What’s up with Google? Whatever I search for I get the message
Strange things happen. Did somebody haxxorz Google?
Update: The official Google explanation.
Just as I thought life couldn’t get any better, I found out that The Color of Doom is a student showcase winner in the Independent Games Festival.
I made the end credits music together with my friends in The Brown Pumas. The song is also used in the trailer.
All of us contributed to the lyrics.
Victory dance!!
Oh no…I forgot that my foot is b0rked. 
Hi everyone!
I created a walkthrough for those of you who wants to know how to break a foot. Enjoy!
The adventure genre is almost instinct, and rightfully so. I’ve been playing video games for about 25 years and I must say, things are improving. The commercial industry might go through a “fear of innovation period” but it’s still much better than how it used to be.
I remember playing Simon the Sorcerer when I was a kid. At that time I found the story intriguing but hated the gameplay. I’d get stuck, try different things for hours, look for a walkthrough at some random BBS, ending up combining the fishing pole with the wooden figurine or something equally silly. It didn’t make sense then, it doesn’t make sense now.
The communication is horrible in Grim Fandango. You constantly get a couple of choices that you go through just to follow the story. Don’t get me wrong, the story is awesome, but that’s all there is to it. Grim Fandango would make a great movie. Gameplay though, as in what you as a player actually do, is so flawed I can only play the game one hour at a time without getting annoyed.
Die adventure game genre, and stay that way!
Not me! I don’t play WoW anymore. But I stumbled upon an article at GameSpy which is quite amusing and grasps the feeling of playing WoW really well.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/world-of-warcraft-wrath-of-the-lich-king/941576p1.html
Here I am, 30 years old, and I was obsessing over the opinions of random gamers, some of them probably children.
Every now and then I google You Have to Burn the Rope to see what’s going on in the blogo/forumsphere. A reoccuring comment is that the game makes people feel good about themselves. When I wrote Now you’re a hero I didn’t intend to do that. In a subconscious way perhaps but not intentionally.
To win or not to win at IGF? It would be great to win of course, but then again, I’m aware that we are kind of the baby brothers here. YHTBTR became sort of a meme and I think a part of the reason is because of the effort/reward ratio. No matter if we win or lose, I made a lot of people feel good about themselves and that makes me feel good about myself.
As we approached the new year, the best of 2008 awards started to pop up. I was really happy that Gamasutra, IndieGames and RPS liked You Have to Burn the Rope (YHTBTR). The Gaming Club over at Slate’s gave the game some attention while Spike TV used my song “Now you’re a hero” at the end of their show The Next Great Game Gods. I celebrated when Jayisgames finally wrote a full post about the game and as the article by Stuart Horvath in the New York Daily News was published I was quite surprised. YHTBTR by the side of GTA IV, Fallout 3, Braid and the other great games was an honor beyond my wildest dreams.
To top it all of, YHTBTR is nominated for Innovation in the 2009 Independent Games festival. I really want to go to San Fransisco to attend the awards but I’m not sure I can. The tickets + expenses will surely amount to at least 1000 EUROS which is way over my budget. Oh well, you never know what might happen.
I read some comments about the nomination and realised that some people think YHTBTR don’t belong on the list. I can’t make you like the game and if you don’t, to be honest, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. But I want to make something clear which is obviously just a misunderstanding. People who think YHTBTR was something Kian and me threw together in a hurry need to think again. To get it in perspective, let me tell you about the text on the way to the boss. If you count the hours me and Kian talked about colors, placements, alternative ideas, testing it on people and so on, it amounts to at least ten. Do the math and you’ll understand how long it took to complete the full game.
Surprised?
An old saying fits well here:
Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest.