Vlambeer is asked to do some public speaking every now and then. Although we might form the duo that is most likely to disagree during a talk, we listed all our talk-related posts underneath.
Man, we haven’t been this busy for a while. It’s not yet finishing-Super-Crate-Box-busy, but it’s definitely getting close to finishing-Radical-Fishing-busy. We’ve been doing so many things that it’s hard to remember what those things actually were. I mean, we had another succesful indie meetup, we gave a talk at the Utrecht School of Arts on getting nominated for IGF (answer: no idea) and we designed and cancelled something called MUSCLE RPG, but most of all we’ve been working on two projects.
One of them has been going for a long time, and is finally shaping up into our second Vlambeer light release. We can’t say much about it, but this is the pitch document we sent around two months ago.
The game has probably changed a bit over time, but expect to be able to play this on a nice place on the internet sometime in the future!
The second thing we’ve been busy with is Serious Sam: The Random Encounter. The game is looking quite nice already, and after days of testing I’m still enjoying trying to beat the battles with the limited features we’ve implemented so far. In an attempt to be interesting, here are some stone-cold features for the game:
More then 8 damned fine parallax layers per battle!
Underwater battles!
Bosses so big you can only see their feet!
Sweet, sweet loot!
We’ve been getting nice feedback and a ton of enthousiasm so far, thanks everyone! We’ll work had and will definitely try not to disappoint Sam.
Finally, the awesome Ciro Continisio interviewed us. If you know his awesome interviews, we are sure you will check it out here right now. The website is Italian but the interview is in english.
So it’s time to write another blog post. We’ve been up to way too many things, drowning in work, interviews, talks and other beautiful things.
First of all we gave a talk at This Happened – Utrecht #9. It was pretty great! We had some nice food, spoke to the other speakers and then spoke about the creation of Super Crate Box. Funny was that we were the only game creators there, so we had a fresh audience of media-enthousiasts, asking pretty good questions. A video of our talk (with never-before-seen design sketches for Super Crate Box) should be online soon.
We’ve also been working on our current Flash game, and it’s finally becoming fun to play! Kick Rami in the face at GDC to maybe get a secret preview. Speaking of GDC, we’ll be there obviously! We’re super excited to meet everybody and hug and talk and drink and play some good indie games. Jan Willem will be in NYC before GDC and we’re going to throw a SUPER CRATE BOX PARTY AT BABYCASTLES. Cool people should and will be there.
We also got some nice IKEA furniture for our office, including a big hole in my table and a broken chair leg.
Finally, we’re announcing the Vlambeer Super Poster Frenzy. Send us a super poster through mail and we’ll stick it to our super poster wall. The idea was we would create a poster weekly, and have a nice wall within a year. Since we are rather impatient, please contribute and help us get all the walls and ceilings and floors full! If you’ve created something for the contest just send it in an envelope to our postal address! Thanks.
Jan Willem was supposed to write about our presentation at Gamelab #6 last thursday in Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam, so we could post a video of it on the blog. I specifically asked him to make sure to explain that the video is in Dutch, but that it was subtitled in English.
Instead, tonight I received a heartbreaking account of the tragic story of his marmot when he was five years old. In Dutch. Since the e-mail might have spanned a few pages, I’ve translated only the gist of the mail and put in a slightly more readable format so that you, too, may learn one of the darker secrets about the game designer at Vlambeer.
When JW was five years old, he always wanted a squirrel or a bunny. He loved that kind of small animals. He opened his dad’s encyclopedia one day and found the following excerpt:
Marmots are generally large ground squirrels. Marmots typically live in burrows (often within rockpiles, particularly in the case of the Yellow-bellied Marmot), and hibernate there through the winter. Most marmots are highly social, and use loud whistles to communicate with one another, especially when alarmed. Marmots mainly eat greens and many types of grasses, berries, lichens, mosses, roots, and flowers.
JW , sadly, at this age had a tiny room, but his smart dad proposed a dwarf-marmot, which apparently is a existing gene of marmots. Two weeks later ‘Stippie’ (Spotty) was a fact and Stippie fitted in JW’s small room. They were happy together for just over a month, when JW found the kitchen closet empty and Stippie fat and dead. And smelly. That’s when JW learned dwarf-marmots are nasty animals. But kind of cool.
Yeah. True story, I suppose. Uh. Now for that video of Gamelab #6.
It’s a bit late for a Friday-blogpost, but Thursday-night was the first Utrecht Indie Meetup and with how awake I felt on Friday I decided to postpone this weeks post a bit. That being said, we’re glad to say Utrecht Indie Meetup #1 was a great success! Starting at 19:00, it was a busy night at the local pub Stairway to Heaven until past midnight.
We’d love to thank everyone that attended for being there, and we’ll let you know about the next event through here, Twitter and Facebook!
So, what did we do besides that this week? Well, the WINNITRON NL is out there. It’ll be featured at the local Global Game Jam and we’ve even arranged a Winnitron developers challenge for the event for those attending. We hope to be able to provide a great public debut to the cabinet by having a great game created for it.
In the next weeks, we’ll be attending a few events and we’d like to remind you about a few events that showcase our work.
In the Netherlands, we’ll be speaking on January 19th at the Dutch Gamelab #6 event in Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam. February 7th we’ll be talking in-depth about the design and development process behind Super Crate Box at This Happened Utrecht. We’ll also be speaking at Festival of Games halfway this year, but we’ll let you know about that some other time. Too many dates in this post already.
Okay, just one more date then – abroad, in the United States, Attractmode, Giant Robot and Meat Bun and LA Game Space have rescheduled the X-mas Game Night to January 22nd. If you happen to be nearby Los Angeles on January 22nd, drop by to play an exclusive Christmas edition of Super Crate Box.
Darn, we really need a dedicated ‘interesting events‘ page.
We actually got a lot of work done this week! The office is a bit cleaner, the new project is making a lot of progress and we even gave ourselves our first paycheck (1 euro per hour, beat that McDonalds)!
There are now 4 days left to vote for the IndieDB top 10 indie games of 2010. As you obviously know, Super Crate Box made it to the top 100. If you somehow missed that and feel like helping us a bit, you can vote here: SCB on Indie DB. UPDATE: Bytejacker nominated Super Crate Box for Indie of the Year just now. If you feel like voting for us there too head to Bytejacker and vote on the right!
We would also like to say Happy Birthday to Paul Veer aka Pietepiet who did the excellent animations for Super Crate Box. We might also possibly maybe be working with him on our new project. Happy birthday Paul.
Finally, some cool news for people with money/private jets/living near Amsterdam; we will be doing a short presentation about Super Crate Box and arcade games at Ignite Amsterdam 4. It is going to be a lot of fun, and as you can see the other people talking there are super interesting as well. It only costs 3 euros and starts at 8pm! Be there and get an exclusive FREE autograph from me and/or Rami!
That’s about all for now. More interesting blog posts will surely appear in the future!
jw on maart 30, 2011 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman