Honeyslug

Bit of a weird thing to post this, but one from the heart of all of us at Honeyslug. If it’s true that BBC 6Music is for the chop, the airwaves, and certainly our office, will be a worse place because of it.

I latched onto 6Music reasonably early in it’s life, the brilliant radio duo of Mark and Lard had ran its natural course on Radio 1 and were sent their separate ways on the network. Radcliffe was a known entity whilst Marc Riley (Lard), and 6Music, were something of an unknown quantity. Thanks to the power of the Psion Wavefinder, one Saturday on 6Music, I sat there and listened to “Marc Riley’s Rocket Science” and suddenly I had something other than sports radio to listen to again.

In the subsequent years there have been a fantastic mix of broadcasters, countless new and exciting groups discovered, and controversy (one of those tedious call scandals that only the Daily Mail cared about came from 6, as did Russell Brand and, sadly, George Lamb).

I have two radio stations in my life, 5Live and 6Music, sports and news can sometimes bring you down, whilst the variety and sheer uplifting content always available from 6Music never fails to put a smile on our faces. Adam & Joe we’re, and will hopefully continue to be, very funny and entertaining, Shaun Keaveny has become an excellent replacement on Breakfast after the brilliant Phill Jupitus left. Jon Holmes Saturday show is a personal favourite, Marc Riley still champions new music with the zeal of the legendary John Peel. Gideon Coe, Bruce Dickenson Rock Show, Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone, Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show the list is endless and each offering a unique musical slant. I could bang on about shows of the past such as Brindsley Ford’s Dub Show, The Queens of Noize, etc…the list goes on and on.

6Music is more than listener figures, it’s a vital line for new and diverse music styles to be absorbed by avid music fans. It’s loss would be a travesty, only the other day my walk to the station was accompanied by Regina Spektor, the incredible Faith No More and then Jeff Buckley. That would only happen on one station. 6Music. Show your support for the station and don’t let it become part of a needless bloodletting to satisfy an indignant minority of BBC haters.

If you don’t know anything about 6Music, check out the station here.

If you do know about it and want to register your frustration, there’s a facebook group (I’m not normally an advocate, but make an exception with this) here.

In between much swearing at images or smashing of keyboards as yet another bit of a script goes haywire, we’re chuffed to let you know that a new version of Ric Rococo is now available on ace flash portal Miniclip.com. We’ve made a few nice little changes to it and added a new set of paintings, as well as a high score table. If you’re yet to experience the highs and lows of our wiry, light-fingered chum, why not bob along to the rather lovely Miniclip here. If that ace burst of Ric whets your appetite, why not snap up the iPhone version from the iTunes store, too!

Right back to my script…

10 PRINT “Makr is Skillo!”
20 GOTO 10

Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!
Makr is Skillo!

Makr! Gah!!! I give up!

A full man’s year ago, I risked life, limb and mockery on the coldest weekend of the year to take photographs of a small plasticine model, all in the name of “user experience”.

It’s been proper Baltic over the last month in the UK, but the weekend of 2009 Chinese New Year was not a weekend to decide to take time out to grab some snaps of the Kahoot on the wander around London. Given Nat and Ricky were hard at work on the game code that weekend, I felt I should contribute *something* to the development process. Being as the last thing I coded in anger was in Z80, I was best to stay away from them and instead wander the streets of the capital carrying a small brown box containing an increasingly battered looking clay figure and a brief to get pictures “which are dead touristy”.

Obviously a number of the pics didn’t make it into the final cut, so I thought you might like to see them here, now. With your eyes. Enjoy!

We did an interview with toppermost industry mag Develop a short while back. It was part of a focus on development within the urban sprawl that is London. It was a pretty useful exercise for us and certainly generated a bunch more interest in our company, and we also got to create our first advert promoting the company!

The interview is credited to me, which is something of a misnomer as it was a collaborative effort where anything considered and well written was by Ricky, and the bits that look like an ape has punched a keyboard are by yours truly.

You can read the online article here, if words and pictures is your thing, try this on for size. Check out pages 28-29 (Nat – 30Under30), 34-35 (interview) and 38-39 (advert).

Tomorrow, following on from Ricky’s ace post about how Kahoots might have looked, we have a picture special looking back at some more of the things we did on behalf of the development of Kahoots. It’ll be ace! Like one of those nostalgia programmes except without the likes of Stuart Maconie, Chris Moyles and Jane Moore pretending not to be able to remember things.

Here’s my original stab at Kahoots artwork, before we went in the direction we eventually did..  probably inspired by the Amiga game  Gobliiins..

There’s a bigger one after the jump.

As the adminny point on our particular company triangle, I make it my business to go on regular “Vanity Sorties” across the internet to find reviews and chatter about us and our games. Thankfully the overwhelming majority of what people say about us tends to be nice, which is good as otherwise this website would be a whole deal less interesting to write. Anyway, it’d been some time since I’d done a search for feedback on our games, but after seeing another increase in the Kahoots metacritic score, I went on a bit of a hunt and found some quite humbling praise of our claytastic puzzler.

Biggest news is that our game came out as one of the top 10 PSP games of 2009. This is based on the metacritic score (for those unaware – Metacritic is a site which collates review scores from a variety of sources, weights them appropriately and spews forth an overall score – 80 and above is regarded as a good score) and from our perspective the score puts us 8th in the table for all PSP games released in 2009. Just above Resistance and Monster Hunter, and just behind FIFA10. That’s a bit special! To see the full top 10 check it out here and see the nice things they say about it.

Seguing seamlessly into another paragraph about nice things about us, my search revealed a number of quite lovely things that reviewers have said about Kahoots and us. The review list of Save The Kahoots will be updated in due course for the new comments, but here are some of the “That’d look ace on the back of a box” bits which made us feel all fuzzy inside.

“But the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts and all this adds up to an adorable, but mentally challenging game which will tax even the sharper of brains. £2.49 doesn’t buy you much at the moment, but it now buys you one of the best Minis on the store. Individuality is rare in games nowadays, and Honeyslug should get a hearty pat on the back for having the balls to do something a little different.” – 4.5/5 Junkiegamer.com

“What you do get in Kahoots is a charming little god game (if you will) which will keep you occupied on train and bus journeys, or perhaps a little escape from a more serious and substantial game. If you want an eccentric, zany and enjoyable game for a very reasonable price, pick up Kahoots.” – 83% VGChartz.com

“When the work of Aardman Studios is being discussed, people often mention the fact that you can see the fingerprints of the Aardman artists imprinted in the plasticine figures of Wallace & Gromit and friends. It’s implied (or explicitly stated) that the fingerprints are not just literal but also metaphorical, describing the particular aesthetic of Aardman’s work, the love and care they take with their creations, and so on.
I believe the same metaphor can be used for Kahoots. I don’t think the PSP’s screen resolution will allow you to see the physical fingerprints of the Honeyslug team, but you don’t need to — they’re there all the same.” – User comments European Playstation Blog

Don’t forget Kahoots is £1.74/€1.99 from tomorrow for 2 weeks!

Sony Europe are having “minis Month” during February and part of this promotion means that you can now get Kahoots for a bargain price of £1.74/€1.99 between the 4th and 18th of the month! However, that’s not all…

To make your life in the world of the Kahoot much easier, our very own Nat Marco created a hints and tips guide to help learn the tricks of the game. This is no bullet pointed list of cold hard facts, like everything else in Kahoots it’s a handdrawn picture guide which the lovely people at Sony Europe have made available on the PlayStation blog here.

So with a knock-down price and a handy page of helpful stuff from Nat to get you started, there’s never been a better reason to buy Kahoots minis for your PSP, and don’t forget, that Kahoots minis is also available for download and play on PS3’s fancy emulator.