N+ developer unveils Office Yeti
Indie N+ developer Metanet has revealed a new single-player action-puzzle-simulation game called Office Yeti.
Heavily inspired by Skool Daze (ZX Spectrum, 1985), Office Yeti simply puts one in control of a yeti working at an office. It's an idea Metanet had long before Robotology and even N.
"Our first goal is to get a simple little artificial-life office simulation working; from there we’ll drop in a big ol' yeti and see what happens. We’re expecting hilarious mayhem," wrote Metanet on its blog.
"The general idea is that the yeti is free to interact with the environment just like a normal worker, but also has a unique set of abilities: eating people, climbing walls, smashing things — you know, typical yeti behaviours."
Visually, Metanet wants the game to look like "airplane safety cards" in motion, although any examples or even solid game mechanics are all being kept under wraps. Platforms aren't mentioned either, although the developer has worked with DS, PC, PSP and XBLA in the past.
Meanwhile, work on Robotology goes well, and the finish line is now a "when" rather than an "if". Unfortunately, the "when" appears to be a long, long way off.
"We generally tend to vacillate between supreme confidence and terrifying anxiety about [Robotology]. Despite months and months of work, it’s still nowhere near complete, but at the same time we’ve managed to get most of the vital parts figured out. Many of these systems are currently up and running, and we’ve learned a lot in the process," the developer explained.
Metanet said the next few months will be "crunch crunch crunch" as the team tries to cobble something together for the Independent Games Festival, and, eventually, something for the end of the year.
N+ was released for DS and PSP in the US earlier this year. The ninja platform-puzzle game can be found on XBLA, too.
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick







