Posts Tagged ‘Nerd Kingdom’

RPS Feature Vinecraft

The Lighthouse Customer: TUG

I'm here to chew gum and kick ass and I'm all out of... enthusiasm.

Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, a little digging, a little building, and a lot of failing in survival crafting sandbox TUG.

I’ve survived the survival modes of many survival games, and I went into TUG figuring it wouldn’t be any different: I’d whip up a house, dig a mine, get my smelt on, build an arsenal, kill whatever animals were around, and consider the game conquered. Instead, I built half a house, dug a shallow hole, got killed by a cat, and spent the rest of the time fighting with the smallest backpack in video game history.

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Yogventures Backup Plan TUG In Trouble

Tugged off.

TUG appears to be, at a glance, another Minecraftbut — it’s Minecraft but not entirely squares and with some story bits. It is also, you might remember, the game that Minecrafty YouTubers Yogscast turned to after the crowdfunded Minecraftbut they officially endorsed, Yogventures, crashed after running out of money. Yogventures backers would get a TUG key and Yogscast would team up with the TUG team to do Yoggy things, was the idea. Now TUG, which was also crowdfunded, is struggling with money too. Developers Nerd Kingdom have laid off half their team and are delaying the game. Oh dear.

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RPS Feature "a game that is circumstantial for everybody"

Making It With Science: A TUG Interview


TUG is an interesting proposition. A game of exploring and building, a multiplayer thing that encompasses lots of what has excited us about games over the past few years – dynamic, procedurally-produced environments, exploration, collaboration. It’s also a platform that will be exposed as much as possible to modding, and the Kickstarter explicitly supports creating tools to make that easy. It also claims to be using science and academia in its development. How can such mad alchemy be possible? It was time to ask Nerd Kingdom‘s handsomely bearded academic, Peter Salinas.
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The Voxels Are Academic: TUG


TUG? “The Untitled Game”, of course. There are two parts to TUG‘s Kickstarter summary sentence: “TUG is a multiplayer open-world sandbox-RPG using new technology and social sciences to directly involve players in the game’s design.” That first part, with the open world and the sandbox, I say yay! The second part with the social sciences, I say huh? Indeed, developers Nerd Kingdom don’t really going in to that second part all that much in their pitch, sensibly dwelling on the first, and revealing that this is an academically-motivated happening with the job titles of their talking heads. And good thing too, because it looks mighty feisty and entirely intriguing. I recommend the videos, below.
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