We’re delighted to showcase our friend @XavierThiry‘s excellent work on Pix the Cat’s original soundtrack!
He has brought the game together with his delicious tunes. A large part of the “zone” feeling you might experience when playing is due to his ability to take you by the hand before throwing you against the ropes.

The Laboratory music has been carefully composed by our other friend (yes, we have two) and talented artist, @SylvainHellio.
His work is remarkable in many ways. It is very hard to craft music you hear when listening and that dims from your ears when you’re struggling on a puzzle.

Here’s a link to stream or buy the OST!

Xavier has been kind enough to share a little explanation on his intent and inspiration for the Arcade Mode.
His work with Nicolas Signat and Vincent Mougel on the Nostalgia Ragtime melodies is equally charming. Give it a try!

Sylvain’s blogpost will come shortly!

Last but not least, here’s a little gift for you!!! The FEVER TIME track taken from the OST to blast your ears away!

Enjoy!

The post Pix the Cat OST available! appeared first on Pastagames.

You are welcome to play, enjoy, hate, praise, laud or trash our games privately or publicly.
You are equally welcome to monetize videos of our games with no limitations.

We want you to be able to live from what you do.

FREEEEEEEEDOM!!! *screams his eyes out before being out of breath and falling miserably to the ground*

The post Freedom for Youtubers! appeared first on Pastagames.

We previously introduced the ARENA and the NOSTALGIA modes and it’s now time to scratch that competitive scoring itch!

The ARCADE Mode is a seemingly endless descent through handmade levels at break-neck speed.
Quick thinking and faster fingers are well rewarded. If you’re into scoring and competing against yourself, your friends and the world, you should feel right at home. There are many tricks and subtleties that will help you grow your score in each of the Grids of Infinity!

Here are 10 tips that both beginners and advanced users should find useful:

1. Stay focused at all times!

It sounds obvious but it’s mandatory to stay ultra-concentrated throughout the Time Attack. The entire Arcade Mode’s purpose is to get you sucked in from head to toe and always keep you on edge! Pix the Cat never stops! Neither should you! Take a deep breath, sit comfortably and dive in.

2. Speed and Combo are one and the same.

Your speed goes up constantly, and with it your combo multiplier. However, every mistake will slow you down. Missing a perfect, facing a wall for too long, trapping yourself or colliding with an enemy will all cause you to lose speed and with it your combo multiplier level.

3. Getting a perfect is nice but keeping your Combo is nicer!

It’s far better to fail a perfect than to trap yourself! You’ll soon learn that some mistakes are more costly than others. In the end you’ll have scored a lot more points by playing safe even if you miss a few perfects, than playing greedy and getting trapped. If you do happen to miss a perfect, adapt! Find the new optimal clearance path and move on!

4. Having trouble getting a wall-boost? Turn earlier!

Getting those sparks on every turn against a wall is a sure fire path to the leaderboards. Practice your timing until you don’t miss any, you’ll be surprised how much speed you gain through this. The deeper you are, the bigger the boost is!

5. You can boost against your own duck-tail.

When you get into the mindset of getting every boost you can without going too much out of your way, you’ll think of new ways to catch easy boosts! Boosting against your own duck-tail is one of them…

6. Look ahead, use the best warp to get close to your next target.

Some levels have more than one entrance, picking the right one is a huge time saver! Think in terms of distance and be smart! Some levels have warp entrances right next to each other but that end up on opposite sides of the level below! Going back up and down elsewhere is very useful. Use the dimensions to your advantage to cover distances much faster!

7. Don’t focus only on the best path to pick up the eggs, finding the best drop off path is equally important!

Think of each level as being built with two paths, one for pickup and one for drop off, don’t give up on saving time halfway through!

8. Is now the best time to blast that skull? Maybe if you get it later you won’t have to go out of your way as much.

When going for the skulls in Fever Time don’t forget everything else! Try to get them when they’re on the way to your next objective (warp / pick up / drop off). Optimal path-finding is the key to saving time.

9. Don’t stay stuck in your old ways, keep innovating, you may have overlooked a simpler, more optimal path.

Don’t be afraid to try new paths, they might be better than the ones you’ve been using. Some paths might be a few tiles longer but maybe you’ll pick up more boosts on the way which overall will make you faster!

10. The ghosts are a great tool, use them as reference when trying new paths and see if you come out ahead!

Ghosts are the perfect tool to find out if one path is faster than another, use and abuse them! Look at your friends’ or the developer’s ghosts as well, you might learn something! You can also progress a lot by challenging the Scoreboard  Sensei! Which is basically the ghost of the player just above you on each Grid’s leaderboard. The Sensei will teach you tips & tricks until you reach the top!

Hope to see you on the Leaderboards!

@nadimpasta

PS: if you know of other tips that can help reach the top, do share in the comments. I’d love to know about them!

The post Arcade Tips & Tricks to rule them all! appeared first on Pastagames.

Howdy! After the reveal at Gamescom and the ARENA mode presentation, I’m back with another Pix the Cat game mode that just might float your steamboat! The Nostalgia Mode!

Everything in the NOSTALGIA mode: gameplay, art, music… is inspired by something from the past that we love.
Gameplay comes from Snake, Art from the early animated cartoons and Music from the jangling melodies of Ragtime!

We took these references, shook them up in a vintage cocktail shaker and poured out a cloudy mixture, something we think looks like us. The result is a game that feels familiar but is always ready to surprise you!

This mode plays like Snake but with a few twists. Collect the target number of ducklings to win. Succeed before the Goat chomps the Flower to get the “bonus”. Don’t run into a wall, get stuck inside your tail or collide with a baddie, or it’s Game Over!

The many levels offer a variety of thrills and pleasures that blend into an adventure that’s one of a kind. Some levels last a couple of seconds and only require a few moves. Some are about being consistent in collecting a ton of ducklings in your tail without crashing. Others are tiny ant-farms in which you need to collect only a few eggs but getting there is the tough part! And of course many more which I’ll leave for you to unravel…

I’ll let Hervé Barbaresi, Lead Artist @pastagames, tell you a little more about the nostalgia theme:

“Pix the Cat’s Nostalgia Mode gave me the opportunity to have fun adapting the charming old-fashioned touches from the classic black and white cartoons of the 1920’s.

The challenge with this skin was to make you forget that you are controlling a video game character on a tiled grid. We have worked and re-worked the image filters (grain, B&W pulse, glitches, dirt and scratches…) to create a look which really evokes the simple yet sophisticated feel of those old cartoons.

It was a real treat designing the various gameplay elements throughout the levels in this mode! I went with simple, expressive shapes, then made them look as plump as possible. Keep that in mind when you meet Mr. Owl for the first time!

I think you’ve caught a glimpse of how fond I am of Nostalgia… I really hope that the way the game plays, my personal contribution as well as the delightful tunes of @XavierThiry will transport you to the worlds of old!”

The post Introducing NOSTALGIA MODE! appeared first on Pastagames.

In-depth couch gaming!

Hi folks!
We are releasing Pix the Cat on PS4™ and PSVita™ (cross-buy) in the first weeks of October and we have a new game mode exclusive for PS4™ players: the ARENA !!!

Call me old-school but the most outrageous fun I have when playing games is with friends, at home, facing the same screen, hearing laughter or frustration after a quirky situation. I grew up with Bomberman and am still playing Towerfall just to enjoy shoving my buddy’s controller away when he’s winning or whining too much!

We have been wanting to make a nervous and rewarding couch-game for years at Pastagames and Pix the Cat turned out to be the best opportunity to satisfy this multiplayer urge!

In the ARCADE Mode, you control a restless cat in a dimensional maze. You collect ducklings that line up in a tail behind you – and then deliver them on targets to open the gates of the next level.

The core Pix gameplay sets solid grounds for a feisty ARENA brawl! So we added three other cats to make a party of (up to) four players that fight to be the last PixBot standing.

You will collect ammo-eggs that make your tail longer (and slow you down) and then use them to destroy your opponents. Three egg-types grant you different weapons: the white stun-shots, the green proxy-mines and the purple amok-rockets.

You can also choose to consume your ammo-eggs for a continuous “Dash” to ram through your opponents. Dashing is colorblind and will burn through purple, green and white ammo-eggs alike.

Find your own style to go with each of the seven Arenas – they cater to all! From Trap-Tsar to Lean Mean Missile Launching Machine, through the Insta-Head-First-Rusher without forgetting the Unstoppable Dash Train, every strategy has its place… and its score screen medal!

Don’t underestimate the power of white eggs and minimalistic strategy. Collecting a lot of ammo is not always wise. A carefully timed stun shot followed up with a tiny-one-egg-dash can be extremely effective!

Some of the Arenas feature nested sub-levels you can hide in to avoid oncomers. Or use them to change battle-grounds if you think it is to your advantage. The warps can be your saving grace! But watch out, as soon as all PixBots are in the same dimension, the camera will zoom down, closing warps on its way!

If you’re having a three or four player ARENA party, killed PixBots will come back to life as ghosts! This way, you never stop playing… because if a ghost hits a live PixBot, they’ll switch, one coming back to life as the other fades away into a grudgeful ghost!

Ghosts may not be speedy but they pack a punch! If you or your ammo-tail gets caught you’ll regret it! Don’t try shooting them either, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise!

There’s too much to say on the many strategies and tricks to adopt in order to win with the various setups and settings you go about in the ARENA… So you’ll have to find your own! Please do share them if you’ve invented new ones!

It’s the first time at Pastagames that we stay afterhours and fight for a controller to play a game we’ve being working on for ages! We hope you’ll take as much pleasure blasting your friends away as we did in making this mode!

tl;dr

Pix the Cat – ARENA is a local multiplayer combat game mode. It’s friendly and beastly, hectic and strategic. It’s very simple to tame and have fun with, even when playing with experienced players but if you stick with it you’ll find many levels of hidden depths - pun intended - waiting to be explored.
So dash on fellow PixBots!

Find us @pastagames and @nadimpasta

The post Pix the Cat – ARENA MODE appeared first on Pastagames.

“Today at Gamescom 2014, SONY and PASTAGAMES officially announce that PIX the CAT is coming to PS4 and PSVita in FALL 2014 with a mission: to make your thumbs sore! After Pix’n Love – Rush (PS Minis), the infamous blue cat is back for an intense scoring arcade game loaded with surprises!”

Writing these words means the world to us. It means that the game we’ve been making for the last three years is coming out!

Our strategy at Pastagames is simple: gather XP and gold by making cool games for others (Rayman Jungle Run, Panzer Bimbo, AR Rescue…) then spend it all on our homegrown production. We empty the bank account and start the cycle over…

PIX the CAT is the game that saw the most cycles. For the first time in years, we’re playing it solo! No publishing or editing to hold us back from our many kinks and obsessions! Naturally, we’ve ended up being obsessed and kinky about everything, even the new Pastagames website! But most of all about getting players sucked into the game from head to toe!

The Arcade gameplay comes from our initial desire to build a hectic 2D level-based scoring game that offers constant flow without any kind of scrolling. We wanted the BLUE CAT to ride the maze and save ducklings from levels displayed on different dimensions. As PIX extends his tail, he’ll straddle over multiple dimensions at the same time! We went for a game of Combo, Boosts, Perfects and FEVER TIME!

We now have powerful enough tools to display infinitely small details. So we tackled the technical challenge of showing the levels within the levels – Russian Dolls style! Our goal was to build a game where your sensations grow and intensify as your skill improves. A flexible gameplay where speed and tempo adapt to each player.

This is where the On & Off production schedule turned out handy. We quickly needed to get the game into as many hands as possible to collect feedback while working on other projects. We had to take a very close look at players improving. So we took advantage of the Off periods to have a custom arcade cabinet built for PIX the CAT. Its purpose and destiny were fulfilled in bars, hands-on parties at our studio and game-conventions over the last two years.

The cabinet turned out to be the best thing we have bought. Ever. Watching some of you play regularly and others only for a few games was an amazing tool to build and polish our gameplay throughout production. Once the backbone of the game was ready, we’ve packed PIX the CAT with surprises! Things to lower your heart-rate in between Arcade thrills. Things to make you raise your eyebrows. Things to make you raise one eyebrow…

The one surprise we can tell you about right now is: “The ARENA! Up to 4 players send their PIXBOT into battle knowing it will probably not come back! Come have a go at this PS4 exclusive local multiplayer battle ARENA!”

It’s a blast releasing a game for Sony platforms because the machines are well designed, the controllers very precise and the people we work with at SCE sure know how to make our lives easier! It was a very natural transition from the arcade sticks to the PS4 and PSVita controllers and the display abilities of both consoles shine the best light on our handmade PIX the CAT.

Come one. Come all. The Grid of Infinity awaits…

ps: You cannot buy Happiness but you can cross-buy PIX the CAT, and that is almost the same.

The post Gamescom 2014: PIX the CAT on PS4 and PSVITA! appeared first on Pastagames.

I loathe learning anything by heart. The idea itself gives me the creeps. It feels like I have to remove my brain and stuff my skull with knowledge. So I find ways to avoid it by inventing mnemonic workarounds. It didn’t prove useful to get better grades in school but it gave me a feeling of learning to use my head instead of dull forced-feeding.

The problem.

In the Arcade mode of Pix the Cat, I wanted to build Level Design that offered the possibility of getting better at every try. I also wanted to avoid that players learn the levels by heart and keep repeating their solutions as their skills get better.

My goal was to find a system in which levels would look and feel the same without actually being the same. Experience should lead to better performances without systematic repetition. I was looking for something that would keep players alert all the time.

Because Pix the Cat is a scoring game with online leaderboards, it was mandatory that each play would allow to reach the same number of points.

Procedural level generation would have done the trick (and made everything easier for production). Unfortunately I wanted each and every level to have this handmade touch that makes it special. Memorable. Isn’t it ironic…

The resolution.

The solution we found turned out to satisfy my trauma and gave a fresh feel to every new game session.

An Arcade level pack is composed of a series of floors. Once you finish a level, the “doors” to the next level open. It is embedded in a “wall” of the previous level. Just like Russian Dolls. Once Pix enters a door, the camera zooms in to display the next level in full screen.

The first step was to design one complete pile of levels (~25), from the “ground floor” to the “deepest floor”. Then, we randomly flipped the level-pile horizontally and/or vertically at every new game launch to unsettle the players.

Between 1 and 9 variations of each level within that pile were designed. Moving the collectibles here, the drop targets there, shifting a few walls here, reverting enemy paths there… and so on. Only slight changes, but everywhere.

As a new game is launched, a variation for each Wagon in the Level Design Train is randomly selected and the complete pile is mirrored one way, the other or the other.

Because the variations look alike, players feel comfortable; and because each variation has its best optimized path, players must constantly adapt to make sure they perform.

Then, it was an abyss of complications to make sure all variations for a given level were equal. Measuring the “first approach path” for each, the “best possible path”, the number of tiles from entrance to exit; balancing traps and movement patterns, and so on…

The last thorn in my side was the Ghost feature we implemented that allows you to compete with your best score, your friends’ and eventually the leaderboard’s best performances on the entire pack, not one given generation. We needed everything to match visually in order to avoid ghosts going through walls or showing illogical paths…

The level design for the Arcade Mode of Pix the Cat was a lovely experience and one hell of a ride (pun intended).

When we calculate all SKU generation possibilities for the Main Arcade Pack, it adds up to a mere 6 817 131 521 397 227 520 possible draws… oooooh yeah! (Math by the PastaDevTeam).

In other words, if you play the Main Arcade version on Pix the Cat, the game will pick a draw of levels out of Six Quintillion possibilities. And every time you start a new game, you feel at home nonetheless!

I never thought I’d use the word Quintillion. Achievement unlocked!

@nadimpasta

The post The Random Train appeared first on Pastagames.

As we are making Pix the Cat @Pastagames, I learned that this process is flawed.
Here is why:

When you play an action game, the emotions you feel come from the connections between your mind and body. You might even come close to a mantra-like experience and the bubble you get drawn into is our ultimate goal as (action games) designers.

There is a lot to discover when building. “Better” ideas bloom and ripen. If these ideas contradict your initial intentions, you will be frustrated if you stick too closely to your core rules.

Logical bottom-up creative process helps to build a coherent game but can get in the way of emotional lift-off.

When writing a description about a game; it is better to describe the experience a player will go about rather than listing the number of characters, levels, environments…
I now understand that during a creative process, it is much more fruitful to set unwavering emotional targets rather than cast-iron core rules. Wings before roots.

Staying on the emotional course is more important than being coherent and structured. Accepting to do “illogical” things is often hard, but it can contribute to reaching your emotional targets. Players may end up disoriented but it is acceptable considering the added emotional value.

For example, a basic rule of Pix the Cat was that when Pix collides with a wall, it kills him. It was meant as a tough rule (taken from Snake) that ensured constant flow and danger.

This rule was used to decide how the Cat turns in curves; it guided the positioning of collectibles for the level design; it contributed to the collision rules with the tail you build up…
It unfortunately forced us to keep Pix’s speed pretty low. I held on to it because it vouched for the Die & Retry aspect that was very important for the player’s frustration/satisfaction balance.

It took time to break my mold and understand that the emotional benefit of increasing the Cat’s speed was more valuable to the player’s experience than the initial balance and intentions. Increasing the speed added another level of concentration and contributed to the mantra-zone pleasure.
We therefore changed the core-rule to allow greater speed by being more tolerant on the collisions (using a long slow motion before impact).

We even ended up removing this rule entirely in the multiplayer ARENA mode. The satisfaction of “finishing off” your opponent became more valuable than the game’s DNA. Though illogical, we chose to reduce the situations in which a Cat dies because of his own mistake to avoid the “You won only because I lost” factor. We wanted that Victory was obtained by the winner’s action directly!

The collision-with-walls rules are now different in each mode and very un-elegant: here walls kills you, there they stop you without damage, here there is a slow motion that protects you, there direct crash…
We sacrificed consistency but made the player experience better overall.

From now on, I will start by crafting top-down emotional targets that should resist production discoveries, and only then basic bottom-up rules that can be tampered with if necessary.

Until I change my mind…

@nadimpasta

The post Break Your Rules appeared first on Pastagames.