If you enjoy reading about game design, like Inkle’s games, or both, then you’ll be very interested in the latest developer blog on the upcoming Heaven’s Vault, which goes into detail on the way the game’s procedural narrative works. Heaven’s Vault is the next game by the developer of the terrific 80 Days and Sorcery series, and this one will have you helping guide Aliya “El" Elsara and her robot assistant Six as they travel through the Nebula, a network of rivers that flow from moon to moon. As we talked about in an earlier story, you will learn and translate the language of the Ancients of the Nebula as you go along, and you’ll be able to play the game as a different kind of character. The art looks lovely, and—knowing how great the other Inkle games are—I expect Heaven’s Vault to be another gem of a game.
The blog post, titled Procedural Narrative Cupcakes, talks about the challenge of having a massive branching game and not always being sure what the player knows or doesn’t know at different points in the story. Most of the clues are generated procedurally (although there are some hand-authored clues as well), and now the developers have “closed the loop" by feeding procedurally generated artifacts back into the narrative. They do that by making sure the stories of the objects El and Six will discover aren’t generic procedurally generated ones; instead, they use hand-authored content—which they call the “icing" to the procedurally-generated cupcake “sponge"—to make the stories and the objects more intriguing. There are more details on how the system works and how it will improve Heaven’s Vault narrative and gameplay, so check it out.
This game is never coming out for mobile. They're just trolling iOS and Android gamers again. I love indie games, but I hate freaking hate a lot of indie developers.
Love Team Meat. Love Super Meat Boy. Love Bitcoin.
This will probably be censored by Disqus, but I gotta get this out:
Developers that grump on mobile gaming like this are dicks.
(Awaiting "hold on, this is awaiting moderation by Touch Arcade...")
Keep up the good work, Team Meat. Troll long and hard.
No its legit! the other half of team meat is none other than Edmund McMillan who as we know also made one of my fav games The binding of issac which actually came out on ios which they also said they would never release we all know how that turned out Tyrone worked his magic and got Apple to approve it too which no one thought would happen. I think going auto runner is smart cause the controls in the smb have to be tight. This game will be awesome. I will say this Ed's been busy making his new project Bumbo not to mention Binding of issac afterbirth+ for ps4 and xbone remember there is not many devs for these games its a few people so 2018 for super meatboy forever ill take it.
What is that headline? Team Meat doesn't owe you anything! It'd be cool if SMBF came out in 2018, but I'd want them to have the option to delay it if that'd make sense. The dismissiveness of your headline is irresponsible & unprofessional!
Also, I would never want to play a game like SMBF on a mobile device without a controller. I just don't think that current mobile gesture/touch controls are precise enough, but I'm sure that some people will disagree with that!
It is literally a two button game. It's an auto runner. It was designed for touchscreens in the first place, it doesn't need a controller.
Additionally, every time I've ever seen the game demoed it was on a touchscreen.
Apparently my comment wasn't approved... Probably because I strongly disagreed with the passive-aggresssive-to-aggressive tone of this story! (And the bizarre headline that sounds too confrontational, imo!) But, yeah, I'm sure that Team Meat really is lost without being able to sell all of the games they've ever mentioned the existence of on mobile devices, especially to people who carry around stacks of perceived slights in their heads on a daily basis! 🙄
I hate to break it to ya, Jared, but not every game you are going to want to play is going to be released on your preferred platform. Get over it!
This is not about me wanting games to be released on mobile. There's nothing to get over. This is about Team Meat announcing games FOR mobile and then never releasing them, and being as shitty as possible to the audience along the way. Don't make promises for things you can't deliver, over and over. Strange you feel the need to defend that behavior.
Looks amazing and once it comes out on iOS, I'll throw endless buckets of money at Team Meat. Until then, yeah...forgetting this is even a thing. Not setting myself up for disappointment.
Autorunner? I'm excited...not. Sigh
Ah, finally!
*rakes in 10 bucks for winning the bet*
;)
They are indeed really late to the endless stream of autorun party and I can't possibly be less excited about that pc classic cranked in that burned genre. Just keep it an ordinary platformer. Maybe next time...
Let them be, Jared. It's their choice. Don't worry, mobile gamers will tease them by low sales, once they "release" SMBF. aka. Mobile community strikes back. :)
You know what? They are right in many ways about market. Do they things in the right way? Who knows.
Either way, they lost credibility in the eyes of a few...
Pretty neat article!
But it's coming for Switch and that is a mobile platform. I really like Super Meat Boy but I'd rather support developers that actually care about bringing great games to all users.
Looks hard 😂
I don't mind the trolls, these guys are used to use game as a medium for opinion expression, like how they added Tofu boy to troll peta back. And the delay - I don't think team meat purposefully neglect mobile. Those games didn't make it aren't even targeted for mobile primarily (the cat lady, the binding of isaac spin-off). They were experimenting with a SMB mobile but never could make it right.
And the autorunner thing...Let's be honest, mario run is not like the real mario. It is a well designed puzzle game wrapped up as a runner, but it doesn't bring much joy and freedom of a platformer into mobile. And the mobile port of binding of isaac proved two things: 1) the control is still shitty (although amazingly optimized, comparing to other mobile duel shooters); 2) and enough people are still willing to buy it. That might incentivize them into their current approach which is to make a really good console game and try to port it good on mobile. (you can say that they give up making novel mobile game on this point) The control will probably be a little bit awkward without MFi, but if you can play it on PC or switch you are probably better off playing on those devices. And compared to a million of other amazing indie developers who don't even bother trying to make a mobile port, they seem to be one of the better guys to me.
Personal bias: I believe touch screen is inferior in some forms of gaming (mostly action based) for its lack of physicality and tactical feedbacks. (with the rare exception of Monster Hunter Freedom, which might plays better than it is on PSP). It is difficult to develop an action game on mobile. It is like wearing an extra pair of handicaps on top of the pressure to make a good game. So I don't blame people who don't want to.
Team Meat might be team trolls, but they try really hard to make good games and be good to fas, console or not.