Here’s a new one: a mobile game developer is now making PC games. Yes, I know — usually that is the other way around.
Developer Dynamic Pixels, which is responsible for a number of iPhone and Android apps, is announcing its plans to develop and release a PC game called Hello Neighbour. While Dynamic Pixels has previously worked on action-heavy games or sims on mobile, it is going with a “first-person suspense logic puzzle game with smart artificial intelligence,” according to the studio founder and chief executive Mikhail Minakov.
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“Many players must have at one time had a feeling that they could do something in a game that its developers had not thought of; go to a spot on the map where they should not have,” Minakov told GamesBeat. “We wanted to create a game with that sort of freedom. To do that, the game must be very flexible and have a relevant reaction to all players’ actions. Only smart A.I. can solve such tasks. This is how Hello, Neighbour! was born.”
As we noted, this is a bit of a departure for Dynamic Pixels. The company is probably best known for the arcadey sports app Goal Defense and the Tamagotchi-like My Om Nom that turned the main character from developer ZeptoLabs’ Cut The Rope into a virtual pet.
For Hello, Neighbour, the company obviously feels a desire to do something ambitious. And that ambition will manifest in the game in an interesting way.
“We don’t tell the player where to go and what to do [in Hello]. He or she is the only one to decide what objects to use to reach the only goal — the neighbor’s basement door — and reveal his secret,” continued Minakov.
Dynamic Pixels will try to keep players out of that basement by giving the neighbor motivations of his own.
“We had to give the neighbor the ability to collect and analyze player’s actions and build up his own tactics to protect the house,” said Minakov. “This is how the key element was created — the ability of the neighbor to study and learn by himself. This forces the player to change tactics constantly, looking for the new ways to reveal the secret, and the neighbor will decide how to stop him.”
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Hello Neighbor is on Steam Greenlight, and the developer is planning a crowdfunding campaign for next month to help it finish development.