Summerbatch pre-post

Summerbatch, a collection of games for the summer is almost ready for release. I wanted to post a quick update about some of the material within the collection. We've had to extend the deadline for developers a couple of times, but still very hopeful that it will be ready for the end of the month.

Additionally, 2 games will unfortunately not see the light of day in this edition so the total number of games is 6 this time round, however they WILL be included in the followup collection, which could possibly be in Winter (some have speculated Winterbatch, I am up for it - but only when this one is out!!)

So this week is an important week for beta versions and testing. I've been lucky to have a go on 4 out of the 6 games, with 2 others hopefully presenting their beta editions today or tomorrow.

Nancy The Happy Whore by Technocrat is a quality retro looking game that can take up to about an hour to complete. James has mastered another medium length game and had it finished well in time for the Summerbatch deadline, in fact, his final version has been available for almost a month now. A slightly different angle for James perhaps, to go with a comedy about a whore - but the writing is witty, the characters are funny and the atmosphere has a great vibe. I admit though, I haven't actually beaten the game yet!

Patchwork is of higher resolution and is made by Ilyich. I HAVE completed this game and enjoyed it, it took me about an hour and a half in total. The back story may seem a little cliché at first but the world you're thrown into is magical, whimsical and a nicer side of the "transported to a parallel universe" cliché. No snorting horrible aliens trying to eat you - a fun bunch of local characters and spirits. You can control two different characters which works nicely, and undertake puzzles for the both of them. I really enjoyed the puzzles which are not just inventory based. It's a lot of fun and it's finished and ready for Summerbatch!

Barely Floating by AJA is another higher resolution game that features a whole cast of characters and is reported to have a play time of 2 to 3 hours! I'm progressing through it but haven't beaten it yet. The design is slick and there's an interesting feature when it comes to talking to other people, you can also ask them about anything in view which is a nice touch. There is some advanced scripting in other areas that help create a wonderful atmosphere inside the ship. Lots of music & incidental sound effects add to the puzzle solving, playing the role of an old man has never been so fun!

PISS by Ben304 is a game that presents an above-usual quality by said developer, known for his work various successful free adventure games. In fact, he's even stated lately that this is probably his longest game to date! I've been playing but have no indication on how long it is, as I have only tried the early beta at this point. But seeing some of the screenshots recently posted it appears the explorable world really opens up later in the game. With some neat effects, lots of character animations and some clever little features - PISS appears to be everything a point & click fan could want! Again a fantasy setting, a quirky mission but most of all a wonderful thing to play!

Jailbreak is a top down stealth game by Rocco. We're waiting on the beta, expected today or tomorrow - all I can say is I'm intrigued!

BioFactor by LocutusOfBored and Babar began life as an arcade game when it was designed many years ago - but the idea has been resurrected for Summerbatch and re-made into a point and click. Yet to play the beta, so little is known about this game right now.

Teardrop and Lycoris have been hit by development hell and will not be released until the next collection. However, you can certainly still support developer Creed Malay with his project The Big Sheep in the meantime, and tell LimpingFish you want to play Lycoris very very much!

The next post should be a release announcement! The website should be up and functional at Summerbatch.co.uk this coming weekend, and don't forget I've recently updated the main Screen 7 website with a new look! iPad users, it turns out, won't be able to listen to the (Flash) radio player. Sorry about that!

Thanks for reading :)

chim chim cheroo

The new s7 website is delayed a little bit but rest assured it'll be up at the end of the week! The Olympic torch passes through town at 8am tomorrow so I will be going to watch that. I'll write a full post soon :) In the meantime you can watch my project showcase if you haven't already...

Come rain or shine

Thought I'd write a bit of a progress report, especially so that when I'm 80 I can log on and remember what I was up to in June 2012. But also because it might interest someone like Jim Spanos, or his grand-kids, when he has them, and teaches them to re-post articles from the 21st century in 2112 (that son bitch will get the last laugh, I know it!!) ;)

Ben Jordan must f***ing hurry up and exist
The movie sequel is just about done. We have one scene and a couple of shots left to take but the weather has been ridiculously bad the last month, the final location has been flooded, dangerous and such so we just haven't been able to do it. I'm waiting on some voice files and graphics but I still have every intention of releasing the video around July 7th. Promo video below!



July 7th is Screen 7 re-launch day
This is the day the new website goes live. The content has been somewhat cut down as I intend to shift all my personal stuff (my own games etc) to my mods.agser.me account. Anyway, from this day, you'll be able to see the new website, and some others, including:

Summerbatch (summerbatch.co.uk)

Kinky Island (actually already online at www.kinkyisland.co.uk)

The Visitor

Sub-sites that will not be quite ready by that date but will follow soon after:

The Cat Lady (thecatlady.co.uk)

A Night at Camp Ravenwood (ravenwood-game.co.uk)

Summerbatch 8th July release
The developers have been working their pants off to get their games ready for July 8th release. The batch will be on sale for 3 months from July 8th to Oct 8th 2012. You can pay what you want. PLUS I've just been told an 8th game is also in the works, after some debate and problems, but that's great news. Not just 7 games, 8 now! Lots of talented people working on their games and I'm excited to see how they develop. Games include:

Nancy the Happy Whore (Technocrat)

PISS (Ben304)

Teardrop (Creed Malay, Denxil Quixode)

Barley Floating (AJA)

Jailbreak (Rocco)

Lycoris* (LimpingFish)

Patchwork (Ilyich)

Unknown title* (LocutusOfBored and Babar)

* Title may be changed

I've played Nancy the Happy Whore and it's a very slick retro point & click with excellent humor, satisfying graphics and animation and the soundtrack is funky to boot!

The Cat Lady
Currently in beta testing and voices are being recorded. Still quite a bit to be done, but it's looking great. Scary game though, even I can't handle playing it late at night :P But I'm a pussy. Still, hope to get it out sooner than Halloween 2012 but that is the "max" deadline for the game.

Other news
- Still working on Camp Ravenwood music, having fun :) Here's one of my earlier tracks, Where's Smoky? You may be wondering how did I come up with such a stupid melody? Well I was thinking the words (and syllables) "Drin-king lots of be-er on a tues-day day!" because I was drinking beer at midday on a Tuesday and that melody popped into my head. Try it, you'll hear those words and never look back ;) - Kinky Island exceeds its funding goal, I've started gathering photos of pledgers to turn into characters and am currently writing the second draft of the story - FoY will be recruiting new writers very soon, progress on the game is good

Thanks to everyone who's supported these projects recently, no matter how, by blogging it, by pledging to it, by simply keeping an eye on it. Last month was pretty slow AGS wise but this month sees Resonance come out and at the beginning of next month Screen 7 present 8 new games with Summerbatch. So SOMETHING is certainly going on. I'm also in the process of arranging AdventureX 2012. Watch this space!

That's all I can think of right now. Have a nice June!

Mods

BADGER!!!

As requested, here are the two sounds from the judge fight of Poacher supplied by Yahtzee - who says:

"Trivia time: It's me shouting! With a pitch shift and reverb."

judgegreet1.wav
judgegreet2.wav


All the best, Mods

Poacher soundtrack

Full soundtrack for Poacher by Yahtzee Croshaw is below! Thanks to Simon Love for all his help composing it, and of course to Yahtzee for letting us get involved :)

Includes some bonus tracks and concept work that I did before passing the task onto Simon. All in OGG format.

Of course the music is available in the BGM folder of the game but this collection includes the titles and an order for your music player!

Poacher OST SE (75mb)

The game has been well received and seems to have been enjoyed by most. Some nice comments about the music to, which is great - thank you!

extra extra!

First update of the twenty-twelve, two months have passed and it's been quite a ride. Since the last post a fair amount has happened especially in the world of AGS.

I managed to complete my game 11-11-11 and release it and got some good feedback from players, even some good reviews including Adventure Gamers and it even made Best Free PC Games of the week with PC Gamer, so that made me proud!

Since then I've updated the game with more sounds and more cutscenes so it's even better than before, if you haven't played it, give it a go! It even takes about 2 hours to complete so I'm glad it panned out to be quite long. I personally can't finish it in less than 30 minutes and I know exactly what to do.

11-11-11 official page

Things are moving in terms of Screen 7 becomming more than just a hobbyist website with games and stuff, yep, it's finally time to take it to the next level, form a legal company and focus on selling great games. Of course, if that fails, it's time to officially stop pissing around with AGS and game-making and go get a real job :P

Here's how the new site is looking, which will be focussed entirely on games and services for game-makers. I'm wiping out the film section for the time being as it's no longer my focus for the company.



So if you have a game in production of any scale get in touch because I'm looking for games to sell. You can expect to see info on that in public on the AGS forum pretty soon.

That said plenty of people want to go it alone and I don't blame them. So it's going to be a very testing year for me and this business, fingers crossed, it will get somewhere :)

Beyond that I've been doing more editing for BJ:MD and it is in a very sweet state, but still not completely released. I've put the first 26 minutes online even though it's got some errors and is missing a few shots, for people to preview. But the weather has prevented me from filming the final scene but hope to tackle that this weekend.



Still waiting on Unga Needs Mumba a game I wrote music for last year. But it's undergoing some voice acting stuff, can you believe one of the chaps who wrote Ben There Dan That is providing the voice for Unga!

I've been working on test music for A Night at Camp Ravenwood, and that's been cool - I don't know how else to describe it. I'm having fun, and I'm happy with how it sounds.

Kinky Island is now looking for your help for funding, though the funds are half for KI and half for the setup of Screen 7 as a proper online publisher. You can help out at:

Kinky Island @ IndieGoGo

What else? Oh yes, organising a music gig, just a couple of weeks away now. Do you like rock and metal music? Feel free to come along, you can even get a discount ticket online! But if you're reading this, you probably don't live anywhere near Wallingford :P

Wallystock

You can probably see I'm in creative/do stuff over-drive. It feels like I am in a way but thats great, things feel achievable and it feels like there is a clear goal ahead of me for once, rather than uncertainty.

My friend Simon Love continues work on the soundtrack for Yahtzee's new game Poacher, it's very nearly done, just 3 tracks left to finalize. So as always Screen 7 is holding up Yahtzee's game :P Nothing new there, but I can assure you, it's very close.

I sent all the completed tracks to him last night and Simon has promised he will get the remainder done asap. He's been uber busy with 3rd year uni work. He also recently won and then set a new AGS tune contest and announced the winner the other day.

Fountain of Youth team are looking at ways of getting things done even quicker, we need artists - if you are one or know any, get the hell in touch, we need you to help us share the workload! Passage of Saints was released over Xmas and also went down well, thank you everyone who played it!!

There were a few errors and I don't want to be the ass that says they will never be fixed, but they probably won't until the end of the year, we all have so much else to be getting on with in the meantime.

Gonna leave it there before my computer crashes (which it WILL do in the next few minutes, regular as clockwork!!!) - but thanks for reading. It's pretty much just been an update this time round. Hopefully it's shown you that things are still full steam ahead this end.

Oh, and Summerbatch is still underway nicely - people seem to be working on their games and the list is looking nice!! More on that in a future update :)

BE GOOD!

let it snow?

I read today about a drought apparently sweeping the lower regions of the UK. We've certainly had very limited rainfall in my hometown this year. I keep an eye on the weather and have noticed no more than 7 days of rain since the beginning of the year.

We didn't have any thunderstorms either - unless there was one for the one week of this year that I've not been here... But the news article confirmed my curiosity - there has been a significant lack of rainy weather, and unless it picks up this is going to put strains on the water supply into early next year.

So where did all the rain go?

There have been some fairly freak weather incidents around the world this year. Off the top of my head I can recall the hurricane in New York, the recent floods in that city whose name I can't remember - and perhaps we can even include the Japanese tsunami (triggered by an earthquake). On top of that we also have El Hierro's volcano rumbling steadily at the end of the year, with claims it is forming a new Canary Island!

The Canary Islands and their volcanoes play a significant role in disaster predictions for the future. I enjoyed reading the one about a megatsunami that would apparently destroy the East American seaboard.

That said - there is no evidence as far as I'm concerned to say these things are "happening more often". I think myself and others are just reading about them more often, there are more reports on them and the Twitter age means we know about any fairly small event very quickly and from multiple sources.

So yeah, weather... Rain... We need some :) Obviously it's evaporated here and gone and been a freak event elsewhere in the world this year. Glad to know Oxfordshire could help on that one.

I am phasing in and out of creativity. My game is being tested. It's a phase I definitely missed out on with my last game (testicle) that I finished in April this year. There was no testing on that one but I can't remember if it was my incompetence or just no interest in beta-testing it.

During the testing stage - error hunting aside, I think it's just great to get some feedback prior to release to help you on your way. It's a key bit of game making motivation, and it can trigger new lines of conversation in your mind - ideas which you may have missed completely because you were never seeing your game from that angle before. Here's the trailer:



I want to make a short Xmas movie. But I am too busy getting AdventureX prepped and done, Passage of Saints and my own game above finished. And doing whatever I can on BJ:MD to finish it. I am pushing this old computer to its limits. So I'm posting this now before it crashes (which it does every 56 mins).

Thanks for reading, take care, and here's to some snow this year!