Kloonigames

Game Developers Conference was lots of fun, not because Crayon Physics Deluxe won something there, but because I had a great time hanging out with friends and fellow developers. I wish I could have spend more time away from the booths, meetings and general “work” and spend more time checking out the lectures, hanging with friends and partying. Hopefully next year won’t be so hectic.

Anyway during the first days GDC I asked a bunch of friends and fellow game developers to draw crayon versions of their games. But I lost my crayons during the award show (I had to do the sign while running to the stage and I dropped my crayons and I couldn’t find them afterwards 🙁 ), so I couldn’t get these from everyone I wanted to. Which really sucks. But here’s what I got.

I apologize for my lack of photographing skills.

A real sweet crayon Jetpack Brontosaurus by Ben Ruiz of Flashbang Studios.

Cinnamon Beats as drawn by Jani Kahrama.

Crayon Clean Asia by ever awesome Cactus looks really sweet. No wonder he got nominated for Excellence in Visual Art. 500 Bananas!

Cortex Command by pixel physics wizard Daniel “Data” Tabar.

It’s easy to see why Fez won the IGF Excellence in Visual Art award… Fez as drawn by Renaud Bédard (the programmer of Fez) .

Random dude with a Fez by fez wearing Phil Fish (the artist / designer of Fez) .

An actual screenshot of Gesundheit! as drawn with crayons by Matt Hammill.

Goo as drawn by Adam “Atomic” Saltsman.

Look behind you, a Three Headed Monkey! by one of my heroes: Ron Gilbert.

The awesome Gamma256 game Mr. Heart Loves You Very Much by Zaphos (who should really put a proper website for his games who now has a real website).

Darwinian poetry game Poesysteme as drawn by Balthazar Auger.

Crayon qrp as drawn by Sean ‘th15’ Chan (of Battleships Forever fame). I think Sean should do a kindergarten crayon version of qrp.

Crayonized Starwave as drawn by the fellow experimental game designer Daniel Benmergui.

Toblo by Steve Chiavelli.

2DBoyish World of Goo drawn by the brilliant Kyle Gabler. (I love you too Kyle!)

The IGF winners World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe melt together and form this ultimate unstoppable game: World of Crayon Goo Physics… Deluxe drawn by classiest dressed IGF winner Ron Carmel.

Someone drew this and didn’t even leave a business card. It’s awesome so thanks!

Apparently the GDC interviews are surfacing now. I remember vaguely talking to some people from gametrailers and now they published the interview on Gametrailers TV 😮 (The indie section starts around 7 minute mark). [Thanks to Apina for letting me know about this].

It’s quite a small clip and all I get to say about the game is “you draw stuff, they behave physically correctly and you solve puzzles”. But I’m glad they included it there anyway. There are also couple of other indie developers there; Mårten talks about Fret Nice and Darren demonstrates Iron Dukes. It’s great to see that indie games are getting some airtime, in between GTA IV and Gears of War 2.

Link to the Gametrailers TV episode

Also I was positively surprised to see Crayon Physics Deluxe talked on DL.TV. They did this small round up of couple of the IGF games and Crayon Physics Deluxe was one and the other one was the sweet 2D/3D platformer Fez. While they didn’t really have any real footage of Crayon Physics Deluxe, they talked about the game in detail and got past the “you draw stuff, they behave physically correctly and you solve puzzles” stage. Garnett Lee has some really constructive comments about the game and he “got” what it’s really all about.

The Crayon Physics Deluxe part starts around 1:30 mark.

I and bunch of other indies did these interviews with 1UP people at GDC and they posted them online now. I’m having a really hard time watching myself being interviewed. Part of it is, that I always have the hardest time watching video footage of me and the other part of it is it’s really laggish and it loads for ever.

Make sure you check out the other more articulate indies as well:

• Cactus talking about Clean Asia
• Phil Fish talking about Fez
• Dylan Fitterer talking about Audiosurf (which was originally a FPS?!)
• Mårten Brüggemann talking about Fret Nice
• Joakim Sandberg talking about Noitu Love 2

Edit: Also 1UP just posted a video of Jonathan Blow and David Hellman talking about Braid.
[via David’s blog]

2nd Edit: It’s a scientific fact now; 1UP loves indies!

• Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen talk about their games
• Scott Sharkey’s feature about indie games and a nice list of the interviews
• Jenn Frank’s blog post about IGF people

Apparently jet lag (GDC will do that you), over 50 unanswered emails (I blame GDC) and trying to prototype multiple game ideas (also GDC’s fault) at once isn’t the most productive working environment. Who would have known. And before traveling to San Francisco I was thinking that it wouldn’t be too difficult to do a game after the conference; having a head full of ideas I wanted to test out. Anyway I patched together this prototype in two days. Unfortunately it isn’t nearly as finished as I would like it to be. I’m not sure if the game mechanism even “works”…

It’s a two player game, played with a single mouse. There is no single player mode in the game! Also there isn’t any instructions in the game, so please read the written instructions before trying it out. And to reset the game you have to manually “reset” the game, by closing and restarting the program.

Cancer Wars

DOWNLOAD: Cancer.zip (2.4 Mb)

Instructions

You play as pink and green stomach cancers, who mainly survive by consuming large amounts of beer (yellow liquid in the stomach). The goal of the game is to harvest enough of the beer to fill out your resource meter. Who ever fills their resource meter first wins the game.

To harvest the beer try to get as much of the beer into your cancer mouth as possible. You can build constructions by dragging cancer pieces from the “shop”. You can rotate the pieces (while dragging) with the mouse wheel. Every piece you build will cost you some amount of resources. The bombs will allow you to destroy cancer pieces from the stomach.
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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 🙁 )