Honeyslug

I just made this by accident. Bigger version after the jump!

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!

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.

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.

A lovely prezzie in the post to us today!



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