Pang Adventures brings new features & gameplay while keeping true to the original spirit:

Local Co-op in every game mode!

3 different modes:
Tour Mode: one location at a time!
Score Attack: 3 lives and NO CONTINUES! The real arcade experience!
Panic Mode: 99 levels of continuous battle! Put your skills to the ultimate test!

The Bros. have upgraded their gear since the last invasion: machine guns, flamethrowers, shurikens…you name it, they’ve got it! Electric, explosive, smoke & lava balls will all be deployed to knock them off their feet!

Boss fights! For the 1st time, the Bros. come face-to-face with the nefarious Alien Commanders! They didn’t come to Earth for the sightseeing…so get ready to blow them to smithereens!

The post Pang Adventures 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

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