PlayStation First Showcase – PAX Aus 2015

November 16, 2015

When it was announced that PlayStation, Nnooo Studios and the AIE were uniting under the PlayStation First banner to give promising young students the opportunity to work with the studio and hone their skills, I was hopeful of what it could bring. With the current state of the Australian industry, namely that almost all of the larger developers have closed shop in recent times, fostering young talent seems like the perfect way to help grow the burgeoning indie scene. At PAX I got the chance to play two of the games currently in development by AIE students, Rumble Academy and Retro Vision.

 bb1dde_388c3bf1c1114485b89ccaa9a15a6023

Rumble Academy

Rumble Academy is an anime-styled, Super Smash Brothers inspired 3D fighter. Set within a school, as the name suggests, you take control of students and fight it out to death. Gameplay is reminiscent of Super Smash Brothers. You gain KOs by knocking opponents off the edge of the stadium or clean off the screen. As you take hits your damage percentage increases, leading to you being sent farther and farther with each hit. Attacks are governed by a light and heavy attack system, with straight forward combos, again reminiscent of Super Smash Brothers.

Additionally, as well as your standard attacks items also drop in the stages for you to pick up and use against your opponents. In the demo I played I found a book that created three balls of lighting that circled myself until they struck opponents and a bomb that created an area of effect explosion. You also have a super that charges by collecting orbs that drop throughout the fights. The two characters in the demo felt unique, with different movement styles, weapons and attack patterns.

It sports a clean and colourful graphical style, exactly what you would expect from an anime inspired game, with textures and characters being intentionally simply designed. It’s quite nice to look at as you’re playing the game. It controls well, and battles are fun and frenetic as you try and hit your opponents while doing your best to guard and stay out of their range.

Rumble Academy is a promising character fighter for a platform that doesn’t have anything quite like it, so it will be interesting to see how it progresses until release.

20502_415475795325142_6815562797156362721_n

Retro Vision

Retro Vision, my personal favourite of the showcase, is a first person endless runner that reminds me of a cross between Audiosurf and a tunnel-shooter.

With a visual style taken straight from old 80’s tunnel-shooters, Retro Vision, is a fast paced endless runner that shoots you straight forward as you rotate yourself around a cylinder to collect orbs and dodge obstacles. It starts off slowly, but the longer you last, the faster it gets. Quickly you find yourself having to make decisions at breakneck speed on which way to rotate to doge obstacles and trying to plan ahead to your next movement. The neon, line based graphics are fantastic and fit together perfectly with the retro-electric feel of the music.

Everything on the screen throbs in time to the electro soundtrack, and as the music gets more hectic, so does the undulation on the screen. The sense of speed that I obtained later in runs reminded me of the feeling I got from playing Wipeout, which is something I’ve missed since SCE Liverpool was closed down. The music is frenetic, and the game isn’t very forgiving, so a single lapse of concentration can lead to a quick end when playing Retro Vision, but the adrenalin is still pumping so you jump straight back in.

Retro Vision feels incredibly promising, and seems to be a game that will fill a specific niche in the market. Personally, I will be avidly paying attention to its progress throughout development and up until release.

 

The students that I spoke to while playing their games spoke fondly of their time in the PlayStation First program with Nnooo Studios, as did Bruce Thomson, the director of marketing and business at Nnooo. They credit their time spent with the experienced developers as a major asset in helping to improve their understanding of development and design, and in improving their games. They were also particularly excited about having gained access to PlayStation Dev Kits, which they may have struggled to obtain otherwise, and therefore gaining a foothold into the console market via the publishing agreement with PlayStation and Nnooo.

If the games I played are anything to go by, PlayStation First, Nnooo Studios and the AIE have made an excellent choice to create this partnership and work with the promising young students coming through school. My hope is that this program will be adopted by other platform holders and spread to more schools throughout Australia and the world.