• Cults, cars and tornados...
  
• In glorious pixel art...
  
• What's not to like?!

Everyone, hi!

We've just announced GRIZZLY MAN, our newest Pixel Pulp, a grisly game about an amnesiac man in black guiding a group of tourists in Alaska while a slasher starts killing them off one by one!

Look, a teaser (and a BEARY good one!)

So... Who's excited?!

ːsteamthumbsupː You can wishlist the game HERE!

Cheers and have a great one!

- LCB Game Studio

There is something about the idea of 'accumulation' in writing that has always appealed to me. It's not just about the day-to-day stubbornness of the craft—writing two or three pages a day—where, in a short time, you have a novel. Rather, it's the notion that accumulation can be used to justify anything.

I've never been attracted to the elegance of simplicity. Given a choice between minimalist industrial designs and complicated Goldberg machines, I don't hesitate for a second. Exacerbated complexity, redundancy, and gratuitousness are pillars of the kind of art I like the most.

In computer systems development, there is this concept of "refactoring," a procedure by which a developer optimizes code so that it does the same thing but in a more efficient way.

Faced with the idea of refactoring—which etymologically is nothing more than re-considering the elements of the code—I propose the idea of "accumulating." The code is not optimized; more code is written to keep the system doing the same thing.

This same principle guides the writing of our Pixel Pulps. When I was quite a bit younger, I read about the Finite Rules Paradox. Basically, this paradox posits that predicting the next element in a series is impossible because new rules can continually be added to justify any progression. For instance, 1-2-4-8-16... 32? But why not 999? There exists a rule—undoubtedly more complex—that can rationalize 999 or any other subsequent element.

Writing, then, is nothing more than adding rules to be able to narrate anything.

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Bahnsen Knights is out now... You can even try out the demo if you would like a little taste before delving fully into the world of Pixel Pulps!

Nico's here. Yeah, it's my birthday. Yeah, I'm turning 40. But that's not the reason why we're here... Today is BAHNSEN KNIGHTS' release date!

And to celebrate it, we're dropping a brand new trailer!

BAHNSEN KNIGHTS is really important to us. We're so grateful to everyone who played our previous games; the support so far has been amazing. As you may know from previous blog posts, things were... Tough. So we want to thank all of you. THANK YOU. IT MEANS A LOT TO US.

We'll be sharing new blog posts in the following days, addressing some curiosities from the game, some behind-the-scenes, and more. But we'll keep it short today...

For all of you who get the game, please leave a review. We cannot emphasize enough how much this helps indie developers.

So now go, get on your Sierra, play the game, and tell your friends and family about it.

Have a good ride, everyone!

Bahnsen Knights is out now!

Check out this stream with Nico and Fer of LCB Studio playing the game

Francis Ponge[en.wikipedia.org] is a French poet who among many other things wrote a book I read twenty years ago: Le Parti pris des choses (translated into English as Partisan of Things). His procedure is simple: Ponge looks for the extraordinary in the ordinary. He's not interested in exhausting the object in language, he doesn't seek definition by extension. For Ponge the "cigarette" is not a cylindrical roll of paper filled with shredded tobacco, designed to be lit at one end for smoking, but "a small torch much less luminous than aromatic". Ponge does not define an object, he seems to search for something more like an incantation!

While developing Bahnsen Knights, Francis Ponge never crossed my mind. However, upon reviewing my notes, his writing procedure came to mind. Something about pulp fiction has always intrigued me. In this narrative style, character building rarely involves a comprehensive study of a particular personality. There isn't sufficient time for in-depth exploration, and character development is likely to be 'flat'.

Many criticize this in pulp fiction. But this flatness tends to be boring if the definition of a character is based merely on clichés. If it is based on the uncommon, the result can be quite different. All our characters are flat, but of a singular flatness!

Take Kevin, for example, the owner of Danny's Bar in Bahnsen Knights. Kevin inherited the bar, and if he works there it's because he feels he owes it to his father—Danny, after whom the bar is named. Kevin, when he was a young boy waiting tables, met a customer who gave him a copy of Scientific American where he could read a column by Martin Gardner. He became obsessed with that column and his father paid for a subscription. After that subscription, others would follow—most notably, one for a writing workshop.

Who is Kevin then? He isn't just the big guy bartender who gets into an occasional fight with the more violent patrons at a dive bar, Kevin is passionate about math and writing thanks to the mail subscription services of certain publications.

When someone criticizes any narrative work by arguing that a character's development lacks depth, I smile. Rather than depth, rather than exhaustion, I prefer this flatness, the definition on a plane of the uncommon: two singular points can define a unique straight line.

Hi Everyone,

For the launch of Bahnsen Knights we will be recording a brand new developer walkthrough and we would love to answer any questions you may have for us.

So, if you have any questions about the game, the Pixel Pulps series or even just Indie Development in general, please drop your questions in the comments and we'll do our utmost to answer them in the video...

Cheers

Nico, LCB Game Studio

Are you familiar with the "Marvel Method", a process in which Stan Lee would define a synopsis, receive pencilled artwork from the artist and add words over it?

Stan Lee by Fer. Really cool piece, right?

Pixel Pulps writing is somehow similar to the Marvel Method: from a story outline I write, Fer puts together a storyboard in pencil and then I write over it. The iterative aspect is there. But there are at least two fundamental differences in our own process, two things that although they are not interrelated by definition, they do so by our own work logic: Stretching and Wildcards.

In the Marvel Method, Stan Lee cannot stretch ad infinitum the text of a panel. Space is finite. But we? We can! We can keep a single image on screen and render as much text as we want. This process, which I call Stretching, allows us several things from a narrative point of view: to manage the reading pace, to build expectations, etc... But, more importantly, Stretching allows us to let players see Fer's work on screen for longer!

Since the first Pixel Pulps, Stretching has been a resource that I sought to exploit to do justice to the art direction of our games. Now, to keep each scene interesting, text in a stretched scene has to generate something, it can't just be filler.

And this is where Wildcards come into play. In the writing of the outline, I usually add details in order to create a certain atmosphere or define some aspect of a character. The details, in themselves, are not important yet, they are usually superficial, and they add sense to the narrative by simple accumulation.

Once I receive Fer's storyboard, that's when things get interesting. The detail appears as an unavoidable presence, and many times I wonder why I chose what I chose, or why Fer chose what he chose. Wildcards is letting go of the steering wheel for a while and then pick it up and straighten the car.

Let's take as an example chapter VI of Bahnsen Knights, a scene where Vincent spits on the floor after talking to Boulder, the character players embody. In the outline I wrote:

"Vincent and Boulder are standing each against a car hood, waiting on the side of the road. They are waiting for the truck to come. Vincent kicks a rock or spits. You try not to look at him."

"Kicks a rock or spits." Fer chose the action of spitting, and the way it was represented on screen looked great. How could I then stretch the scene to give prominence to a detail that could have been something else?

Building on this, I wrote the following scene, where Vincent tells Boulder about the healing powers of saliva and his relationship with his stepdad.

Stretching and Wildcards. The first is a resource of the dimension of pragmatism: to show Fer's art as long as possible on screen. The second, a challenge, a puzzle, a gamble, something to keep interesting all stages of production of our Pixel Pulps.

Hi Everyone,

Fer and I took some time to sit down and play through the brand new demo for Bahnsen Knights and also answer some questions that you sent in for this Next Fest video. We hope you enjoy watching and finding out a little more about Bahnsen Knights and the Pixel Pulps adventures.

Don't forget to play the demo and, if you like what you see and play, wishlist and follow the game!

Cheers

Nico, LCB Game Studio