In Pixel, players are challenged on each level to make it from the starting position to an end gate as fast as possible. In order to reach that destination, the platforms and columns around the player must be manipulated using a multi-purpose gun. Shooting some columns with your standard gun ability will cause those cubes to temporarily slide in one direction, giving the player a new path to travel down. Some paths are constantly moving,  but can be slowed down using a special gun attachment. Other areas serve as launch pads that send the player flying through the air towards doom or glory. Certain platforms will only start moving once the player connects two nodes using yet another gun attachment. There’s a lot of variety to what the player can accomplish using their Swiss Army gun, and the game does a great job in terms of pacing when doling out new abilities or platform types. Each of these is introduced just as the previous one has been fully explored. In all, there are a couple dozen levels with the latter ones requiring players to use more than one of the abilities at their disposal.

While playing Pixel I was reminded of my experiences playing T.E.C. 3001 during last year’s Indie Games Uprising even,t or the various titles in the Super Monkey Ball franchise. Even though they are games with completely different themes, all of them challenge players to find the quickest path to the end of the stage. While racing the clock, the urge to keep plowing forward has the ability to lure the player into a bad situation. Sometimes when trying to be fast, the best thing a person can do is slow down and get a better view of what he or she is speeding into. That being said, there’s nothing quite so exhilarating within a platformer as just squeaking past a moving obstacle or nailing an impromptu leap all at breakneck speed. A smart decision by the developer was making sure everyone can get right back into the action when dying by dropping the player back at the start of the level without the need to acknowledge a retry prompt.

Sadly, there are a number of issues that rear their ugly heads throughout the game. Jumping a gap will often look like it’s going to succeed only for you to clip through a column or seemingly bounce off to the side of your intended landing spot. Sometimes firing your cannon at a cube beside you will send you careening off to your death, while performing the same action on an identical formation elsewhere won’t have that undesired effect. Pixel ends up being as much a guessing game as it is a platformer. For players with the patience of a saint, some of the hiccups can be worked around once they’re learned. This repeated trial and error of working through the game’s bugginess isn’t a big deal on the shorter levels. There are a few levels, though, where painstakingly creeping towards the goal only to be undone by one of these issues will likely result in a steady stream of profanities. I know it did for me. It’s a shame because when it does work, it’s actually a really fun game.

The other issue with the game is the camera. The first-person view just doesn’t feel right. Other reviewers have complained about the gun taking up too much of the screen real estate, but my biggest beef with the camera is that it’s just too close to the action. Navigating on small ledges and around tight corners causes undue grief with the camera zoomed in. It’s much harder to tell where the player is going to land when jumping, and that problem is only compounded by the aforementioned clipping issues. I understand that pulling the view out into 3rd-person would make the shooting aspect more difficult, but there has to be some kind of happy medium.

Players may find the first-person camera too close for comfort when navigating levels

It’s a shame that the execution fell through on Pixel, because there were a number of things that were done right. The cel-shaded art style is simplistic, but it fits. Using the gun to trigger changes in the levels is fun to play with, though I wish it had been taken further. The bugs can’t be overlooked, however, because even though this game combines multiple genre elements, it’s platforming that dominates. While changing the camera at this point might be too radical of a change, going forward I would hope that at least the clipping issues get fixed. That would certainly go a long way towards restoring the joy that is supposed to go hand-in-hand with playing a game. Unfortunately, Pixel as it exists right now is an unsatisfying platforming experience for the two to four hours it’ll likely take most players to complete it.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

Additional Pixel coverage:

Review on Clearance Bin Review

Review on theXBLIG.com

Review on Indie Gamer Chick

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Toronto-based Ratchet Game Studios is looking to make their first Xbox splash with Pixel, a puzzle game that’s been selected for participation in this year’s Indie Games Uprising. In the following interview, we talk with studio rep Rob who shares his unique programming background and tells us why everyone will be really missing out if they don’t take Pixel for a spin.

Hello Rob. Thanks for joining us today. You are part of this year’s Indie Games Uprising event for your title Pixel. Before we talk about your game, can you give us a little bit of the background history of Ratchet Game Studios?

I wanted to try my hand at a software/game studio for a while. I was always pulled in by 3d design and for a while was wanting to go into it as a career. After learning how much of a creative outlet 3d programing could be, I realised I needed a name, and being in a mechanical engineering program at the time, it only seemed natural to call it Ratchet. Since being done with school I’ve had to time to really work on some of the projects I’ve had brewing.

Why did you decide to go with XBLIG as your platform of choice?

I started with XBLIG more out of convenience; I took a programming class in university thinking it’d be good background information, and turned out to become a real interest of mine. XNA launched a few months after I started taking the class and it really caught my eye at how much easier it was to program in (relatively) and how versatile it was. Not to mention, there are some pretty solid titles out there in it, so it seemed like a great community to get involved in.

What is Pixel all about, and did you have any inspirations for the game?

Pixel was an idea I had years ago in university, and even tried putting it together in Blender’s game engine, but just couldn’t get it working the way I wanted and didn’t have the time to dedicate to it. It gave me time to polish the idea every so often. Once I was done school and settled in a job, it gave me the time to work on it and develop it.

I think the game will naturally draw some comparisons to Portal because it’s a physics-based puzzle game with a gun of sorts. Can you explain some of the mechanics in the game for our readers?

You’re right, and Portal was a real inspiration for it. The physical controls are similar (as they are for any FPS), but the mechanics though are different, in that you need to manipulate the pillars physical position to solve the problems instead of using portals. Also, if you fall you land back where you started your level. I had a few dev’s say they liked that feature, a few didn’t, but I found it kept the flow of the game going instead of it having some death sequence and then you have to wait for it to load again. Here you just “fall” back to the beginning, and give it another try.

Pixel pairs physics-based puzzles with a cel-shaded artistic style

I’m really digging the art style of Pixel with its almost cel-shaded appearance. How did you settle on that look?

Ha, I started developing Pixel on my old university laptop (circa 2006), which was a single core, 2 Ghz, 1 Gb of ram, 128 mb of shared video memory. The thing could barely run Youtube at 720p, so when I was coding in XNA I found it ran quickest when I used cel shading. Once my laptop died (becuase it couldnt get through a system restore without overheating and shutting down), I upgraded to a quad core with 8 gigs of ram. I tried other looks, but the cel-shaded look just looked the best, so it stuck.

What’s been the biggest stumbling block in terms of getting development wrapped up? It seems like every studio has some of the same roadblocks, but it’s often a different one that’s proven the most difficult to overcome.

Last minute bugs are my biggest issue. My background isn’t in coding, so a lot of the time I’m lost at what the issue could be and I need to dive deep into the code to find the cause. End of the day, Google is my home boy and has saved my ass a few times in terms of issues I’m out to lunch on.

It’s actually pretty interesting that you had no programming background coming into this project. Generally it seems like developers are the people doing solo projects or initiating group projects. If programming isn’t your strength, what would you consider yours? And what advice would you give to aspiring game developers who aren’t the strongest coders?

Without sounding self absorbed here – haha – I’d say my greatest strength would be problem solving and that I try to understand not just ‘How’ things work but ‘Why’ they work that way. For instance, I had a lot of memory and garbage collection issues on Pixel at first that caused it to run fine on a PC but lag badly on an Xbox. Understanding why garbage collection is an issue on the Xbox helped me find issues in the code and to fix it. So if you aren’t the strongest coder, learn WHY you’re doing things, so that later on when you have an issue, you have a better chance at debugging it.

How surprised were you that you made it into this year’s Indie Games Uprising?

I was. I was initially uploading it to DBP (Dream.Build.Play) and thats where people noticed it for the Uprising.

What does the future have in store for Ratchet Game Studios? Are there plans yet for a new game? Will Pixel be ported to other platforms?

I plan on porting Pixel to Android as well as getting a PC version out. There are also a few other things in the pipeline, but you’ll just have to wait and see.

And finally, let’s end things by touching on what’s best about Pixel. Why should our readers play your game?

Pixel is the sort of game that draws on a lot of already established FPS and puzzle mechanics and combines the tw0. Sometimes the solution is obvious, as early levels usually are, but as it progresses, it challenges the player to really think about how to solve the levels, how different coloured pillars respond differently, and that you need to really think outside the box to solve the problems. It’ll give a good challenge to the player.

Additional Pixel Coverage:

Prelude  to the Uprising: Pixel on theXBLIG.com

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.