We won a Dutch Game Award. It’s the biggest thing you can win in our home-country of the Netherlands and therefore it is quite a humbling thing to get such recognition from the industry around here. Radical Fishing took home the ‘Best Online Game’-award.
GUN GODZ is nearly done, so for all you Venus Patrol backers, we’ll have some news on when that’s available soon. For now, we thought we’d give you a short sneak-peek at it. Since the game is a polytheistic hip-hop inspired first person shooter, the best way to do that is release one of the songs the amazing KOZILEK made for us for you to listen to.
One episode that included Jan Willem running through Philadelphia airport with his shoes in his hands later, we arrived in Austin for Fantastic Arcade. At Fantastic Arcade, we’ve been finally showing off Serious Sam: The Random Encounter to a larger audience, which has been something we’ve been looking forward to for quite a while now. We’ve also talked about the game and the process behind creating the game on Friday, although in our slightly jetlagged state that did turn out rather interesting.
Something that’s also really cool is that Radical Fishing is playable on this amazing arcade cabinet courtesy of the event & we talked about the game a bit during our Developers’ Commentary panel on Saturday. It was fun finally getting to explain how much effort went into something as seemingly crude as Radical Fishing, getting all of it to feel & be just right. We continued to talk a bit about how cloning is different from iteration & how clones endanger creative, novel games – potentially stopping them from being made at all. Finally, we explained that in the wake of the cloning thing, people told us that we should make ‘less simple games’ to avoid cloning and not ‘show our ideas’. We proceeded to show two simple prototypes we have that we might work on some more later on called FFFLOOD & Yeti Hunter because you know, screw ‘em.
The most fun thing about Fantastic Fest is meeting up with fans and fellow developers, but the Super Crate Box Versus tournament we kicked off with an opening match of titans between JW and me comes in at a pretty good second place. I’ll have to admit that JW won in a stroke of luck (I did manage to beat JW in the Bit Pilot tournament on Saturday so that evens things out – although JW would say it doesn’t). Brandon Strong took away the first place in the Super Crate Box tournament and earned himself eternal fame and a crate filled with goodies.
Speaking of Super Crate Box, Halfbot and us have decided that Super Crate Box iOS just needs a bit more time. It’s definitely getting there – the controls are tight, the gameplay is solid & we can pretty consistently have players score close to their desktop scores. We’re just going to tweak the weapons a bit more so they feel right on iOS. We believe that’ll upgrade the game from being a direct port of the PC/Mac version to being a real Super Crate Box iOS. We’re really sorry for the delay there for all of those waiting for the game, but trust us when we say we think it’ll be worth the wait.
So now to the most important part of this post, because those of you looking forward to shooting hordes of enemies in their turnbased face, you won’t have to wait for long. Serious Sam: The Random Encounter will release on Steam and other digital distribution platforms for $4.99 in mid-October. That’s right, only a few more weeks left!
Well, that was GDC. We’re currently sitting in a hotel room with some of the usual suspects, some of us jamming for fun – some of us working on something serious that’ll be announced later this month at PAX East.
So, the quick wrap-up of things: Desktop Dungeons took the ‘Excellence in Design’ IGF award Super Crate Box was nominated for in what was a nothing less than well-earned victory. If you feel like it, you can watch the entire ceremony just above this paragraph. We were really happy with the overwhelming applause Super Crate Box got when it was presented – so thanks, attendees!
Also thanks to all of you who dropped by our Super Crate Box booth on the IGF Pavilion! It was great meeting so many of you in real life, and to face off with some of you on the WINNITRON Versus version of Super Crate Box. Speaking of which, it was really cool to finally meet the guys with whom we cooperated to make the WINNITRON NL a reality – and it was really fun seeing people, from famous to aspiring, giving eachother hell in Super Crate Box Versus. We might not have won the IGF award, but Super Crate Box was the most played game on the WINNITRON 1000 by far:
Finally, a big shoutout to the indie game community for being such heroes. It was great meeting the faces behind the games, the personalities behind the projects and the ideas behind the fun. We’re getting back to work on the two projects we’re currently working on, and we hope to be able to tell you mean as soon as possible.
We’re back at the Vlambeer offices again after our participation in last weekends’ Global Game Jam. We joined up with usual suspect Paul Veer, designers Laurens de Gier and Jonathan Dijkstra and last but not least, the excellent audio-do-it-all Rutger Muller. In the past weekend, a minimum of hours of sleep was had, lots of internet videos were mashed into a single music video and most of all, a lot of games were made.
This years’ theme for the Global Game Jam was “extinction”. Our attempt at the theme was called ‘Glitchhiker’ – a game that was dying itself. We would explain it, but Matthijs Dierckx of Dutch game industry magazine Control wrote a great article on the game on the magazines’ website. As its in Dutch, I’ve translated it here.
“ The game was sick. It tried to be playable, but its decline was clearly visible. The screen revealed distortions, glitches; increasing in both intensity and frequency.
Curious about the sick game, numerous players took what was likely to be their only chance at their game. In grueling sessions they gave the game a try. And the game obeyed. It offered – as good as it could – exactly that what it was created for: entertainment.
Just a few players were able to give the game back more energy than it gave them. Sometimes, there was a spark of hope. But they faded quickly. A next player would bring the game closer to its end. Then another one. And another one. And then.
Then it was over. Done. The game disappeared from existence.
It was Sunday-evening around the clock of nine, when the server-script executed its inevitable task. GlitchHiker was extinct.
Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail, the creative and technical brain behind indie-award-magnet Super Crate Box participated in the Dutch edition of the Global Game Jam in Hilversum. Together with their usual freelancer Paul Veer and they were joined by designers Laurens de Gier and Jonathan Barbosa Dijkstra; audio designer Rutger Muller completed the team. Together, they tackled the assignment of creating a game within 48 hours.
Afterwards, the team was holding two awards. The jury – among others Triumph CEO Lennart Sas and former Codemasters VP Jurrie Hobers – had just declared the game as winner of the event when the results of the votes of all ‘competing’ team was announced. GlitchHiker was, according to the masses, the best game this GameJam had conceived.
It’s not hard to see how both parties ended up with the same conclusion. Nijman and his team had devised the ‘terminal’ game. Visually attractive it lured the player to participate. The catch: whoever scored less than a 100 points partook in the destruction of the game. Scoring over a hundred points gave the game an energy-shot of sorts. Who scored less was partly responsible for the demise of the game ['Extinction' was the theme of this Global Game Jam].
After having the game explained to them, many of those interested were in doubt whether they still wanted to give the game a try. Hectic visuals, the beautiful distraction of the glitches – it wasn’t that easy to score 100 points. Players and viewers appeared to quickly become emotionally attached to the game. That led to doubts about playing the game or not and that in turn led to guilt in players that didn’t reached 100 points.
Emotional involvement? It was almost as if was art. No. It WAS art.”
Our own Jan Willem designed and programmed the game – including all its glitches – in just under 48 hours. Rami Ismail of Vlambeer created the website, the server backend and the API for Jan Willem to implement in that same time, while also managing the team itself. We would like to thank our fellow Aardbevers for their great work. Laurens de Gier, besides helping design the game, took care of the iconic website header that visualized the health of the game. Jonathan Barbosa Dijkstra, also for helping design the game and for the creation of its official trailer. Paul Veer for the great animations and the devising of the attractive art style for the game. Rutger Muller for his amazing adaptive music and for being the one who brought us on the track of the ‘glitches’ by mentioning glitch-music.
All that is left for us to say is thanks to everyone who tried to keep GlitchHiker alive. Sadly, the game has gone extinct and while it can still be downloaded, isn’t playable anymore. GlitchHiker went down around six hours after the deadline of the Global Game Jam.
After a long day of zero-productivy due to chronic F5′ing our browsers, we decided to take a quick break from the offices. During which, of course, the IGF finalists were announced.
We would like to apologize to our neighbours for the noise eminating from our offices as we found out Super Crate Box received a honorable mention for the IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize and then the finalist nomination for Super Crate Box in the ‘Excellence in Game Design’ category!
Although I would love to talk more, we’re off to celebrate.
Rami on november 30, 2011 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman