submitted by jw on november 3, 2011 |

#ffflood  #gungodz  #not-vlambeer  #ridiculousfishing  #sstre  #scb-ios  #events  

We are back to making games again.

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.

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submitted by Rami on oktober 5, 2011 |

#gungodz  #ridiculousfishing  #sstre  #scb-ios  

Just reminding everone that there’s just 42 hours left on Brandon Boyers’ Venus Patrol Kickstarter and pledging $25 or more really is your only chance ever to get your hands on the super-exclusive hiphop-inspired shooter action roguelike we’re creating for it.

Yes, we’re also still working on Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Super Crate Box iOS & Ridiculous Fishing – but we just felt it was fair to give everyone a heads up on this one.

submitted by Rami on september 9, 2011 |

#gungodz  #ridiculousfishing  #sstre  #supercratebox  #scb-ios  

We’ve been off the grid for a while. It’s been a crazy ride, the last few weeks, and we needed to focus our efforts and resources into handling a lot of negotiating & hyper-important making games. Don’t worry, it’s only going to take a little while before we can get back to giving some more in-depth looks at what we’ve been up to lately, for now, we’re going to skim every subject and that’s going to end up being a massive post anyway.

The elephant in the room is the cloning issue, of course – so let us get that out of the way first: Ninja Fishing and Muffin Knight. We’re superglad to see so many people standing up for original gameplay and experimenting with simple, minimalist and new mechanics.

Muffin Knight isn’t a 1:1 clone of Super Crate Box. We’d argue that the strength of Super Crate Box is in its minimalism and Muffin Knight turned away from that and added things like upgrades. Sure, we’d have loved to see some more original weapons, but besides that it’s pretty obvious that they put effort into their design: there’s a lot of things built around the gameplay & they differentiated the theme a lot – not because they wanted to hide that they ‘cloned’ the gameplay, but because they believed that was the best thing to do for their game. We think Super Crate Box iOS & Muffin Knight can easily co-exist without biting eachother & for us, that places it a long way ahead of Ninja Fishing.

We also found out that if you’re interviewed and say something like “imitation is the sincerest form of buttrape”, that means that’s going to show up in the article. No exceptions.

We might revisit the entire subject later, when we’ve got some more time, as we feel its a pretty important discussion – even though it has been deadlocked forever now. For now we hope we can work for a while without our other designs being ‘tributed’.

Kert Gartner is working his magic on the Serious Sam: The Random Encounter trailer

So, back to what we’ve been doing besides these fucking politics, negotiations and interviews.

For those of you that kind of lost track of what we’re working on due to the early announcement of Ridiculous Fishing and the announcement of Super Crate Box iOS, we’re currently working on three projects – actually four, but we’ll get to that later. These projects are Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Ridiculous Fishing & Super Crate Box iOS.

Our cooperation with Zach Gage & Greg Wohlwend for Ridiculous Fishing is going great and we think we’ll have something to show there in a while. For now, the above image’ll have to still your apetite for fishing like gramps told you about it.

Wondering whether the Super Crate Box iOS controls work? Check out the above video and decide for yourself. Halfbot and us have been working and we’ll be tweaking the controls even beyond the amount of control you have now. Someone playtesting said that “it’s almost as if the game was made for iOS” and for a platformer, we think that’s pretty encouraging.

Finally, we want to ask your attention for something important. Venus Patrol is a new website by Offworld editor, IGF-chairman and Vlambeer-friend Brandon Boyer. Offworld was a site where it seemed like videogames were actually a beautiful thing, it shunned the traditional review and delivered context, backgrounds and exploration of the medium – it brought together culture and videogames in a way that makes us miss it sincerely since it went down in 2009. Venus Patrol is the spiritual successor to Offworld & Brandon is running a Kickstarter to get his site funded for the first year.

Venus Patrol is already funded, but this Kickstarter is still worth your money if you believe that games can be more than simple products that need to be reviewed objectively in terms of ‘worth your money/not worth your money’. On top of that, Brandon has arranged some amazing gifts for backers & if you pledge more than $25, you’ll get games by Superbrothers, ADAM ATOMIC, JOUST by Copenhagen Game Collective and a secret Vlambeer project we’ve yet to announce. Besides that, there are amazing other incentives like a wallpaper by Keita Takahashi (who JW famously taught the black ball can’t go in the pocket in pool), music by Jim Guthrie and a lot more.

Main incentive remains that this industry can use a new Offworld. Venus Patrol is just that.

September 1st, we celebrated our first anniversary as Vlambeer. Had an amazing party – thanks to C418 for the music, everyone attending and everyone who checked in through the livestream.

We’ll be talking a lot more about our turnbased RPG Serious Sam: The Random Encounter in a short while, as we’re getting it prepared for its final testing rounds. We’re aiming for a late September or early October release at somewhere around $5, so bear with us while we get this done. We’ll have some gameplay footage for you soon.

Sorry for the somewhat messy blog post, its been busy. Expect some more of these messy blog posts soon and after that, we might just try and get the Vlambeer website updated to the level of the new Super Crate Box website.

submitted by Rami on augustus 8, 2011 |

#radicalfishing  #ridiculousfishing  

Just wanted to take a moment to say a quick thing about the Ninja Fishing thing.

In case you’ve missed it, Ninja Fishing launched and is getting some extremely good numbers. We don’t want to complain about that. Greg said it all and he said it way better than we could ever do. We don’t want to discuss cloning and patents, because we think the only thing that matters is that we feel that what Gamenauts did is morally wrong. The worst thing is reading positive reviews complimenting the superoriginal design of the fishing gameplay – by people who have no clue that we even exist.

What we want to do is thank everyone for speaking up without us having to ask for it. While that one tweet, Google+ post, Facebook update, blog post, app review or telling your friends won’t stop or solve the entire cloning thing, it does tell us that all of you have our backs might we ever need it. Nothing encourages us to work even harder than knowing there’s people out there that care about Vlambeer.

Thank you for supporting what we do, so that we can continue what we’re doing.

submitted by Rami on juli 21, 2011 |

#radicalfishing  #ridiculousfishing  #sstre  

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.