Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Frog parkour, flimsy trigger fingers and a lover's quarrel
Don't call it a "Hellevator"
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Our weekly ritual returns, gathering us all to summon gifs, screenshots and work-in-progress videos from the murky depths of the game development community. This week: Satan's personal elevator, wibbly-wobbly firearms, a late-night conversation and powerful amphibious tongues.
Flying in first this week is Frog Island - a name that doesn't quite hit the tongue-twisting ambitions of the game proper.
Nothing quite gets me excited in a game as much as slick, fast movement. And while that's never been a description I'd ascribe to frogs, student devs Shotgun Mango have managed just that with liberal interpretation of how frog tongues work. What follows is a brilliant looking platformer, licking every surface with your mammoth, rope-like tongue to build up a velocity never before experienced by your pond-dwelling siblings.
It doesn't take a frog detective to uncover the inspiration behind this next game, mind. Devil Daggers whomst?
From the blood-red lo-fi palette to the wobbling hand at the base of the screen, there's an awful lot of Devil Daggers going on in Heinn's latest experiment at first glance. And yes, there's a demo on Itch that's pretty much an attempt to recreate the skull-blasting fave.
But there's a recent skew in the dev's feed that leans further into the arcane - a vision that extends the world beyond a small murder-disk with great chains, stacked bones and many eye'd, many ringed angels. There's a glimpse here of something fantastically strange, even if it is jumping off one of the best games of the decade. Not a bad jumping-off point, all things considered
We're still blasting away with Yongmin Park's prototype - unfortunately, our aim's gone right out the window.
Many of this week's #screenshotsaturday posts are coming out of the Game Maker's Toolkit Jam, a gamedev-a-thon rooted in the YouTube design channel of the same name. The theme for this weekend's jam is "out of control", and that's certainly what's going on in Park's colourful experiment.
Sure, the designer in me sees a lotta scope in seeing how different weapons physically affect the player character and such. But more than anything, I'm simply drawn to this cheery wee fellow waving about his one noodly appendance, firing off lethal rounds with a care-free whimsy and absolutely zero trigger discipline.
Finally: Pastel sunsets, broad strokes and an unexplained tension? That's all I'm looking for with this column, really.
Releasing next week, The Outcast Lovers is a follow-up of sorts to The Night Fisherman (Steam page), a quiet conversation at sea between a fisherman and a shotgun-toting stranger. Developers Far Few Giants describe Outcast as the "next episode" of this story, and I'm beyond curious to find out how a showdown at sea leads to this warm - if perhaps tense - land-locked conversation.