So what the heck is .detuned? It isn’t exactly a game or an art piece like Linger in Shadows. It is a user-driven music visualizer that allows you to create your own visual performance to accompany your favorite music tracks on the XMB, simply by using the SIXAXIS controller to manipulate and interact with objects within a scene. It also has its own music and a performance you can watch, too!

So, for those of you wanting a different experience on the PS3, get your creative juices flowing now. I highly recommend downloading this tomorrow to have some fun.

It’s Rusty Buchert from SCEA Santa Monica again and I’m here to talk to you about another experiment from the demoscene that will be coming down the pipeline later this year. This one is called .detuned and is made by .theprodukkt, who has been involved in the demoscene for quite a while now. They have done some interesting pieces, which includes .kkrieger, an FPS that is all done with one 96k file.

.detuned is a bit of an odd beast that offers an abstract and surreal interactive experience like nothing else. It is not exactly a game or an art piece like Linger in Shadows. It allows you to create your own visual to accompany your favorite music tracks on the XMB, and using the SIXAXIS™ Wireless Controller, you will be able to manipulate the given scene by interacting with and modifying a man and his world. It even lets you tweak your music as you play with it.

Check out some of the photos below.

It’s all in your hands!

That’s all I can offer for now. Continue to check here for the latest updates!

So Rusty wanted me to write a little blog post about Everyday Shooter for PSP. I don’t really know what to talk about so I guess I’ll start chronological and see where that goes.

I actually tried porting Everyday Shooter to PSP way back around December 20th, 2007, and stopped around December 27th, 2007. Here’s an old video I found from back then:

WHAT!!??!? WHY DIDN’T YOU RELEASE IT!?!?? WHY DID YOU SIT ON IT FOR 239846921487 MONTHS YOU SON OF SO MANY UNMENTIONABLE THINGS!!!!!!!

I thought the same thing until I remembered that it crashed every eight seconds, had a ridiculously low frame rate, was missing graphics and effects, and generally blew.

Yeah, Everyday Shooter PSP really worried me at the time. I was convinced to get the game running properly it needed to be hacked to shreds – reducing the number of enemies, changing all the
backgrounds, changing the enemy graphics – ugh, this is going to SUCK.

So I dropped the idea until Rusty contacted my agent, Warren, and I, saying Sony was interested in putting Everyday Shooter on PSP. Immediately, the floodgates opened to the stress of so many potential problems sweeping my soul to the faraway depths of darkness where it was then beaten repeatedly at three frames per second before crashing…

But Rusty said (paraphrased): “Jon, this is how it’s going to go down. We’re going to hire this developer [Backbone], and I know this guy, he is one of the best programmers I know. And the deal is going to be this: if they even hint at a suggestion of messing with your vision, we are going to fire them and find a new developer. This is going to be a straight port, we are not going to mess with your vision.”

Skeptically, I replied “and the boobies?” To which he answered “no boobies.”

Honestly, I was still skeptical.

I was also told that the original QA team for ES-PS3 was brought in to test the PSP version too, so I’m quite confident that it was left in good hands.

I’m amazed at the job Backbone did:

They actually ported it without altering any of the graphics, effects, or gameplay! How!?? No seriously, how did you do that!? Like, even the backgrounds? I was expecting to have to do this whole back and forth about what graphics needed to be changed and redesigned, what enemies needed to be reduced, gimping the game just for the sake of performance… NO! Not at all! They just somehow made it work. What is this sweet juice of hexadecimal that you drink from and where do I get it?

Then again, I’m not technically a great programmer, so maybe there’s some simple secret I’m not aware of. I generally just multiply things by negative one if they don’t work because in math, to get the opposite of something you just multiply it by negative one. Since the opposite of “doesn’t work” is “it works,” multiplying numbers by negative one should yield a correct result. Unfortunately, when
applying this strategy to Everyday Shooter PSP it still didn’t work.

Thus, and clearly thus, there was no solution.

Of course Backbone proved me wrong.

I think this is a pretty accurate port of the game. I mean, I played it till my hands cramped, jotting down every subtle problem, some bordering on imaginary, but yet still fixed. For example, the first
few builds I played, everything looked great and seemed to be in working order but something was weird. I kept getting beaned by the game! I mean, I couldn’t even get to level 4! Suspecting my own
skill level, I busted out the PS3 version just to make sure and to my surprise, I was still able reach the final stage with just three starting lives. It’s got to be the port.

Okay, so how do you convince someone that this is actually a bug and not because of some lack of skill on my part? I mean, otherwise, the game felt exactly like the PS3 version, so there was no factual information to draw from except for “well, Jon thinks it’s too hard now.” For weeks, I kept thinking they were going to ignore it, and it’ll get released, and the internet will swallow me whole, and then it will hurt a lot.

But amazingly, the bug was found. Apparently (and from what I recall — I might be wrong), it had something to do with timing issues since Everyday Shooter PSP runs at a much lower simulation rate given that the PSP isn’t as powerful as the PS3.

To this day, I’m still not sure if anyone believed me on this, and I’m not even sure if I believed myself (I’m quite positive it was way harder, though), and I totally see that the whole thing just sounded nuts and imaginary, but either way, Backbone was gracious enough to give me the benefit of the doubt and make this change. I know some people who paid a silver dollar only to have their ports birched by shoddy developers, so I’m very grateful for the amount of effort and attention Backbone gave to the project.

Anyway, we tried to make this as accurate as possible. Warren called me a few weeks before the final build asking whether I played the PSP port yet and what I thought of it. I replied, “I don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s basically Everyday Shooter PS3, except it’s running on a PSP.”
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Hey all – I’m back again, and I hope you’ve had a chance to read my recent post on Linger in Shadows from last Saturday. Linger releases today on PSN for $2.99, so I wanted to answer some questions that popped up, as well as give a little insight as to how you go about exploring and interacting with Linger.

First things first … I know I haven’t gotten back to folks on the comments, but I have been busy working on finishing the PSP download version of Everyday Shooter, but I promise I’ll chime in and respond to some of the questions and comments here.

When you actually play through Linger in Shadows there are a bunch of things to think about as you explore. Roam through the timeline both forward and backward. Look beyond the frame of the picture as you see it. There are things hidden that you can play with, unlock, and even get Trophies for if you find them. You’ll want to utilize all aspects of the SIXAXIS or the DualShock3.

Right now you may be thinking, “What in the world is he talking about?” But once you jump into the experience, you’ll start to realize what I’m talking about. I don’t want to explain it too much and give it away.

Also, there are even hints both through audio cues, visual effects, and the DualShock3 if you have that controller as well. If you miss something critical, it winds back, and you are given a hint, too. We added these hints because we want you to enjoy it and not get too frustrated.

Ok, onto Trophies. The reason for including Trophies is that we wanted to reward the player for exploring. The more exploration beyond the basics, the more you get. A lot of these are reflected through “greets.” For those of you who don’t know what greets are, they come from the demoscene. Demo groups put in call outs, or greets, to friends or other groups whose work they really respect. It is kind of like liner notes on a record album. It’s a tradition of the art form that I think is cool, and it exposes you to other demoscene groups that you should check out.

Another thing to think about is that Trophies don’t have to be the traditional “You Killed XXX enemies” or “Beat time of blah” sort of thing. They can be explored as part of ideas, philosophy, mocking the traditional idea of Trophies, or for very unique approaches to playing the game, art, or whatever. I think we’ll start to see Trophies awarded for a lot of different things moving forward as people think about them as being more than just a bullet point.

I hope I answered some of your questions. I probably created more questions than I answered, but then again, I hope I can address some of those in the comments. I think that once you get your hands on Linger in Shadows and explore the experience today, it will start to make a lot more sense.

Hi all, my name is Rusty Buchert and I am the Sr. Producer for Linger in Shadows. Some of you may have heard about it already from coverage here and there, but there are a lot of questions surrounding this unique title. It will be releasing on the PlayStation Network on October 9, so I wanted to explain today about what Linger is and what it isn’t. I’ll start with the easier side, and that is Linger in Shadows is NOT a game. It was never meant to be a game and it will never be a game. Yes it has trophies, but it still isn’t a game and I’ll explain why a little later on.

So then, what the heck is it? There are a few different answers to that question and I’m going to try and cover them here. So here is the short version and then I’ll ramble on in more detail. Linger in Shadows was created by Plastic, from the demoscene. It is an experiment with the demoscene and it is an experiment in Interactive Digital Art.

Now for the first part: what the heck is the demoscene and why does it matter? The demoscene came from an underground digital art culture that started in the 80’s. A “demo” is an audiovisual program created to demonstrate and push the limits of a machine through the devotion, creativity and originality of the demosceners who created the “demo”. Like games, “demos” went from being made by individuals to being made by groups. The demoscene has created some amazing pieces over the years, and that is why we decided to reach out to the demoscene and see what they could do with the PlayStation 3 hardware. The results are pretty amazing. The kicker is that the folks who made Linger in Shadows did it part-time after-hours. This is a work of passion for them; they have day jobs too.

Previously demoscene productions were passive experiences. You ran it, sat back and watched. One of the things that Plastic wanted to do with Linger was to move in a new direction. Linger can be watched passively, but you won’t get the whole experience that way. It is meant to be an experience that you explore through. Look beyond the frame of what you see. Search for new things, experiment with the SIXAXIS, and you might be surprised by what you find.

I hope you’ve had a chance to check out the trailer on PSN. If you haven’t seen it yet, give it a look. You can also find out a little more about Linger in the Shadows here.

I’ll be back here on the blog soon to talk more about Linger in the Shadows, Plastic and how this all got started.

Heya PlayStation fans, my name is Rusty Buchert and I’m the Sr. Producer for Everyday Shooter. As we’re approaching the release of the game, I wanted to drop in and give you some background on how Everyday Shooter went from the Indie Games Festival to the PS3.

Starting at the beginning …

At GDC 2007, some of us from SCEA’s Santa Monica Studio were looking for new games and developers that we thought would be cool for PS3. George Weising had beaten me to the Indie Games Festival (IGF) booth this year and started looking through the games that were there. After a bit he grabbed me from a meeting saying I had to check out a game. But because of meetings, I never made it over there. George kept telling me, “Dude, when you get a chance you need to play this game.” So the first thing I did was figure out how I could get a hold of the developer Jonathan Mak or his agent if he had one. I found out that I knew his agent already so I gave him a ring and told him I really would like to get a build of the game so I could check it out. He connected me with Jon and we went from there.

The first time I sat down with it I knew we had something magical. Not often do I get that buzz from a game. It was something that I wanted everyone to play. We worked things out and we got Jon Mak – the one man that makes up Queasy Games – up and going on PS3. It was amazing how quickly he got it up and running once he got started on the PS3. In just 3 days he had it running and in a few weeks he was up to what was shown at GDC.

What made it magical? It was the constant interaction between the music, gameplay and visuals. The way they feed back into each other is something that happens very rarely. Lots of people try but most of the time it comes up short. Jon hit it dead on and did it with guitar music. Most people have always thought the only way to do it was with techno or electronica. Every level has its own vibe and song that just work for me. I hope they work for you, too.

I love the fact that it’s an album of shooters. That is just plain cool. It hit that point where you are honestly crossing that barrier between being a record and a game.

E3 proved to any doubters that there was something magical to the game. I never expected the press coverage that Everyday Shooter got. Who thought a downloadable game would hijack a lot of press. It’s nice to know that people do want to know about indie games from the hardcore to casual player. This is where we’re going to find the future of the game industry.

One thing I have to say is that after the months of working on and playing the game, I’m still enjoying it and I’ll still be playing it after it comes out.

Oh, by the way it will be up on the store by Oct. 11 (this Thursday). Make sure you check it out!

Tomorrow, we’ll have a post from the game’s creator so you can learn more about the one man show that makes up Queasy Games – Jonathan Mak.

PS – My favorite levels are Root of the Heart, Build 88 and So Many Ways. Check ’em out!