We’re excited to finally announce our launch date and pricing details for Guacamelee! The game will be released on April 9th in the Americas, and will support Cross-Buy for $14.99. This means you buy the game once and get both the PS3 and PS Vita versions. And that’s not all… there’s also a Platinum Trophy!

With GDC being this week, and the IGF award nomination for “Excellence in Visual Art,” we also thought it would be cool to share some early concept art and video footage of the game, so that you can see for yourself how much things have changed. As you can see, Guacamelee! has really come a long way visually since its inception.

We began working on Guacamelee! in February of 2011. For the first two months, the game existed solely as a PowerPoint presentation and some concept art. Here’s the very first screenshot mock-up of the game from that presentation:

We brought these materials and another game idea with us to GDC to gauge publisher interest in the two titles. Guacamelee! was clearly the more popular of the two ideas, and after returning from GDC we spent some time making a prototype to test out how the combat would work, and also took some time to make a “Target Gameplay” video in Flash:

This video was shown to publishers at E3 in 2011, and was also used as part of the materials that helped us get the Canada Media Fund award and actually have the funding necessary to make the game. You can see that most of the initial ideas for the game’s design have made it all the way through to the final product, with one notable exception being the “World of Nightmares”.

Since then, we’ve worked hard on pushing the game much further visually (going through about four style revisions), which can clearly be seen by comparing to our latest trailer, which you can see at the top of this post!

If you’re going to be at GDC, make sure to stop by the IGF Pavilion and say “Hi” to two of our amazing artists; our Art Director Steph, and animator, Augusto. Without them, Guacamelee! would not look as great as it does!