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 everyone! Some of our friends make games too!
We’ve been friends with Max and Josh aka JohnnyTwoShoes for a while now, and they’re always amazing us with their games. They’re two brothers who work on iPhone/iPad games together, they’re also two of the nicest chaps you’ll ever meet. They love games and always get far too excited when talking about them – just like us!
Ladies? I give you: Johnny Two Shoes!
We’ve been getting sneak peeks of their latest game for a while, and it’s totally awesome. We are super excited to hear that it’s finally been released! It’s called Plunderland and it’s out on iPad and iPhone now! Did we mention it has pirates in it? You must buy it immediately!
Just a quick update into how we are feeling here about launching Joe Danger and all the positive reviews we are getting..
Yeah, pretty exciting!
We also got reviewed in some proper real-life Sunday broadsheet newspapers here in the UK! Both the Sunday Times and the Observer featured reviews of Joe Danger. It’s great to find out from your parents that they are reading a review of your game in their regular Sunday paper over breakfast. Not so good when you find out which infamous screenshot they decided to go with..
The Sunday Times reviews Joe Danger
The Observer's take on the Master of Disaster: Joe Danger
Don’t tell anyone. We have done something naughty.
We have infiltrated PSM3, and covered their magazine in Danger. PSM-Online
PSM3 is known as “The Playstation 3 magazine” and we have managed to spread our propaganda across 8 different pages (6 page feature and 2 page review). This is not just to further our own needs, but the needs of every indie.
Featured this month is a 6 page feature on indie development. As you can see when covering this topic, it’s important to draw equal attention to everyone…
There’s also a TWO page review in the magazine. We don’t know the score yet, but we’ll settle for no score less than the number of pages we’re on.
On Friday July 2nd go to your newsagents and shout “DAAAANGEEEEEER!!!”, they’ll know what you’re after.
There isn’t a single day during the last two years that the four of us haven’t dreamt of this day, and here we are… We’re getting all emotional.
Joe Danger is available on the PlayStation Network Store now!
We’ve literally poured everything we have into Joe Danger. Going it alone, there have been times when it’s been rather tough, but to see people enjoying what we’ve done is the most rewarding feeling in the world. It’s why we’re so excited for the release.
To those of you who have already downloaded it, thank you so much. We’ve been having a great time watching people set insane highscores on the leaderboards. Also a huge thanks to everyone who is spreading the word about Joe Danger and telling their friends – we’re your biggest fans!
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
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?
Apparently, Video Games is a business… We were as surprised as anyone! I guess this means we need to brush up on our graph-making skills. Expect future blog posts to talk about sales projections, tax breaks and the benefits of middleware.
Luckily, it’s really not that kind of business! We found out last week that we’ve been nominated for the following 3 Develop Awards!
Best New Download IP
Best New Studio
Best Micro Studio
We are super happy to get nominated for these. With the four of us stuck in this room together, it’s very easy to feel invisible – News like this reminds us there’s an outside world that knows we exist!
When we were getting Joe Danger rated we had to send a video showing a playthrough of the whole game. Sean and Dave sat down to do it, and seemed to enjoy it too much. I thought it’d be fun to show some of the footage they recorded…
This took them many hours. I don’t quite know what happened, but it seems to have made them go a little giddy. You’ll have to forgive their empty-headed laughing.
Here we see Sean doing one of our tricky coin dash levels:
This video shows Sean making an evil level using the sandbox, and then passing the pad to Dave to try and complete it:
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.
I know it seems like a long time ago, back when flares and moustaches were in fashion, but I thought it would be worth writing a word or two about our trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Covering the whole week would be something of an epic undertaking so I’ll just keep it to a couple of the highlights.
The People
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this several times before, but this is what it’s all about. Seeing people take the controller, play the game and genuinely enjoy themselves. Particularly those who begin with ‘this game isn’t for me’ but who inevitably don’t put the controller down for half an hour, then return later with their friend to play splitscreen. As a programmer in most companies this isn’t something you typically get to see. You work for however long at a desk to create a game, then it magically appears in shops. There’s no point at which you witness total strangers (i.e. not your friends being polite) playing the game you’ve slaved away on for so long, and actually having fun!
This was immeasurably encouraging for us – it confirmed that we were on the right track, that people do enjoy the game and that we aren’t just crazy. These are the people that you don’t get to see – the people you’re making it for, the people that are one day going to appreciate all that effort. Hopefully.
The Award Ceremony
The awards ceremony was fun and it certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. But then having not read anything about the IGF award ceremony itself prior to going I’d been expecting something akin to a school hall with a cardboard box for a stage and a tramp giving out the awards. Turns out the IGF awards were the precursor to the Game Developer Awards so it was all very fancy; suits, massive audience, enormous screens, free wine. We were way out of our depth and we stuck out like a sore thumb. Except for me. I fitted right in. No I didn’t.
Us with Andy Schatz, creator of Monaco, winner of the Internet
What really terrified us was when Joe Danger was announced and came up on the big screens. That was the moment that I think we were all secretly hoping that we wouldn’t win and have to get up on the huge stage in front of hundreds of people who had absolutely no idea who we were. But everything turned out ok because we didn’t win.
The Crab
Then there was this:
Before
After
The crab feast. This is like, 600 crabs. Sean had to face off against them in an arena and fight them to the death. How different things could have been.
Pixel-Lab have organised another excellent event: World of Love, Indie Game Development Conference. It’s on June 25th at Channel 4 in London.
“World of Love is going to be a UK one day extravaganza for indie game developers to chew the fat over everything related to their craft/practice/art. From the intricacies of development to dealing with publishing, we’ll have some of the foremost UK indie developers on hand to share their absolute best”
If there is one thing we love, it’s chewing fat, and extravaganzas. That’s two things but let’s not dwell on the past.
There will be a number of interesting speakers, and Sean. Come along and see what’s on their minds!
Hello everybody! Sorry we’ve been so quiet lately, we’ve been in the thick of it. I don’t think any of us have ever worked so hard, except that one time where Dave had to earn his flight back from Thailand, but he doesn’t like to talk about that.
Getting ready for GDC, then PAX East all the while trying to finish the game has been quite the marathon (ask anyone who’s seen us lately (which is practically nobody) – we look like extras from Shaun of the Dead), but we’re almost there now. You should see the fruit of our labour very soon and we very much hope you’ll like it.
Coffee won't fix this
We’ll also pop up some posts about how GDC and PAX went possibly sometime before the next GDC and PAX.
Wow, that certainly is a big logo!
Incase you hadn’t guessed, we are going to be at PAX East! It’s happening in Boston on the 26th – 28th of March. We’ll be showing Joe Danger in our very own booth! We’ve never had a booth before… If you’re attending, please come and play! We’ll probably be rather jetlagged so you’ll have to talk slowly. It’s super exciting though – we’ll be able to show off some brand new stuff! If you’re coming, we’d love to hear from you via twitter @hellogames or email hello@hellogames.co.uk!
On another note – GDC was an amazing experience. Hopefully we’ll be able to do a proper write up soon. I got to play Monaco co-op with Andy Schatz which was toooo cool. We met so many other indies and they were all really nice to us… Shank blew my socks off too! A big thanks to everyone who came and played Joe Danger!
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.
