The first game we ever made, Radical Fishing is our simulation of the noble pastime that is traditional redneck fishing. Armed with just his underwear, a boat and his trusty fishing gear, Billy uses the widely available range of destructive weaponry he brought to fish like a man.
This is an announcement we hadn’t yet planned to make, to be completely honest. We’ve been sort of wrapping up on Serious Sam: The Random Encounter before final testing commences and were planning on having a week of rest after release and announce this then.
Sadly, last week, this happened:
Next thing we knew, the internet exploded with people angry about the entire thing. We really want to thank everyone for being so readily available to notify us and say something about the whole thing: we received over a hundred e-mails, tweets, messages and other sort of really quick modern internet-communications.
We’ve had the idea to do a sequel to Radical Fishing as our debut on iOS pretty much since the first day we released the game – it’s really one of those things we’ve been getting requests for since the day we started with Vlambeer. Thus a few months ago we teamed up with Zach Gage and Greg Wohlwend to create Ridiculous Fishing, an iOS sequel to Radical Fishing. Since all of us had projects of our own, we started working on Ridiculous Fishing recently and the Ninja Fishing thing completely took us by surprise.
Ridiculous Fishing will have new gameplay mechanics, more powerful weapons, exotic locations, over the-top upgrades, monsters and treasures. The game will allow for some nice ways to brag about your biggest catch, your shinier boat and your coolest gear. Also, it’ll feature fish wearing hats.
We didn’t just want to recreate Radical Fishing for iOS, so we reimagined the idea from the ground up for the platform. We also took time to implement the things we learned from the original Flash version and to watch a lot of documentaries about the art of fishing with high caliber weapons. Ridiculous Fishing is everything you loved about the original but better and prettier. Greg has come up with an amazing visual style for the game.
Anyway, Ridiculous Fishing is Vlambeers’ debut on iOS, so it’s very cool to do that by working with our very first IP” and we’re super-excited to be working on this with Zach & Greg involved. Plus, to be honest, it has always been our ambition to make a game about fish wearing hats.
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!
I’m wondering what causes stuff to never stop happening, because we’ve got loads of it again. This week there is some great news for people with boring jobs, mac users and even ourselves!
Radical Fishing has been released! The first Flash game we’ve made as Vlambeer is now available on bored.com.
As you might know it is a game about our hero Billy, who goes on a fishing trip. You catch rare species, throw them in the air, shoot the crap out of them, buy new upgrades, and make a damned lot of money.
We have also just released the Mac OS X version of Super Crate Box, available for OS X 10.5 and higher! We wanted to get it out there to you people, so we got everything working, except for the online highscores, some minor sound glitches and limited gamepad support. There might be some other problems we don’t really know about yet, but we’ll try to fix those soon, before we get too busy with our next project.
Now that we are definitely staying in this office, we’ve started decorating it with posters, more empty bottles and the awesome papercraft by John Gottschalk. He decided to donate it to us, for which we give him this heart: <3
Here is a picture of the papercraft celebrating with the little crate cakes we shared around the building. Do notice the excellent wrong colors!
Oh, and space murder. It’s as almost done as it was 5 days ago, and we still need a name!
First of all: Thanks to everyone for collecting 1.1 million crates in Super Crate Box so far! To celebrate this amazing milestone, we’ll be having pie on thursday.
With that said, we’ve been busy, as you might have noticed in our sudden drop in activity. Besides wrapping up on Radical Fishing – which should be released somewhere the coming few days, we’ve been visiting Game in the City in the Netherlands and of course, working on our not-as-one-week-as-we-wanted-game ‘Space Murder’.
But that’s not even the most important thing in this post. One month (and a day, but never mind that) after the Windows release of Super Crate Box, we’re officially announcing Super Crate Box for OS X 10.5 and later! If everything goes well, it’s out by Friday on the Super Crate Box website. So, all you Mac-using fans craving for some arcade action, we’ve got you covered. We would like to remind you to be careful with your expensive hardware – we are not responsible for damage you cause to your iMac or Macbook.
Stay up to date about Super Crate Box for Mac through our Twitter or Facebook accounts. We’ll probably be having pie to celebrate that launch too, because getting the game to work correctly on Mac was more work than we anticipated.
For those of you who kept up to date, we’ve been working on something called ‘Space Murder’, which basically is a one-week-project turned two-week-project. The above video is 6 days old, and we’ve been working away at it. We’ll show more of the game later this week as we hope to release it somewhere near the end of November. We decided to do some more work on it because, with all the people who’ve joined in to help along with the project – AdamAtomic, FrankieSmileShow, C418 and Derek Bones – we really feel we should polish this enough to honor their contributions. And then find a good name. Maybe have pie for finishing that too.
For those of you who’ve been visiting Game in the City in Amersfoort last week – we’ve had a lot of fun. It was quite cool to see Keita Takahashi (of Katamari Damacy) and Brandon Boyer (chairman of the IGF) give Super Crate Box a few tries. Thanks to Dutch Game Garden for providing us with the excellent Indigo arcade cabinet the game was playable in.
You might be wondering how any of that last paragraph is pie related? Well, Jan drew this for Brandon during the event.
We’ve been quite busy after the launch of Super Crate Box, working simultaneously on the website, the forums and finally getting Radical Fishing to its destination. Quite busy meaning – in my case – a chronic lack of sleep due to cola overuse. Which isn’t too bad as I can do more awake than asleep.
That’s just last week and the week before it. If a tsunami ever hits the Netherlands, we’ll be able to build a raft of these in a few more weeks.
In any case, first things first: we’d like to thank all of you who voted for Super Crate Box for doing so in the Bytejacker Free Indie Rapid Fire contest. Your effort was not in vain: Super Crate Box won with a landslide victory of over 95% of the votes. Much appreciated!
We also wanted to thank John Gottschalk, the creator of the winning papercraft entry has been so kind as to promise to send us his entry for our workspace. We’ve got no clue how we’re going to get the entire thing over here, but we’ll work something about.
Speaking of contests, the SFMT highscore contest for the second of three SUPER LIMITED editions of the game is still running until the 14th of November. The highest score on the SFMT difficulty on Construction Yard (with a screenshot of the game over screen, or a video of the accomplishment) wins that second crate filled with goodness. If you still want in, mail us your best score at sfmtcontest@vlambeer.com.
Since we have a Vlambeer Light projects in its very early stages that we can’t talk too much about yet, I guess I’ll be drinking quite some more cola the coming weeks. Maybe we should get these guys to sponsor us?
Rami on juli 21, 2011 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman