Wojdan
News

Arabic visual novel aims to celebrate the language’s beauty

Based in the small town of Qatif, Saudi Arabia—”on the shores of the Arabian Gulf”—Light Studio is a team of five women who are currently making their first videogame. Leading the team as director, writer, and programmer is Fatimah Aldubaisi. The rest of the team all works on the game’s art and animations, comprising character designers Hameedah Hamadah and Zainab Aljishi, and background artists Lalyla Aldubaisi and Zainab Abu Abdullah. Their game is called Wojdan (Arabic for the soul or inner strength) and it’s pitched as an “Arabic visual novel” on account of its text and dialogue all being in Arabic—an English and French…

Feature

The Future of Board Games According to The Cannes Games Festival

During the awards ceremony at the International Cannes Games Festival, three men walked onto the stage with Cuban hats, throwing fake money to the audience. They were the ones behind Mafia de Cuba, an intrigue and deception board game set in La Habana during the Cuban revolution. The game was one of three nominees for the As d’Or Award (Best Game of the Year) and these creators had decided to project its universe into ours by becoming the game’s characters in real life. Mafia de Cuba didn’t win, but this stage act set the mood for the following days: a…

News

Outer Wilds is like Groundhog Day in space

Even though it took the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Design awards at the Independent Games Festival earlier this year, Outer Wilds is something of a mystery. It was still in very early alpha when it was being judged for this year’s Game Developers Conference, and has flown under a lot of people’s radars since, especially in the shadow of a game like No Man’s Sky. Both games feature an open, explorable universe at their core, but Outer Wilds differs in a lot of ways. why does the universe keep resetting?  The defining factor of Outer Wilds is…

News

Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign now exceeds the GNP of Tuvalu

Star Citizen, the spiritual successor to Wing Commander, continues to inhale gobs of cash from the crowd, recently breaking the $47 million dollar mark, which is nuts. Passing this milestone gives players the added feature of engine tuning, allowing them to tinker around under the hood of their ship. If (when) this reaches $49 million, the devs will add a rare species of space plant, which blooms one night every 100 years. It sounds like they are running thin on stretch goals.  For the record, this puts the budget for a game about spaceships shooting other spaceships far above the…