Hello Games

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!

Tea is very important here at Hello Games. It is one of the pillars upon which our might is founded, along with deception, slave labour and beards. Dave was musing over the number of cups of tea we’ve consumed since we began and I thought I’d expand a little.

As he stated, we have consumed an estimated 8542 cups of tea. Coffee largely takes a back seat to tea. In fact only Dave and I drink it, and fairly rarely at that. This is nicely illustrated by the below graph, showing that we’ve consumed an estimated 27 cups of coffee compared to the 8542 cups of tea, which gives us a tea/coffee ratio of 1 : 0.00316.

Tea vs Coffee

I would however like to point out the effect coffee has – mainly on Dave. This is demonstrated by the below graph.

We can see that the number of sensible statements made by Dave is actually inversely proportional to the amount of coffee he has drunk. Unfortunately his volume is proportional, meaning that if he arrives in the morning having had coffee it is highly likely we will:

A)     Hear him before we see him.

B)     Not have the faintest idea what he’s talking about.

Note how ‘percentage of sense made by Dave’ never reaches 100. Equally, he is never completely silent, preferring instead to emit unusual and often disturbing noises throughout the day.

We even have a set of rules surrounding tea. The order in which we arrive in the morning dictates the size of the mug you have for the day, along with who must make the first round. The only exception to the Mug Allocation Sequence is Grant who always drinks his tea from a bowl. The one thing you can see from this is that we quite clearly spend too much time here together.

We once ran out of tea. Grant didn’t react well:

Grant with no tea

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!

Today we had the pleasure of a visit from some of the lovely chaps from Media Molecule. They made the treacherous journey through wind and rain, sleet and snow, fire and brimstone to cross the river and discover the luxuriousness of our plush penthouse offices.

Spatious AND comfortable

Anyone who’s seen our office will know that fitting eight people into it is something of a Tetris-esque challenge, but we usually have to pay people to sit on our laps so we were happy for the human contact.

We handed the pad over with some trepidation, after all it’s not every day the likes of Mm pop round to your house to play. Thankfully Joe provoked plenty of laughs and smiles from the crew. They also successfully re-created the entirety of LittleBigPlanet within the editor. Awesome. They should put an editor in their game.

Hello Molecule?

Well we made it through in one piece, though we may not be the same men we were at the beginning. Particularly Grant, he’s no longer a man, I’m not entirely sure what he is but he scares me just a little. 4 days of non-stop talking (not a problem for Sean) is quite a task, and frankly, I didn’t know it was possible to be in so much pain from simply standing all day (what a disgrace I am), but it was all more than worth it. We met a lot of very cool people, and we’d just like to say thankyouverymuchindeedy to all the lovely people we got such a great response from, along with Eurogamer and Pixel-lab for allowing us to introduce Joe to the public for the first time.

Here are some of the nice things people have said:

IndieGames

ThatVideoGameBlog

Resolution Magazine

The queue for Joe Danger... *cough*

I should also quickly mention the Show & Yell event that David from Pixel-lab organised on the friday night after the Expo. This was an informal get together of indie developers with a selection giving brief presentations/Q&As about, well, whatever they felt like really. Sean gave a talk about the birthing process of killer whales and how this is analogous to the production, or ‘birthing’ if you will, of an independent game. He may have also briefly mentioned our development process and how we got this far. There was also a lot of beer.

Where's Wally?

We’ll be doing a more in-depth update on the Expo and Show & Yell at some point in the coming days, along with the competition that we didn’t get round to running as we were so busy. And quite frankly I’m pretty sure nobody wanted to win a Joe Danger t-shirt we’d been wearing all day in the man-sweat filled expo hall

End of the Expo. Exhausted but happy, Sean has just pleasured his final visitor.

We’re all very excited at the moment (Dave even did a bit of wee in his pants) as we’re preparing to show the game publically for the very first time. We are very proud to be showing at the Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer Expo alongside some awesome games like Plain Sight, Eufloria (previously know as Dyson) and Time Fcuk. Apparently there’s also a bunch of other old tat at the Expo which you’re probably not interested in – Assassin’s Creed 2 and Uncharted 2, small-time stuff you probably haven’t heard of.

Everyone should come along and play Joe Danger and let us know what you think. It’s an exciting, but terrifying prospect, its first public outing – I imagine like taking your child to its first day of nursery, only completely different.

We’ll be running competitions where you can win a kiss from our very own Hairy Grant and other useless crap. Or perhaps something better like a free copy of Joe Danger and other ace Joe related prizes!

Hairy Grant

Grant may try to kiss you anyway. Beware.

So come down, play the game, meet the team – more fun than a dead clown on a rollercoaster.

We’re in this month’s Edge. How ace is that? Being in a magazine you have read since you were a kid… it’s very ace.

You can read a summary here, but its only a summary, because we take up four pages in the magazine. Four pages. Four. We’re even on the inside covers (and apparently have a mention on the cover, I’ve not seen it yet, but if that’s true – I’ll eat my cat).

It gets better, they had never met such helpless buffoons before, and thought it would be funny if we wrote a column for Edge online. So we will, starting from tomorrow and it will be funny. In its own way.

Edit – Edge online column is here!

As you might imagine, I spend a fair amount of my time feverishly scribbling away at doodles. Brandon over at Offworld spotted some of my work, and had some awfully nice things to say. Thanks Brandon – I kind of love you right now!

I’ll hopefully be showing more of my inane scrawlings in the not too distant future.

We have been keeping quiet, so quiet in fact that no one actually knows we exist yet. All that is about to change FOREVER! (A little bit.)

We’re going to show everyone that you don’t need money to get lots of press. Instead, we have all written positive thoughts on a piece of paper that I keep under my pillow. Its early days, but we believe it’s working.

If you sometimes write things and would like to help, then get in touch! We will say things which are daring, charming and controversial. Guaranteed.

We would like to tell you about us and our game and don’t care if you write for a magazine, a blog, school newspaper or on the side of a public toilet (actually it would be nice to get some good press there for once).

We have been sneaking up on the world, and now we are ready to pounce. If you would like to be pounced on too, then please do say.