Welcome to Friday! This week we’ve been mainly gearing up for something special that we’re going to be talking about next week. We’re super excited! It’s been long in the coming… But we’ve still had time to look at stupid stuff on the internet, obviously. Like this:
What’s been keeping us working is this guy, though. Hazel has had him on her screen permanently for days now. Her productivity has gone through the roof.
This collection of anime backgrounds is incredible, though Ryan couldn’t resist noticing stuff like a glass that doesn’t have a shadow, the old pedant.
Then we’ve been thinking about space via this trailer, which is for a documentary called Continuum, which is about what astronauts who’ve seen Earth from space think about our planet. Super beautiful. Obviously, we’ve also been obsessed with Commander Hadfield’s tweets from the ISS. We really want to go to space.
Hello! We’ve decided to spark up a regular list of links and stuff that we’ve passed the week reading and playing. It’s a little insight into why making games takes years and how bugs happen.
Killing goblins in Candy Quest is a fine sport
First up, did you ever play Progress Quest? Candy Box is EVEN BETTER than the RPG that plays itself. That merchant’s so creepy that we threw all our candies on the ground to make him sad. That’s winning isn’t it?
After seeing the new trailer we’re all scarily excited about GTA V, because we had our funnest times driving about in San Andreas and trying to find Bigfoot. We identify with Trevor most, obviously. By the way, we would like to think that we wouldn’t have made these comments on GTA V stories and videos if we were younger but we can’t guarantee it. Come to think about it we can’t guarantee we didn’t make any of them today either.
Remember how exciting facing down this guy in Shadow of the Colossus was?
Speaking of Bigfoot, Eurogamer’s feature about the quest to find the secrets of Shadow of the Colossus is awesome. We hadn’t heard of most of these. Oh god we have to go and play it this weekend now.
This crazy guy lived without the internet for a year. Bet he had to spent the whole time laughing at keyboard cat. Apparently he can somehow be reabsorbed into society. Who’s going to tell him about Ed Balls and Gangnam Style?
Finally, we’re into this GPU-powered water physics demo. Needs more sharks/squid though.
Hello! I’m Hazel, programmer at Hello Games. Since it’s Friday afternoon, I wanted to talk about where I went the other weekend – a demoparty in Germany. Revision 2013 in Saarbrucken, in fact.
Demoparties are massive gatherings of coders, artists and musicians, who show, create and compete demo productions, which are pure and sublime feats of realtime digital art. What that breaks down as is basically four days of loud music, drinking, sitting in the dark and writing code (so, yes, I took a holiday from programming to go do some programming).
Actually, most proper programmers take interest in the demoscene, but going to a demoparty is an awesome experience. There’s a constant friendly party atmosphere, but the biggest thing is watching incredible demos with hundreds of other people and realising that this is the first time they’ve ever been shown off in public.
What were the best demos this year? I’m glad you asked! Here are my picks!
Brain Control – Turtles All the Way Down (64k PC Intro)
This is really consistently stylish, and of course amazing from a technical perspective too. It won first in the PC demo category. REFRACTIONS PORN!
Pattern Skank by Hoffman (Tracked Music)
Demoscene isn’t just about code and visuals; here’s some nice music, which won first place in the Tracked Music category.
Smoke and Mirrors by Ghostown and Loonies (Amiga Demo)
I am not old enough to be able to tell you exactly why this is cool (Sean is but he’s too busy grumbling about the good old days of the Amiga demoscene to comment), but there’s some amazing 3D work and lighting. It got first place in the Amiga demo category!
Last week we realised players have collected eight billion gold coins in JD Touch. If we had a dollar for every gold coin collected, that’d be like EIGHTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. No wait… Less? For the record Mum, we don’t get a dollar for each for them. Only Shigeru Miyamoto was smart enough to get that kind of deal. MIYAMOTO!
The update is going to add our most requested feature, iCloud support, so you can play on your iPhone then continue on your iPad, or vice versa. We’ve also fixed every bug reported so far, as well as made a bunch of tweaks to gameplay and such.
Do you want to see iCloud support in action? Watch this!
It’s actually taken way longer than we expected to finish this update! We got a bit excited adding a few new game mechanics, and now that has potentially become something far, far bigger. But it’s not quite ready yet. I probably shouldn’t say much more at the moment, but I’ll be in touch as soon as I can (it’s super exciting).
Also, look out later for a chance to tell us what you’d like to see in Joe Danger Touch’s next update. Engage imaginations … now! We’re super excited to find out what crazy stuff you come up with. Also a bit scared!
Ahem! Since we released Joe Danger on iOS things have gotten a little bit crazy, and we need some help.
Last year a beautiful person called Stevie joined our little group of creative misfits. He played with the idea of making a new version of Joe Danger for iOS and then together we created a chart topping success and one of the highest rated iPhone games EVER! It’s been a liberating and bohemian development, but also so rewarding for everyone involved. If you’ve played it, you’ll know it’s a total labour of love.
We really want to continue building on the magic we’ve started, and like Joe Danger Touch we never just do a straight port of our games. It’s always something new and unique.
We’ve got so many other ideas and opportunities like that, but we’re too small ( right now ) to do them all!
That’s where you come in.
Programmers!
We’re looking for programmers with experience, or maybe even an existing team to take on a project start to finish.
Perhaps you are a programmer sat in the plush offices of a proper games company browsing jobs pages, wishing you had the chance to go indie (maybe it’s even you and your friends). Maybe you already broke away to do your own thing, but you are getting lonely… and realising that baked beans get a bit samey after a few months. We’ve been there… have you tried them with cheese?
Hopefully you enjoy freedom, but also need some support. Ideally you have industry experience, you actually like bringing existing games to new platforms, but want to create something fresh while you are at it.
Sean doesn’t believe in producers, he thinks they are mythical creatures. Like platypuses. On iOS though, he realised he spent a lot of time doing a job that sounds an awful lot like production. Sometimes he did a schedule, sometimes he wrote support emails, sometimes he got an eighties tribute band to record them screaming “DANGER”, and one time he organised QA/localisation across 23 territories.
You would almost certainly be better at this than him. Maybe you have a year or twos experience and are so enthusiastic it hurts. Maybe you have lots of experience, and you are going to turn us into a proper company.
You are infinitely more organised than us, you enjoy spreadsheets, spinning plates, talking on the phone and helping facilitate people getting the highest quality games made.
You can find our general jobs listing here. Don’t let the serious corporate speak you find there fool you though. Hello Games is actually a very small little group. We’re not super actively hiring and we can’t reply to every email as quick as we’d like. We do read every CV that’s sent to us though and if you are as good as we think you are, then we’ll definitely get in touch.
