Here is a quick run down on the new features being added as of June 18.

Cloud:
This is a game mode that allows players to upload levels they have created, and also download levels that others have posted. We have added a simple search function to go with it. For example, if you find someone whose works you like, you can search for their levels by ID.

Our Picks:
For those of you who do not want to search through the sea of user-generated content, we have weekly updates of 8 recommended levels for you to enjoy.

YouTube Uploader/PlayStation EYE support:
Another great feature update is the YouTube uploader. Once players have played through a level successfully, they have the option to upload the replay to YouTube (you will need a YouTube account of course, but the process is very straightforward).

Even better, if you have the PlayStation Eye peripheral, you will be enabled to capture yourself playing the game. This capture will appear as a “picture-in-picture” image, that you can also upload to YouTube. Capture that moment of successfully solving that mind breaking puzzle and share with friends!

There are a bunch of smaller but important additional updates as well, such as DTS Sound Support, custom soundtrack support (play back your own music in-game, from your XMB playlist), and updated Trophy Icons. So yes, we do listen to comments or feedback from our dear users.

We are very happy to continue support on this project, and hope you enjoy the added value!

And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the trailer for the echochrome spin-off for PSP that was announced at E3 last week — “echochrono (working title).”

But if you haven’t had the chance, we’ve snagged a few of our favorites for you here. Enjoy!

Gran Turismo 5

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves gameplay

Gran Turismo for PSP

Hustle Kings

Echochrono

We have kept quiet for a while, but we bring you good news today. The world of echochrome expands again!

Inspired by the artistic works of M.C. Escher, echochrome with its’ minimalist black and white graphics plays with your imagination. Echochrome plays with your mind. Its’ deceiving artwork delivers mind-bending puzzle solving. It also includes a custom level editor allowing the players to make and trade their own stages amongst friends, or even submit to the developer.

Now that we’ve refreshed your memory on echochrome, it’s time to deliver the good news! We know many of you have been asking for Trophy support. Well… echochrome will receive an update patch effective today.

Yes, that’s right.

The update patch for echochrome includes the long awaited trophy support. YAY! This is a great reason for many of you who already have echochrome to go back and play, and for those of you who haven’t picked it up yet? Now is the time!

Players are rewarded trophies for clearing a number of stages, or even for the total number of footsteps or falls! It’s a great time and reason to experience the world of echochrome and give your mind a little pinch. Can you collect all of the trophies? Bragging rights!

In addition to the trophy support, remember how we rolled out the user-generated stages 10 at a time? From this update forward, we are making a total of 1,000 user-generated stages available for gameplay.

Yes, that’s right. ONE THOUSAND STAGES!!!

If you think you can create a level that’s better, we’d love to see it! Don’t hesitate to upload!

Now, to play these 1000 user-created levels, just go to “Freeform” and start playing, and the levels will come up at random as you play. I’m sure you will enjoy a great range of creativity collected from various players and locations worldwide.

Last but not least, we have now enabled the screenshot function as well. Again, a useful tool to enhance your bragging rights!

As a token of appreciation, we have put a video together, introducing all of the 1,000 stages that will be made available in this update. I’m sure you will love it!

For some closing words, I have yet again, a message for you from Suzuki-san, the Producer of this title at JAPAN Studios.

Hello beloved fans of echochrome.

The development team and I are very happy with all of the positive feedback we are receiving from various parts of the world. Until recently, our way of collecting your views or thoughts was based on websites, questionnaires or blog posts such as this one (which is fine!). However the stage upload feature in echochrome delivers your passion to us in a unique way.

The total count for stage uploads worldwide have now exceeded 3,700 (submitted from 33 different countries and 1664 unique users). We have done the honors of selecting a total of 1,000 user generated stages to be made available with this update patch, to everyone else. The stages are the crystals of our users’ creativity and variety, often surprising us and sometimes even an eye-opener from a development point of view.

For the reasons mentioned above, we are on another mission to create a second update patch to further enhance the echochrome experience. We have enjoyed the activities surrounding the user-generated content, and would love to see more.

The Japanese title for echochrome is “Mugen Kairou”, translation? “Infinite Corridor”. As the name suggests, your combined creativity is infinite, and it helps fuel our motives for development. We are enjoying this relationship with our users, and would like to take this as far as we possibly can.

Thank you.

Hey, did you hear (or see, rather) that? Yes, there is another update coming!!! Can’t tell you when at this point, but there are some more interesting features coming your way! In the meantime, we hope you will enjoy the added features to echochrome. I’m sure this will keep you busy for a while!

For those of you who have not yet played the game, it’s available for $9.99 on the PlayStation Network Store. We also have a demo for you, if you are not sure. You’ve got nothing to lose!

For $9.99, it’s a bargain if you ask me! It’s great for kids and grown-ups too!

Thanks for reading!
Tsubasa

Just when you were close to beating all your clear times on all 56 echochrome stages on your PSP, we have even more challenges coming your way!

An expansion pack for echochrome is coming to the PSN on October 9th for $4.99.
You can almost double the fun of the original with an additional 40 new stages to master. For those of you who don’t have the original version, not to worry. We have a bundle pack ready for you guys and gals too, so you can pick up the game and expansion pack all at once!

Also today, I have a message to you from my buddy (and counterpart) back in Tokyo.
Check out what he has to say to get a glimpse of what makes echochrome as fun and interesting as it is! echochrome wouldn’t be what it is without its core philosophy.

Hello, echochrome fans! This is Tatsuya Suzuki, Producer at JAPAN STUDIOS for this project. I hope you have been enjoying your experience so far.

Five months after our release in May, we are happy to bring you a whole bunch of additional stages for echochrome PSP/PSN. In an era when crisp, photo-realistic graphics are a pre-requisite for games, one may look at echochrome and perhaps question its artistic design choices, namely the modernistic approach of its monotone color palette and line art style.

However, you may be surprised to learn, this look was only made possible with modern
day technology.

First and foremost, there is the high quality wide screen LCD that is standard to the PSP. All of the artwork in echochrome is based on straight lines, thus clarity and resolution is a very important aspect to our game. The mannequin figure is also drawn just with lines, so it’s important that its outline is smooth. Another important aspect of the screen is its responsiveness. Since the core of the game’s design relies on rotating the stage, clarity and visibility plays a key role as you try to find the best perspective for your next move.

And then there is the all-important CPU that feeds the images to the LCD screen. Again, at first, echochrome may not appear to be such a CPU-intensive game. However, in the background, the title is pushing the processing power of the PSP to its limits. It’s like a swan swimming on a lake. It looks graceful to our eyes, but beneath the surface of the water that swan is actually kicking its feet pretty hard to just to move around.

Anyway…

The core of the graphics rendering and the calculation and rendering of the transformation of the stage as the perspective changes are two separate operations. Jun Fujiki, the creator of echochrome, originally designed it as a PC-based application, thus it relied heavily on the PC’s processing power. So, when it came time to bring this game to the PSP, there was a need to dig deep into the source code and fine tune the code to maximize the performance of the PSP processor. Without the PSP’s 333MHz mode, the game would not have been possible.

Music was another aspect where the PSP hardware performance shines. Not only were we inspired by the works of MC Escher, the father of optical illusions in art, but also for his love of strings quartet consisting of 2 violins, 1 viola and 1 cello. All of the in-game music was written and recorded with a string quartet. Only the PSP’s ATRAC support could have allowed for the streaming of such high-quality sound, faithfully reproducing the original studio recordings.

All of these elements are core elements in bringing the world of echochrome to life on the PSP.

The team took extra care in creating all of the intricate stages. The design team consisted of members who worked as planners and stage designers for puzzle games in the past, and even then they had difficulty during the initial stages of development. There was a learning curve because of how radical the designs and game rules are.

We also turned to some graphic designers who had no previous experience with game design. They were given a mission to explore the limits of their artistic skills and imagination, without worrying about how they would work when the rules of echochrome were applied. Obviously not all of their creations were suitable for play in echochrome, but it certainly was an eye-opener seeing their creativity and the beauty of architecture they were able to create. And these were eventually converted into playable stages.

It was a moment all of us realized that “it is when common sense and assumptions are let go of, that the hidden path opens up”. This later became a philosophical mantra for the development of echochrome.

With that said, we are happy to bring these 40 new playable stages to you as an expansion pack. There are plenty of new puzzles and challenges waiting for you inside, and maybe some of these new stages will inspire some new level creations in your own imagination.

Now, it is your turn to be tested with our echochrome mantra: “it is when common sense and assumptions are let go, that the hidden path opens up.”

I’m here to give you the latest update on echochrome for PS3. If you have the game, hopefully you’ve been enjoying the top user-created levels, as chosen by the developers themselves. These levels are available for a limited time only, so once they’re gone, they’re gone!

Thirty free, new puzzles are making their way to your PS3 over the next two weeks, starting Thursday. And to salute those of you in the USA and Canada, 29 of the 30 puzzles originate from North America (one from Malta!).

The entries continue to roll in, and some of the names are familiar – meaning some of you are getting good at this!

Once again, these additional levels will appear at random in freeform mode depending on the difficulty level you’ve chosen. The difficulty level is represented by the bars at the bottom right of the loading screen between freeform levels, and the difficulty for the next level can be set while the next level is loading by pressing left or right on the d-pad. Levels are picked randomly from all levels in your “gallery”, “portfolio”, and user created levels. Remember that in freeform mode, levels that have not been cleared are selected first – so if you’re specifically looking for one of these new levels, you may need to skip forward until you find the one you want.

We’ve updated our flickr page with the new layouts, including credit for those who put in the time to make these interesting and complex puzzles. The difficulty level of each puzzle is also noted if you click on the individual puzzles. If you’re feeling inspired to create your own echochrome levels, here’s how to do it.

The first ten will appear beginning tomorrow, and the second set of ten will debut in another week. So if you haven’t played through the last set of free levels – now is the time! And if you haven’t downloaded this crazy perspective puzzle game from the PLAYSTATION Store yet, what are you waiting for?

Once again, the additional levels will appear at random in freeform mode depending on the difficulty level you’ve chosen. The difficulty level is represented by the bars at the bottom right of the loading screen between freeform levels, and the difficulty for the next level can be set while the next level is loading by pressing left or right on the d-pad. Levels are picked randomly from all levels in your “gallery”, “portfolio”, and user created levels. Remember that in freeform mode, levels that have not been cleared are selected first – so if you’re specifically looking for one of these new levels, you may need to skip forward until you find the one you want.

We’ve updated our flickr page with the new layouts, including credit for those who put in the time to make these interesting and complex puzzles. The difficulty level of each puzzle is noted on the flickr page as well. If you’re feeling inspired to create your own echochrome levels, here’s how to do it.

Look for more in the coming weeks!

The additional levels will appear at random in freeform mode if you set your difficulty level to 2 or 3. The difficulty level is represented by the bars at the bottom right of the loading screen between freeform levels, and the difficulty for the next level can be set while the next level is loading by pressing left or right on the d-pad. Levels are picked randomly from all levels in your “gallery”, “portfolio”, and user created levels. Remember that in freeform mode, levels that have not been cleared are selected first.

There was a comment in the last blog post asking if there is any recognition if your design is chosen for the incentive, and the answer is yes! I will reveal the creator’s PSN ID for every new level being distributed, starting with this week! To whet your appetite for these new challenges (and maybe even spark your imagination!), I’ve include screenshots of the levels as well. Just click on the screens to see the creation’s name, author and the country of origin. Look for more in the coming weeks!

So take a look and start planning now. Your fellow gamers certainly didn’t make things easy for you!

If you haven’t already downloaded echochrome (it went live during Thursday’s Store update), you’ve got 56 brain-busting, perspective-spinning puzzles ahead of you. If anyone out there has already managed to clear all the levels, these people are looking for you. Still, you’ve hardly seen all echochrome has to offer. Aside from *another* 56 levels to be found in the other version of echochrome (both the PS3 and PSP editions contain unique level sets), you can also play the best levels your fellow gamers have created.

When you boot up the PS3 version of the game and sign in online, you may be prompted to download new content. These new, free updates contain the top user-created levels, hand-selected by the developers themselves. There will be new levels available on a regular basis, but they will only be available to play until the next group of levels is up. So be sure to check in regularly for more content – or you may miss out!

Additional levels will appear at random in freeform mode. Remember that in freeform mode, levels that have not been cleared are selected first.

Now, if you want to see if you have what it takes to create a custom level that might be good enough to get picked by the developer for distribution to PS3 owners everywhere (or if you just want to mess around and see what kind of crazy creation you can make), then keep reading.

To start your own custom level from scratch, go to the main menu and select “canvas.” You’ll start off on a blank canvas, and your builder icon will appear as a red box in the middle. Use the thumbsticks to rotate the camera (and R1 button to go faster), just like the game itself. Move the cursor with the d-pad on a 2D plane (up/down, left/right) based on where the camera is looking (rotate the camera to move in a different direction), and use the X button to put pieces down. If you want to erase a piece, use the O button. A handy feature is the Square button, which will jump the cursor to the closest built area.

You start off with the default path piece selected. To change to different pieces, such as stairs, holes, fans (jump pads), echoes, and the start point (mannequin character), press Triangle, select with left and right on the d-pad, and X when you are at the piece you want to use. Pressing the O button while the selection menu is open will cancel and back you out to the piece you were just using.

Every level has to have 3 things: a start, pathways, and a goal. The mannequin piece acts as the starting point for the level. You can build pathways with as many gaps, obstacles, and bends as you like. The goal is to reach the echoes, or shadow guides. These are like markers that you have to guide the mannequin to. So you’ll need at least one of these. You can place up to four echoes anywhere in the environment, while the fifth and final echo will always appear exactly where you place the mannequin character.

Before you can do anything else with the level, you will have to make sure it can actually be cleared or completed. So open the pause menu and select “test play.” This will let you attempt to get through your own creation to see if it can actually be completed. If it can be cleared, you will be prompted to save it. You can also add a name to your level from “title” in the pause menu.

Now, if you’re not feeling very creative right off the bat, and want some help getting started, you can go to the gallery, where all the pre-made levels that shipped with the game are, and press the Triangle button on one of them. This will copy it over to your portfolio, where you can edit it all you like to make it more challenging, easier, whatever.

Once you create a level and successfully test it, you’re ready to send it off. To do this, go to the portfolio menu and select the stage you want to send by pressing the X button. In the PSP version, you can select the “send” option, which will let you send the level to someone over Ad Hoc. If you’re playing the PS3 version, you’ll have two options. One is “send” which lets you enter the PSN username of the person you want to send the level to. The other option, “upload,” allows you to send the level to the developers. And if they really like your level, it may be distributed to everyone with the PS3 version of the game! Pretty cool, huh?

The game can get pretty challenging on the bigger, more complex levels. To help you out, if you go to the “etc.” option from the main menu, there’s a tip section with useful bits of information. There are other hidden secrets and advanced techniques waiting to be found in echochrome. What have you figured out so far?

So as promised, I am back to tell you just when you can get your hands of the full version. echochrome will be available for you to download this THURSDAY, MAY 1 on the PlayStation Store for the PS3 and via the PC Store for the PSP. Both versions will be available for $9.99, so make sure you have funds in your wallet! There are 56 unique levels on the PS3 version, as well as 56 completely different levels on the PSP version (112 levels overall), so no matter if you are sitting at home or on the go, there are plenty of puzzles for you to wrap your brain around.

If you did not see my last post and are wondering “What is echochrome?” It’s a fun and addictive puzzle game with really elegant and simple graphics. The concept is inspired by the famous MC Escher artwork, which explores infinity, architecture and impossible constructions. In echochrome, you control the camera and perspective on an infinite canvas, guiding a mannequin figure by carefully tilting and turning the level to create a continual pathway, allowing your character to walk safely through the design. Also, there is a Canvas mode, where you will be able to create your own puzzles from scratch and share them with your friends, or even the world! You can still download the demo for free and sharpen your skills before taking on the full version when it is released on Thursday.

Stay tuned to the Playstation blog, because later this week, I will give you some tips on creating your own mind-bending levels to play and share with friends, as well as details on getting the top user-created levels each week for free (on the PS3 version). It blew 1UP’s mind … now it’s your turn.

Perhaps you have read about echochrome here, here, here or even here. There is a lot of excitement for it – N’Gai Croal of Level Up even wrote, “…as of last E3, the 2008 game we’ve been looking forward to the most is echochrome.”

It’s a fun and addictive puzzle game with really elegant and simple graphics. The concept is inspired by the famous MC Escher artwork, which explores infinity, architecture and impossible constructions. In echochrome, you control the camera and perspective on an infinite canvas, guiding a mannequin figure by carefully tilting and turning the level to create a continual pathway, allowing your character to walk safely through the design. Puzzled?!? Check out this video and you’ll see what I mean!

There is no single way to get through a level in echochrome. You and your friends will find different ways to clear levels so each time you play will be different.

The demos you can download tomorrow will take you through a brief tutorial and give you the basic idea of how to progress through the puzzles, but I wanted to also tell you what to expect when the final game is available for download in May. In addition to the 56 exclusive levels for each of the PS3 and PSP versions of echochrome (112 unique levels overall), you will be able to create your own puzzles from scratch and share them with your friends, or even the world!

On PS3, you can upload your created levels to the developers through the game’s interface. Once uploaded, your creation will be considered by the developers for a future downloadable content release. In other words, if selected, people around the world could be playing your level!! Additional content will be available from Day 1. Initially, however, these levels will come from Japan or Asia since the game has been out there for a while already. We’re not exactly sure when we’ll start including US players’ levels, but we’re excited and waiting for customized levels from all of you!! You can also share the levels with your friends by sending your creations directly to them over the PlayStation Network. Stumping your friends is REALLY fun!

And for the PSP version, you can share the levels you create with other people in your area via wireless Ad Hoc. Cool, right?!?

Well, there will be more to come on echochrome soon, including some great wallpapers for your PS3 and PSP. But in the meantime, be sure to download the free demos tomorrow and give them a whirl! And let us know what you think!