Archive for the ‘Creative’ Category
We’ve spent a long time refining the gameplay in Velocity. All levels were built over a period of three months from December 2011 to February 2012, after over a year of tuning the controls.
As a result, Velocity is easy to pick up and have fun with immediately, and it also supports an incredible level of skill if a player wants to learn to master the game, as you can see below:
A few months back we asked our loyal Twitter Followers, Facebook Likies and PSPminis.com Readers to name the alien race in our new game, Velocity.
Now that the game has been announced on PS Blog, we can reveal our selections!
The Zetachron, a formidable alien race from the far side of the Toron Nebula
As you can see above, the winning suggestion was the first to arrive, courtesy of Mat Redvers, who will receive a free code for Velocity on release! Congrats Mat!
Which leaves three runner-up prizes, with a free copy of the game as well:
Insidians - from Ofaliss @PSPminis.com
Vianubis – from sniper721 @PSPminis.com
MechaMoths – from Simplebob here in the comments
Congratulations folks, please get in touch with us via the contact page to confirm your email address and identity.
Hope you enjoy Velocity as much as we have!
Also, if you haven’t done so already, go and bag yourself the image above, as well as some more cool Velocity Wallpapers courtesy of Push Square.
Once upon a time I wrote this short tip on how to get yourself in the door of a cool company without experience. You can see how crusty our logo used to be 
Since then I can honestly say I’ve never been on the receiving end of anything that I would call exemplary along those lines – until about two months ago.
This arrived in Kirsty’s mail box – no email body, just this attachment:
Super Intern
We laughed our heads off, and got Richard in for an informal interview.
Turns out he was a bit handy with his pencils, so we offered him a bit of work experience on Velocity – we were short on time and needed to get some extra cutscenes done. Rich was delighted, and he turned around some ‘pretty good’ pieces. Then I gave him some feedback, and he did them again. And again. And again, each time getting better and better. Awesome we thought, this guy is one of us.
Then our contract artist went AWOL – literally left us hanging with no word of why, with three weeks until submission of Velocity to Sony. Oh ****!
Rich stepped in, and took over. Rich is now responsible for every single piece of cut scene art in the game except one. He’s worked around the clock to help us out, and the art looks great!
Of course we are now going to pay him for his work, and we’ll also find some way to reward him for the awesome contribution he’s made to our game. He literally saved us when we’d run out of time.
That’s what going the extra mile means, and that’s what he showed in his initial contact – he made the effort to do something out of the ordinary, which got us interested, and now he’s credited on his first game.
Put the time in, go the extra mile.
From a press release sent out today:
FuturLab today revealed the much anticipated follow up to their critically acclaimed debut Coconut Dodge.
‘Velocity’ is a scrolling shooter unlike any other which features an innovative teleport mechanic, allowing players to jump around the screen and return to previous areas of a level to solve time sensitive logic puzzles.
From James Marsden, FuturLab’s Managing Director:
“We’ve achieved some notable innovations within the shoot ‘em-up genre, to the point where Velocity not only lives up to fond memories of shoot ‘em-up classics, but goes several steps further by introducing something completely new and exciting – teleportation! It also features a phenomenal soundtrack from Joris de Man, winner of an Ivor Novello award for his work on the Killzone series for PS3.”Robin Jubber, Supreme Technical Commander added:
“Speaking as a handsome man, I can confirm this is just the sort of astonishing programming masterpiece I like to play, when I’m winding down after a nine hour coital marathon. With its fluid 60fps gameplay and remarkable hidden features, it very much reminds me of me. As an extra bonus, space is black, so you can always see your face in the Vita’s shiny screen. Modest yet beautiful men like me will find this game as polished as my Superbike. I like to watch my name in the credits while marveling at the sharpness of the font. Buy Velocity now, and earn my manly respect!”The official Velocity website is now live, as is the Facebook page where artwork and screenshots can be viewed, as well as back story.
http://www.velocitygame.co.uk
http://www.facebook.com/VelocityGame
Did you take part in the Name Our Game competition? If so, check out PlayStation Blog (EU and US) this Thursday 9th Feb at 3pm GMT to find out if you won!
We’ll be revealing the game’s title and the winners of the competition, as well as the trailer and official website with screenshots – so don’t miss it!
Did you name our new game? Find out this Thursday on PlayStation Blog!
In our upcoming game Velocity, you are rewarded for three different play styles – Speed, Destruction and Survivors Rescued. Each aspect awards an XP value, which allows you to progress in the game.
Levels are therefore designed to challenge you in all three aspects, and can be played a number of ways to earn XP.
For example, someone who is good at shooting enemies can progress into the game without having to rescue many survivors or do it particularly quickly, but at some point they’re going to come across a level that is locked, and they will need to revisit earlier levels to balance their performance across the other aspects to unlock further levels.
Earn Perfect Triple-Stripe Gold Medals by being... Perfect.
Speed and Survivors are the two critical aspects of a level that you can fail a mission on, so the medals reflect how well you performed on those critical aspects: Bronze, Silver or Gold for Speed, and One, Two or Three stripes for number of Survivors rescued.
So, you can earn a Single-Stripe Bronze Medal if you suck, and a Triple-Stripe Gold Medal if you rock.
The Perfect Triple-Stripe Gold Medal is awarded when you have mastered all three aspects in the level; you can collect every survivor, you can take down all the hostiles, and you can do it bloody quickly – all in one attempt.
When you’ve reached this level of excellence, you clearly rule at that level, and deserve such a pretty medal for your efforts
"I totally rule, that perfect medal is mine!"
FuturLab (Marsden & Rigden, 2012) recently conducted a focus test to determine the reductive effects of highly addictive ‘Teleport Activity’ on test subjects’ other addictions, such as Smoking (Nicotine), Tea/Coffee (Caffeine) and Jaffa Cakes (Chocolate-Orange Sponginess).
It was found that 100% of test subjects either forgot about their existing addictions, or ignored them entirely in order to continue engagement with ‘Teleport Activity’ – for up to four hours at a time.
An infographic illustrates the findings:
Heavy engagement with 'Teleport Activity'
It remains to be seen whether the results of this study can be extrapolated to the wider population, but we’ve got our fingers crossed…
The ‘story’ for Coconut Dodge (about pirates stashing treasure in the trees) was conceived when faced with the challenge of writing the store descriptions for PlayStation Store. It took 5 minutes…
We’ve spent a lot longer thinking up the story for our untitled Space Shooter (the name of which is soon to be revealed we promise!), but we haven’t thought of everything.
Now we are faced with the challenge of naming the alien race that has descended on our stranded space fleets, and thought why not ask our lovely Twitter followers?
They fly in attractive (but terrifying of course) formations, shoot at you quite a bit, and have a tendency to swarm :p
A sample of enemies from our Space Shooter game due for release in March!
If someone comes up with a great alien race name that HASN’T BEEN USED BEFORE, and we use it in the game, they’ll bag a free copy of our game when it is released, plus any other goodies we can find at FuturLab HQ 
Please write your suggestions in the comments!
Thanks all!
When Dust 514 was announced a couple of years ago, it was something I’d been looking forward to in games for a very long time. Having just finished reading a great article in Develop magazine [Issue 122] about Dust 514 and its place on PS3, I looked online to watch some videos and read details on CCP’s website. I found this:
“Long term, we aim to become the premier service provider of the complete science fiction experience, one in which the experience itself extends from the ground all the way up into space, and on every vehicle in between.”
Today marks the first time I’ve ever been envious of young kiddies, because they will get to spend days at a time playing Dust 514 with their friends playing EVE, and I won’t :’(
