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Warner Brothers are currently working on the prospect of a Minecraft Movie and thus are trying to pull together a team of names to help with the production and directing of the movie. The producer of the Lego Movie, Roy Lee, has already been brought aboard and now another person is supposedly in talks to join the project.
Hollywood journal Deadline have said that Warner are currently “in talks” with Shawn Levy to direct the movie that Warner signed on to make in February. Levy’s past credits include the Night at the Museum films, The Internship and Date Night. All comedic movies, so does this hint at the direction the film is being taken in possibly?
Levy worked with Warner Bros previously on This Is Where I Leave You, and it seems the experience was positive enough that Levy is tempted to continue the partnership with another project.
Excited for the Minecraft movie? What do you think it could be about? tell us below if you have any ideas!
Who recalls the ‘Saga’ dispute that happened between King and the developers Stoic, who were making a game called The Banner Saga? It was earlier this year and get quite a bit of coverage throughout the gaming media, including our own.
Eventually the two parties came to a settlement, although the terms of it are not publicly known although Stoic have said that they got everything they wanted out of the deal. They’ve also since revealed that at the time they were planning to fight King’s bid to block them using Saga in their game’s title, they had considered Kickstarting their legal counsel.
They responded to a question from a developer on Reddit by saying that “we felt that we had a strong enough presence on Kickstarter that if worse came to worse we could run a campaign to raise the funds to fight it and would probably get the money rather quickly.”
And indeed they already had a strong fanbase that had backed their game previously, even before the media attention came to the case and covered it. “thankfully the whole gaming community came to our aid arguing on behalf of us on the web. If you’re a small company with little following and you don’t get the large media companies and gaming community behind you it may not wind up as well.”
In the end it worked out well for Stoic, who notes that the coverage probably made the game a lot wider known in the community than it had been before.
This week I selected 2 random games from my library to take a look at. They are the first person programming game Glitchspace, and the logic, puzzle game Hexcells Infinite.
Glitchspace
Summary
Glitchspace is a is a first person programming game that’s centered around a visual programming mechanic. You find yourself in a cyberspace world in search of the Glitchspace, a part of cyberspace filled with glitches in the system that can be exploited. As you travel, you find yourself reprograming certain parts of the world around you to help you on your way.
When you come across a programmable object in game you are able to bring up a canvas that contains the info of the object though symbols called nodes. You can delete or add nodes to the canvas and connect them together to edit the object. Depending on what you add to the canvas you can: apply a force to an object, moving it out of the way; scale an object down to make it the correct height for jumping on; duplicate and move an object to create stairs, or floating platforms; make an object have no collisions to pass through it; change the physical properties of an object; make an object move when you touch another object; as well as many other things.
This game is still currently in Alpha so they are adding more and more to it. At the moment they only have a short story mode which is basically a tutorial. When you finish that the game unlocks sandbox mode which allows you to mess around with the mechanics how you like. They also recently added Oculus Rift support to the game so it may be interesting to see where that goes.
My Thoughts
I did not know what to think of this title when I got it. It had an interesting concept I haven’t really seen before and it got me curious. Of what I played of it, it didn’t disappoint. I don’t have much knowledge about programing, but this game, with its visual mechanic, made me feel like I was actually accomplishing something. It makes you think logically about what needs to be done and the current “story mode” helps you learn everything pretty well.
I personally can’t wait to see where this game goes in the future and I hope that they add more content to the game including more of a story hopefully. While I did enjoy the game, it is still in Alpha and unless you are desperate to try it now, I would definitely wait for it to be finished or wait for a good sale. With the Early Access you never know what will come of the game later on.
Hexcells Infinite is a logic, puzzle game much like Minesweeper, but more complex. In this game you need to find all the highlighted blue cells in each puzzle and try not to make too many mistakes. There are a few ways to figure out where they are at. One is that some of the non-blue cells will have a number on them saying how many blue cells are touching them from 0-6. Some of the blue cells have numbers on them as well, but these numbers indicate how many other blue cells are in a designated area around them. Some puzzles also have numbers along the outside of the puzzle area saying how many blue cells are in a particular column, row, or diagonal. You will have to use all these clues to complete the puzzle. You should be able to figure out, logically where the cells are with making as few mistakes as possible.
The main campaign consists of 36 challenging puzzles, each getting harder as you go along. The game also has a random puzzle generator which uses random seeds that can be shared, or it can make puzzles based on the current date. This mechanic can be used to create more and more puzzles, almost giving you an “infinite” supply.
My Thoughts
I do like to play a nice casual puzzle game every once in a while to calm down. Currently this game has become one of my favorites to play while listening to music or podcasts. It has a nice relaxing atmosphere to it and is also challenging.
I think this is defiantly a must buy for anyone who likes games like Minesweeper, or Logic/Puzzle games in general. And with the fact that you can have practically infinite amounts of puzzles to work on, it is defiantly worth the cheap price tag.
