugs are inevitable after any release so this shouldn’t be too much of a shock to anyone. Polytron’s newly released XBLA puzzle platformer, Fez, has caused some people to get in contact with the developers due to bugs but now the number has increased so that they have to deal with them differently. Many of the team at IGM noticed a couple of weird occurrences that we couldn’t replicate and, like just about everyone else, seem to be having a lot of framerate and lag issues. Other than that, we seem to have avoided the worse bugs thankfully and we have enjoyed the experience as it was mean to be, as can be read in our review.

Initially, the bug reports were manageable via Twitter but now Polytron have updated their website asking any ‘game breaking’ bug reports to be emailed to support@fezgame.com. If it’s just a smaller issue then they’re happy to deal with it via Twitter as they say there are simple workarounds for now.

The kind of bugs they want to be emailed are ones that completely prevent you from playing the game, an example they gave follows:

“A small subset of older Xboxes with smaller hard drives can’t run the game at all. The game has trouble running off a USB stick. Crashes are occurring in specific levels or situations. In a rare situation (exiting the game from the “wall village” interiors), the save file becomes unusable. Nasty stuff.”

For now, there’s not a lot they can do – Polytron just need all of your reports to come in and they’ll do with them as soon as they can with an upcoming patch, there’s no estimate on when that will arrive though.

More information on Fez can be found on the game’s official website.

The composer of thatgamecompany’s flOw and Journey, Austin Wintory, was inspired by Stoic’s The Banner Saga so much that he is now going to be composing the music for it – there are new Kickstarter incentives to match this too.

We announced the coming of The Banner Saga not so long ago now and since then it has exploded all over the internet and especially on Kickstarter where it’s now reached 500% of the funding asked for. Nuts. The game for those who don’t know, is a viking-based strategy-RPG with turn-based combat, Bioware-esque dialogue and an engaging storyline.

The news of the game we bring today is that Austin Wintory (who we’ve since become fanboys of) will be composing the soundtrack for the game and he’s going for epic. We believe him when he says that. The Banner Saga is also entering its last week on Kickstarter so if you haven’t nabbed yourself a copy of the game yet then now’s the time to do so.

With Austin joining the team at Stoic, there are new Kickstarter incentives – three in fact. The first will require you to put $150 forward for limited edition physical copies of the game’s soundtrack, hand-signed by Austin himself. Secondly, at $350 you can get an autographed copy of the performance parts from the recording sessions; the sheet musc used by the actual musicians who play on the score.

Lastly, for the really rich people, putting forward $4,500 you are invited to attend the music’s recording sessions in Los Angeles or elsewhere later this year. “This will include a day of hanging out with all of us at the recording studio, and lunch (on us). You will also receive a signed, leather-bound book compiling all of the game’s music (produced as a one-off and therefore never commercially for sale) and earn a Music Associate Producer credit in the game and on the album. Not enough? Austin will personally compose an original 30-second ringtone, just for you!”

So there you have it – The Banner Saga is going to sound epic, it just is, plus you can get involved in some of those sweet audible offerings.

More information on The Banner Saga can be found on the developer’s official website.

Werewolf Montreal, the studio best known for its 2011 Dream.Build.Play finalist, Last Dragon Standing, has shed light on its next gaming venture.

Currently named Infinite Tactics, the game in question will be of the turn-based arena fighting mould. Taking on an asynchronous battle system so as to allow players to wage war at their own pace and around their own schedule, it’s currently in development for PC, Facebook, iOS and Android.

With development currently in its early stages, the boys and girls at Werewolf are keen to emphasise that Infinite Tactics is still very much a work in progress. With that said, they’re adamant that it will harness the powers afforded to it by modern technology to allow players to access their teams of in-game characters, known as Heroes, anywhere, any time. Details on how this might be accomplished are sketchy as of this writing, but one can assume that social media platforms could play a key role in how the game operates.

A few more details on the project, along with some extra insight into the inner workings at the studio, can be found on the game’s Blogspot page.

Those crazy Ostrich Banditos got in contact to inform of us a momentous event this Friday the 13th concerning their game High Vaultage, but whatever could it be?

Cast you mind back about a month ago and we covered a little game called High Vaultage. Back then the developers were holding a little competition that could be won by playing their game and travelling the furthest distance. The winner is apparently called ‘neon lane’ and it turns out that they were masked so they get said mask in High Vaultage as a playable character.

It turns out that this slightly spooky entrance from Neon Lane will be unveiled today in order to fit with day – “we’re taking all the lucky coincidences we can get (we’re going for 13:13 GMT as well)”. So there you go – expect a new masked character called Neon Lane in High Vaultage today you creepy lot.

If you haven’t already, give High Vaultage a go on Mochi Games, Newgrounds or Kongregate.

More information on High Vaultage can be found on the official website.

Misfits Attic are having a little celebration after having released their action-puzzler, A Virus Named TOM, on to Desura this week in beta state, so they’ve released the game’s intro video and it’s rather cool. It is.

Co-op action-puzzle games are not something you come across too often and certainly not to the calibre that A Virus Named TOM is boasting. We’ve written about the game before, but to re-cap – A Virus Named TOM has you playing as a computer virus inside a mainframe. Your objective is to spread yourself around as much as possible, dodging all of the anti-virus measures as you go. You’ll need to get your thinking cap on for this one as well as train your mind and fingers to react fast. The game supports up to four players with any combination of controllers and keyboards you can think of and has both co-op and competitive game modes.

A Virus Named TOM will be released on Steam and OnLive as well as Desura where it is currently available at 50% off while it’s in its beta stage. You can also grab a pre-order from the developers themselves.

Now that A Virus Named TOM is available on Desura, Misfits Attic have released the game’s intro video in which we learn a bit about the back story. The video below is just that and it explains how the maniacal genius Doctor X became a pariah in the very city he helped engineer. Seeking vengeance, Doctor X creates a virus he calls TOM and sets it loose to destroy the infrastructure of the city that betrayed him.

More information on A Virus Named TOM can be found on the game’s official website.

You may recall that a little event called PAX East happened last week and amongst the many attendants were Gaijin Games who said of their capacity and interest in bringing BIT.TRIP Runner 2 to the Wii U.

Considering that the BIT.TRIP series started off life as a Wiiware title it may be fitting that the next entry in the quaffable series, Runner 2, might, perhaps, just maybe coming to Nintendo’s upcoming Wii U. It is most certainly a non-certain subject at the moment but Gaijin revealed at PAX that they are interested in the notion and do in fact have a Wii U development kit, thus making the possibility of its happening fairly likely.

“Stop floundering and get on with it, will you?” Oh yes, I hear your cries, as faint as they are – but I digress, let’s actually pull from this interview with PushSquare‘s Jon Wahlgren, what Gaijin actually said. Better?

“We have a Wii U dev kit, and our game is coming out around the time that system launches, so [Runner 2 on the Wii U] would be pretty cool.”

Gaijin were also asked what they thought of the Wii U’s controller too – you know, the one with the in-built screen:

“I have to think of it in terms of Runner2 now — thinking about it broadly would be too much — but if we were to do a Wii U version, what if you could have a pick-up in the game that reveals hidden bonuses and stuff that you can’t see on your screen but have to hold the controller up? You’re still playing but it’s sort of like an X-ray vision.”

Well there’s a thought – it certainly seems that Gaijin can conjure up some ideas for Runner 2 on the Wii U. But wait – what’s this? It seems that Gaijin are asking fans what king of thing they would want to see implemented in a Wii U version of Runner 2, as proved in this tweet. Well? What do you want to see – go and tell them!

Via NintendoLife

Naphelia Games make shooters in the old sense of the term and are currently working on their next one called Xenoid Maze – you can try out the beta now and offer some feedback if you’re a giving person.

So here’s a simple concept and one that a good majority of people will recognise: you’re a lone space marine, aliens are after you so you better try to escape. Oh, you have guns…and a flamethrower. That is Xenoid Maze in a tin can so you can probably judge for yourself just from that if you want to give it a go. Of course, the game isn’t actually ready yet – it’s still in beta. That does mean that you can help the developer out by giving it a bash and informing them of any improvements they could make, couldn’t you?

Well, if you do want to give Xenoid Maze a go then you have two choices – either you can download the executable or you can play it in your browser. Make your choice and march head first into the alien scum. Gun in hand, of course.

More information on Xenoid Maze can be found over on the developer’s website.