A Downtown Los Angeles WC ad wants to put us out of business! Nature is the largest competitor of the Video Game Industry.

Here are some folks crowding around Skulls of the Shogun. I didn’t get a chance to play it but will probably play it on Xbox 360 soon enough.

Here’s the StarDrone station, swingy game for PSN.

Deepak Fights Robots. I heard this described as “Bubble Bobble meets Bollywood.” Didn’t play but it looked fun. Looked like single room puzzles where you have to find the correct way to defeat or avoid evil robots.

The crew, David Rodriguez and Chris Rock. Minhua’s head in the bottom right corner, haha.

The kissing game. She tried hard to convince us to play and for me to affix metal diodes to my tongue with fixodent to play a cheesy racing game. Cute idea but… PASS!!

Continue Reading…

The Indiecade game festival is going on this weekend in Los Angeles, California! It takes place October 8-9. We didn’t even bother to submit anything this year due to a complete lack of response that we received last year. The show does make for a good environment to meet up with other developers and see what interesting things are going on.

Looking forward to it!

“Behold! A Massive Overhaul!” – Bryson, the Mighty

Tonight I finished an update to our blog theme. The new theme follows Sokay.net’s color scheme and design more closely — it’s bothered me that they looked similar but different. I like the direction it’s going and I’ll continue to revise the design sporadically.

Indiecade’s this weekend! Although Chris and I didn’t get our entries accepted, it was disappointing that they didn’t even bother to give feedback on our games — they basically said “we got too many entries. if you’re lucky, you’ll get feedback”. I’m suspicious as to whether they even played all of the games submitted. When Chris submitted Children at Play to Indie Fund, he was given a prompt and usefull feedback from Jonathan Blow. And he didn’t even have to pay an entry fee, haha.

With the Donut Game, I’ve passed the Fight Game’s engine to David. He’s working on updating the Fight Game’s animation with his most recent updates. I’ve spent some time working on the UI and some effects for that section of the game.

(this is a work in progress, yo)

To help me ease my mind, I’ve been working on this pixel portrait between running around in circles. I’ve been getting some assistance from the Pixelation community, check out my Work in Progress thread.

That’s it for today!

Peace!

-Bryson

So we’re done with that Indiecade submission nonsense. It served as a good goal for us, rushing toward the finish line. But in the end, it was just a checkpoint — a milestone — since there is still so much more to be done.

I’m happy that all of 3 games in the project are hooked into each other through the game scenario and most of the art assets are completed. We now have an even clearer idea of how the project is working so it makes the refinement process go much faster.

To the left are some game assets from the car game. I drew these cars in Adobe Illustrator, and made a few color variations. I’ve determined 11 variations aren’t enough so I’ll draw a few more and make additional colors to break up the visual monotony.

Since the last post, I’ve added Cryptic Circuitry’s music and sound effects to the game. It sounds great and it’s becoming more obvious what sounds are missing now. We need to take another pass at the sound now that it’s in. The sound is always the time consuming part that I spend little time at the end on. With the energy Cryptic’s putting into the sound design, I want to make sure it all works smoothly.

As far as the Sokay war with Chris Rock goes, I declare myself winning. As he is too much of a wusscake to post any news on his game. He claims his time “working on it” is much more valuable than posting on a blog. Pssh!

So Chris surprised the hell out of me yesterday when he mentioned that there was an independent games festival going on right down the street from me in Culver City — Indiecade ’09. His friend told him about it and he told me. I was feeling kind of down that I wasn’t out raving in the streets of San Francisco this weekend, but I suppose things happen for a reason. I missed Saturday but I checked it out today.

I Wish I Were the Moon by Daniel Benmergui

I didn’t get the opportunity to see everything but the favorite thing that I played was Moon Stories by Daniel Benmergui of Argentina. This is a series a 3 games, which are more like interactive stories. I could spend a paragraph trying to explain it or you can just play the damn thing. I liked that I could just jump in an play around and that the game didn’t expect anything from me. I had fun messing around just to see what would happen. This is really how game stories need to be told more often. Continue Reading…