Retronator

Noah Cai, better known as Pixel Architect on YouTube, has been posting inspiring devlogs of Chef RPG to his channel for almost 4 years now. As a former architectural designer, he brings a specialized set of processes to his ever-improving pixel art skills.

Chef RPG is clearly inspired by Stardew Valley, expanding it with many activities such as hunting and cooking mini-games as you manage your very own restaurant in a quaint, seaside town.

We just received a new trailer for the game along with a September 12 release date (Early Access). You can wishlist the game on its Steam page.

I was a big fan of Antoine ‘Sir Carma’ Lendrevie’s voxel art ever since I wrote my big article on pixels and voxels in 2016. Not long after, Antoine moved to Vancouver—the home of Brace Yourself Games—and started working as lead artist (and now art director, among other artists) on the simulation/strategy game Industries of Titan.

What followed were 4 years of patiently looking at cubes being carefully arranged into delicious dioramas on his Twitter, merging slowly into vast sci-fi cityscapes you can marvel at in the screenshots above (make sure to see them up big to take in all the voxel detail).

Finally the good news, you can now start colonizing the largest moon of Saturn yourself, as Industries of Titan landed in early access yesterday on Steam and Epic!

Here’s a small voxel diversion from me, a nature simulation thingy called Project Gaia. 

Codeveloped with Anneke Lisa (design, voxel art), we started the project at Global Game Jam as a calm simulation of nature reclaiming the wasteland that humanity left behind (the theme of the jam was “repair”). After struggling with Unity during the jam (and failing to get anything done), I rewrote everything in WebGL/Three.js, and put some polish on top so that you can try it yourself in the browser. I even wrote music for it!

All the world simulation runs in shaders on the GPU so this is basically a stress test for the graphics card (especially World 5, which is at 120×120×80 voxels). You can press t or h to display temperature or humidity simulation that is running in the background. If you’re so inclined you can even peek at the source code. Enjoy!

Since we were talking about Indonesian indies yesterday, it was about time for me to try the Coffee Talk demo. It’s been out for over a year now, but boy does it still feel as warm as a hot chocolate on a cold December rainy day.

Coffee Talk is being developed at Toge Productions where it’s pixeled by one of my favorite artists, Hendry Roesly a.k.a. @iceztiqarts​ (art lead on the project is Dio Mahesa, an amazing character artist as well). The game is essentially a visual novel in a fantasy 2020 Seattle where you get to listen to everyday stories such as a love drama between an elf and a succubus, an alien’s attempt to understand life on earth, or a dreams-come-true tale of a writer trying to switch from journalism to writing a novel … It all feels incredibly chill and cozy, thanks as well to the lo-fi jazzy soundtrack and the fact that you help these characters feel better by serving them delicious, hot beverages.

As a person who never even tasted coffee in their life, I grew surprisingly in love with becoming a barista. I truly appreciate every game in which I can learn something and thanks to Coffee Talk I finally know a difference between a latte, a cappuccino, and an espresso (if you were as uninitiated as me, it’s basically the amount of milk added to coffee from loads to none at all, in the respective order). 

The barista simulator goes so deep that you can even make latte art. Every time a piece of entertainment excites me so much that I pause the movie or alt-tab from a game to go read Wikipedia, my hat is off to you. With Coffee Talk it wasn’t too long before I had YouTube opened, learning how to make hearts, tulips, and rosettas by pouring milk into the steaming blackness. 

Here lied my only moment of disappointment: the liquid simulation just isn’t close enough to reality to reproduce what I observed in online tutorials—a missed opportunity to have even more transfer of knowledge between the game and the real world. On the other hand, the misbehaving simulator breeds creativity as you try to find ways to make cool shapes in your own way.

Who knows, maybe the programers did yet another rewrite of the latte simulation since the latest demo came out and the full game will blew me away even more. Everything else in the demo was perfect enough that the incoming release has me incredibly excited regardless. The date we’re looking at right now is January 29, 2020 and may the gods of coffee bless these beans so that brewing completes successfully. Till then you can play the demo yourself or wishlist the game on your favorite store by following links from the game’s website.