Hello Games

Bit of a delayed post this, but other things got in the way!

When we released Joe Danger last month, we decided that racing tiny motorcycles was the only logical way to celebrate. So we invited a few friends along to a MiniMoto event and raced for what seemed like about 12 hours! The bikes felt like little death-mobiles, and my eyes hurt from laughing so much.

Let's get DANGEROUS

It was excellent fun, even though I was the only person to crash, someone had foolishly placed a truck-tyre on the side of the track – how was I to know you were supposed to stay ON the track?

There is nothing funnier than men on miniature motorbikes.

Unfortunately no-one took any photos of my double backflip over the sharktank, or the bit when Ryan punched Dave into a hurdle. I’m also pretty sure Sean spent half his time talking to an overly enthusiastic mole.

Hello Games is pretty awesome – how would you like to come and work here?

We’re a teeny tiny small studio with big ideas, it’d be cool to meet some talented new people and go on adventures together. Exciting ones!

Here’s the “job description” – make fun games, drink tea, win awards and talk nonsense. You can have total creative freedom too, if you want.

Free to draw monsters eating rainbows

If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out our jobs page here.

It’s all a little bit much for me! Knowing people are out there playing the game is both awesome and terrifying. We’re bouncing off the walls with some of these reviews though, people seem to be really enjoying themselves!

We got a 9 from TheSixthAxis! They said some really nice things – we’re grinning like idiots… Again!

“don’t miss this one: seriously, it’s fantastic.”

We got 8/10 from eurogamer and a really nice review. They’ve also posted some videos of some of their attempts. Also Eurogamer Sweden gave us 9/10:

“If you like collecting things, going fast, beating times, posting scores… If you like videogames, basically, you ought to like this.”

Metacritic is a website review site run by robots, I believe they scan games with their laser eyes then assign a numerical value. It is considered the most important number in the universe – we’re currently assigned ‘89′ which makes us one of the highest rated games on PSN. So if you could all just stop reviewing the game now, that’d be great

Hello all!

We got our first ever review last night. I don’t really know what to say other than:
JOE DANGER GOT 9.5 ON IGN!

We are totally over the moon, we heard the review was going up at some point yesterday but had no idea whether it was going to be good or not. We had to wait until midnight to find out! It was a long looong day.

It’s really good to know that other people are enjoying playing the game as much as we do… One person anyway

We hear more reviews are on the way, we will continue to not sleep until then… Tea anyone?

June Danger?

Hello there everyone!

We’re extremely excited to announce that Joe Danger will be appearing on PlayStation Network NEXT WEEK!

We’ve worked realllly hard to make sure that we release everywhere at the same time, or nearly the same time!

8th of June:
All of America!

9th of June:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UAE, UK… Think that’s the lot.

Also, we got an awesome preview from Destructoid:
“I double dog dare you not to have fun with Joe Danger”

We’ll no doubt be spending the next few months desperately attempting to stay on top of the leaderboards.

Here you can see the four of us beavering away on Joe Danger, this is us working towards a big deadline. We started recording at around 10pm and finished around 7am the next day. Making it a lovely 22 hour day. Some people (lazy people?) say you can’t work productively doing those kind of hours, and that you just end up making silly mistakes. Utter pish posh, I never make mistakes!

A few key things you may notice:

• We drink a lot of tea.
• At one stage we eat some toast.
• Our office is full of chairs.
• We sit down a lot, especially me, I hardly move for about 4hrs testing the game – No wonder my neck hurts.
• Sean seems to spend half the night talking to Ryan, probably worrying about some “really important” code problem.
• Right at the end we decide everything is broken and go home.

Greetings!
We’re super busy trying to finish the game at the moment, like four ugly little elves on the run up to Christmas.

It’s not all work work work though, we’ve decided to temporarily relocate the studio to San Francisco! All four of us will be attending GDC and the IGF!
It’s been a while since we left the safety of these walls, so we’re all a little frightened. If you’re attending, please come and say hello and keep us company!

We’re going to be showing Joe Danger from the Thursday(11th) til the Saturday(13nd) somewhere on the show floor – it’ll be playable and everything!

Also, our very own Sean ‘Sean’ Murray is going to be speaking at the Indie Games Summit (9th). I imagine he’s going to be talking about his latest get-rich-quick scheme, it’ll no doubt involve a small initial investment and ultimately lead to him having to change his identity again. Anyway, you can read about it here – hopefully you can come!

Hello there!
We’re going to be at the Nottingham GameCityNights event tomorrow evening (25/02/10). We’ll be showing Joe Danger and saying some words out loud. It’d be lovely to see lots of people there!

There’s going to be games to play and people to talk to – I’ve also heard rumours that there’ll be snacks!

If you’re interested, you can find all the information right here.

Hope you can make it!

We had a very pleasant surprise on our first day back after Christmas. Joe Danger has been nominated for two awards at the Independent Games Festival! We got nominated for the Seamus McNally Grand Prize and the award for Technical Excellence. We thought it was a windup at first, some cruel soul toying with our fragile emotions, but it’s true! We are obviously over the moon. This means we get to visit San Francisco and meet loads of other indie developers – Hurrah!

Also, we have posted a few more titbits over on our Edge blog:

Hello Games Spouse – In which David describes how he fails to juggle life and a relationship.

Robots In Disguise – I waffle on about artists, programmers and robots.

No Comment – We comment about internet comments.

Sony and Microsoft: Round One – Sean talks about three legged cats, I forget why.


Also, also: IT’S SNOWING!

Phew! Joe Danger has finally been announced, we can all relax now. Big thanks to all the people who said nice things, truly our hearts are warmed.

You can read a few hands-on impressions at:

Eurogamer

NowGamer

There is also an interview up on Gamasutra here:

Gamasutra

We are doing a fortnightly column for Edge about our experiences in the world of independant games development. We’d love to hear what you think. You can read it here – well and truly out of our comfort zone!

Introducing our new mascot.

Imagine you’ve been baking a cake for a loved one, slaving away in the kitchen all morning. You’ve written them a love poem, carefully rendered in delicate fondant icing. Now imagine, upon presenting the cake, you realise you’ve spelt their name wrong… This is kind of how I felt after realising we’d accidently used ‘3nd’ instead of ‘3rd’. Oh well, we’re just going to have to use 3nd from now on and pretend it was all intentional.