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.

“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.

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.

Working on this game was amazing in very many ways.
Ubisoft asked us to take Rayman Origins and fit it into a simple “one touch” runner game for tactile devices. We had just finished the On/Off mode of Pix’n Love – Rush and were ready to tackle this complicated challenge.

They gave us access to their impressive production tools in order to port their Framework (UbiArt) onto our own Linguini. It was a challenge for everyone here at Pastagames; getting “similar” display results on mobile than on Xbox360 for the coders; taming the very powerful level edition tool for both level and graphic designers to produce levels that would be cool and still work on the laggier devices.

The huge success the game is still having (GOTY 2012 Appstore) is giving us a lot of visibility and opening new doors for our studio. Yay!

The post Rayman Jungle Run appeared first on Pastagames.

We were lucky to be chosen by Parrot to build this game. It was a complete deluxe discovery pack for us: augmented reality, novelty machine, gyroscopic controls, and actual Hardware management within our software. There was a long R&D phase as they were still working on their SDK when we started.

To come upon such an original project to work on once in a while is simply wonderful. Naturally, the extreme restrictions limited our game-making liberties but the experience was delightful!

The post A.R. Rescue appeared first on Pastagames.

WANNA PLAY WITH FIRE?

You know you do. So take a blazing hot adventure and help 3 little Flames rise from the molten depths of the earth to the Top of the World. Torch your way through 100 puzzling levels on this Journey to their Daddy, the Sun!

Get those worries off your chest with this cool and refreshing game.
Come heat up your fingers and Burn It All!

Burn It All was an attempt to stick to a rather precise plan and complete a game within a short timespan (relative goes without saying).
The only great thing about the game is the TimeLoop feature that gets you to collaborate with previous versions of yourself! (Cheers to the amazing Cursor 10).
Playing with fire and getting it to react in a cool way, both graphically and for the gameplay, was a blast for all of us!
Our lesson on Burn it All was that tight recipes are not the way to go for us to make the games we like most.

The post Burn It All appeared first on Pastagames.

Thanks to the new-and-improved Pastagames Amusement Device, enjoy The Rush with never-before-seen playability!

Do you want the clearest, cleanest, shiniest pixels money can buy?
Choose Pastagames Amusement Device brand game consoles (any iOS powered device)! You get not one, not two, but three times the fun for the price of one.

Hurry to your local drugstore or the nearest app retailer and get yours while supplies last! Say Goodbye to a bland and boring life, and Hello to the laughter of children!

Warning: this game may contain residues of macadamia nuts and gluten.

——-

We were growing a bit weary of various work-for-food projects when a massive desire to build a dot-matrix driven display came up. We failed to resist the urge and dove head first into an extra-hours project. It was a great opportunity to release some pressure and give a task to a special kind of minion we host from time to time at Pastagames.

At least twice a year we have 9th graders who come eyes wide open to our studio for a week to get a first contact with the professional world. We want them to do more than just play-test our latest production for a week.
So we set up a computer with Game Maker and invite them to give it a try. A one page design document in hand and a folder full of graphical assets; welcome to the beautiful world of video game making!
Our goal is for them to leave the Studio with a game that is not just placeholder populated. We had just released 03: Pixel with Arkedo. In it were plenty of great sprites and animations to work with.

So we designed a minimalistic platform game design with a twist. Pix’n Love – Rush was thought of at first to give a chance to these kids to end their one week internship with something to take home and be proud of!

The simple design got refined at every new trainee. We ended up liking the gameplay cocktail we had shaken enough that we decided to make a prototype our way. Then we got excited…

The production was cool for all of us: code-wise, the game uses a real Dot-Matrix display, each pixel has its own physics (shaders without shaders!); art-wise, playing with an existing set of sprites and modifying the rendering for each combo and game mode; and gd-ld-wise, using notepad to create levels (C was the cat, # a wall) and working the WarioWare hectic rhythm was amazing!

We struggled a lot to propose “good” tactile controls. It was the biggest setback we suffered. Virtual buttons on a touchscreen are a no go. Period.
To get back on the right track, we devised 3 one-touch game modes and added them to the 1$ package! One love.

The post Pix’n Love – Rush appeared first on Pastagames.

We ganged up with Arkedo to make this game come to life.

1 from Pastagames
+ 1 from Arkedo
+ plenty of coffee

= The birth of Pixel  Pix the Cat!

Have you ever meowed under the pale moonlight with your feline posse?
All cats are not grey at night ‘cuz Pix glows in the dark.

The only way to reach the City is above the Giant Tree, through the Cave and deep into Space!

Can you get there before dawn? For the moon will not wait.
Got milk?

The post Arkedo Series 03: PIXEL appeared first on Pastagames.

Can you get him to defeat the evil Staccato and bring music back to life?
Will he save the world and sing his love to Bella once again? Go Maestro!

Maestro is Pastagames‘ first personal game.  It’s also our first (and probably last) boxed game.
Our friends at Neko Entertainement supported us from day one, they funded and published the game with us.

It was a blast to build this game together. Intricate collaboration between musicians, designers and developers got us to release this ear-eye-finger combo game.
Maestro received a very warm welcome by gamers and journalists but failed to be well-distributed enough to reach its audience. In other words, we lost all our precious savings on that one…

“Looks great but where can I buy the game?” was a running joke for a long time. *laughs awkwardly*

We secretly covet a wish to re-make this game, or a sequel, or a prequel, or a reboot, or a deboot, or anything if we have a shot at giving Presto and Staccato a fresh take!

The post Maestro! Jump in Music appeared first on Pastagames.

“This is my Baby. There are none other like it, and this one is mine.
My Baby is my best friend. It is my life. I shall love my Baby true.”

Second “Studio for Hire” project at Pastagames. We practiced and learned a lot on user interface, 3D rendering, camera management and a bit of behavior crafting.
We had philosophicalo-ethico-ego issues from head to toe on the Baby Creation module. We finally opted for including a Blue Baby in the bunch. Endless stormy arguments with our client lead to “The DiaperGate”. We prevailed and there is no apparent filth in the game. Yay! Long life to faeces-free games!

The Bathtub module was pretty cool. The Babies’ behaviors and the clockwork behind it proved very fun in the Garden and many Toys you could enjoy with your baby. Last but not least, the Diner Dash-like game where you take care of all the neighborhood babies was a great challenge for us back then (small screens, tiny 3D lowpoly display, stylus management and how it covers parts of the screen differently for lefties)…

The post Baby Life appeared first on Pastagames.