Back from FGS and GDC in San Francisco! Wow, what a crazy 10 days. Heres a quick round up:
I travelled over to San Fran with now life time buddies ChrisJeff and Jay Armstrong. We got on like a house on fire and have big plans together for the future, more on that real soon!
My FGS talk on Aesthetics and Branding went pretty well. I was tired from the 16 hour flight the day before, but got some good feedback and people seemed to enjoy it! You can find a live stream of the presentation here.
I met a LOT of great people at FGS, including Joey Betz, Dan McNeely (Armor Games) and John Cooney (jmtb02), who I’ve worked with for years but never had the opportunity of meeting in person. Achievement Unlocked 3 was up for a Mochi Award, but understandably lost to the frankly awesome Incredipede, so better luck next year! Shout out to my man Jay Armstrong who won the Most Creative Game award for Super Adventure Pals! It kinda felt like a win for me as well because I kinda stole the award…
GDC was also a fantastic experience, it was hugely inspiring to be around so many like minded people and to get a glimpse of the crazy world beyond indie games. We made it to a bunch of great parties and generally had a ridiculously good time!
One highlight for me was an impromptu meetup of flash game developers which consisted of myself, ChrisJeff, Jay Armstrong, jmtb02, Joey Betz, the Mochi Media team, Toge Production guys, John from Notdoppler, Anya from Addicting Games, the Con Artists team, the Kongregate team, Brad Bourne and more… It was rather surreal drinking with so many massive names in our industry but was certainly a night to remember!
After GDC we chilled out a bit and did some touristy stuff, like biking the Golden Gate bridge and checking out the Japanese tea gardens. San Francisco is an amazing city and possibly my favourite place out of anywhere I’ve ever visited. Everywhere you look has great food, drink and people. My kind of place, roll on next year!
I have a couple of massive games to release this month so keep an eye out!
My latest game with Jmtb02 is out now! Super Duck Punch is the first game we’ve worked on together for Kongregate, and it turned out to be one of our most ridiculously insane games to date. Go play it out now!
New business cards for FGS/GDC! Just over a week until we head over to San Francisco. Exciting times!
Heres some sneaky screengrabs from RocketPets, the new game I’ve been working on with Jay Armstrong! Its a distance based game focused on collecting coins and upgrading your pets to get as far as possible!
The game has been coming along blindingly fast and should hopefully be finished and out in the next few weeks!
I’m working on a new game with Jay Armstrong! Its the first time we’ve worked together but its going really well, the games looking great and coming together super fast. Heres a teaser, screenshots soon!
Super excited about this, I’m speaking at FGS in San Francisco this march! My talk will be covering ideas on how you can use aesthetics and branding to make a game more appealing and maximise its potential success.
Click here for a list of speakers and a slightly more in depth overview of my talk!
I’ll be in San Fran for 10 days with fellow flash game developers Chris Jeffrey and Jay Armstrong. We’ll also be attending some of GDC and the Indie Games Festival which should be great fun. I’m really looking forward to meeting loads of great people, especially guys like Jmtb02, Joey Betz and Dan McNeely who I’ve worked with for years but never met!
Achievement Unlocked 3 is up for a Mochi award too, which is especially exciting since this is the first awards event that I’ll have attended!
I’ve also got some other secret plans with Jay and Chris that I can hopefully talk about soon, a new game I’ve just started working on, and Crush The Castles Adventures to release so keep your eyes peeled!
Q:I'd like to know what program do you use except flash cs5, if any. And is there a name for the style/technique you use, i'd like to learn something about it as i like the way your work looks. Best wishes and keep up the good work :)
Anonymous
Pretty much all the work I do is drawn in the Flash IDE (so yeah, like cs5 though im actually on cs6 now). Sometimes use a bit of photoshop to touch things up but thats not really part of my usual workflow.
Q:what is the game called whe this blue penguin shoots others?
Anonymous
Penguinz! http://armorgames.com/play/3454/penguinz
Little bit late on this one, but a few games I worked on placed in the JayIsGames best of 2012 awards!
Sushi Cat 2: The Great Purrade came 3rd in the Action or Arcade category, and Achievement Unlocked 3 came 1st in the Puzzle Platform category!
Its always fantastic to get some recognition in things like this, thanks to everyone that voted!
Freelance Video Game Artist, based in Cheltenham, UK
