Screenshot Saturday Sundays! We’re the last stop on the road to another working week – so why not stay a while, rest your legs, and soak up some of our lovely selection of screenshots, vids and gifs? This week: moody melodies, grimy bikers, reckless taxis and a bothersome door.
It’s dark and dreary in the woods tonight, but nothing that can’t be fixed with a light tune and lighter step.
A game play snippet of The Forest Quartet, ACT 1! #screenshotsaturday #gamedevelopment #indiedev pic.twitter.com/GlImrNnWV6
— Mads Vadsholt (@ItsMadsTalking) August 29, 2020
In development by Mads Vadsholt and friends, The Forest Quartet is an eerie woodland trail about a dead singer trying to bring the back back together. There’s a wonderfully otherworldly “melted” look to the way trees, fungi and undergrowth shift and throb, enhancing the all-too-static plasticity of later machinery – odd pipes and doodads that burst with life when brought back online.
Now, I only tend to call a taxi these days if I’m out on the town – but if Edinburgh’s cabs were even half as wild as Hover Cabby‘s gravity-defying drivers, I think I’d rather walk.
This is not not a handbrake turn.
This is a inertia damper activation induced drift!#gamedev #indiedev #screenshotsaturday pic.twitter.com/Y1TPNHkEoQ
— Hover Cabby (@HoverCabby) August 29, 2020
I do love me a game with a good sense of speed, and developer Alexander Birke’s cab ’em up is absolutely throwing some spine-wrenching G-forces on screen. Described an an open-world courier game, Hover Cabby looks to be the first bit of The Fifth Element to Cloudpunk‘s Blade Runner, a blur of colour as you nip your passangers across a vibrant, vertical metropolis. I just hope there’s a sick bag or two in the back seat.
Despite being called Mechajammer, our next game has nothing to do with giant robots. That doesn’t mean it can’t have its own share of clunking great machines, mind.
Taking a mecha U-Turn #ScreenShotSaturday #cyberpunk #IndieGameDev pic.twitter.com/ZZBGXG4BBZ
— Whalenought Studios (@whalenought) August 29, 2020
Coming from the folks behind Serpent In The Staglands and Copper Dreams (which made a screenshot saturday sundays appearance last year), Whalenaught have given the latter a new name and new art style in the form of Mechajammer, a “cyberpunk horror CRPG” on a grim future colony world.
I’ll admit to not knowing about the switch until after writing this post, and I do reckon something’s been lost in the switch to a grainier, more oppressive style. But they are quite good grains, a filthy smashing together of low-poly 3D props and sprite-based characters in an awfully moody palette. A “cosy RPG” it most certainly is not.
Finally: how many anthropomorphic seagulls does it take to open a door, anyway?
The many ways to get past a door in #GustOfWind#screenshotsaturday #indiegame #unity3d #madewithunity #gamedev #gamedeveloper pic.twitter.com/F73H1PJyqz
— GustOfWind (@Pneuma10805135) August 29, 2020
Now, this is ostensibly a game about skulking your way onto brass ships on the open seas. As that, it looks neat enough, sure. But in trying to demonstrate a range of door-opening animations, Gust Of Wind developer Samuli Lautjärvi has stumbled right into a slapstick routine.
Brilliant.