“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.

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!

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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.

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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.

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