February 21, 2011

It has been one week since everyone split up in teams with the goal of making a game in just 5-days. The results? Amazing! 9 new games were finished and submitted by the deadline. While we called this a competition, it was really a "week to do anything" and recharge our creative spirit. It was a complete success. Some games were simple, polished and very fun, while others were ambitious undertakings which resulted in amazing prototype games. Personally, I was most excited to see teams making 3D games (Mecha Zorbak's Rampage), creating an isometric game engine (Isonian), and building a physics driven game (Battle Fruit). These teams really earned my respect for building these games in only a week. I mean, take Isonian for example. To finish on time, Thyton had to draw each angle of every monster, every frame, by hand. Flash can be hidiously slow, so I was very impressed seeing Minimal's super smooth sprite based engine (Soothe). Instead of using any of Flash's built in movieclip controls, he create custom functions to control all of the graphics and animations which caused the game to run at incredible speeds on even old slow computers. All of the games showed creativity and a lot of hard work. I would like to congratulate everyone who participated. That is one week that none of us will forget. Now... onto the AWARDS!

Player's Choice Award 1st Place: STICKQUEST!
Congratulations to StickQuest's amazing team of Xyo, Roshuno, Polistar & Ichidori. When you are the "new guys" you have a lot to prove -- and they proved it! Their game's non-stop action and "every key from A-Z is a fully animated attack of destruction and mayhem" was hands down the player favorite. Each member of the team will be rewarded with $100 worth of BattlePoints to spend on the games of their chosing. Furthermore, we are flying Xyo to the Secret Underground Lab during spring break where he will be helping with the launch of our new game, HeroSmash. (Note: I would like to make a point this is the real Xyo, not the hacker who has been posing as him - be careful!) We expect to see great things of these guys in the future. For all of you who would like to get involved with AE and create a future with us... this team is showing you how to do it.

Developer Choice Award 1st Place: ORGANISM!
Team Triple Rainbow's physics and music sandbox game narrowly won against Fat Panda by just 1 vote. Their prize... a K-Mart Rabbit Lawn Ornament (Um... it is year of the Rabbit after all.) Warlic thanked Dage, Nythera and Mido for all of their hard work in a touching speech while clenching his ceramic Rabbit with joy.

Developer Choice Award 2nd Place: FAT PANDA!
To award them, we threw boxes of creme filled cookies at them... periodically throwing something healthy like  a bannana or apple. The results were almost as satisfying as in their game. 

Developer Choice Award 3rd Place: ISONIAN!
We awarded them with the boxes of creme filled cookies to throw at FAT PANDA's team.

Developer Choice Award LAST Place: NINJA SHADOW ASSAULT!
Wow.... 0 votes from the staff? Really? *Chuckles* This is actually something I am very proud of. No one felt obligated to vote for my cheesy game just because I sign their paychecks. That is the sign of a good game making organization - open, honest and fair. I love this team so much.

Video of the Event
We had a ninja video taping the behind the scenes footage of the contest from beginning to end. (Yikes, about 530GB of video footage to go through) We are not sure if the footage is usable, but we are going to try to edit it. We will keep you posted on the progress!

What are you going to do with these games?
We are going to edit our games and post the final versions on EbilGames. Although, some of the game engines are going to be used to build bigger, more substantial games in the future. Warlic has already begun porting the code to the Andriod and iPhone... cross your fingers for him!

Will you do this again?
YES! We are totally going to do this again. We will probably do this twice a year (maybe once per quarter.) You should all plan on joining us in the next one. Maybe for those of you with art skills we can build an engine you can use and you can create the art? See you then ;-) Battle on!

February 16, 2011

We hope you enjoy all fo the games. All of the games created for the Game-tastic 5-day gaming challenge can be found below.

http://portal.battleon.com/game-challenge/games/

February 11, 2011

Played though all of the new games? Which one is your favorite? Let your voice be heard by voting for your favorite game based on Fun, Graphics, Sound, Music, and overall awesomeness!

Vote now HERE and let the best Team win!

February 11, 2011

EbilCorp ninja attacks against the secret underground lab are becoming more frequent. In version 0.01 of Ninja Shadow Assault, a sneak attack begins an epic battle lasting... only 3 levels... and will ultimately face you against the ninja's most secret super technique: Multi-Ninja-Bear-Chainsaw!

Hopefully you will get a kick *coughs* out of this LIVE ACTION game and encourage us to continue working on it! Ghost did an incredible job on the animations!

February 11, 2011

Hi all, Zephyros here. Unfortunately, Hunt for the Jade Moglin is not going to be ready in time for the contest. There are all kinds of reasons, but that's really the bottom line. I ran into a bug late this afternoon that resulted in creating no-win conditions, and I had to be a little realistic about the time left and tasks remaining to make this a playable game.

The way I see it, though, if we're not going to meet the deadline, we might as well put together an even more awesome game for you guys. I'm going to finish this up and get it tied into the Master Account with an achievement for winning, and maybe even use that achievement to unlock an item shop in AQ.

I'd like to thank the rest of the Muscle Tribe (Hollow whipped up some amazing art on short notice, and without Aelthai to help clarify some of the game designs and work on setup and coding there's no way we would have gotten as far as we did), all the other teams in the contest, everyone who stopped by the #game-tastic chat room to talk shop this week, and the rest of the players who were watching! May the best game win!

February 11, 2011

February 11, 2011

Day 5! We made it! The Fat Panda minigame is 99.9999999% complete! The Team has some final bug testing and some very minor edits, but after that… we will be DONE!

Here’s a spoiler preview of what we have so far. We’re looking into making the derp food bigger so fat panda can become even fatter! That’s the object of the game, afterall ^___^

As long as Artix doesn’t steal Yorumi from us…again…grrr…we hope to release our game first! Yay!

OH YEAH! In AQWorlds tonight… a special shop in Battleon will be released so you can bring FAT PANDA to the world of Lore!

Waahhahaa! Fat Pandas rule!

February 11, 2011

This game is like a glimpse into the furthest reaches of your mind.  Is it a game or is it a new type of musical instrument ?  I don't actually know.... The answer is mysterious.  All I can say is that you should spend a few minutes to experiment and explore this musical sandbox...  Triple Rainbow All the way!

Organism is really a first step...  There is so much we can do from here now that we have the pieces together and working... Ever since I can remember,  I have always wanted to create something like this... There were many firsts in this project.  We used an excellent open source game engine called PushButton to handle the game physics.  It was truly a blast to delve into it and learn the inner workings of this powerful engine.  It also freed up a lot of my time to actually create the music backend for Organism...  This was NOT easy to do in Flash....  

Dage, Mido, Desil and Nythera really did an AWESOME job on this one! Together, we overcame a ton of challenges in a ridiculously short period of time!  I wasn't sure it would even be possible - and yes, some things were not.... others were.  I feel our entry in the AE Game Callenge is truly unique and addictive!  It is definitely unlike anything we've done before!  I hope everyone enjoys it!

Here's a Gameplay preview!

Build your own musical instrument and listen as the organisms play it!

-Warlic

February 11, 2011

That's right, Rolith and I are at the Lab working on the game challenge and other projects. After midnight. Hopefully the undead don't invade, because Artix is at home working on HIS game challenge project and I am not sure our arsenal of nerf projectiles will be enough for me to protect Rolith.

J6 is also working extra-late on Gnome-Man's Land! He just sent us the newly updated title screen and user interface and MAN are they pretty! Here's a peek:

Those undead are going to be boned in short order!

I wonder if I can figure out how to work the super Coffeemaker o' DOOM? I have a feeling Rolith and I are going to need it before too much longer!

See you tomorrow! Later today!  The deadline is in 16 and a half hours! GOGOGOGOGOGOGO!

February 11, 2011