Pixelopus has been hard at work creating something wildly different from their first game.
Hi there, my name is Dominic Robilliard and I am the Creative Director of a small team at PlayStation called Pixelopus. It’s been a while since my last post — that’s because we’ve been away working hard on our second game: Concrete Genie. It’s an action adventure game about a boy called Ash who discovers he can bring his paintings to life.
As you might expect, given that our hero is an artist, a lot of the gameplay in Concrete Genie is about having fun with paint. Using DualShock 4’s motion sensor, you can effortlessly create stunning landscapes that come to life and even make your own cast of unique creatures to hang out and play with. Our goal is for anyone to be able to paint in this game. The paint strokes you make on the walls will turn into beautiful, living artwork.
Unfortunately, Ash has to contend with some bullies in the neighborhood, so the creatures in particular become really important to him: they’re the friends he wished he had in real life.
Concrete Genie is set in a small fishing town called Denska, which sadly at this point is practically abandoned. It has been heavily affected by pollution, but Ash discovers that his magic paint can cleanse the pollution from its streets and alleyways. Using the power of your brush to clean the walls is incredibly satisfying!
The team has been on quite the journey since we made Entwined. We’re really happy with the response we got to that game (It’s been downloaded over 1 million times!) but at the beginning of this project we decided as a team that we wanted to make something more accessible. Combining that with a desire to be more ambitious we decided to switch to Unreal 4 as our engine, and we invested in developing a 3rd person action adventure – a genre that we all have a lot of passion and love for. We wanted to make sure that if we were going to put our hearts and souls into making a game designed to create an emotional connection with players that it can reach as many people as possible.
There is so much more to share about Concrete Genie in the coming months, and I can’t wait to show everyone as much as we can as we head toward release in 2018. I’m also looking forward to sharing more from the team directly and their individual work on the game. There has been a lot of fascinating development behind the scenes, which I think will be really interesting for people to see.
Thanks for reading,
Dom
Definitely seems interesting. On the one hand I thought that you’d be able to pull a monster out of a painting, in order to protect yourself, when it seemed like he pulled some grass out. But on the other hand not every game needs a combat element.
I’m guessing this is sort of a non combat 3rd person, experience, sort of like an Industrial Graffiti style Journey hybrid. Seems interesting. The biggest bummer in my mind is that it’s a 3rd person game. Very possible that a first person VR option could have made the game push over the edge into “Definitely will buy” territory.
Definitely and upgrade to Second Son’s “Spray paint Dualshock 4” feature. I would probably buy this game if you include some VR mode. Or maybe maybe a VR add on, or even just make a separate VR experience that is completely different withinspirations from this game. Probably not a day 1 buy but Josh from PS Nation will probably convince me to play it lol.
Looks absolutely stunning, congratulations, I’m in.
Looks fascinating. Interested in hearing more about your story, and about your controls. I’m the world’s worst artist, while my kids are all pretty amazing – if I can make stuff look decent, while they can make stuff look incredible, then this could be a game we want to watch each other play.
I love the art direction in this game. Looking forward to learning more about it.
Wenn love it! – GamesArtDE
Would like to say: We love it! – GamesArtDE
This game looks incredible. Can’t wait.
This looks great visually and interesting game.
This looks like a day-1 buy for me, I’m so glad to see a creative game come out that isn’t locked to stupid VR for a change. As someone who can’t even use VR, I was starting to feel pretty gated from everything interesting happening on PS4. Good to have one more thing on the system that justifies me owning one.
This was one of my favorite games at the showcase – awesome job! Really glad to see such a creative idea coming to life, and will be anxiously awaiting our next look :-)