Screenshot Saturday Sundays: brilliant body language, desert driving, and plant-based propaganda
Weekly gif-ts
Screenshot Saturday! A day for peering behind the curtain of game development, at least insofar as carefully chosen early peeks of games-in-progress will allow. This week: some NPCs that aren’t happy with what you’re selling; a desert fit for a car-fight, and a farm that might have more going on than meets the eye.
Starting off with some grouchy characters from Potionomics, because I really like how they’re all expressive but in their own unique ways:
“Have you ever wanted to play an RPG about an in-debt witch? I did, so I’m making a game about that,” reads the developers’ pinned tweet. I can’t say I did want that until I read it, but now I extremely do. I also admire the straight forward ambition of the thing. As well as Twitter, you can follow along with the game’s development on Tumblr, where there are lots more character designs and pretty cauldron assets, the latter of which I liked enough to include as the header image for this article. (I want one in my house please and thank you.)
Meanwhile, do you ever just see an image and realise that you’re in the mood to drive off into the desert for a few days? I just did.
Actually doing so probably wouldn’t be so straightforward in Mileage, which the developers describe on their website as “destruction derby meets Mad Max.” It’s currently in preproduction, but there are more shots of graffitied buildings and firey side-swipes to take a peek at as they work.
And of course, it wouldn’t be something that I wrote without some pixel art foliage, this time courtesy of Agricultura:
I love the reflection of the clouds on the pond here. From the Tumblr linked in the Tweet, Agricultura is a “solarpunk farming sim” in which protagonist Holly discovers that being a Capsule Farmer for the government might not be as idyllic as she expected. But if the government promo makes it look as charming as this gif, I can hardly blame her for being taken in.
A bonus to close this week, from Chasm, a game that’s already out on Steam, because I like the concept of using Screenshot Saturday to share cut things that are worthy of attention even if they didn’t fit into the final game.