I’m not sure how I feel about it yet, but I may have to give it more time. He’s designed it like Space Giraffe in that you have to figure out how the game works on your own for the most part.
It certainly looks fantastic, and when you have a flow going at a billion miles an hour, it feels amazing.
I don’t have PSVR so I’m just playing it on the telly.
Let us share tips and stuff here.
Something important I somehow didn’t notice until today is that gates will go red to signify you’re going to pass through them without clipping.
I wish Atari didn’t fuck him with TxK.
Here he is showing off the first seven levels:
“Go as fast as you feel comfortable with” maybe that’s where I’m going wrong, haha.
I wasn’t sure about this game at first, but now I’m up to level 13 and I think it’s amazing.
It’s definitely a spiritual successor to Space Giraffe, not only in the visuals, but also in how each level is built around a certain twist. It works a little more smoothly here since the core mechanics are so simple. And like Space Giraffe, it’s up to you to figure out how each level works. Once you do, they often feel amazing to play through. This game feels ssssooooo good.
I think the difficulty curve isn’t quite right, I wish Minter eased people in to the game better, and I think some information could have been communicated better to the player. But overall, yeah, this game rocks.
I finally played this on PSVR and it is a HUGE game changer. It feels so much more natural, and it feels amazing when you get to high speeds. Minter said he wanted it to be a relaxing game but I couldn’t feel it until I used the headset. I can’t stress how much better it feels.
I got the furthest I’ve gotten while using the headset, and my friend who has never payed a Minter game before got to level 11 on her first go (most people hit game over on level three or four without the headset). I noticed things I didn’t on a TV screen that communicates things to the player better, too.
They mean it when they say it’s best with the headset, it seems. I mean, it’s playable without, but it seems pretty clear to me that it was designed with it in mind now that I’ve experienced it. If you have the headset, get this.
Minter confirmed to Ars Technica that the project began with a cold call from NIN’s Trent Reznor via Twitter direct message.
“[Trent] mentioned that he’d enjoyed Llamasoft’s stuff and he had an idea to discuss,” Minter says. “Of course I was super chuffed to hear he’d liked our work, as I’ve enjoyed his a lot over the years too!”
The idea: Trent wanted to show off Polybius exactly as it looks and plays, only with song lyrics and other visual effects overlaid to the beat of NIN’s latest single. However, the game is currently a PlayStation 4 exclusive, so in order to give Reznor what he needed to direct the gameplay in a video, Minter forwarded the musician something pretty exclusive: one of the only copies of the game’s PC version, which still doesn’t have a release date.
Minter says the customized code in Reznor’s copy of the game is “simple stuff, really.” It calls a script for every frame of the game as synced to the music, and its primary purpose is to display text at whatever timestamp its user desires. The script can also accept field-of-view and shader modifications, and the game itself had extra button inputs added so that a player could fine-tune some visual effects with nothing more than button taps. Minter was kind enough to send us some sample code:
>START_TRANSITION,4
# Track energy increases
>[1:07.5]FOV 4.0,2.0,0.5
>ROLL -0.5,0.3,12.0
>POSTPROC 3,3,0.1,0.05,ff7f00ff,ff00ffff
>TETHER 1.0,0.3,2.0
>THROTTLE 0.5,0.7,1.0
>[1:08.80]PRINT"SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?",1
Minter says he was under a time crunch with “only a few days” to finish the build, and he didn’t see NIN’s results until the video went live to the public. “Of course I was a bit anxious, since when you’re doing your own creative work and it needs to mesh with the work of an artist, it’s not entirely a given that your work will agree with what he had in mind,” Minter says. “I just did stuff that I felt went well with the energy of the music, and I was really pleased when Trent liked what we’d done.” (Minter is clearly excited, adding, “Did we mention we’re chuffed?”)
Before he was getting featured in Nine Inch Nails videos, Jeff Minter was making mobile games that sold like seven copies. They no longer work on many iOS devices and will be rendered unplayable completely by iOS 11. Which is a shame, because some of ‘em are pretty mint. So I’m gonna record some raw footage from the ones I like the most, so that they may be preserved at least a little.
Here’s some footage of Minotron: 2112, a sequel to Minter’s wonderful Atari ST Robotron-alike Llamatron. It features the first 26 stages on “Simplified” mode (which means I only control movement, aiming and firing is handled automagically).
Minter’s first iOS game, a curious take on Asteroids… and the Atari 2600 launch game Combat. I tried to do the black hole trick, but failed.
This concerns the urban legend, not Jeff Minter’s game, but this seems like the best place to link that excellent documentary on the origins of Polybius:
