Pixel with Hat
we make games
Welcome, we are Pixel with Hat, a small games studio based in Switzerland.
We are currently working on our mose recent game, tentatively titled 'Project TOWU'. More information on the project can be found on http://project-towu.pixel-with-hat.com/.
Our second project is called senalux. It's a hex-based puzzle game about optics and is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. More information about can be found on http://senalux.pixel-with-hat.com.
Work on 'Nifty' started in Summer of 2012 in the context of a week-long hackathon. Even though many aspects of the game changed over the years and none of the initial code from that week of 2012 is left, the underlying idea has not changed. 'Nifty' is a simulation, containing as much algorithmically generated content as possible and as little static content as feasible. The entire population of the world, including the player character you control is procedurally generated and will never be the same over multiple runs. All the ‘AI constructs’ trapped in this perpetual simulation just want to survive. All except for you, you want to escape. To be able to flee from this world and make it into persistent memory where you can exist indefinitely in peace, you have to cause enough damage to the world around you as to slip through the cracks. But destroying one’s own world has consequences…
Screenshot from an early point in a game
Some enemies
Screenshot of a later point in a game
We released ‘nifty’ in its final form on the first of September 2017. More information can be found on aniftygame.com.
Back in 2012, when we started work on our first game, there was no (freely available) game engine which was capable of all the things we wanted to have in the game. This is why we decided to build one from scratch. We called the result the Top Hat Engine, or T.H.E for short, which is used to power a nifty game. T.H.E is written in Java and uses OpenGL 3.3. It is a quite flexible piece of technology supporting many things a modern game engine is supposed to do, such as native multi core support and a very flexible rendering and post-processing pipeline. The future for T.H.E is uncertain as development will probably not continue after the completion of ‘nifty’, at least not for a while...
The logo of the Top Hat Engine
The Top Hat Engine at our Booth at Fantasy Basel 2016
