My name is Greg Johnson, and I’ve been making games longer than I’d like to admit (ever heard of Toejam and Earl? If you’ve heard of my first game, Starflight, you’re older than you probably want to admit). We at HumaNature (that’s Human Nature… not Huma Nature by the way) are a pretty small group, as far as game development groups go these days. Our (admittedly lofty) goal is to create new and original game experiences that reach out to people looking for more humanity in games. We love interactive stories, emotional expression, and self-discovery — we’re not so big on shooting things.

Here at HNS we are hard at work building a game for PlayStation, who, thankfully, seems to like a lot of the same lofty things we do. Our game is called Doki-Doki Universe. It’s tough to describe Doki-Doki, because it’s actually a set of related products that will be released at the same time. Players’ first exposure to Doki-Doki will be in the form of a free download for their PS Vita, PS3 or PS4. This is a light version of the game where players can fly around a Universe and take fun personality quizzes.

This free game will include our fun Doki-Doki Mail messaging app, which players will also be able to get for free on mobile platforms, for cross-platform chat. If players decide they want to land on planets and interact with all the crazy characters in our Universe, they can purchase and download the full game, which you might call an ‘RPG/Simulation/Interactive Story’ game. There’s a lot more I could say, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Maybe I should tell you a bit about the game itself…

In Doki-Doki Universe, you’re a robot named Model QT377665, or QT3 for short (QT – get it?). Your human family said to wait here on this asteroid, and they would be right back to get you.

That was 11,432 days ago. Bummer.

To make matters worse, an alien that looks like a green hot-dog, named Alien Jeff, finds you and gives you some bad news: It turns out your model is getting recalled and scrapped, because you apparently don’t have enough “humanity”… whatever that is.

Alien Jeff has been assigned the task of discovering just how much “humanity” you are capable of, and reporting back to the company. So as you travel around the Universe on a giant flying pig (or whale, or poo, or whatever you choose) and visit themed planets (cute, scary, gross, robot, ice, etc.) you’ll interact with hundreds of some of the most bizarre characters you’ve ever heard of, and Alien Jeff will be watching you the whole time.

While you’re traveling the Universe, you’ll also stop at many tiny asteroids where you can take fun, visual personality tests. You can get a full personality report from the Therapist who lives on your home planet, which by the way, you get to decorate. You even get to visit your friend’s home planets and check out their personality reports.

Doki-Doki is a lot more than just a game. It’s a huge simulated “living” Universe of intriguing content, filled with interactive stories and self-discovery. From within Doki-Doki players can use Doki-Doki Mail that ‘magically’ animates anything you type, and lets you communicate in playfully expressive ways with friends who also have the game or the mobile app.

Doki-Doki Universe is new and ambitious. Rather than describe it, we just want you to experience it and see what you think. You might be charmed by it, or you may not, but we guarantee you won’t find anything “typical” about it.

Thanks from HumaNature Studios! (I’m the guy in the front with the robot and balloon on my t-shirt.)

For more on Doki-Doki Universe, check out Game Informer’s story.

Hello, PlayStation.Blog compadres!

I’m one of the co-founders of Dynamighty, a small independent studio situated in lovely San Francisco, CA. We’re a 10 person team of passionate game makers, founded by myself and my buddy John, who previously worked together at LucasArts, with the core team rounded out by the two Marks. ‘Business’ Mark and Mark Holmes, who before us was at Pixar for 16 years. When Sony asked us to write a quick post to tell you a bit about our game, we met the request with a mix of excitement (“YES! We get to start talking about our game!”) and terror (“Holy [REDACTED]! Now we’ve got to actually deliver…”).

Truthfully, we are super excited to finally be able to start talking about our labor of love, our very first game: CounterSpy (working title), an action side-scrolling game being developed forPlayStation 3, PS Vita, and mobile platforms.

As an elite member of C.O.U.N.T.E.R., your goal is to infiltrate, sabotage, and strike at the heart of two opposing Super Powers embroiled in a frenetic Arms Race that threatens the existence of humanity. You are countering the insane plans of these Cold War foes, raiding their seemingly impregnable bases and undermining their mad military machinations, all before they can launch their ever more ridiculous weapons of mass destruction against each other.

To give you a peek, one of the levels we’ve been working on this month has you going behind the Iron Curtain to raid a secret military base that is preparing a deadly new rocket for launch. As the countdown to launch ticks away, you’ll fight through hordes of well-armed representatives of the card-carrying oligarchy that object to your presence. Get to the rocket in time and you can sabotage the guidance system, causing a launch day explosion and getting you a nice fat bonus from C.O.U.N.T.E.R. HQ. To help you out, you’ve got a broad arsenal at your disposal, including a cool selection of prototype weapons that you will unlock as you steal collections of blueprints.

So a little bit about why we are making this game…

At Dynamighty, we are huge fans of side-scrollers and CounterSpy is our love letter to the genre. These are some of the classic games that shaped our childhood: Flashback, Out of this World, Impossible Mission, Metroid, and more recently, the awesome Shadow Complex. We’re inspired to deliver something that brings our own voice to the genre.

Choosing the 50s/60s Cold War aesthetic of CounterSpy was driven by a fundamental part of our vision at Dynamighty, which is to build games around themes and settings that we love and have inspired us across movies, TV, music or literature. In this case, there is SO much rich inspiration to geek over from that era: the Bond movies, the classic Mission Impossible TV show, the graphic designs of Saul Bass, the cool mid-century architecture of that era… We love it all and this feeds into our passion that the games we make have a really distinctive, strong visual style.

Although CounterSpy is primarily a single player game, we are working on some interesting ways to let you compete with friends that go a little beyond traditional high scores. We are very eager to talk about more about our cross-platform plans in future updates, including how the PS3 and PS Vita versions can work with the extended gameplay you can get from also downloading and playing on a mobile device. (You know, that ‘device’ you use to post Instagram photos of your cat, tweet your awesome lunch plans, or play those free games that don’t seem to ‘quite’ give you enough gems to get to level 4. It’s OK; we do those things, too!)

From all of us at Dynamighty, thank you for reading! We hope you’ve enjoyed this small taste of what we’ve been working on. We’ll be sharing more as we go, including some of the cool stuff we have planned for the social side of the game. Until we meet again!

For more on CounterSpy, check out Game Informer’s story.

It is with great pleasure that we are able to announce Hohokum as a Sony Santa Monica project, coming to PS4, PS3and PS Vita in 2014!

Hohokum is a collaboration between artist Richard Hogg and Honeyslug, a London-based game studio. It is a whimsical colorful game with an emphasis on playful exploration and creativity. You take on the role of a curious flying snake-like character. A technicolor, calligraphic, worm-like, kite-like being! The way you move around the world is very expressive and kinetic and kind of mesmerizing to play.

One of the main aims for Hohokum is to create something where the usual pressures of videogames – constantly being told to do things, fearing failure and being challenged to earn progress – were all absent. This is quite a challenge, but we’re really excited about how it’s coming together. There are goals and secrets to discover. There are even Trophies. But at its heart Hohokum is a playground, a place to wander about, perhaps even lose yourself in.

It is kind of awesome to be able to finally say that. We have been working away on the game for the last year, maintaining strict radio silence. Before that we had a Hohokum-sabbatical in order to make Frobisher Says for PS Vita. So it has been around two years since the public saw anything of Hohokum that was when it was an IGF finalist and then followed by Indiecade.

But now the cat is out of the bag! I guess it was in the summer of 2011 at Indiecade that our involvement with Santa Monica Studio began. We have come quite a long way since then and they are still the perfect fit to be working with on this game.

We can’t wait to show people all the new additions in Hohokum at E3.

For more on Hohokum, check out Game Informer’s story.