Honeyslug

At Honeyslug, we strive to encourage the youth of today to put down their hoodies and happy slaps and get involved in video games development through our innovative “work experience” scheme. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post from Robin Clarke. Robin is a producer for www.Gimme5Games.com, and writes about videogames on his blog at www.citystate.co.uk

The World of Love conference. It threatened to draw an unprecedented horde of independent game developers to our nation’s noble capital, where they would surely be compelled to blurt scandalising ideas out of their disordered brains, to binge-drink, and to forever infuse ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with apocalyptic portent. Such a volatile situation required delicate handling – as anyone who has seen the shameful aftermath of a TED conference can attest.

As luck would have it, celebrated indie scene-boffins Terry Cavanagh (DistractionWare) and Ricky Haggett (Honeyslug) were seeking to organise a weekend Game Jam around the same time. This event would act as a lightning rod, diverting the indies’ attention to their second-favourite pastime of making games. (Although regretably, a group of unrepentant maniacs had to be released into Kensington Gardens.)

The World of Love Game Jam was held at Honeyslug’s offices in Kentish Town on Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th June 2010. It comprised of four three-hour jam sessions, and a proportionate amount of time in pubs and restaurants. Over the course of the weekend it is estimated that around 35 games aficionados made an appearance, from backgrounds as diverse as MMOs, social games, journalism, console development and academia.

The suggested themes of the sessions were:

1. Facebook, Traps

2. Vegetables, Hugs

3. Light and Shade, Water Water Everywhere, The Blob

4. The Jury, Reunion, Drifting

The results (that were deemed fit for public consumption) can be found at the Cambridge Friendship Club site: http://cambridgeindies.com/events/jam-world-love

A woefully incomplete list of attendees can be found here: http://lovejam.eventbrite.com/

My impression of the event (compared to the grand total of one game jam that I’d attended previously) was that it was remarkably quiet and intensive. While there was some collaboration going on, the majority were content to tinker on their own projects until (and beyond) the end of the allotted time before casually demonstrating them to the group.

As I spent most of my time squinting at Deluxepaint and inelegantly hacking at Python, I am sure I missed a lot of people’s stuff entirely, but out of things going on at my end of the room/things drawing the biggest crowds/things with the loudest sound effects, standouts were Terry’s Vegetable Game, Kieron’s VVVVVVegetable, Perrin and Terry’s Blind Faith, Alice’s VIDEO GAME, and Alan Hazelden’s blood-soaked tentacle-vs.-submarine game. The best game that I only found on the website afterwards ribbon goes to Don’t Eat Kittens. There were loads and loads more.

But as well as games, friendships were made, plans were hatched and fun was had (and other cliches). There are going to be more London-based game jams. Oh yes.

After a work induced hiatus on the blog front, it’s good to be back with some news about us being featured in the latest edition of Edge Magazine not just once, but TWICE!

Edge have done a feature on Minis with Sony which also features an interview with Ricky around our becoming involved in the Minis programme and also working with Sony.

In a double whammy the magazine has also named, Poto and Cabenga as “Internet Game of the Month”, pretty cool, eh?

Edge issue 216 is out now and available from any competently stocked newsagent. Check out a preview of the issue here.

Coming Soon – Hopefully we’ll have some exciting news on some new games and our plans for Kahoots on iPad and iPhone, AND we’ve got our talk at Develop Conference in mid-July to tell you about, AND we’ll have some more updates to the look of the website. Also, some new pictures to celebrate our second birthday in July! Hooray!

It may not have escaped your attention that we in the UK recently had an election for our new government. It was a keenly fought battle from the three main parties, but the only clear winner was BBC’s chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg who was managing to appear on 2 TV channels Live from two different locations, and appear on Radios 4 and 5Live and twitter all at the same time. Impressive stuff from the diminutive and unable-to-stand-still-on-camera Scot.

We we’re really excited about the election, voting is generally seen as “a good thing” here at Honeyslug and this all segues nicely into telling you about another vote you can take part in, it’s the C+VG Golden Joystick Awards, and you can help us make the shortlist in a number of categories!

Simply go to http://www.goldenjoystick.com/, and you can vote for us and our games in the following categories:

Downloadable Game of the Year: Kahoots
Online Game of the Year: Poto and Cabenga
Portable Game of the Year: Kahoots
UK Dev of the Year: Honeyslug (yay!)
Ultimate Game of the Year: Both games

Voting on the longlist closes on the 27th May, so if you love our stuff and love us, please give us your support and we may make the shortlist!

So yesterday the three of us took some time out from slogging away at XML to take part in Eurogamers’ Podcast where we talked about many things including trapped pigeons, collective indifference towards Alan Wake, Nat’s expensive Magic: The Gathering habit and indie developer type things.

It’s located here but you can also download it from iTunes should you wish to listen to it on your choice of mp3 player.

Many thanks to Tom’s Bramwell and Champion and the rest of the guys at Eurogamer and GI.biz for an entertaining time and sub-zero drinking environment on Brighton beachfront.

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.

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!

In the midst of all the exciting stuff we’ve got coming up, there’s an endless stream of paperwork, video capturing, more paperwork, image manipulation, pricing, supplemental paperwork and swearing at volume as we attempt to compliance ourselves up with the various parties who need us to supply them with facts and blurb and whatnot. This is what make our games publishable, marketable and any other -able which means we get cash at some point down the line from our friendly publisher/distributor. All of this takes time and is the sort of mundane act which would drain the joy of life from Nat and Ricky, that’s is why people like me exist.

Don’t get me wrong, I like contributing to the creative flow of games, but my more day-to-day stuff involves taxation, accounts, forms and, well, admin of any form, be it filling in bank details to creating 300dpi images to approving min spec labels for the box artwork.

With the bulk of the effort on Kahoots home and hosed, we had a ton of catch up admin stuff, loads of contracts and form filling for which I was rapidly running out of space for. So hooray! We’ve bought a new filing cabinet, AND a set of suspension files to separate all our docs, brilliant!

So with our boss new filing under control, the next thing I needed to get done is the video submission for age rating. As a 3-man team with a somewhat limited amount of funds, we’re not in a position right now to have some big mad 4-grand Mac with insane levels of video capture capabilities, so we have to adapt to our much more meagre assets to hand. To which end we managed to eventually set up this carpel-tunnel inducing contraption to create a 30 minute subs video.

So you people just think about the actual, physical pain gone through to get this game to you.

Well done if you’ve stuck this post to the end.

Welcome to Honeyslug. We don’t just make games, we… No. My mistake…we do just make games. Read the rest of this entry »

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