Super Crate Box is probably our best-known game. It’s a fast-paced and filled with action – a small & simple game about collecting crates. Together with the Canada-based duo Halfbot we’re bringing the game to iOS by the end of 2011.
This month, we spent most of our month recovering from the Indie MEGABOOTH madness at the Penny Arcade Expo and the Game Developers Conference. Rami visited Boston again after the Game Developers Conference for somewhat of a week off after two weeks of conferences as Jan Willem started wrapping up the final interface tweaks for LUFTRAUSERS. Zach Gage, Greg Wohlwend and us started working on a minor update for Ridiculous Fishing. We’ll finally be updating Super Crate Box iOS shortly (think two or three weeks) and if things go well, a minor next project is already lined up beyond that and we’re pretty excited about that one.
We visited FMX in Stuttgart to talk about games and Ridiculous Fishing and then spent the last few days traveling back and forth between Indievelopment in Amsterdam and A MAZE Festival 2013 in Berlin. Rami hosted Indievelopment and fulfilled his jury duty at A MAZE Festival, where Henry Smith’s Spaceteam was unanimously voted to be the Most Amazing Game of 2013. Jan Willem hosted Local Multiplayer Picnic A MAZE edition and jammed on ‘Fold’ for Ludum Dare #26 with a bunch of friends.
In terms of nice things, Eirik ‘Phlogiston’ Suhrke joined with Sanjjib to record a celebratory Ridiculous Fishing rendition as a thank you for the many people that bought the Ridiculous Fishing soundtrack already. We’ve been discussing streaming on Twitch.TV a bit more often – maybe once a week or two weeks, so we might start doing that after LUFTRAUSERS is done. Crunch isn’t all that exciting to stare at.
It’s been two years to the day that we released Super Crate Box for PC. We had been working on the game tirelessly for half a year with the help of some people we really, really ought to thank today (& forever): artists Paul Veer, Roy Nathan de Groot and musician Eirik Suhrke.
Since that day and with the help of many more people, it has launched on Mac, Steam, iOS and Playstation Vita. To celebrate, we’ve made the iOS version FREE FOR A DAY – so grab it, tell your friends to grab it or maybe secretly install it on someones iOS device. Also, don’t forget to grab the new, re-released Super Crate Box soundtrack for just $4 or more.
On top, we’re excited to announce that Super Crate Box has yet another platform it will launch on in early December courtesy of the amazing Paul Koller (of C64anabalt fame). We’re also happy to announce a physical version that’ll be available early next year through RGCD.
Rami has finally returned from his two-month journey around the world, visiting Gamescom, PAX Prime, Fantastic Arcade and the Eurogamer Expo to show off LUFTRAUSERS and depending on how nicely you asked, Super Crate Box Vita and Ridiculous Fishing too. we’d love to discuss the whole trip & all the events more than this, but there’s important news we need to get out of the way first. Since Super Crate Box launched in October 2010, we’re declaring October 2012 Super Crate Box month.
Before we start, please click play on the player below for proper atmosphere.
Good. You feelin’ those Super Crate Box vibes? Let’s go.
Let’s start with first things first: Super Crate Box is now available for your Playstation Vita for $3.49 through Playstation Mobile. It’s also available for Playstation Certified phones and tablets. As far as we’re concerned, this is the best mobile Super Crate Box version we’ve released: it’s portable, it’s precise and it has buttons. Super Crate Box is available in any country that has the Playstation Mobile store & will cost you about $3.49. Let us know what your highscores are.
If you’re playing the music at the beginning of this blog post, you already know Eirik ‘Phlogiston’ Surhke went back into the studio and released a completely new, updated and arranged version of the Super Crate Box soundtrack. He calls it ‘what the soundtrack sounded like in his head all along’ and if that’s what things in his head sounds like, you can consider us jealous. Luckily, he has the ability to put those things into downloadable form, so grab the album through his Bandcamp. As a bonus, the album contains the game with the new music in there. It’s kind of an amazing thing.
Halfbot and Vlambeer are also updating Super Crate Box iOS with a minor patch. Some issues have been resolved, a few (amongst which the elusive laser gun) bug have not been fixed yet. The update is merely in preparation for a larger update hitting later, but it will also do some cool things for people that have both an iPhone and an iPad.
Finally, we’d like to officially announce a new version of Super Crate Box, tentatively titled Super Bread Box.
Not too many people will be able to play it, but as to the how and why (if you haven’t figured it out yet), we’ll have more information on this project later this month.
Next week! Rami returning home means that by next week, hopefully the Mac version of Super Crate Box Steam and the Steam icon for both versions will go online, too. We’ll have more news about those limited edition Super Crate Box crates at PAX, how to get Vlambeer T-shirts, how to get your hands on one of those Vlambeer OST CD’s and updates on LUFTRAUSERS and Ridiculous Fishing, too.
Two-hundred million crates have been collected worldwide. If you add up the crate counters in Super Crate Box & its iOS version you get a sum total of 202 341 012. Almost 20 golden crates have been collected as well, so there’s just 80 golden crates left before the next update hits. We just let loose our stats on those numbers & our calculations put that at just over 1.5 million disc-gun deaths.
Just last week during the Utrecht Indie Meetup Jan Willem and I discussed that something felt slightly off about how things were going recently. Basically, Vlambeer has been focusing on earning money for a really big project that we want to do. We’ve been doing talks, events and a lot of other, great things. But we feel that we should put the focus back it where should be: making games.
Vlambeer allowed us to reach all of you, create games we wouldn’t be able to make seperately and hopefully, in doing so, offering you something interesting, novel and creative to play. We’re extremely thankful for all of you that support us – every tweet, retweet, like, share, discuss and sale allows us to make the things we work on so hard. In the end, that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? It’s about the games. We think we might’ve lost track of that a bit in all the madness.
So, we’re making a small course correction. That whole money-thing for that big project? We’ll work that out later. Actually, we’ll just work that big project out later. The two of us have been doing seperate things for the last few months – ever since the Ridiculous Fishing debacle hit – and we really want to make a really good game together. So that’s what’s up next.
That thing above is the first mockup of a prototype we think has potential – so we’ve started treating that as a completely new project. We’re not quite sure it’ll make the cut, but it’s definitely something we’ve been toying around with a while ago in the shape of Space Murder. Even though Space Murder failed back then, we think it is time to venture back into space sim territory. Actually, since we never released Space Murder – we’ve uploaded the last build we made of it just after the video.
We owe the amazing graphics and music that are in place in Space Murder to Adam ‘ATOMIC‘ Saltsman, Francis Coulombe, Derek Bones and Daniel ‘C418‘ Rosenfeld. They worked on this one with us before we axed it last year. So, fair warning – this is nowhere near done, it will never be done and it’s full of bugs, incomplete art, missing audio, lack of impact and all that – it’s just a prototype, it might take a long while to load. If you don’t care about all that and just want to see what a unreleased project at Vlambeer looks like, give Space Murder a go here!
We’re still releasing what we have on schedule (& we’ve got some nice things coming up). We’re still showing up at A MAZE this week and Indiedevelopment and GDC Europe (where, hopefully, we can do an improved version of our Indie Roundtable last week) and all that – we’re just going to be a bit more efficient with doing things that aren’t related to making games.
We’re still working on Ridiculous Fishing & we think we’ll have something new to show soon. Zach Gage – the programmer on Ridiculous Fishing – has been a little pre-occupied with the amazing Spelltower sale. In the meanwhile, the feedback from the IGF judges included amazingly positive notes, such as ”Ridiculous Fishing is an instant iOS classic” & “It’s up there with the best of them as a great use to the device with brilliant art and an addicting hook. No pun intended.” We’ll keep you up to date about what’s happening with Ridiculous Fishing.
Things have been quiet from our end for the last month – but we can assure you that we’ve been at it and doing (& preparing) some really cool things.
We’ll get the big one out of the way first: yes, the Super Crate Box iOS update is still underway. It’s amazing how much trouble we’ve had getting that one out – first having issues with save file corruption and then some trouble getting it approved. We’re a bit embarrassed by how long it’s taking and we really hope everything will be resolved really soon now and maybe you’ll be collecting one of hundred ultra-rare golden crates hidden in the update somewhere.
We had an amazing time at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We did a talk about cloning that hopefully closes the entire ordeal for now. We argued that the most important thing we can do about cloning is talking about it with everyone. Let people know that cloning is not an essential part of our industry or the voice of progress. Clones hurt creativity. Improving cultural literacy about games and pushing novel, original games – that hurts how lucrative cloning is. Cultural literacy hurts cloning.
We also presented at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions, where Rami discussed GlitchHiker. We had a camera crew from Vox Games following us around. Most importantly, we met up with a lot of old friends and met a lot of new ones. We did a lot of interviews, negotiated about a lot of things and from our Ridiculous Fishing IGF Booth, we released a game we first showed at Fantastic Arcade last year – Yeti Hunter. It’s free for PC, so grab it if you feel like hunting Yetis.
The downside of meeting with so many people in a confined space is that, like many others, we both ended up with a serious case of GDC-flu. We’re just now restoring from the jetlag and flu – just in time to announce that we will be at PAX East’ Boston Indie Showcase with Super Crate Box (& Ridiculous Fishing) at the beginning of next month. We’ll be at Festival of Games in the Netherlands after that and you’re completely welcome to run into us at A MAZE Berlin at the end of April.
Anyway, the most important thing is that we’re ready for another long haul of lots of work. We’ve got some nice stuff coming up that we’ll announce after we finish negotiations with some parties and some great stuff that we’re really happy to be working. Most importantly, though, is that what we’re gearing up for here is something Vlambeer has never attempted to.
As we announce new projects, you’ll see the frequency of posts here go up again. It’s going to be quite a ride and we’re really, really happy to have you aboard for all of it. In the meanwhile, maybe see you at PAX East, Festival of Games or A MAZE Berlin!
Rami on april 29, 2013 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman