GameStorming

I've spent this last weekend in a stand ( booth? ) together with Sergi at the GameStorming event in Barcelona as part of the game creation competition, showing our game to everyone interested. I had much more fun than I expected and met lots of people from other development teams.

I'd like to congratulate the Agedya team on wining the competition. Totally deserved. They've put a lot of effort in this project, and it's very nice that they get some recognition from it. I already had played the game before the event and liked it a lot, but it was great getting to learn how the combat mechanics work... although I died miserably lots of times until I got the hang of it...

And of course I also want to congratulate my good friends at Izanami for wining the prize from the public with their game The End Of The World, for making a great and fun game, and just for being as awesome as they are!

I'm leaving with an image of the poster we made for the event, to maintain my policy of at least a picture per post.

Zen

Truth be told, I had a very lengthy post about presentations, Powerpoint, and how horrible crammed slides with lots and lots of bullet points are.

But, thinking it through, instead of boring you to death I rather show you some of the slides I made for The Teddy Incident presentation.

Good visuals are the best way to communicate messages, and even the most mundane enumeration ( a list of technologies used for example ) can be made a little bit more entertaining and memorable if you spend more than a minute thinking...









I'll leave you with two inspirational resources on the topic.
Presentation Zen
Art of Innovation ( Presentation by Guy Kawasaki )

Photoshop Madness

A contest is a great time to flex those Photoshop muscles.

I'm taking part in the Crestock Photoshop contest this year again, because last year I had lots of fun and I learned lots of new things about photo manipulation. This year has been no exception, and I feel I'm improving a little.

The idea of the contest is that you're given a number of source stock photographs, and a theme, and you have to use the source images and combine them in original ways to come up with a new image.

The theme for this round is extreme makeover, and the source images can be seen in the contest page.

Here is a link to my entry for this round of the contest.

ArtFutura 2008: Best Art Direction!

Today was the last day of ArtFutura show, and the winners of the videogame development competition were revealed. We are very happy to have been able to go back home having won a prize.

Here is the complete list of winners:

Best technology: Number 6
Best sound: KuKoo Kitchen
Best art direction: The Teddy Incident
Best design: Magical Gloves
Best graphics: Number 6
Most polished (?): Kukoo Kitchen

And finally, the Grand Prize was for Invasion of the Granny Snatchers.

Here is a photograph of the ecstatic Teddy Incident team rejoicing.



Of course, I post the nice team photograph, because to post a photograph in which no one is looking at the camera there's always Sergi around...

ArtFutura 2008

According to this source here we have been chosen as finalists in the ArtFutura 2008 game competition!!

Here is the complete list with the 13 finalists and links to some videos I've been able to find:

2 Ash too Furious
Acheron
Agedya
Chickenball
Farm Games
Invasion of the Granny Snatchers
Kukoo Kitchen
Magical Gloves
Maldoror: la Mansión de las Siete Torres
Number 6
Sword Fighters
The Squad
The Teddy Incident :)

The final results: Revealed this Sunday.

Congratulations to everyone!

Edit: The official list has been made public, and there are 13 finalists instead of 12. Updated the list.

Edit: Found videos for all games.

Bottled Water..?

It's the same video that was shown on The Teddy Incident presentation, so it's very short as I didn't want to devote much time to talk about the animation system. The presentation was about the game after all :)

A higher resolution video can be downloaded by going to the vimeo page.

Finishing the Master

Yesterday ( actually the 23d ) we finally presented the game we've been working on for the master's.

The room was packed with people ( how many? 100+ for sure ), and the level of all the other projects was also great, so congratulations to everyone who worked hard. Sadly that doesn't mean everyone, as every group can have parasites, but I really don't want to taint my good mood with that.

From the thoughts I gathered after the talk, I think our game had a very good reception. People liked it, they thought it looked fun to play, and that is very important. But don't trust me on this one as I'm clearly biased, go make your own opinion about the game by downloading and playing.

I'll be happy to receive opinions, critics, suggestions... any feedback will be very nice!

I've learnt lots this year. Mostly numerous ways of how NOT to do things. But that's the way to learn.



I must confess that I haven't slept as well as last night for months :)