Earlier this month, Gaijin Games (of Bit.Trip fame) announced that they’d be teaming up with Jason Cirillo’s Robotube Games for a 24-hour jam session at this year’s Blip Festival. The idea was to sit around, get high on PCP, and write code all day, resulting in something playable.
Given that Blip happened over the weekend, it should stand to reason that Gaijin and Robotube should have something to show for themselves (the horse tranquilizers notwithstanding), right? Right.
Right. The Frankengame is called Bit.Tonik, explains Gaijin’s Alex Neuse: “We wanted to make something that screamed ‘BIT.TRIP’ and we wanted to make something that also screamed ‘Robotube’. After considering what we could accomplish in a day, we decided to create the tasty tasty lovechild of BIT.TRIP BEAT and Bloktonik.”
The result looks like some sort of Pong-inspired puzzle game, but that’s about all I’m willing to guess on, given that the only info I have conists of A) two photos in the gallery and B) the promise that Bit.Tonik will be available on Robotube’s website “very soon,” “as-is, without any extra fixin’s [sic] or polish,” according to Cirillo.
“I’d say we did very well. We ended with some bugs and some weird gameplay issues, but I think we created a clever and fun mechanic that we’d like to further explore. I think the concensus [sic] was that we have an 80% finished game,” explains Cirillo.
When I think about what I accomplished this weekend, I’ll take 80% of an interesting game over 100% of sitting around in my pajamas watching soccer on TV. Anyway, now that Robotube aren’t busy philandering with the Gaijin guys, maybe they can get back to working on new episodes of Bit Museum.
