When Wood talks about the fun and freedom he feels building Little Kitty, Big City, he compares it with a top-down rigidity and complacent bureaucracy he experienced in Valve’s production line. Meanwhile, Steam has been printing money while maintaining Valve’s deathgrip on the PC marketplace. In 2020, Valve debuted Half-Life: Alyx, a VR game exclusive to the studio’s Index hardware, and after ignoring an extremely disruptive bot invasion, the company rolled out an update to TF2 this summer, largely comprising community-made maps and assets. It’s a running joke that Valve can’t count to three: Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007, Left 4 Dead 2 came out in 2009, and Portal 2 came out in 2011. In practice, this structure has resulted in an incredibly rich company that doesn’t produce much. This cemented Valve’s reputation as an ultra-rad, super-cool video game company in the public eye, and this perception persists today. The handbook made its way online in 2012 and went viral for its Libertarian-inspired corporate ideals - it outlined a flat hierarchy at Valve, suggesting employees had the ability to manage themselves and work on their dream projects at any given time. Valve’s internal structure has long been the subject of myth and legend among video game fans, with the company’s founder Gabe Newell in the role of messiah and the Valve Handbook for New Employees as its sacred text. But, you still sort of live within that direction that Valve goes in.” “You have a lot of autonomy and freedom to do things there. “Valve is not a typical large game studio,” Wood said. It owns Steam, which functions as a bottomless bank it’s a private company, so it doesn’t have shareholders to appease and it’s the steward of iconic franchises including Portal, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress and Dota 2 (many of which are on Wood’s résumé). Valve is a unique behemoth, even in the AAA space. Wood’s long history at Valve contextualizes his current role as the founder of an independent studio, and his years inside the insular company have helped shape his approach to game design. It was refreshing to come to that conclusion to say, no, these are just for fun.” And while that is true for some things regarding the hats, largely, they're cosmetic. I think 10 years ago, I would have said, OK, hats are gonna give you this ability, or, like, there's going to be all of this gameplay tied to all this stuff. “You always need a function, a purpose, a reason for doing the thing. “As a game designer, you kind of sit down and go, what is the purpose of this thing that you're doing?” Wood said. Aside from a few unique cases, there are no stats attached to the hats - wearing the ladybug head doesn’t grant Kitty movement speed, and the construction hat doesn’t add bonus armor. Kitty’s face endearingly pokes through the center of each hat, and they can be equipped at will throughout the game. The hats are embellished bonnets that come in various forms, including a fish head, a half-shucked corn cob, little devil ears, a cowboy situation, a hedgehog and even some root vegetables. Little Kitty, Big City is an open-world game filled with adorable animals to befriend, people to pester, quests to complete and hats to wear. However, procrastination is highly encouraged. The main character, Kitty, has wide green eyes, inky fur and batlike ears, and they’re on a mission to find their way home to an apartment complex in the center of a bustling downtown. Little Kitty, Big City has Saturday-morning-cartoon vibes, with hand-animated scenes and a clean, friendly art style.
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