I’m here to give you an update on our coming PSN game, Sportsfriends. Here’s a new teaser:

Last time I posted here, we were still finishing up our Sportsfriends Kickstarter drive. Thanks to some of you, we were successfully funded, and since then we’ve been working on the games!

We’re at E3 this week showing some of the games, directly on PS3 hardware. As part of the E3 fanfare, we want to talk about some of the new features we’ve been working on.

To start with, let’s talk about Super Pole Riders, which has seen a radical overhaul since the free browser version. Below you can see one of the new arenas, illustrated by Bennett himself.

You’ll note that there are four players there. The game now supports 1v1 and 2v2. Two-on-two is especially crazy, with poles flying everywhere. We’re also thrilled with the new control scheme. It feels nicely direct to rotate your pole using the analog stick.

Hokra, too, will feature some graphical updates and a bunch of new features and arenas. The new arena layouts – which feature walls, different numbers of goals, and “nets” that slow down the players – make the game even more replayable. Here’s a sneak peek at one of our favorite new arenas, Tokyo:

Ramiro is also working on an arena builder that lets you make and save your own custom arenas. Part of the idea is that we want players to be able to design their own “home court.”

Johann Sebastian Joust has also seen a graphical overhaul. Er, well, I’m not sure that “overhaul” is even the right word, since the alpha prototype doesn’t even have graphics! But we’re thrilled to announce that Montreal-based artist Dominique “Dom2D” Ferland is doing the visuals.

You might be asking yourself, “Why does J.S. Joust need graphics at all?” After all, it’s a game that’s about looking at each other, in the space in front of the screen. That’s true, but we wanted to frame the game in the right way and set the right mood. Dom’s animated baroque characters perfectly complement the Bach music, and we think they’ll provide a nice “entrance” into the game.

I’ve also been adding a slew of new gameplay features, including choose-your-own-music, a traitor mode, sudden death, freeze directives, and a resurrection power that allows dead players to bring themselves back to life if they remain still enough – that is, if the other players don’t interfere! Of course, you can still play the original game without any of the optional modes, but I wanted to allow players to tweak the base system. Oh, and there are some hidden “taunts,” but you’ll have to find them on your own…

Finally, the BaraBariBall team has been hard at work on the core game system, trying to make the combat as dynamic and replayable as possible. Read up on the new clashing system here in the online manual.

Noah has continued to show the game at exhibitions and tournaments around the world (including UFGT in Chicago), gathering valuable playtest data. In case you’re looking for some high-level tournament action, we’re planning to bring BaraBariBall to EVO this year – stay tuned.

That about does it for this update. We’re still hoping for a Fall release, and can’t wait to share these games with all of you!

For news on the development progress and upcoming events, follow us on Twitter or our blog.

UPDATE: We want to thank all of you for all your enthusiasm and support. Special thanks to all our colleagues who gave us advice and contributed games, video testimonials, footage, photos, designs, music, help at events, and other support. We also want to thank the team at Sony’s Foster City office for championing the concept and making the PlayStation side of the project possible.

Hi PlayStation.Blog readers! Over the past few weeks, the Sportsfriends designers and I have been posting about the four indie multiplayer games that we’re hoping to bring to PS3 as one action-filled compendium.

We’ve exhibited all four games around the world at festivals and parties, and now we want to get them into your living room. But we need your support on Kickstarter to raise enough development funds. Today is the final day of our campaign!

So far, Noah Sasso has told you about BaraBariBall – a carefully balanced fighting game that plays like a stylized mix of Super Smash Brothers and volleyball.

Bennett Foddy, the creator of browser game classics like QWOP and GIRP, wrote about his head-to-head physics-based pole-vaulting game, Super Pole Riders.

Ramiro Corbetta told you about his popular 2v2 minimalistic sports game Hokra.

And I posted about Johann Sebastian Joust, a multi award-winning, no-graphics motion control game that uses PlayStation Move motion controllers and feels more like a 21st-century martial art than a videogame.

For us, Sportsfriends is a passion project. We believe that local multiplayer is a hugely rewarding way to play games, and we hope to demonstrate that it’s still viable for indies like us to develop these kinds of games. We love all sorts of videogames of course, but we feel like local multiplayer has been a bit overshadowed in the last decade with the rising popularity of online play.

Why local multiplayer? There’s nothing quite like playing games with your friends on the same couch or in the same physical space, yelling, laughing, trash-talking, and just plain old having a good time. There’s a certain magic playing in front of raucous crowd, or seeing the facial expressions of your opponents.

Think back to the console games you used to play in your friend’s basement, the playground games you improvised at school, or the games you played at the arcade. Those are the kinds of gaming experiences that have inspired Sportsfriends. We want to breathe new life into local multiplayer, taking it into the 21st century. We want to make deeply replayable games that will last the test of time. We want to call attention to what happens in front of the screen, between the human beings playing and spectating.

But today is the final day of our Kickstarter campaign, and we need your help to make it happen. Support us now and pre-order four extensively tested multiplayer games for PS3. Support local multiplayer!

“In the glade, there grew a tree.
Merry, merry king of the woods was he.
Deep in his heart hid he monsters, three.
Dark secrets had this family.”

Where-is-my-Heart? is the debut game of Die Gute Fabrik.

The idea to make Where-is-my-Heart? finds its origins in a very personal experience I had with my mother and my father three summers ago. It was a sunny day on a weekend and we decided to go for a hike in the woods. The hike went well enough for a while, but after an hour or so we realized that somehow we’d completely lost our bearings. Stuck together and lost in this situation, we came to face each other’s negative personality traits. My father showed his anxiety and became increasingly bossy. While my mother responded to this as she had been doing for the 25 past years of her partnership – she turned to lamenting about her life and her existence. I, for my part, found myself trapped in well-worn patterns of regret, remorse, and disconnectedness. Here were three hurt children-at-heart, unable to understand each other and unable to break out of their predicament.

This game is basically a clumsy attempt to come to an understanding of myself and my family.

In Where-is-my-Heart? you can play the story of a family of monsters. They live comfortably in a tree in the woods until one day they lose their home and thus embark on a great adventure. It will take them down to the mushroom caves, even deeper to the lifeless crystal pools and back up into the mountains, as they try to find their home tree again.

I was interested in expressing the sense of being lost and without orientation via pure game mechanics. The approach I decided for, was to take the regular platform puzzle game and split up the screen into many separate panels (or little windows into the game world, if you prefer). The game then shuffles these panels and places them back into the screen at unnatural positions. Therefore, as a player you don’t know exactly where in the game world your monster is located. The challenge is on you to find your way.

This basic mechanic opened up many possibilities for puzzles. What’s more, even further game mechanics could be harvested from it. One of these is the Spirit-Rotation mechanic. Describing this mechanic is not easy, but I’ll give it a try (see it in the trailer above; it’s easier to understand). There’s a special player-controllable monster in the game called the Rainbow Spirit. It behaves like any little platform creature, being able to walk left and right, jump and fall. But everything changes when you press the shoulder buttons of your PSP or DualShock controller. Pressing L or R will rotate the world panels by a quarter circle. Each frame will end up in a neighbouring quadrant on the screen. If the Spirit is up in the air at the time of rotation it will keep flying, staying put in its quadrant, hovering above the panels that glide on underneath. After you’re done with your rotation, the Spirit drops back into the world. In a way, this mechanic therefore constitutes a non-linear form of travel, which sounds technical and hard to grasp, but basically it really gets your puzzle-brain to call out “yummy!” The rotation is really satisfying to play around with and we took great care and detail to make it feel just right. You’ll love it (I’m almost one hundred percent sure).

Each monster transforms into a super-being with special abilities: Antler Ancestor, the Rainbow Spirit of True Sorrow, and the Bat King. You have to help the monsters orientate themselves and find a way onward. The special abilities of each monster will help you solve unique puzzles: Antler side-steps into the Land of Fireflies where he can walk on the stars. Bat King opens a window to the Land of the Bat, a scary parallel world with secret platforms and hidden passages. The Rainbow Spirit can make the world panels spin round and round.

“Where-is-my-Heart?” is coming to PSN (as a mini, so it’s compatible with PS3 and PSP) on November 22nd for 6.99. It will be free to PlayStation Plus members starting on November 8th.

If you’d like to read more about the design and the development of ‘Where is my Heart?’ you can go to http://bushghost.blogspot.com/. Also, please ask and say if you have questions and comments. Last not least, enjoy the game.