Arcane Kids

Arcane Kids
Industry Video Games

Arcane Kids are an independent video game studio known for creating surreal and humorous video games using the Unity engine. The team first joined together at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute while part of a DIY basement music club, where they decided to start developing video games for fun, eventually moving to Los Angeles to focus on this endeavor. Among their most best-known games are 2013's Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective and 2015's Sonic Dreams Collection, both of which are jovial tributes to the game Bubsy 3D and the Sonic the Hedgehog series, respectively.

According to members of the studio, the name "Arcane Kids" was derived from a mysterious rewritable compact disc with the phrase inscribed on top of it which was found lying in a patch of dirt. The team released their first game, a platforming puzzle game titled Nudo, in 2010. Their second game, Zineth, was first developed and released for Windows and Macintosh PCs as a student project in experimental video game design and won the award for Best Student Project in the Indepentent Games Festival at the Game Developers Conference. The following year, they revealed Perfect Stride, a skating game which depicts what would have happened if Tony Hawk had never performed the 900 skating move.

History

Creation and Zenith (2010-2012)

Arcane Kids was first founded at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute by several members of a DIY music club, among whom were Ben Esposito and Russell Honor.[1] After meeting each other, the group decided to uptake the development of video games, taking inspiration from D.I.Y. group Babycastles.[1] According to the team in an online chat interview for Sex Magazine, the title "Arcane Kids" was a phrase written on a rewritable compact disc that they had found lying on the ground. In 2010, Arcane Kids released their first developed video game,[2] Nudo, a platform-puzzle title described as "a platformer on top of a rubik's cube."[3]

Following Nudo, the studio developed Zineth as a student thesis in experimental game design. The game is a cel-shaded 3D skate game, set in a futuristic world in which the entire world has been absorbed within a mobile game, brainwashing all of its inhabitants.[4] The title is a pun on the words "zine" (a slang term referring to a magazine) and "zenith";[2] the player, controlling a magazine deliverer, flies throughout the desertlike setting and delivers magazines to people in order to show them what the real world is like.[4] An in-game cell phone is constantly present on-screen, having stemmed from the concept of a character who could "skate around in a big desert, [sic] while trying to play a cellphone game."[2] This cell phone is used to receive missions, as well as containing Twitter integration which can be used to tweet screenshots taken in-game, and a minigame titled Mirage Cat which was originally developed separately with the intent of being its own arcade game.[2] The phone mechanic also takes inspiration from online Flash-based titles and role-playing games such as Pokémon, with several upgrades that can be purchased using earned currency.[5] Jacob Kipfing, a developer who helped work o the game, cited many of the Dreamcast games from the early 2000s as large influencers, highlighting games such as Jet Set Radio and Rez as prime examples.[5] Zineth was released in August 2012 for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh PCs, with 7 people credited as having worked on the game (including fellow students who were part of the same class at the time).[2] By March of 2013, it had been played more than 140,000 times.[5] Comparisons were drawn between the game and Jet Set Radio, a game with similar graphics and gameplay mechanics; despite this, the game's developers have stated that none of the team members working on the game had owned a Dreamcast or played Jet Set Radio, although Honor lamented that his knowledge of the game based on magazine coverage had undeniably had an impact on him.[5] It was eventually nominated in the Independent Games Festival at the 2013 Game Developers Conference, where it won the award for Best Student Project.[5][6]

Perfect Stride and Bubsy 3D (2013)

In 2013, Arcane Kids announced their next project, titled Perfect Stride. The game, an online, first-person skateboarding simulator where players can do skateboarding tricks and socialize, depicts what would have happened in an alternate universe in which pro skater Tony Hawk had never landed the 900 at the X-Games and achieved widespread recognition.[7][8] According to an anonymous developer under the moniker "lil_vertex", the setting is that of an apocolyptic universe where the stunt hadn't "triggered an explosion of corporate skateboarding."[2] They also claimed that it takes place within a metaphorical depiction of Yahoo! Geocities and served as a symbol of the "dying web," noting that the various pieces of architecture are representative personal web pages.[2] Esposito and Honor further explained that in the wake of this, an immortal "time wizard" comes into power who uses his abilities to prevent anybody from dying. In the midst of this, the player's overarching goal is to venture through the various islands within the game's dystopian environment and find what is rumored to be the very last bullet to exist on Earth and use it to kill the Time Wizard once and for all.[7] Gameplay-wise, Perfect Stride takes inspiration from early movement exploits in first-person shooting games.[9] Making use of only the computer mouse, it utilizes a unique control scheme in which the player clicks the left and right buttons to build up force and moves the mouse in that direction to gain momentum.[7] Esposito found specific inspiration for this style of gameplay several years prior to the game's development while attempting to mod Half-Life 2, where he mistakenly produced an unorthodox style of control that he felt would be interesting in a game of its own.[7] Esposito brought the idea to co-developer Honor, who took a full month in order to faithfully recreate the style of movement that Esposito had described.[7] A "rewind" feature allowing players to correct mistakes is also present in the game. This feature was included out of the developers' experiences with other games, and was considered necessary in order to make it fairly challenging.[7] The rewind gimmick is also tied into the game's plot; the player is unable to die at any point at all, as time freezes whenever they are about to and they are forced to rewind out of it.[7] The game is meant to simulate the social atmosphere of a real-life skate park, taking heed from early mods and online chat rooms,[1] and is intended to provide a laid-back multiplayer experience, with the team referring to it as a "lifestyle game".[2] An early access alpha version of the game was made available to backers of the Kickstarter campaign for L.A. Game Space in August of 2013.[1][7][8] Due to its ambitious nature,[1] the game is still in development and planned for eventual release via Steam, with intentions to include a level editor and a full-fledged multiplayer feature separate from the story mode.[7]

In the same year, Arcane Kids released Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective, a 3D platform game and an unofficial entry in the Bubsy series of games. Touted as an edutainment experience centered around modern art, it follows Bubsy the Bobcat as he endures a surreal spiritual experience while visiting the tribute exhibit for light artist James Turrell in Los Angeles. It is a facetious homage to Bubsy 3D, a 3D platform game in the series released for the PlayStation in 1996 which gained infamy for its negative reception, and attempts to inform the player about the modern art frontier using gameplay which mimicks that of its inspirative predecessor;[1] Bubsy's controls are made to be similar to the original game's, and stages contain copious collectibles which exert little to no effect on the player's performance. It was released in September 2013 to celebrate the 18th anniversary of Bubsy 3D, and received considerable attention on the Internet for its strange content.

Games

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Confessions of an online prankster: A good laugh with Ben Esposito - Kill Screen". 14 June 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Asher Penn". asherpenn.com.
  3. ↑ "Nudo Game (2010)". herotwin.com.
  4. 1 2 "'Zines, Screens, and All In-Betweens - Unity". Unity.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 "Zineth: A colorful celebration of speed, motion, Twitter and cell phone obsession".
  6. ↑ "Cart Life wins big at the 15th annual Independent Games Festival Awards".
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "How Arcane Kids replaced Tony Hawk's 900 with a Time Wizard in Perfect Stride".
  8. 1 2 "Zineth developer's next project is Perfect Stride, a psychedelic skateboarding game".
  9. ↑ "Perfect Stride". pstride.tumblr.com.
  10. ↑ "The Top 10 Video Games of 2015".
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.