Vlambeer visits a lot of video-game and technology/art-related conventions as a public speaker, to showcase some of our games or most importantly, to meet up with our fellow indies.
We were invited to the gamejam-themed talkshow Control Gamelab #2 yesterday-evening. We teamed up with GlitchHiker composer Rutger Muller & Super Crate Box pixel artist Roy Nathan de Groot to create a game during the 2 hour long show. The theme the audience chose for us was ‘paranoia’. Turns out two hours isn’t that much when there’s an audience of 150 people eagerly awaiting the result.
We managed to pull it, though, with ‘Café Noir’ being the result. The above is a timelapse of the entire process as recorded from Jan Willems screen. You can play the game by clicking here.
We were invited to speak at Spilbar #8 in Copenhagen & since the Global Game Jam happened the day after, we decided to attend the Copenhagen edition – better known as the biggest Global Game Jam location in the world: the Nordic Game Jam. For those of you who’ve never heard of a Game Jam, it’s basically an event in which small teams of developers try to create a game based on some theme in an extremely limited amount of time – in the case of the Global Game Jam, that’s two days of no sleep, lots of caffeinated drinks and lots of development – but more importantly, it’s a chance for meeting old friends and new friends alike. Some parties and Infinite S.W.A.T. reaching the finals of the event concluded a great weekend over in Copenhagen.
Infinite S.W.A.T. is available for free download after the jump. continue reading… »
Some pretty busy weeks have passed lately, with the Super Crate Box iOS updates taking up most of the time that wasn’t invested in Ridiculous Fishing or GUN GODZ. One thing we’ve been working on behind the scenes was a talk about Game Cloning that we wanted to give over at the Game Developers Conference.
After being through quite an episode with Radical Fishing being cloned, we believe the industry is approaching the topic from the wrong angle – one that is focused on what we cannot do about the problem – and we want to offer an alternative and reignite the discussion from a more constructive perspective. It was just confirmed that we’re actually giving the talk and we’re thankful that we’ve been offered this chance to speak at the Independent Games Summit, an amazing venue to kickstart this new discussion.
In 2010, Vlambeer created Radical Fishing, released it as a sponsored Flash game and began work on an iOS version. As we were working, a third party suddenly released a game – which, down to the upgrades, was almost identical to Radical Fishing’s design. This resulted in a lot of thinking about defining cloning, the dangers it poses to upcoming indie developers and the variety of strong opinions that keep the issue from being debated in a useful manner.
Vlambeer will talk about the practical dangers of clones to our industry and what we CAN do, instead of discussing only what we cannot do. We want to pick up the discussion at its impasse and provide a starting point for a new, more practical conversation about cloning.
Further details and the exact timing of the talk will be announced over at the GDC Schedule Builder.
Unrelated: we’re hoping to push the Super Crate Box iOS update this week & will be attending the Nordic Gamejam in Copenhagen. It’s a busy week, but it’s going to be fun!
Working on long-terms projects such as Serious Sam: The Random Encounter is very taxing for us, we were both pretty dead during the project, and I don’t know about Rami but I slept for 20 hours after it was done. We’re currently almost recovered, and finishing up all our projects so we can prepare for The Big Secret One.
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!
Rami on februari 15, 2012 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman