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A new studio where people who don’t like videogames make videogames

Montreal-based programmer Brie Code has set up a new studio called Tru Luv Media that aims to make videogames with the help of people who don’t like videogames. The reason being that she wants her friends and people like them to care about games. These are people for who videogames do not resonate at all, mostly because they draw from the same cultural references time and again, use the same design principles, and are primarily made for people who already play videogames—there’s nothing there for anyone else. Code herself has worked on games for a number of years at Ubisoft…

Emporium
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Emporium, an upcoming videogame vignette about suicide

I was expecting Tom Kitchen to be reserved when talking about his upcoming vignette game Emporium. He’s shown plenty of images on the game’s TIGSource thread but not said a lot when it comes to what it’s about, leaving me to believe he wanted to keep it secretive. So I was taken aback when he came straight out with, “overall the belly of Emporium is a conversation about suicide.” He goes on to tell me that you’ll play a young boy around the age of 12, who speaks with a much older man, both of them victims of suicide at the…

Card Thief
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Card Thief’s abstraction of stealth gets more impressive

The last time we saw Card Thief, its creators were in the midst of building a stealth-based approach to card games that has more in common with Thief (1998) than, well, cards. Long story short, Card Thief uses the statistics typical of both card and tabletop games to simulate the effects of light, the direction of vision, and the player’s stealth level. It’s the same thing that might be taken into consideration as you creep behind people’s backs in an RPG, but boiled down to its most simple. It’s the same fundamental change in conditions as crouching down behind a…