PlayStationSpot

Hey everyone,

Deborah Mars here again. We’re so excited to be releasing PixelJunk Eden tomorrow (Thursday, July 31) on the PlayStation Network. Dylan Cuthbert and his team at Q-Games in collaboration with Baiyon, a Kyoto-based multimedia artist and DJ, have really outdone themselves here.

Now I know I’m biased with all my PixelJunk love, but seriously…this is one outstanding, addictive, gorgeous, amazing game. So I just wanted to take a moment here and mention some of the really cool “firsts” that the team has achieved with this title, and highlight some of the things that we really love about it.

1. Trophies

This is the very first game to launch with trophies. And just so you know what to be gunning for when you play, here is a complete list:

BRONZE

• All Seeds 01 - Open all seeds in garden 01
• All Seeds 02 - Open all seeds in garden 02
• All Seeds 03 - Open all seeds in garden 03
• All Seeds 04 - Open all seeds in garden 04
• All Seeds 05 - Open all seeds in garden 05
• All Seeds 06 - Open all seeds in garden 06
• All Seeds 07 - Open all seeds in garden 07
• All Seeds 08 - Open all seeds in garden 08
• All Seeds 09 - Open all seeds in garden 09
• All Seeds 10 - Open all seeds in garden 10
• All Gardens Clear - Get a Spectra in each garden
• Combo Ten - Pollen Prowler combo x 10
• Combo Fifteen - Pollen Prowler combo x 15
• The Hundred Thousander - Get 100,000 pollen in one garden
• 500 Dead Pollen Prowlers - 500 Pollen Prowlers killed
• Ten Minute Grimp - Get all 5 Spectra from a garden within 10 minutes
• Fifteen Crystals - Get fifteen crystals in a single jump
• Zero Wasted Pollen - Open all seeds in a garden without missing any pollen
• Three Play Ping Pong - In 3p mode, trapeze jump between two swinging Grimps

SILVER

• All Spectra Found - Get all the Spectra in all gardens

2. YouTube video upload support

How cool is this? It’s a great feature that allows you to capture up to 10 minutes of video footage of your Eden gameplay and then either save it to your XMB or upload to YouTube and share with your friends and the world. So hey, pulled a sweet co-op combo with your friends that you want to show off? Having trouble finding that last Spectra in garden 8? Now you’ve got the proof to back up your bragging rights…or at least accept the fact that you might need just a little bit of – ahem – help.

3. PSP Remote Play

OK so this isn’t a first. But it’s worth pointing out anyway so you can take PixelJunk Eden with you wherever you & your PSP go.

4. Accolades

Great news: We’ve just learned that PJ Eden won a Cheat Code Central award for “Best Puzzle / Arcade Game of E3 2008.” We’re really pleased with all positive response on the title, and thank you all for your support. If you haven’t played some of the other titles in the PixelJunk series, be sure to check out Q-Games’ other titles, PixelJunk Racers and PixelJunk Monsters + Encore.

5. Music & Art

We’re really loving the music and visuals that Baiyon created for PixelJunk Eden. You know the music is good when you can listen to it over and over and over again and it is still kicking. There’s more than 100 minutes of music in the game total, and be sure to stay tuned for an upcoming interview right here on this blog with Baiyon and PJE’s game director “Tomi” (Tominaga Shouichi).

6. Druck der Farben

Hands down, my favorite garden.

7. Cannons, teleports, gravity changing, oh my.

Enough said.

8. Top 5 Things Said While Playing Eden

Dylan Cuthbert sent us a link yesterday to a story on TripleTags.com about the top 5 things said while playing Eden. Matt Morton, Associate Producer on Eden, and I have our own here while playing co-op, so we’ll leave you with this list as parting thoughts

- “Seeding!” [And yes, I know I’ve been ridiculed for this one.]

- “Get off me!”

- “Where did you go?”

- “Combo. Combo! Combo!!”

- “Get on the plant. Get on the plant!”

Always spreading the PixelJunk love,
Deb

Hey everyone,

It took a little while longer than anticipated, but we wanted to revisit those who answered our call for your PixelJunk Monsters + Encore co-op stories.

With PixelJunk Eden hitting the PSN this week, we know the PixelJunk love will be spreading in a whole new way, and that even more co-op tales are in the offing.

So thank you for your continued support, and we’ll see you back around here really soon!

When my boyfriend and I first started going out we used to play video games together a lot. Actually, we used to do everything together a lot but especially gaming.

Suddenly we were college graduates who had been going out for almost three years and were jobless, clueless and living in different states on permanent basis. You might be able to guess what happened next. We broke up. Eventually, we got back together but warily, and hoped we be able to find some time to reconnect.

One day we’re sitting in his room and he suddenly turned on Pixel Junk Monsters. He says he thinks it something we can do together. Five minutes in and I’m hooked because not only is it something we can do together but I’m just as good at it as him! Now we turn it on every time I visit. It’s our special thing. Oh yeah, and dancing to level up towers? Totally the perfect time to make out.

- Jasmine, NY

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For the past two years, I have been a dedicated gamer wife. Before I met my husband, Isaac, I had little to no knowledge of any games since I’d never played before. Because of him, I’ve become acquainted with many different worlds. But none so endearing as the world of Pixel Junk Monsters, or what I have affectionately nicknamed the “Tiki Babies game.”

The first time my husband asked me to play this game, I was reluctant to join him. This was mainly because I am terrible at strategy and I can’t do more than two things at once, a problem which leads to repetitive and hilarious videogame deaths.

But I was so taken with the cuteness of the game and the creatures that have to be guarded by cleverly placing and using weapons against the assorted monsters that I couldn’t resist. It took a lot of fumbling, but we made it though a few levels.

This has become one of our favorite games to play together. Sometimes we even dance the upgrade dance! It’s a great way to start our days together; it’s both loving and silly and we get a kick out of it.
Thank you for creating a game that both my husband and I can enjoy!

- Beatriz, IL

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On television shows, they do all sorts of crazy things to test a couple’s relationship… getting them lost and having them navigate with a map, etc. The real test should be playing PixelJunk Monsters co-op together.

Let me start out by saying that my girlfriend hates video games. She thinks they are a complete waste of time… until Monsters. The adorableness eventually got to her and she gave it a try, and before long we were up until 4 am trying to get a rainbow on “Double Team”.

We’ve often debated why we both love this game so much. She believes the game brings out her maternal instincts (“Don’t kill the babies!!!” she often yells at me). I think I love it so much just to see the joy in her eyes as an arrow narrowly kills the last spider right before it is about to get a villager. Whatever Monsters is, it’s magic.

Thanks for creating such a fantastic game that has both brought us closer together as a couple and helped solidify our relationship by showing us how much fun we can have when working together.

- Jefferson, CA

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Early this year, I purchased a PS3 under the pretense of playing games of all sorts with my girlfriend. In my search to find something we could play together that was easily accessible, I stumbled across PixelJunk Monsters and purchased it from the PlayStation Store one lazy afternoon, not realizing the addictiveness or the enjoyment in store for us.

The quest has been fraught with casualties and arguments, including the countless times when I’ve yelled “Build on THIS tree, not THAT tree!” while gesturing emphatically with the controller. Each time, my girlfriend responds “WHAT tree, there’s nothing BUT trees in the FOREST!” Our playthroughs have not always resulted in heated discussions; the first time we figured out we could combine our dance powers to level up a tower faster, we broke out dancing ourselves in sync with our characters on the screen, hoping to hurry the process even more.

It’s been said that the couple that games together, stays together, and thanks to the endless entertainment given by PixelJunk Monsters, we’ll (hopefully!) be together a long time.”

- David, TX

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Okay, I’m not going to make any excuses for Sarah and me. Since showing her PixelJunk Monsters, it has occupied all of our time when we’re together, she adores it. We open a bottle of wine and settle into the couch for a few hours of rainbows and towers.
As a couple, especially a couple that plays games, we just have times where we want to do something silly for the sake of “just because.”

My award winning letter contains some Romeo-approved language like, “No golem as tall as a mountain, or army of overweight bumble-bees could prevent me from adoring you with the most precious gems. 5 gems for a kiss…” I even drew some characters on there, relying on my middle-school art skills. I gave the blue dancer some feminine touches like lips and a pony-tail.

She loved it. We laughed out loud. No excuses.

- Michael, TX

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Related Post:
- PixelJunk in the Trunk: Contest Winners (Part 1)

UPDATE: Hey, folks. Thanks for all the comments. It’s always great to get feedback straight from the fans. I just wanted to give you a short update on Eden.

First of all, be sure to check out the demo when it hits the PLAYSTATION Store tomorrow. Just a hint - if you explore the “main menu” you’ll find access to more than one demo stage. Also, to give you an idea of how cool the YouTube recording function works, here are a couple of videos taken by someone at Sony today.

This first one shows single player on an early stage.

This second one shows some 2-player action on a later stage, although the
demo and the full game feature multiplayer for up to 3 people.

Don’t forget to download the demo tomorrow!

Hello, this is Dylan from Q-Games (the Cuthbert one, not the Warhawk Jobe one - when did all these Dylans suddenly start turning up eh?).

We’ve just wrapped up PixelJunk Eden, and it has been an incredibly interesting project from start to finish. We started off by getting an intern programmer from France to try and implement Baiyon’s out-of-this-world foliage designs, and he did a good job with the help of one of our tech guys, and managed to replicate the look. So after he went back to France, we assigned a proper team and went gung-ho into development. That was around December last year. Back then all it had were plants. There was no player character or any real idea for what the game would become, but over the new year I had some sparks of inspiration and that’s when things really started getting moving, leading to the demo video we played at GDC ‘08.

Anyway, this all leads into trophies somehow. Ah yes, because our development cycle is so short, we find ourselves being able to implement all the latest OS-supported features before anyone else can. For PixelJunk Monsters it was Dual-Shock 3 support, but this time there have been a couple of really cool new features and we have put both in. These are the Trophy support and the YouTube video upload support. Both of which are really cool.

Initially we implemented all our own trophy screens etc., but then Sony Computer Entertainment built it all into the OS, which really helped us out. The trophy comparing and your “gamer card” screen really up the ante for those hard core gamers out there. In fact, it might make some of the non-gamer types even turn hard-core as chasing trophies can be rather addicting.

PixelJunk Eden is a short-form PSN title so there are fewer trophies when compared to, say, a Blu-ray title (which can have the esteemed platinum trophy), but we still managed to pack in quite a few. To begin with, you can get a bronze trophy for opening every “seed” in a stage. This is quite a challenge on some of the stages as the gardens are large and expansive. Then there are trophies for a load of other things, such as destroying 500 of the “prowlers,” or collecting 15 “crystals” in one jump. My personal favorite is a trophy that you can only achieve in 3P mode, where you have to “volley” a player between you back and forth five times without him/her landing on a plant, a bit like tennis.

The YouTube upload feature is going to revolutionize how people share tips. Up until now it has been limited to people with video capture equipment, but from now on, anyone can record their game and upload it directly to YouTube from within the game! It is as simple as pushing one button to start and one button to stop and upload, and there is no affect on the gameplay thanks to the power of the PS3 and its abundance of SPU processors.

For more info on the YouTube API and PixelJunk Eden and to see it in action, take a look at the YouTube API Blog.

Oh, and we have been totally inundated with requests for trophies in PixelJunk Monsters via some kind of patch. As this goes to press, I can say we are definitely looking into it - you just need to badger Deborah Mars and her team in Santa Monica to get some dates set. If we release a patch, we will not only implement this but we will also implement XMB music and a couple of other things.

One final note about Eden, I really can’t emphasize enough how much pure fun this game is, and I’m saying this as a gamer, not as the developer of the game! My mail box has been overflowing with direct mails full of the same kind of comments from online review sites who have preview copies and I have never had that before, so we must be onto something (fingers crossed)!

Here we are, a week away from the LA Convention Center’s doors swinging open for E3. What will you be seeing? Well, you at least know *some* of what’s going to be shown. Now, it’s time to meet the people behind the games you’ll see next week, and will be playing soon after.

A few weeks ago I quizzed you to find out what *you* would ask our producers if you met them. Well, I took those questions and did just that. First up, Deb Mars, who’s working on the highly anticipated (and awesome, seriously) PixelJunk Eden.

Here’s what we asked (and which Blog readers asked it, in parentheses):

• What game(s) you have at E3 this year?
• Do you think huge trade events like E3 are going to last? (Jeigh)
• Who in the industry would you most like to collaborate on a game with? (indigovenom)
• When did you know for sure that you belonged in the video game business? (Sindress)
• What kind of advice would you give those currently in college and would like to pursue a career in video game development? (Voozi)
• If you could say one thing to the fans of your game/series out there, what would it be? (Xanog)

Deborah Mars is a Senior Producer in SCEA’s Santa Monica Studios. She joined SCEA in 2002, and is focused primarily on working with External development teams to bring fresh, unique and innovative games to the PlayStation Network. Mars has more than 17 years experience in Product Development, with an extensive background in interactive media, new business start-ups, and management consulting. She has held positions at Sony Computer Entertainment America, Scient Corporation, The Tribune Company, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Now that you know who she is and what she’s showing at E3 - what game-related questions do you want me ask her next week? Tell me below.

Tomorrow: Kyle Shubel (LittleBigPlanet and Killzone 2)

A few months ago, during the Game Developers Conference, we got our first look at Q-Games’ PixelJunk Eden. Clearly it possessed a striking look, but how do you actually *play* it? That’s what I was wondering as I approached the PJE setup at last week’s E3 Judges Day event. I’m guessing that you might be too, so I set up the camera as blog regulars Deb Mars and Matt Morton walked me through the early parts of the game.

It’s quite an addictive game (not unlike PixelJunk Monsters, even if that’s the only thing they have in common), and this fact wasn’t lost on the media in attendance. Look for more on PixelJunk Eden soon, right here on PlayStation.Blog.