Honeyslug

We’re delighted to announce that our Gamma IV One Button Game “Poto & Cabenga” is now available to play now here.



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So I’m just back from GDC, where our game Poto & Cabenga was part of the Gamma IV event, with an amazing party on the Wednesday night where all six games were projected on huge screens, a bunch of DJs played electro sets and there was much drinking, dancing and shouted conversations with new friends…   then the following morning saw a complete change of scene, as we set up our stand on the Expo floor to allow people to play all the games.. this was also very cool, but in a very different way – fantastic to see people enjoying Poto & Cabenga up close, and chat to them about it, but we definitely had expo-fever by the end – having spent hours in an unnaturally lit aircraft hanger full mostly of depressing stands only tangentially related to games (we were right across from some company selling customer support software). Mind you, we weren’t complaining when these stands started giving out free beer toward the end of every day! And we ended up making a couple of significant changes to our game as a direct result of watching people play it.

Big props to the Kokoromi Crew – Heather, Cindy, Damien and Phil – who did a great job of making us very welcome,
and ensuring everything ran smoothly. Thanks guys!

Overall, GDC was an awesome experience. Was great to hang out a load of other indies and talk games, play theirs, andwatch them play ours..  My favourite two talks were Jon Blow’s ‘The implementation of rewind in Braid”, which reminded me why I make games, and “Changing the time between shots for the sniper rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds for Halo 3″ by some dude from Bungie, which reminded me why I don’t make games for large developers! I also managed to play most of the IGF entrants – including Monaco and Tuning, both of which were worthy winners!

I’ve updated our flickr with a GDC photoset, which you can see here. And there’s an article about all the Gamma IV games on the IndieGames blog here.

We intend to make Poto & Cabenga available to play on the internet really soon – watch this space!

Yes, a curious start to the week, with the momentum building rapidly on our current project, Kahoots still continues be doing the business off its own back. Today we found out it’s been shortlisted for a Pocket Gamer award at GDC!

That’s pretty handy since Ricky is out at the show for reasons which will become clear soon enough, but any road, Kahoots is nominated for the Best Casual/Puzzle Game for Handheld, how cool is that! It has some stiff competition, but that we’re in with a shout against the likes of Little Big Planet PSP and Lego Rock Band DS shows you how well received the game has been. We’re chuffed to bits, thanks Pocket Gamer! Full list of all the awards and nominations can be found here.

Here’s our category, though. How bonkers is this, look at who we’re up against!

Best Casual/Puzzle Game finalists

Art Style: CODE [DS] (Nintendo)
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure [DS] (Electronic Arts)
Kahoots [PSP] (Honeyslug)
Lego Rock Band [DS] (Warner Bros)
LittleBigPlanet [PSP] (Sony Computer Entertainment)

Bit of an update on some Kahoots related activity. We recently scored a marvellous 8/10 for Kahoots from ace site The Gamers Hub. We were also very pleased to be asked to do an interview with them for their site, in which we give full and frank answers to their questions including our thoughts on influences to Kahoots, game pricing, and the announcement of an impending version of Kahoots for iPhone and iPod touch. Follow the links for the full transcripts of the review and interview.

In other Kahoots related news, there is now a Kahoots theme available on PS3 and PSP to be downloaded from the PlayStation store. There was a free giveaway of 5000 of them on the Playstation Europe Blog and there may be a last few still available there if you hurry. Stop Press – Obviously, at this time we urge you to follow the advice of Sony on current PS3 network issues before you attempt to download the theme.

Finally, and rather disappointingly, the BBC has confirmed its intention to close the excellent 6Music radio station. If you haven’t already, you can read our thoughts on it here and there is still time to stop this from happening, if you’re already a fan of the station, you can find details on how to register your opinon. If you are yet to listen to this genuinely innovative music station we urge you now, before it’s too late, to give it a try to understand why we feel so passionate about this. 6Music.

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!