By popular request, we’ve decided to put out the soundtrack from Bob Came In Pieces for free!
The OST was composed by Christoffer Holmström, who’s also responsible for the music in STORM – Frontline Nation.
You can download the full OST for free here: www.ludosity.com/downloads/BCiP_OST.zip (ogg format)
You could say alot of things about EA’s so-called Indie Bundle over on Steam. Personally I’m not upset that EA uses the word “indie” like that – to be honest the games do have an indie flare to them. What is indie? What is art? Bla bla bla.
However, after having played the otherwise lovely Warp tonight for the first time, I must rant a little about publishers. Specifically how they fuck games up post-development. Let me describe what I’ve just endured:
I buy the game on Steam, install, boot it up. Something that looks like Origin pops up and asks me for my CD key. I find it and enter it. I then start the game and play for 30 minutes or so. Quit for a while and come back. My save does not exist! Because I didn’t log in properly the first time. What?
So I log in – I’m greeted by a standard login screen, but it doesn’t say anywhere what it will log me into. To find out, I press “forgot password” and enter an email I usually use for this. Lo and behold, I get an email from Origin. OK, Origin it is, so back into the game and log into Origin within the game. Wait, I already did that before, I activated it on Origin already? Anyways, onward to the game alrady.
Not so fast, now you need to enter the serial key. The hell, I’ve already entered it! GAWD, okay, I guess you need to enter it twice..? Let’s see, copy the CD key again, try and paste. Nope, the field wont accept paste. Shift+Tab to find the key through the Steam overlay, memorize the first four, shift back, enter, shift back, memorize, shift back, enter four more…. FUUUCK THIS GAME I DONT WANNA PLAY ANYMORE!!
I don’t think for a minute this is Trapdoor’s fault. It’s obviously the publisher that pushed for certain features stemming from their current business plans. But it’s so GODDAMN TACKY – as a customer I just say “fuck it” and walk away.
Zynga recently acquired DrawSomething for $210m and instantly started messing with the product. It increased the ads, and changed the login system and some other stuff. This has led to a lot of grief with the players, the ads of course are annoying, but even worse, some people have lost their sessions from before the updates and now have to start over. And so, since they day Zynga took over, the userbase have declined from 15m to 10m (it actually peaked on the day of acquisition). All this because the publisher can’t handle their own area of expertise.
Publishers, please. Don’t suck.
Exploding onto the scene is Kamikaze Kitten, our latest prototype. As usual it was developed by Juha, but concepted by Nils.
This is what Nils has to say: “The idea was born while pondering alternative ways of disposing enemies in action games. A cat was chosen to be the protagonist because of their many lives to sacrifice. Also for their cuteness adding to the absurdity of constantly blowing yourself up.”
So there you have it kids. Head on over and give it a whirl !
Yesterday we launched a new game on Ludosity Play, called Smashanoid! Check it out here !
The idea was born when a couple of us were playing Smash Bros. and using Jigglypuff as a soccer ball, trying to smash him into a goal. We basically took that concept and made a SNES-looking sports game out of it! It’s quite fun, and we’ve already held several office-competitions and are having a blast with it ourselves.
One caveat is that Unity web players bugs out with two gamepads, which is why we’re also offering it as a download – two gamepads works perfectly if you download the game, and it’s really meant to be played that way.
Enjoy!
I accidentally deleted our Youtube account a while back, so no videos currently work on this site either. Youtube is a bit of a black box when it comes to support, so I consider the possibility of restoring the account slim to none. We’ve started on uploading videos to a Vimeo account instead though, so the videos should be up again soon, please let us know if anything is still missing.
Stay tuned!
The videos are back, and now there’s also a Ludosity Showreel of sorts, check it out: http://vimeo.com/couchmode/ludosity/
Ittle Dew is progressing nicely, and we have it up and running on the majority of platforms supported by Unity. That’s Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and now also PS3! It’s slightly awesome to see your own game on a PS3 console, a bit like magic really.
But we weren’t really satisfied with only those platforms, one is sorely missing. You can’t really call a launch ‘multi-platform’ unless it’s on the ZX Spectrum! So without further ado, here’s a snapshot from the game in its full glory. 16 colors, 8*8 tiles, no transparency – the way we all really like it. Stay tuned for a release date.
Juha has just posted a new prototype game over at Play called Moment in the Sun !
It’s a simple game about going from A to B in the shadows. You can manipulate the sun and move boxes around to create a shaded path to the goal.
Don’t forget to like the games you enjoy on our Play page – it’s the way we keep track of which games to move ahead with in the future!
In Ittle Dew, there’s a breed of scary monsters called Jenny Rich’s. They dress up in animal costumes and roam their castle, walking about, talking with eachother, playing yatsy, and generally making a scene. Not really, they just walk around there, and you know, it’s their castle so..
Anyway, I wanted to post some animations straight from the game, so I stringed together some animations into a GIF. Hope you enjoy it!
Why Ittle just runs into their castle and kills these guys… It’s really despicable!
A classic fika
Today we launched a new game on or Play portal, and afterwards celebrated with some afternoon fika. During this little 45 min break we also held some internal pitching, to select the next concept that will become a Play game.
Everybody have been given the heads up during the preceeding week, to prepare a single-sheet concept drawing/pitch, and was given the opportunity to pitch. Each game got like 2-3 minutes of pitch time, then everybody voted, and we ended up with a nice new concept that Juha will start working on next week.
Previously, years ago, we had Friday sessions where everybody was encouraged to brainstorm new ideas on the spot. We set aside a couple of hours for this every other Friday, and while there was no pressure to produce anything, it was our way of feeding new ideas into the company. It failed miserably and noone liked those sessions. Turns out you don’t innovate on the spot, when asked to.
If we would have had really tight rules and themes for what we could produce, like draw 3 words from a hat and make 10 concepts out of those, that might work better. But to get unlimited reins like that in a dedicated time slot didnt work at all.
Now the team is encouraged to write down ideas on paper during the week (taking time off for this is perfectly fine) and then present them on the Friday. Those with ideas and drive will participate, the others will just sit back, enjoy the fika, and vote on the games. Also, during the pitching, many will chime in with their own takes on it, which further feeds more ideas.
I think we have found a pretty nice setup now! We’ll tweak the process over time of course, but I definitely feel we’re on the right track. Especially the fact that we have a guy that does nothing but prototypes – not only is prototyping a way to measure a concepts’ value, it also feeds alot of energy back to the main team when new stuff is happening all the time and the small ideas we have are being worked on.
I feel extremely good about the future!
Hey, check out our new game Bota, it’s up now over at our Play corner! It’s a fun take on Dota and TD’s in a way, but much more tactical.
Here are Juhas words on the game “Inspired by Dota, Bota is a different take on that where you handle and tune the NPC spawning. The game was developed as part of our new rapid prototyping process trying to find new game concepts to develop. Possible additions to this concept could be hero units, upgrades, resources and alternate paths.”
Also, the Play page has had a little overhaul, one step towards becoming more of a “top list” that reflects the votes (or likes) on the games. And I hope you didn’t miss our last game either, Missile Draw!