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.
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!
Vlambeer turns one year old on the 1st of September, so we’re partying like animals!
Everyone’s invited to the Vlambeer office starting 19:00. We don’t fund plane tickets but foreign visitors are encouraged. Press tickets $20. Bring friends we forgot.
We’ll take care of the vlam, you bring the beer.
Let us know you’re coming by RSVP’ing on Facebook or on the forums.
We need to think of the children as children are our future & all that – thus Vlambeer will be giving a series of workshops at highschools in cooperation with a Dutch initiative called Games of Experience later this year. This week we did something similar to what we’ll be doing later this year when Dutch Game Garden & NLGD asked us to introduce a group of highschoolers to game design. In our mind there’s no way to get better at game design & development than designing and creating games, so we had 20 laptops with Game Maker on them and JW designed a basic platformer by the amazing name of Ultra Giullio as a foundation. The challenge was for those attending to change the game in terms of design, art, sound and code.
We think the workshop was a great succes and judging by the fact that the highschoolers attending were bummed that we had to have a lunchbreak halfway they all liked it as well. There were some really amazing results considering that they only had one school-day to work their magic on the abomination that was Ultra Giulio. Thanks to the guys at Corderius College for being such a great audience – we can only hope that the workshops near the end of the year are as fun to do as yesterdays!
On an unrelated note, we noticed that attention for Super Crate Box soared yesterday to the point that we could only believe Notch blogged about the game again – turned out that cynical brit TotalBiscuit posted a video in his “Wtf is…” series named “Wtf is… Super Crate Box“. We had a good laugh with his slow descent into despair.
Thus, no news about Serious Sam this time, but how about Paul ‘Pietepiet’ Veer, our animator on Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (and Super Crate Box before that) promising you a blog post filled with info & animations from the upcoming game on Saturday? We think it’s cool.
One of the many pushes we had to make Super Crate Box into a finished, polished title was last years’ INDIGO: Connected by Ziggo event. Back then, the game was still a one man project by JW and was tentatively titled ‘Crates from Hell’. The massive amount of positive feedback then convinced us to continue working on the game. Not much later, we founded Vlambeer – started working on Radical Fishing for some starting funds and the rest you know from the blog.
INDIGO is a yearly event in the Netherlands organized mostly by Dutch Game Garden, so we’d like to take a moment to thank them for the great event.
So, INDIGO ’11 was a bit of a homecoming for Vlambeer – even though its the first INDIGO for Vlambeer as a company. Of course, the WINNITRON NL was there and saw some good playing time, even with it being on the relatively calm 4th floor of the event. (Did you know the WINNITRON New Zealand launched just a while ago?)
Far more importantly, we showcased a build of Serious Sam: The Random Encounter. We didn’t want to hold out some new stuff for all of you, so the screenshot above shows Sam sporting a Grenade Launcher while his companion is carrying the Cannon, which takes a turn to charge but kills a giant load of enemies when it’s actually fired. Sam’ll be visiting a lot of places to deal combat Mentals’ hordes, including deserts, pyramids, temples, underwater dungeons and spaceships.
It was the first time the game was accessible on a public event, so we were looking forward to finding out what people thought and we were happy to find out people liked and understood what we’re trying to do with the whole turn-based Serious Sam idea. We now have a pretty good idea of where we’re going with the game and what needs fixing – we’ll be working hard to get this game to all of you and it might be a bit faster than you might think!
On April 28th and 29th, we visited the Festival of Games conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Festival of Games is arguably the largest annual game industry event in this little country and this year was no different, the event attracting both ‘big’ speakers as Al Lowe and Ian Livingstone and smaller ones like, well, us. If you don’t care about all that and happen to be interested in LUFTRAUSER, a Flash game we created in our spare time, scroll down all the way.
Since we were asked to do a little talk as well, we came up with the idea of throwing an idea into the fray, something we started thinking about during the ‘press storm’ after we released KARATE a few weeks ago. How could a game as tiny as that gather so much press coverage? What we concluded – not through statistics but through a gut feeling – is that game companies with a ‘average’ scope are disappearing. We don’t have the numbers, we can’t tell you what constitutes a small or a big company – we feel that as a game company, your scope is either big or small, or you’re sucked into the emptiness in between where you fight an uphill battle just to survive and do what you love.
Leading this process, we think, are digital distribution, tech and audience expectations.
Back in the days (but not too far back), you had big companies with enough money to dominate the spaces in the gaming isle and the average-scoped companies that had less money but still got a spot somewhere in the back corner. Nowadays, the small companies can be flexible and cost-effective and the big companies all but own the shelves in retail.
New hard- and software allows big companies to create the most amazing of game experiences with almost insane capabilities. Expensive and continiously advancing engines and middleware allow the big companies to allocate and use every last bit of processing- and graphical power from the increasingly powerful hardware. On the other hand, game creation has been made increasingly simple for beginners and small companies with tools like Unity, Game Maker and FlashPunk or Flixel, allowing them to rival medium-scoped companies in capabilities.
However, the biggest problem for the average-scoped companies we believe to be the audience expectations. AAA games are expected to have high production values and usually, reasonably safe design choices. An indie game is measured with a different measuring tape and whether you like it or not, will usually be compared to its peers on terms of originality & concept.
What does this leave for the average-scope company? They can’t compete with the indie developers, as indies can work far more cost-efficiently and be more flexible. They can’t compete with AAA because the audience expectations are too high in terms of production value – things they can’t afford and the AAA studios can.
We also stressed that big and small are mutually exclusive. A small-scoped company should never aim to make a AAA game, nor the other way around. These are different worlds that require different approaches and different types of skills and experience.
While in the old days, companies grew slowly and steadily, we feel nowadays the jump from small to big – if that’s something you aspire – should be made in one leap. If your company fits in a ship container, you’ll be fine – if your company can own the ship, you’ll be fine too. Anything in between and we feel you might be in for a world of trouble.
Also, we wanted to make a quick mention of LUFTRAUSER, a game Jan Willem and I created outside of Vlambeer in cooperation with Paul Veer and Kozilek in the past few days. It’s a Flash airplane combat game we created to fight some stress, which turned out really good in its first prototype – so we pushed through with it. At this point, we’re looking for any interested sponsors. If you know someone who might be interested in the game or if you happen to be that someone, drop us a quick e-mail at rami@vlambeer.com.
Rami on september 25, 2011 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman