Here's a quick video from the Giant Robot event this past Saturday:

I've dedicated the past 3 or 4 weeks of life to complete a project organized for Art x Game which is a joint effort between Giant Robot and Attract Mode.   An Art x Game is when an artist and a game developer are teamed up to create a game.   I was paired up with J. Otto Seibold to create a game for his gallery opening at Giant Robot in Los Angeles.


What came to be from this collaboration is a creation known as Jottobots.   It's a run and gun metroidvania style platformer where the player assumes control of a Jottobot equipped with a jetpack and some sort of gun.   The player explores through a huge level, shooting enemies and finding secrets along the way.   Players collect little gems that the enemies drop for points, and at the end the game displays a high score table of the best players.


The event was this past Saturday and it got some mentions across the internets.   TIGSource posted a quick article about it, along with Offworld.


The game was projected inside the Giant Robot store for the first hour or so of the event.   It was a lot of fun watching people play the game live.   I had been playing the game repeatedly for the past 2 weeks, so it was great to see someone else who has no idea what the game is jump in and play it.   Watching people explore the level and discover secret areas was really rewarding for me, and them!   It turned out pretty much how I imagined it.   Someone would play the game and discover a secret or take a new path through the level, and people watching would help out and then use the game play they were seeing to their advantage for their next play through.   People wanted to figure out the best path to take, or how to score the most points, and they learned a lot by watching others play.


When night fell the game was projected onto a building outside in front of a parking lot.   It was pretty huge, and people walking by on the street stopped to take a look or give it a go themselves.   It was a lot of fun to see my game projected up onto a giant wall outside where everyone could see it.   Except for this one guy who claimed that the game from Adult Swim.


Jottobots won't be playable on the internet for a little while, but if you're in the LA area it may pop up at some point at Giant Robot in the next month.   As soon as I'm able to distribute the game on the internet though, it'll be up.   Actual pictures from the event will also be circulating about soon, so I'll post those as they come as well.

Whoa, I seriously have no idea where this sudden surge in Bonesaw press is coming from, but this one comes from Kim Komando!?   Yeah, for those of you who don't know, Kim Komando is this talk radio host that deals with the more casual side of computers.   You know your relatives that can't figure out how to change the color of their desktop, or remember how to log into eBay?   That's the target audience of this show.   She's pretty popular, and so is her website, as it has driven about 3,000 unique visitors to the Bonesaw download page in the past few days.   I hope her audience can honestly enjoy the game though -- it's meant to be a severely difficult game meant for hardcore platforming experts.

This is madness!   I remember listening to Kim Komando at my aunt's house, or in the car, and I would've never imagined that my game would end up on the official website.   I don't really know what to say!   I really can't wait to make my next big game so I can try to surpass all of the fame and fortune (not really) that Bonesaw has enjoyed.

I'm very happy to say that Snapshot has been added to the Indiecade showcase happening at E3 this year!   And it looks like E3 is ... this week!   That came out of nowhere.   I thought E3 was supposed to be in July or something like that.

So in about ... 5 hours I'll be taking off for LA to go to the big Electronics... something, Expo.   I don't even know what E3 stands for anymore.   Oh well!   I've been wanting to go to this show since I was a kid, and I was super jealous when my sister got to go through her job a few years ago, but now is finally my chance to see it for myself.   It isn't really what it used to be, but I'm still excited.

Snapshot being in the Indiecade showcase also gets me a Exhibitor pass, so I get to stay around the show floor before it opens and after it closes.   Super secret behind the scenes access, yeah!   I'm making this post moments before I'm going to sleep, so I gotta keep it short.   It's awesome to be able to show off Snapshot some more after the IGF!

Another hit in the media for one of my games that I must've missed!   The guys over at Bytejacker released a recent episode in which viewers answered the question "What is your favorite indie platformer?"   The very first one was...


Verge!   Holy crap, awesome.   Verge was mentioned in the Bytejacker blog during the Commonplace Book Competition at TIGSource, but it never made it into an episode so I felt a little disappointed, but thanks to this rad dude who I only know as "Steve" from Worcester, MA, Verge made it into an episode!

So thanks, Bytejacker, and thanks Steve.

For awhile now one of the biggest Bonesaw: The Game fans out there, DarthMohawk1, has been working on the ultimate guide to Bonesaw, and now finally I'm very happy to report that the work has finally paid off.   I can now present the first complete walkthrough of Bonesaw: The Game.

If anyone out there has been stuck in the game, which I know there are many of you, there have been some YouTube videos showing the way for some players, but now all the knowledge of the game is compiled into one resource.   I remember when I was making most of the levels in the game, most people that looked at it said to me that nobody would ever beat it, or find all the pucks, or find and defeat the secret boss... I even put some things in the game that I didn't think anyone would ever find, but I was proven wrong.

So thank you to all the players out there that collected every single little item and secret in Bonesaw!   And a big thanks to DarthMohawk1 for spending the time to analyze and deconstruct my game down to the very last pixel.   Awesome work!

I haven't updated my blogosphere on the webotron in awhile!   I underwent a pretty large change in my life immediately after returning from GDC (Oh man I totally forgot to do a more in depth write up of what happened at GDC.   The outline for it is sitting on my laptop right now... the more I look at it though, the specifics of my trip only really make sense to the people that were there, and they don't need to hear about it again.   So just know that it was amazing and the best week of my life!)   Anyway, about that life change.

GDC went really well for myself, and Snapshot, so my partner Pete and I want to turn it into a fully realized game.   The problem is that neither of us are programmers, so we enlisted the help of our friend Dave with the project.   The problem was that Dave lived in Phoenix, I lived in New York, and Pete was living in San Francisco at the time.   So we solved that problem by moving to Phoenix.

So I'm now down in the desert, working on Snapshot and continuing work on the other projects that come my way.

As far as my games go, it seems that Bonesaw is among the best freeware games of 2009 according to the crew over at 1up.   It's exciting to see people still enjoying the game after it's been out for a full year!   Hopefully my next big project will be even more successful than Bonesaw.

It looks like after two weeks of public outcry against metered bandwidth, Time Warner has backed down with their trials system of bandwidth capping.   Their initial test in a small town in Texas went over smooth I'm sure because nobody seemed to notice, but citizens in Rochester, NY we're not having it.


Hopefully this shows Time Warner and other ISPs about what people think of bandwidth caps.   I've already ranted about them in some posts before, so I won't get into it again, but I'm pleased that Time Warner has seen that bandwidth caps are only going to hurt the consumers and themselves.