Etoo London: Day Too

With our heads still reeling from all the bombshells Sony dropped last night (well, this morning actually) UK games industry vets and newbies alike pile into Loading Bar in Soho excited to see what other pleasant surprises are in store at Etoo London. And the 4am finish last night means today’s free cake comes with coffee, bonus!

Among today’s indie exhibitors are Appynation, showcasing their newest iOS offering Guide The Light. Taking a pinch more than just name formula ideas from Cut The Rope, it plays like a pipe-plumbing puzzler with a Spelunky themed protagonist. Definitely a decent time-killer. And speaking of, FortressCraft creator Adam Sawkins was in today showing off the progress ProjectorGames have made on the Unity port of their XBLIG hit, and it’s looking bigger than ever. Sawkins boasted that, while not quite mastering an infinity world yet, they have managed to create a 1000-light-year across randomly generating sandbox. Not quite the universe, but at least as big as the Horsehead Nebula, he assured me.

Sawkins also said that while they are not looking to directly compete with Minecraft, he is happy that they are driving a competitive relationship with features being cross-implemented into Notch’s mining monolith. Speaking of some of the animosity he’s received from fans of Minecraft (ranging from death threats over the phone, to people shouting abuse across the street) Sawkins said: “We don’t want to compete with Minecraft on the survival front, they have that down. What we want to make is a world where you can create, easily. On any aspect of that where we compete with Minecraft, we want to be better, we want to blast so far past it that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they’re just nothing like us at all.”

The floor felt a bit sparse today as some devs had yet to turn up (obviously still sleeping off the excitement of last night) or rushing off to fix emerging bugs (expos are a great place to playtest en masse) but there was a definite stand out from today’s showings. The mildly-coveted Exhibitor of the Day award goes to Anima, an intriguing iOS multiplayer game from two-man studio Out of the Bit.

Still in development, the core gameplay looked very promising, pitting 2 players against each other in a vector-based isometric battle arena. The interface is, as expected from an iOS title, extremely intuitive, tap to run somewhere, tap frantically to run there faster, tap an opponent to shoot. The frantic nature of the controls is a perfect representation of the gameplay, with powerups scattered around arenas filled with traps and common enemies for both players. Definitely one to watch in the coming months as designer Arnaud De Bock and developer Alessandro Motisi expect Anima to be available in a few months time on the app store. They have plans to develop for other platforms, including android, and even spoke of the possibility to scale up to bigger screens and platforms due to the nature of vector graphics. They also hinted at new maps every month and a level editor release before Christmas.

If you fancy checking out the commentator reaction to Nintendo’s keynote and more from today’s E3 floor, tune into the EToo livestream tonight and every night this week atyoutube.com/etoolondon