The past few months of radio silence has culminated in a fantastic new job for me in Osaka. Active Gaming Media has signed me on as their new Content Manager for their indy game translation and distribution service, Playism. Basically that means I am going to be hunting far and wide across the net and convention centers for indy games that look truly excellent so that we can bring them to foreign audiences. Playism has already put out a lot of really killer games, including Gunhound EX which I wrote about some months ago. Take a look at the library on our site, which is quite big at this point and is full of awesome games that are otherwise not available in their non-native regions.
Having just joined the team, there is still a whole lot for me to learn (my god, the sheer number of names and companies I am going to learn about in the near and far future!), and so I'm still getting up to speed even with some of our current projects. What prompted this post was checking out the Kickstarter for Band Saga, the video for which simple blew my f#&king mind. Have a look at the Kickstarter page, but below I'll borrow the video and some of the images to let you get a feel for what it is.
Band Saga is "a musical action rogue-like of epic proportions." It is a game where you utilize the sounds available to you in the game to create and remix tracks. Those sounds then affect the random generation of the SHUMP levels that you battle across. It's a beautifully drawn and animated game. The colors really pop, as do the sprite animations. The creator, Roger Hicks, has both incredible talent and excellent support from his lead artist Hillmon Ancrum. Right now I am actually listening to the OST on a free stream here and it kicks very much ass.
Roger has some really cool ideas for where he wants his game to go, including simultaneous coop play and asynchronous music collaboration. But it is really the core game mechanic that intrigues me most. I can't wait to get my hands on a build so I can see how the gameplay in this video unfolds for the player. There is more information on the Kickstarter, so go there to find out more about the game and if you like what you see (why wouldn't you? This game looks utterly bonkers) then back it and spread the word.
