Tip off: Icebürg looks so absolutely charming!
Feathered friends
EEEEEEE! I have no idea how it will actually end up but Icebürg - a fledgling multiplayer penguin life sim looks so cute! It's being worked on at the game incubator, Stugan, out in the Swedish wilderness this year by developer Lucy Morris and I am so pleased about it!
My Icebürg research has just involved me playing little penguin gifs Morris has posted as she figures out the animation and thinking about how cute penguins are and liking that the gender select screen seems to just be "penguin" or "penguin".
She's charting progress over on Twitter via the game's hashtag and on the TIGsource forums via the Icebürg thread.
As per the introductory post:
"While I love playing high tension competitive games with others, there were a lot of days that I came home from work utterly exhausted and just wanting something calm & social to unwind with. Drawing inspiration from the beloved 'slower' MMOs of yore (Ragnarok Online, Puzzle Pirates) and newer indie titles that are exploring some really neat collaborative gameplay (Astroneers, Don't Starve Together), the penguins were born."
Morris adds:
"My niche has ended up being 'semi-realistic things doing semi-unrealistic things', so this isn't going to be a detailed, accurate penguin educational funtime. Expect weird semi-human mannerisms and objects."
At the moment the intention is to create a multiplayer game (using 2-8 player online instances) with base-building, scavenging/crafting, making baby penguins who will go on to inherit the base, maintaining the environment, and belly tobogganing.
I am pro friendly games and so I am VERY into this.