Kloonigames

That was my acceptance speech. I wrote it in crayons on my way to the stage. I still can’t believe it, but Crayon Physics Deluxe won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival (IGF).

I’m just happy that I got to continue the tradition of crappy acceptance speeches (with monocoles) at the IGF.

I really didn’t get a change to thank all the people who have helped me make the game possible. I felt a like a self centered brick, for not thanking anyone, but I didn’t prepare at all for the possibility that I might win, so I was afraid to thank anyone, because I might totally forget a bunch of people. So here’s a list of people without whom, the game would have never been made.

* _Ghost (Jarogniew Slotala), huge thanks for creating such an amazing piece of music and for allowing me and other people to use it. I think it’s hard for an outsider to understand how much his music changed the game, I wasn’t sure about the exact feeling I wanted the game to conceive and it wasn’t until I listened to his song I realized what I wanted.

* Erin Catto, for his marvelous physics engine Box2D. Which he has created on his free time and which he generously released as an open source project and has never asked anything in return.

* Jussi Laakkonen for helping me out with the business stuff.

* Juuso Savolainen for helping me out with some of the coding stuff.

* Daniel Benmergui for helping me out with the design stuff.

* Petri Luukkainen for being an awesome friend, play testing the game way more than is humanly possible and for doing the youtube video.

* All the testers who have given me their precious time to use for the improvement of the game. Without you guys the game would have never made it!

* Kyle Gabler for inspiring me to start doing prototypes!

* All the people who wrote comments, forum posts, blogged about the game, emailed me about, harassed me about it, the guy who kidnapped my cat and demanded that I’ll do a never version of the game or my get gets it… Huge thanks to you all, with out you I probably would have never made the game.

Edit: This was the reason why I didn’t want to say any names during the acceptance speech, because I was sure I’d forget someone. So I wrote this blog post in a hurry so I forgot to thank Ale Fernandez and Krishinda Powers for allowing me to use their sample “Krishinda Singing” in a commercial product. Also thanks to _ghost for allowing me to use Lullaby in (in which “Krishinda Singing” is used) in a commercial product. (I feel awful for forgetting them 🙁 )

Lucky me, in a couple of hours I’m off to the Game Developers Conference. I should probably sleep, but I can’t. I’m too excited. Not that much about GDC, but because I have two new games on my computer that I can’t really play until I get back from San Francisco. The first one is World of Goo’s Chapter One and the second game is Audiosurf. I pre-ordered both of them and they both were released right in the middle of this GDC travel mess that I’m trying to sort out.

If Kyle and Ron had released all the chapters to World of Goo, I would have probably just said “Screw GDC, I’m staying home playing World of Goo and Audiosurf”. Lucky for me they didn’t.

Anyway if anyone reading this will be at GDC, come by the IGF booths and say hello. I’ll be there playing World of Goo and Audiosurf. I also have my own game there that I’m supposed to be demonstrating and representing. But to be honest I’d rather just surf through my Fantomas collection, which I’m planning of installing on Dylan’s computer as soon as he moves away from it.

Oh and didn’t get the Grammar Nazi update done in time. I blame Tim and his interview! 🙂

In the middle of this GDC travel shenanigans I ended up chatting with Tim W. of IndieGames.com. We chatted about things and then end up doing this quick informal interview which can be read here: Interview: Crayon Physics Developer Petri Purho.

And it’s also worth nothing that if it wasn’t for Tim’s interview you would probably already be playing the new version of Grammar Nazi 🙂 (not really). But hopefully the Grammar Nazi update is done by today. Also happy Valentine’s day to you all!

I have nothing against mods, but “Nomination and Interview” is so much better than “A Mod and an Interview“.

• Crayon Physics Deluxe has been nominated for the Wizards of the Coast’s “Gleemie Award”. Being an old Magic: The Gathering player (I still have decks somewhere), it’s an honor to be nominated as one of the seven finalists in this category. The winners will be announced next week at the IGF award ceremony. (Thanks to Justme for letting me know about this 🙂 )
• Entar interviewed me over at Games Fascination. It’s a short interview, but he asked all the though questions. Like when is Crayon Physics Deluxe going be released.
• A comic about game industry. I know it’s old, but it’s so true 🙂 (via TIGSource forums)

I’m sorry that I ended up spamming my RSS readers with tons of posts.

But I had some trouble with my ex hosting company (referred from now on as Beelzebub), so I switched companies. After reading about different hosting companies I came to the conclusion that they are all inherently evil, spawns of Satan and their only mission is to cause hate and sorrow in the world. In this regard I consider Beelzebub to be one of the best.

Problem is that Beelzebub doesn’t want to give me access to the contents of my blog. I’ve been asking them (politely) for about two weeks now and I haven’t heard any kind of a real answer from them. Actually all I’ve been asking for is a shell access (which I used to have), but it seems like it’s something they really don’t want me to have. So I ended up doing this MacGyverish hack to get my content back, using an old SQL dump, google reader’s cache and some php magic.

In the process I lost all the comments between September 14th 2007 and January 23th 2008. I’m terribly sorry for that. But Beelzebub is holding them hostage and I’m still waiting to hear what they want for them. Could take a while since, well since everything Beelzebub does takes a while.