VooFoo Studios are pleased to announce that we are now officially authorised Nintendo WiiU developers! Does that mean we have some exciting project on the horizon that we’ll be releasing on WiiU? It sure does! Watch this space…
BIRMINGHAM, UK. VooFoo Studios, developer of Hustle Kings, Pure Chess and Big Sky Infinity, has announced plans to relocate the studio to offices in Birmingham city centre.
Formerly located in Wolverhampton, VooFoo will relocate to spacious offices at Birmingham Science Park, the home of the LAUNCH: Future Gaming & Digital Conference and numerous other industry events, in October 2012.
VooFoo Studios, who celebrated its 5th birthday earlier in 2012, is also embarking on a recruitment drive for an as yet unannounced upcoming project. Founded in 2007, VooFoo has enjoyed continued success and growth with several game launches on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita, and is now seeking an experienced artist, and an experienced creative producer to bolster its team.
“This is an exciting new chapter in VooFoo’s story,” says Mark Williams, Technology Director at VooFoo Studios. “Birmingham Science Park provides us with the central location, technical infrastructure, and space required to enable us to continue our drive to develop great games for this and the next generation of consoles.”
Dr David Hardman MBE, CEO of Birmingham Science Park said: “The number of games development companies based at Faraday Wharf, Birmingham Science Park’s flagship building, is now well into double figures. This creates such a strong community ethos and is a primary reason why our regular LAUNCH events for the digital gaming industry are so popular and well-attended.
“The wider Birmingham region is home to more than 12,500 digital and technology firms, which employ more than a fifth (21 per cent) of the UK’s games workforce. This is a crucial target sector for regional employment growth, and Birmingham Science Park is developing the £35 million Digital Plaza scheme to create workspace specifically designed for this market. Welcoming exciting local companies – such as VooFoo Studios – to the Park today provides us with the opportunity to engage them in the design process for the new buildings.”
VooFoo is currently in the process of kitting out the offices to provide a state of the art working environment for its team.
About VooFoo
VooFoo Studios is an independent UK based video games developer, founded in 2007 by a small team of experienced industry professionals. Utilising its own proprietary technology, VooFoo’s first game, the critically acclaimed Hustle Kings, was published by Sony Computer Entertainment for PlayStation 3 in 2009, reaching the top of the PSN charts and earning VooFoo nominations for two highly coveted Develop Awards. More recently, VooFoo has gone on to release Hustle Kings on PlayStation Vita, and the visually stunning Pure Chess on both platforms, and is currently developing Big Sky Infinity.
For more information on VooFoo Studios and its games, please visit the official website at http://www.voofoostudios.com/.
Images available in our VooFoo Studios image pack.
So now we can explain why we’ve been so quiet over the past few months – we’ve been busy working on the new NGP version of Hustle Kings, which will be available as soon as the console is released at the end of the year. The NGP is a really cool piece of kit, and the dual touch screens are going to make for some awesome games! Not to mention, the amount of power for such a small device is amazing. Hustle Kings is really well suited to the touch screen, and we’re already having loads of fun playing the early versions in the office. Keep your eyes peeled as we’ll be releasing screenshots, videos and plenty more info over the coming months.
So, I’ve talked about how we render the balls in Hustle Kings, and how we achieve most of the lighting. The remaining thing that gels everything together are the shadows that the balls cast onto the table. We could have quite simply implemented these with drop shadows, small quads in the x-z plane rendered slightly above the table, with a radial alpha gradient. However, this would really not have looked anywhere near as good as we wanted, and this would not have allowed us to cast shadows onto the cushions. I also wanted each ball to cast shadows correctly onto other balls – although we ended up disabling this feature in Hustle Kings, the algorithm I’m about to describe does support this, but we were limited by z-cull requirements of the PlayStation hardware to get maximum performance.
In my last blog post, I talked about the ball rendering in Hustle Kings, and how I used a per-pixel ray-cast and pixel coverage value to produce infinitely smooth balls. The pool balls are obviously going to be the primary focal point in any pool game, but it is equally important that the rest of the scene looks just as impressive. There is no point having some parts of your scene look ultra cool if the rest just doesn’t gel together.
No 3D source geometry used for the balls in Hustle Kings!
I remember when screen-shots and trailers for Hustle Kings started circulating back in the summer of 2009, many people were speculating that the pool balls were ray-traced. Of course, the astute out there will have quickly realised this not to be the case, but it got me thinking as to how a bit of thought can make something relatively simple look really ace.
We’ve added support to Hustle Kings for the new PlayStation Move controller to be launched in September. This adds a whole extra dimension to the game, and is so much fun! We let NowGamer get a sneak preview, see what they have to say here!
Hey, we’ve been getting some pretty positive reviews of Hustle Kings since it’s release, here are a selection of them:-
- Total PlayStation [8.5/10]
- VideogameUK [8/10]
- Destructoid [8/10]
- CheatCodeCentral [4.5/5]
- Gaming Age [A- : Excellent]
- PushSquare [4/4]
- Thunderbolt [9/10]
- Honest Gamers [8/10]