What types of explosive expression can one expect from a creator who is relentlessly driven to break away from the mediocre and mundane? We decided to ask video game designer and digital artist TJ Hughes, who creates under the alias Terrifying Jellyfish, about working on the aesthetically ascendant adventure Nour: Play with Your Food.

In this profile, we speak with TJ Hughes about Nour, how he works with his team, his origin story, and advice he’d give to developers hoping to leave their mark in gaming. Hughes’ first project Feesh, which featured microscopic arcade gameplay and vibrant visuals, showcased TJ’s drive to break the mold in a work space equally microscopic, as it was conceived and completed within a 48-hour Ludum Dare game jam. With no tight time constraints he is magnifying color and playfulness with his sophomore project, Nour: Play with Your Food.

PlayStation Blog: What inspired Nour: Play with Your Food?

Nour is described as “an experimental food art game designed to make you hungry,” giving players a space to play with their food like a kid but without any mess to clean up. A further testament to the difference in working on Nour and Feesh, Nour’s development process was slow and methodical, with no one “eureka moment.”

“I was learning how to make shaders, and was brainstorming the best subject to try and emulate,” Hughes explains. “I was just starting to travel and eat more diverse foods, so I thought it was the perfect subject. I started to upload my art tests onto Twitter, where folks would tell me how the images made them hungry. Being intrigued by that response, I started to try more things like using the tech art concept of sub-surface scattering to simulate the material of noodles and using depth blending to mimic the murkiness of milk tea. I started to develop a library of tech art tricks to make something look appetizing.”

Hughes chose a physics-based experience as it “provides a sandbox to be as chaotic and ridiculous” as a player wants without the wasted food or mess.”

“When presented with a physics-based game, we often have one of two goals: Arrange things as neatly as possible, or make as big of a mess as we can. I think the best physics games should allow you to do both!”

The Nour team

As a leader, how do you motivate and encourage your team?

“It helps to have a team that shares so many of the same interests and fascinations,” Hughes says. “It makes relating to each other and getting on the same page about designs so easy. A lot of us are friends before coworkers as well, we bring a lot of that trust into the project. Anyone on the team can suggest anything, which creates an environment where even the most obtuse ideas are considered. We all love food as well, I noticed that before meetings, we’ll often end up telling each other what we’re eating/planning to cook, if the meeting isn’t in-person

With the PlayStation 5’s DualSense wireless controller, we at Motive are able to immerse players deeper into Isaac’s thrilling journey aboard the USG Ishimura. Across various events such as weapon shooting, asteroids impacting the ship, and Necromorphs attacking, haptic feedback lets players feel the impact as Isaac would.

Our goal with weapons was to give each a unique feel and sensation to make the experience of fighting Necromorphs even more engaging. Read on for some immersive examples of DualSense controller gameplay:

Plasma Cutter

You steady your plasma cutter and aim at the legs of a lunging Slasher. You place your finger on the DualSense controller trigger and push it past the required threshold to fire the weapon, feeling the weapon’s vibration shortly after. The DualSense controller trigger then pushes back up, re-initializing for your next shot.

The same kind of trigger effect is found on the flamethrower, but with a slight difference as you can feel a low vibration on the trigger as the ejected gas turns into flame.

Pulse Rifle

A Swollen begins lumbering towards you as you pull out your pulse rifle. To survive, you give it all you got, emptying your remaining bullets to defeat the approaching threat. While you hold down the DualSense trigger, you feel it buck with each round fired from the rifle.

Movement and ability haptics

When entering certain zero-gravity areas, the player can activate Isaac’s magnetic boots. Through haptic vibrations on the controller, the player will feel the impact of each step as the mag boots engage with the floor.

When players use Isaac’s Kinesis and Stasis modules, they’ll get similar real-time feedback through the controller through rich haptic vibrations.

Forspoken is finally available on PS5, and it’s time to show off your wicked cool magic-slinging combat skills to the world.  You’ll learn a lot of different magic types during Frey’s journey, but Purple Magic will be with you from the beginning and remains a great tool throughout the game. To help you get a leg up on your journey, let’s take a closer look at Frey’s combat-focused Purple Magic and what it can do.

Frey will start with the following attack magics: Burst Shot, Shield Shot, and Scatter Shot (each at level 1), along with the support magic Bind. To learn more spells, you’ll need to spend the mana points you accumulate from leveling up and by finding mana pools scattered across the massive landscapes of Athea. The order you learn spells is up to you, but if you think you made a mistake, don’t worry–you can always unlearn a spell to get a mana refund to use elsewhere. 

Now, let’s check out some Purple Magic spells and detail how to best use them:

Attack Magic

Burst Shot: A powerful and reliable way to attack, burst shot creates a huge rock explosion after you release its charge. The higher the spell’s rank and the longer the charge, the bigger the ka-boom that ensues. When enemy defenses are tough, give a charged Burst Shot a try–it can penetrate the defenses of enemies who flaunt shields at you with ease.

Shield Shot: Some enemies don’t respect Frey’s personal space. That’s where the shield shot comes in. If you’re charging Shield Shot and an enemy tries to attack you from the front, they’re in for a nasty surprise when you counter by blowing up the shield in their face. The shield grows bigger at higher levels and can also function to protect you from certain projectile attacks. Be careful, though, because you’re still vulnerable to side and back attacks and shield-breaking strikes.

Scatter Shot: Do you love powerful attacks but hate that whole “can’t attack while you’re charging” thing? Then you’ll appreciate the mechanics of Scatter Shot. Holding down the button will send out a rapid-fire spray of small magic blasts while you charge up to unleash a big finishing blow. The higher the spell level, the bigger the blast. Scatter Shot is excellent for long-range combat and especially effective on many flying enemies.

To survive this onslaught, you have to stock up on supplies in order to launch enhanced defenses. These are unique events that trigger at the beginning of an XL wave if you’ve stored enough supplies and they slay a ton of zombies at once.

The more supplies you store, the deadlier your enhanced defenses will be. Enhanced defenses differ in each area: there are missiles in the Restaurant area, jet fighters in the Riverside area, and explosive gas at the Construction site.

Horde Mode XL also features other new gameplay features and surprises that

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Happy new year! The team rings in the new year with exciting PS VR2 updates, and thoughts on the premiere of HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us.

Stuff We Talked About

• Forspoken
• Dead Space
• PS VR2’s updated lineup
• Colossal Cave 3D
• The Last of Us on HBO (mild spoilers for Episode 1)

The Cast

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Last week, we asked you to share epic moments from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, available as a PlayStation Plus Monthly Game for January. Here are this week’s highlights:

AreeLyBadPun shares The Second Sister reaches out sinisterly

Defalt368 shares Cal walking in the grass with a moon at his back

call_me_xavii shares Cal posing with a dual-sided lightsaber in a canyon

Ag_Beaver shares a Stormtrooper standing in the darkness

Retsu_Zankoku shares Cal leaping with his lightsaber drawn

RyoppyGamePhoto shares Cal standing in the opening of a massive round structure

Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this week’s theme. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week? 

THEME: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – Lightsabers
SUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on January 25, 2023

Next week, it’s all about Lightsabers. Share an epic moment with Cal or an enemy’s Lightsaber in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.

Ken and Roberta Williams need little introduction among adventure game fans. The duo, who founded legendary developer Sierra On-Line in the earliest days of gaming, has been responsible for some of the genre’s most innovative, daring, and memorable titles. The two have been away from game development for quite some time, but they haven’t been out of the spotlight–in recent years, the pair has been honored with a Gaming Icon Award from The Game Awards, and Roberta received a Pioneer Award at the 2019 Game Developers Conference. 

Play Video

Now, the accomplished tag team is returning to the world of adventure games after 25 years with a new development team, Cygnus Entertainment. The team’s first outing is a full remake of a true classic: Colossal Cave. Originally a pioneering text adventure game released back in 1976 and called Colossal Cave Adventure, Colossal Cave transforms the lime-green-on-black text of the original into a visually captivating graphic adventure. The original game was a huge influence on many of the designers of the era, including Ken and Roberta, who are funding this ambitious remake. We sat down with the power duo to discuss their return to the world of game development and what players can expect from their return to game development. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

PlayStation.Blog: Roberta, can you tell us about your experiences with the original text-based Colossal Cave Adventure back in 1976 or 1977?

Roberta: I had never played a computer game ever. I think Colossal Cave may be the first or, if not, then very very close to the first computer game ever. And it certainly was the first adventure game — I mean, it basically invented the concept of an adventure game. So I played it, and I loved it, and I wanted to play more, but there weren’t really any more games quite like it at the time. So I was inspired to sit down and design my own game, which ultimately became Mystery House. 

PSB: How did the original Colossal Cave Adventure influence the games you made, Roberta?

Roberta: Colossal Cave invented most of the things that many of us who do game design [rely on], especially in the adventure game genre. It developed the idea of mapping a world. Mazes, getting lost, going down a passage o

You find yourself in control of the Clockwinder’s Gloves – an incredible invention that lets you record anything you do with your hands and turn that action into a robot clone that repeats exactly what you did in a loop. These clones are called Gardeners, and you’re going to need their help to save your childhood home. Use the clones to harvest plants, operate machinery, and even throw things to yourself and catch them across the room. There’s no single solution to any challenge: you can create marvels of precision efficiency or hare-brained Rube Goldberg machines. The only limit is your own creativity.

Play Video

The Last Clockwinder is a unique mix of automation and puzzle gameplay. Since its launch the game has been widely recognized for its innovative design, receiving several awards including Road To VR’s Best PC VR Game of 2022, Hardcore Gamer’s Best VR Game of 2022, and Finalist at the DICE Awards in both VR categories. We’re thrilled to bring The Last Clockwinder to PlayStation VR2 on February 22.

A mechanic made for VR

We’re big fans of automation games, but our least favorite part about automation is putting in the instructions for the things you want to automate. Selecting, dragging, moving timelines around – it can get very fiddly! This is where automation with clones is different.

In The Last Clockwinder, the way that you tell a clone what to do is by simply doing it yourself. With the press of a button you start recording yourself. Your hands, head, and all your inputs are recorded for a short time. While recording, you can grab objects, throw and catch, use tools – pretty much anything. When the recording is finished, a clone appears where you were and starts repeating the actions that you just did on a loop. Clones can be created with 2, 4, or 8 second loops, and the recording system ensures that clones will stay synchronized. No fiddling required!

Creating an interface this expressive and easy to use was only possible with VR. With precise tracking and free 3D movement there’s zero friction between thinking something and doing it. This is a game mechanic that is truly unique to VR.

Exploration and optimization

To progress in the game, you’ll need to make teams of clones working together to harvest resources from plants. You’ll use these resources for many things: powering machinery, creating new plant seeds, and unlocking rooms within the Clocktower.