Gray is in IndieCade and Fig. 8 will be at the Eurogamer Expo.

So we’ve known about the IndieCade thing for awhile but haven’t gotten around to announcing it officially just yet here. Though, we just found out Fig. 8 will be across the pond in the Eurogamer 2009 expo so I figured we’d get two announcements with one stone! It’s a pro PR move by us, to minimize our number of press releases. ;)

Anyway, for the IndieCade dealio we’ll be in LA for the entire thing, October 1st – 5th. Mike and I are doing a “salon” of some sort on Friday morning. They tell us we don’t need a cosmetology license or anything like that so I think it’s just us talking. Come and see to find out!

Also, the folks over at IndieCade wanted us to record a little video interview. We didn’t really know what to do but when we were recording my Mom called and saved the day by asking us some hard-hitting questions. Diane Sawyer is one of her idols and I think her influences really shine through in this revealing exposé. Watch it after the jump.

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My top twenty games of all time for 2009.

Over at TIG, the third installment of the TIGForums Twenty for 2009 is going on and I’ve been mulling it over ever since Derek posted it up. It’s a little strange coming up with such a comprehensive list of favorites but I feel I’ve got a good start on my top 20. I went the way of Tarantino selecting my top 20 games [though he didn't do all-time favorites].

So everyone on the forum gets 210 points to delegate however they’d like across as many as 210 games. I went with just the 20 as I’m not sure I have 210 favorite games to list. Initially it’s a bit overwhelming to find even 20 favorite games since there’s no real criteria. I could have gone with games that I love right now or I could of gone with even more nostalgia and leaned towards how I remember the games that I love. I think I have a mix of both as I tried to include the games that had a significant impact on me at the time that I was playing them. I haven’t played Halo in years, but I was so into that game that I started going to tournaments for it. That’s probably the only game I’ll ever do that with, and while there may be games in my future that I enjoy even more than Halo, I can’t ignore that historical context.

So here they are after the jump! If you have any suggestions/objections let me know, I’d love to start a nerdy discussion about favorite games.

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We’re looking for a student intern.

I just finished the second round of “marketing” for our first internship. This won’t be our first employee but it’s close enough that we’re a bit frightened/excited. ISU has offered us a great deal for providing one lucky student [we think] with a paid internship for this Fall semester and we’re doing our best to find someone. So far the first wave has fallen flat on the ISU students. I thought a lot of folks wanted to make video games, but maybe not. We’ve received some interest, but none from students. Even if we get a dozen applicants, it’s still not guaranteed that any of them will make sense to bring on as an intern. Nonetheless, we remain hopeful that our latest Craigslist post, ISU job-board listing and this blog post will have them breaking down our door in droves!

So if you’re a student at ISU or know of one that is interested in game development please drop us a line. We would have been rabid for this kind of opportunity back when we were in school. There have to be some folks hiding in the basements around campus that are just as crazy. Right?!

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Here’s a big gallery of the latest 222 craziness.

These are all the computer 222 sightings I’ve had the presence of mind to capture over the last couple months. Make of them what you will.

222 Posts

222 Visits

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The trouble with not knowing what we’re doing.

Design has been on my mind a lot lately. Liferaft has recently been in a kind of growing-pains stage which is a point in the development where Mike and I fumble around and try to learn how to develop video games. That’s actually a lot of it for us. Each new game we do is usually a whole new challenge with a lot of different problems that we’ve never solved before. The pain comes in the form of arguments between Mike and I, general frustration towards not knowing the best way to do something and all the shitty feelings that come with that.

Right now we’re working on the different levels or “areas” for Liferaft. We’ve never really done that before, not in this scope, and it’s scary. We fleshed out “level 1″ with a fair amount of detail here but that painted us into a serious corner given that we haven’t used our extremely precious friend-playtest-kleenexes yet. It took a very serious conversation and a bit of collapse on my part to realize we need to scrap that entire level and go back to the drawing board with a different approach. It was difficult, but those are the kinds of moments that we must concede to in order to make the best game we possibly can. It also helps with sanity.

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I had a really terrifying nightmare last night.

Ok, so I had a pretty disturbing dream last night. I know this doesn’t really do the atmosphere justice, but that’s the way it works with these dream logs. If it’s too boring, just skip to the last two paragraphs.

So I’m in a school of some kind. Actually it’s a classroom and it’s modern day but everyone in the classroom is from my early elementary school days. I’m not doing well in the class. I think it’s about a foreign language of some kind. Most people are getting good grades and turning their homework in but for some reason I can never get my homework turned in because the notion to do it simply alludes me. I raise my hand and ask the teacher a question about perhaps some alternative forms of make-up work but someone else raises their hand immediately after mine. When they’re called on first, he lowers his hand and says “nevermind.” I raise my hand again and he does the same thing, clearly just to mess with me. The teacher calls on him, again and then I say “you’re a douchebag.” The teacher looks at me and doesn’t like this one bit. She comes over to me and chews me out and I continually apologize saying “it won’t happen again.” Then we finally get around to talking about my troubles with the class and before anything gets settled she leaves the room.

Next thing I know I’m getting harassed by all my classmates while she is gone. It starts to escalate and the class is over with. At this point I leave as well and head down to a market where I’m now in a wheelchair. It’s some kind of market in Rome, I know that because of the Italian television and all the food on the shelves. I actually think to myself: “this is awesome, finally good cheese in the U.S.” My dad comes out from some other section of the market and starts wheeling me around. We go around the place and into another shop. A dark man meets my dad with a bag and he hands me his new 17″ MBP. I’m not sure why he has it. He argues that it’s not 17″ and I assure him it is. Now I can walk again and we’re heading down the stairs. I try to put the laptop back in my dad’s bag that’s on his back and almost drop it. The dark man takes it and puts in the bag instead.

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Breaking down the Fig. 8 bidding timeline.

So Fig. 8 is out in the wild and we’re pretty pleased with the response so far. I went ahead and confirmed with our sponsor, YoArcade, that we could be transparent with the deal. They graciously gave us the green light so I bring you a true story but names have been changed [except YoArcade] to protect the innocent.

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Fig. 8 released!

Mike and I released Fig. 8 today. The whole world can finally play our little game about bikes and stuff. We’re happy to have finally found a suitable sponsor in YoArcade. These things always take awhile, and certainly this go-round took a lot of pavement-pounding to get it sold but I feel it was worth it in the end.

Play the game here at YoArcade.

There are no high scores tables as of yet, but feel free to post your best here in the comments. Mine is 800,250 points. We plan to start the high score competitions in earnest over at Kong when we release the game there sometime in early September.

Mechanics, the hippocratic oath and indie businesses.

A little over a month ago I took my car in for an oil change at Tuffy Auto Service here in Ames. I didn’t see it at the time but on the sign it read “free brake inspection this weekend.” After an hour or so they called me up with some dire news.

Tuffy Mechanic

Well it looks like you need new brakes. Some wheels are down to about 5%. It’ll be around $400 to $500 but if you don’t replace them now you may do damage to your calipers and then you’d be looking at a whole new set.

I promptly asked him if I could pick up my car and he reluctantly said that it was ready. I went in there, told them that I’d think about it and was met with sour face. On my way out I noticed a rattle pulling onto the road, it seemed to be coming from within my driver side wheel well. All in all an awful day at the mechanic. I went back the next day inquiring about the newly found rattle and what turned up was a rusted-off piece of my driver-side front spring. It wasn’t their fault exactly, but putting it on the lift was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I asked them what it’d cost to replace it, he said somewhere between $300 and $500.

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Making and selling Fig. 8

Making the Game

Fig. 8 is our latest game here at Intuition. It’s a relatively simple concept, you control a bike through a technical diagram. At first Fig. 8 was actually called US and it was an art installation. In my junior year of college I was walking in the snow one night and I noticed some bike tracks running through the snow; an unusual scene in the middle of winter. While I walked along I noticed the two paths diverging then returning to a single unified track, it made me think about how relationships change over time how we grow distant then return. The more distant the wheels become, while they may briefly intersect, if it’s too great they’ll separate again and perhaps even crash the entire bike, bringing it all to a standstill. That’s what US is about, but doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with Fig. 8.

I was telling Mike and Joe about it one day at work and they thought it might work pretty well as a scoring mechanic for a game. Perhaps eliminate the difficult control scheme of keeping a bike balanced through obstacles and just use it as a means of rewarding expert players. We went ahead with it. I started how I usually start with these smaller games and that’s through research. Sifting through lots of entries about bicycle history and how it all got started I got really attracted to the idea of this velocipede coming to life off of a patent page. Looking at that image there it’s obvious to see that I more or less hijacked the design of that entire document. The circle was complete after finding the proper typeface [Sirenne Eighteen MVB thanks to typographica's twitter rescue].

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