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Sorry. Just need a moment to come down from having written that title. Whew.
Geek/nerd icon and legendary writer Neil Gaiman has officially announced that he has joined up with game studio The Odd Gentlemen and producer Moonshark to write his first video game, called Wayward Manor. Inspired by films from his childhood like “Arsenic And Old Lace”, “Blithe Spirit”, and “The Man Who Came To Dinner”, Gaiman has apparently been sitting on this story for a while, trying to find the right medium in which to tell it.
The story takes place in an old house in New England during the Roaring 20’s, where the player character has been killed and is haunting his former abode. Unfortunately, people keep moving in to Wayward Manor and disrupting our hero’s peaceful afterlife. It’s the player’s job to scare everybody out of the house, and unravel the mystery of his death and the afterlife in the process.
Given the studio’s past work (see The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom and Slap Happy Sam’s Stageshow), and the tone of Gaiman’s work (see The Sandman or Neverwhere), this is a bit of a match made in heaven. The images shown in the announcement video (See Below) reveal an appropriately unique aesthetic, and the premise offers a great deal of promise for incredibly fun and innovative mechanics.
The game will be released in an undisclosed number of episodes, the first of which will be released this fall.
Preorders are open at http://whohauntsneil.com/welcome/, using a Kickstarter style funding program with different incentives ranging from a $10 copy of the game, to a $10,000 dollar invitation to dinner with Gaiman himself, which Gaiman claims will be the “spookiest ever in L.A.”.
The ability of the studio to continue to produce more episodes will be dependent on sales of the first episode, so get over to the site now and place your preorder.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go see if my bank will loan me $10,000.
The next generation of console gaming may have finally found its niche – as the generation that blurs the line between video game players and video game creators. That’s according to a new announcement by Microsoft, which confirms – like Sony with the PS4 – that XBox One owners can use the next-gen console as their very own development kit.
Xbox’s corporate vice president Marc Whitten said that all Xbox Ones will function as development kits, which are usually only available to licensed developers. This will give everyone who owns an XBox One the tools to build their own XB1 games as part of the very system they’re playing them on – a trend Ouya started with its independently-focused Android-based console; and subsequently adopted by Sony for the Playstation 4. To add to the appeal, reports spreading on the internet claim Microsoft will allow indie developers to self-publish on the Xbox One, though Microsoft are yet to comment on this part of the equation.
UPDATE: However, the functionality WON’T be available immediately at the console’s launch; it will be installed on all consoles at a later date.
Here’s Microsoft’s official comment:
Our vision is that every person can be a creator. That every Xbox One can be used for development. That every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox LIVE. This means self-publishing. This means Kinect, the cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox LIVE. We’ll have more details on the program and the timeline at gamescom in August.
Let me be the first to claim this day, Global Gamedev Independence Day 🙂
UPDATED TO ADD:
Mark Whitten added in late-breaking news today that independently-published games will have just as much potential for exposure as professionally-published games, with Microsoft having no intention to separate the two from the future XBox Live Marketplace:
“My goal is for it to just show up in the marketplace. Of course there will be different pivots inside of that. There will be everything from what are we curating, kind of like spotlight content, to the normal discoverability stuff like recommendations, what’s trending, what’s got a lot of engagement on the platform. And you’d be able to find that content in any of those. There wouldn’t be any difference based on what type of game it was. Then of course there will be other type of pivots where you can go and look at whether its a genre of game or any other. But you shouldn’t think of it as there’s an indie area and a non-indie area.
Just as today, where we will highlight things that are coming in on the service, we want to make that more discoverable. We’ll make it things that we curate as well as the other ways that you find content whether that’s what your friends are doing or what we recommend based on your play behaviour. Or top listings. We want to make sure we have all of those types of discoverability mechanisms.”
Microsoft are yet to comment on whether indie developers will experience any cost to their own pockets to acquire devkits or publish their games. But you WILL have full rights to charge for the games if you prefer; and pricing is aimed to be similar to today’s Xbox 360 Marketplace. With little else revealed, Whitten says we’ll have to wait to Gamescon to know the rest of the details. Stay tuned!
Set to retail with an RRP of £49.99, compared to $59.99 in the States.
Microsoft has announced Xbox One games in the UK will come with a Recommended Retail Price (RRP) of £49.99.
OXM spotted the prices on the company’s online store, which currently lists Dead Rising 3, Ryse: Son of Rome, Forza Motorsport 5 and Kinect Sports Rivals for that price.
Last month, Microsoft announced that first-party Xbox One games would be sold in North America for $59.99, which is the same price games are currently sold for there. In terms of the UK, it’s worth remembering that retailers are likely to undercut Microsoft – in fact, Amazon is already listing Need for Speed Rivals at £43.99.
Sony has yet to announce any UK pricing for its games, though the company has similarly confirmed an American price point of $59.99.
In the development of their mobile platform, it seems the people over at Ubuntu have discovered something about the smartphone industry: every smartphone in production is “consumer grade”. Noting that Formula 1 cars are used a commercial test-bed for new automotive technologies, the people at Ubuntu wanted a similar product for the smarphone industry. So they decided to build one.
The Ubuntu Edge is indeed a powerhouse of a phone. With a 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a multicore processor to be named later, this phone is more powerful than many PC’s. And the chips aren’t the only impressive things on this phone. With a casing crafted from a single piece of textured metal, and a sapphire crystal screen, this phone will be incredibly durable. Rather than focusing on just having a higher ppi, which is wasted on most phones today, the 4.5 inch screen will sport greater clarity through color enhancement and improved brightness. The battery life will also be improved, utilizing a silicon anode battery, in place of the more standard lithium-ion of today’s phones.
On the software side, the Edge will be running both the Ubuntu mobile platform and Android side by side.
To finance this project, Ubuntu is reaching out to technology enthusiasts to donate a whopping $32,000,000 on Indigogo. If the campaign succeeds, it will shatter all previous crowd-funding records. To receive one of the new devices, supporters will have to donate at least $830, and wait until the project is finished in May of next year. Participating in the campaign will be the only way to receive one of these phones, as Ubuntu is only planning to make 40,000 of the phones.
