tinyBuild Games has announced that cut-throat competitive platformer, SpeedRunners, is now entirely with Pixel Art.
After months of research and numerous heated debates amongst the SpeedRunners team, the biggest update in the game’s history goes live today, altering the visual design to give the experience a more pixel-art feel.
More and more indie titles these days are going down the pixel-art route. It’s widely believed that this is down to the reduced costs of producing pixel-art — but new research discovered by tinyBuild suggests that the average consumer is more likely to purchase a game if it is presented in this style.
Working with experts at the University of Oxford, tinyBuild has determined that pixel-art games sell roughly 15 times better than other art styles. New ground-breaking statistics show that the perceived size of the pixels in a game directly correlates with the amount of enjoyment a player receives.
With this in mind, the developer has been pain-stakingly working day and night to provide the players, and fans, with the visual style they never realized they wanted. SpeedRunners has been completely revamped to satisfy the pixel-art movement, and the pixel-art update is now live for all players.
Note that there is no way to revert back to the original art style — tinyBuild has thrown all that gloss and finish into a bin marked “stupid” and it’s never coming back. They are now in the process of pixelating all of their other games too, and any third-party partners who resist will be immediately dropped.
“SpeedRunners was getting too mainstream. Now it feels like an actual indie game I could sit down and play at Starbucks.” – Gert-Jan Stolk of DoubleDutch Games, SpeedRunners designer extraordinaire and the main driving force behind this move, explains.
We cannot wait to see your positive reactions to our new direction for SpeedRunners, and tinyBuild as a whole.
We’ve also determined, again thanks to research from the University of Oxford**, that all players prefer free-to-play games over paid games, so we’re currently in the process of injecting as many in-app purchases into our games as possible. You can expect to see those popping up (literally!) very soon.
Here is the SpeedRunners new art style trailer:
SpeedRunners is currently on Steam Early Access. Let us know your thoughts about the major change.
Related: SpeedRunners sells 600,000 units in Steam Early Access
Source: Press Release
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