Professor Brink

With winter now approaching down under I've found myself adjusting a bit more to bunker life and able to get a bit more balance with my design work. In saying that I've had a little bit more time to play more games, watch new films  and glean new insight and inspiration which I'm going to want to start talking about more.  So l'm going to write about Dead Cells. Sometimes seen as Hollow Knight's other cousin, Dead Cells is also a metroidvania hack and slash platformer.  It would be unfair to compare both art styles as each aesthetic is drastically different to the other but Hollow Knight is an almost like looking at a classical painting of greek mythology with  tolkeinesque ethrealism while Dead Cells is a beautiful sega megadrive mess of pixilated insanity.  What sets them at odds apart however is how Dead Cells has set up it's Game Over in which there isn't one.  Yes your mortal shell does shuffle off everytime you are slain but you

It's finally here . This game has been in development for nearly 7 months under the working title "Abandale." Abandale was released in 2018 but was removed due to an error deep in it's files. What began as some form of satanic version of nintendo's animal crossing/silent hill (you can bet I'm not abandoning this idea anytime soon) is now more aligned with jrpg influnces, specifically Witch's House. It comes bundled with a demo for Creeping Chasms which was originally a more stripped down arcade mode but it just didn't have the same pacing as the main game so It's going to be something I'm going to be putting together the next few weeks. Fun trivia, it was the name of my first "band" in high school and it sounded terrible but it does works better on this.

So with The Scarlet Gallery having been released almost a month now I've decided to take a talk a bit of time about the art from the game itself which is a murder mystery surrounding a sinister art exhibition. Part of the concept for illustrating the game was that every scene was to be an individual portrait so almost forty different pieces were created to help tell the story written by Ghoul Shadows. I've tried my best to make this all spoiler free but I wander a little bit dangerously to that if only help explain where these pictures are in the game and what choices went into producing them. Without a further ado, let the tour begin. #1 The Hall It was a good thing I had abandoned a similar project just before I started this one. An espionage thriller about tracking down mind control chemicals? It was never going to work out. The Hall scene involved pursuing a suspect and the player having to decide which way to go. The lighting and coloration was chose

And with that, The Scarlet Gallery has finally been completed. I am working on a proper deep dive into the making of the project and explain everything that went into designing it. All I can say for now is Ghoul's writing seriously fleshed the game out in ways I never really thought and I am amazed at how it really came along into itself.

In other awesome news my album "5 Creepy Songs From The Internet" was recently featured in one of those listicles. You may recognize one of the tracks "Blessed Be The Destroyers" (In The Tall Grass Mix) is a very punchy version of the Game Over theme from The Scarlet Gallery. http://musicsthehangup.com/blog/spooky-vaporwave-albums-to-listen-to-on-halloween/