We held two presentations during No More Sweden last week, one about our current game engine DaisyMoon, and one about Project B. So here you have a 30 minute long video clip to ease your curiosity with! The guy in white shirt is Kinten, the one in brown shirt is thewreck and the one lurking the backgrund is me (jeb).
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
I will post the DaisyMoon presentation as soon as I’ve had time to edit it.
Also check out our new widgets at the bottom of our blog! Thewreck spent an afternoon installing all of those, and hopefully it will make it easier to find old Oxeye articles
Long time no see! We actually have a lot of stuff to tell, such as we are now working with anosou for music in Project B and that there’s more info about the game online now, but these news will have to wait just a little bit longer
We just came back from No More Sweden 2010 in Skövde. We had a great time and met a lot of really cool indie developers. During the event we also created a 48-hour game called The Dubai Grand Prix Scandal.
It’s a game intended for two people using two game pads, but we’ve added keyboard support as well (using ESDF and IJKL for main controls, check the readme for the other keys).
As some might know, I have the Starcraft 2 beta, which is quite fun. However, for the last couple of days, I have been feeling a rising frustration with Starcraft 2 and Blizzard.
It all started when they removed what is called “wireframe spellcasting”, the User Interface feature where you are allowed to target spells and skills by clicking the unit icons in the bottom bar. Now that it is removed, you must actively find your unit, and click on it on the map. They removed a feature I loved and used, which for me destroyed part of why I was starting to like the game. Instead of improving the interface like they have done for so many parts of the game, they are now hampering the interface to force some kind of ideal playing style on players…
One of our forum members, known as “Doublevil,” has made a pretty rad mod for Harvest. It plays more like a standard tower defense game, with upgradeable towers and enemies attacking your base in a straight line. Doublevil has put a lot of effort into it, you should definitely check it out! You find it here:
Some clever particle effects (I first thought it was custom graphics)
Clean and pretty Lua script, you should definitely take a look
The mod suffers from a crash bug, unfortunately. It occurs sometimes when you upgrade towers, and is likely one of the bugs I’ve fixed for the long lost 1.17 patch… and I still don’t know when we’ll be able to release it…
Just wanted to post a reminder that it’s still not too late to get a real, snail-mail, postcard from us. We have 6 different variations of Project B-related prints. You will get one randomly chosen print, and a hand-written message from us (don’t expect too much though, these take a lot of time to write).
Please remember to write your name with the address! If you forget to write your name, I’ll send a postcard anyway, but I’m not sure how good the post office is at locating you. Guess it depends on if you are living in your own house or not Also, you don’t need to write anything in the name suggestions / comments box if you don’t want to. In that case simply leave it blank.
One of the biggest indie events every year is the Independent Games Festival at the game developer conference in San Francisco. It’s a competition that awards cash prizes to a number of outstanding indie games. Many of these games are still work in progress, hoping to gain some attention and maybe distribution deals. Monaco by Pocketwatch Games is one of these games, and it happened to grab both the awards for best game design and the Seumas Grand Prize.
Monaco is a 4-player cooperative stealth game taking place in… uuh… Monaco. You choose one of four characters (eight characters are planned), each with its own special abilities and skills and attempt to steal money and other stuff from various locations. These locations (banks, casinos, yachts, etc) are protected by alarms and armed guards, which makes things a bit tricky. This is Monaco’s IGF trailer:
Now, as I’ve written earlier, I was one of the judges who were evaluating the games for the awards. I was very pleased to see that Monaco won, since I had voted for it in the final round. There are two reasons for this,
First, Monaco feels like what indie is all about, at least for me. It’s the kind of game that can’t be produced with multi-million dollars. It’s too risky. Weirder games, such as Scribblenauts, seem to be exclusive to portable devices and usually don’t have multiplayer. Also big budget games need big budget content, and I can’t imagine what Monaco would play like if it was, for example, in 3D.
Secondly, Monaco is a really fun game, at least when you play it with a friend or two (as it was intended). The cooperative element works very well. Shutting down an alarm or opening a door will help everybody, and players are able to revive those that have fallen. It’s especially exciting when only one player is left alive, trying to dodge guards and revive the others. I like this sense of giving everybody in the team the chance to be a hero. And even if you should fail you get a sense of progress because the map will remain revealed when you start over. It’s like, “alright that didn’t go so well, but now I know how we should do it!”
These things put together: originality, good design, and pure entertainment, made it easy for me to pick Monaco for the IGF grand prize. Of course, there were like 160 judges voting, so I’m not alone.
I usually try to avoid posting more than once per day, but I nearly forgot which date it was today… it’s the 5h of March! That means we have two birthdays to celebrate!
First up is Pontus Hammarberg, our own very cuddlesome artist who is trying to save mankind, one life at a time He has turned 26 today. Give him a cheer! (And in case you were wondering, Pontus goes by the internet alias “Kinten”, you may have seen him around.)
Second up is Harvest: Massive Encounter that is 2 years old today! It’s crazy how long time that has passed since its release, and how different things are now compared to back then.
To celebrate this we are going to give you a present! We are going to send out postcards (real, physical postcards) to anybody who wants one. All you need to do is to give us your home address (we’ll not use it for anything else, don’t worry), and maybe suggest a name for Project B! Anything goes, but obviously we prefer actual usable game names over “Cheesemaster of Death 2000″ The best name will receive an extra present… I think.
In any case, suggesting a name is optional, so to receive a postcard all you have to do is to go here:
We’ll gather addresses for about 2 weeks. I’ll post again later. (We may not send a postcard to everybody in case this becomes unexpectedly popular, since I have to write all of these by hand… so if that happens it will be first come first served.)
/jeb
UPDATE: Remember to write your NAME with the address! Our divine senses can only stretch so far…
Hey! We’ve made a fun little tool that tweets our subversion commit comments on Twitter. You can see the comments by checking http://twitter.com/oxbot
What…?
Subversion, or SVN for short, is a version-control system that keeps track of our project files when we work on Project B and other games. Think of it as a wiki for files that we add and update files on. Each time a file is modified, SVN keeps track of who made the changes, and makes backups so that changes can be reverted if necessary.
Each commit is also tagged with a small comment describing why the commit was made. It’s this comment that our bot picks up and puts on twitter.
Why…?
Because we can! Also, because this will let you keep track of Project B. We want to be more open about the project, and this is a step in that direction. Actual game information, such as screenshots and a game name, will come later.
Project B Presentation
(And in case you were wondering, Pontus goes by the internet alias “Kinten”, you may have seen him around.)
The best name will receive an extra present… I think.
