twisted tree games

Proteus won 4 Golden Teabags at the #indievisiblity awards party last night!

This was weirdly overwhelming! I’d been tipped off about one of them (the “Best Placeholder” nomination) but otherwise they were a big suprise. Really touching, especially Notch’s nice message about Proteus - “using small tools to convey big messages that might not even be there”.

I loved the absurdist golden spray-painted teabags and One Life Left’s twitter-prank of stitching up Dan Marshall as drunkenly punching one of the winners (me, as it turned out). More award “ceremonies” should be this way.

Huge thanks to Dan and Sheridans for organising and sponsoring such a great evening, and the One Life Left team for exuberant hosting duties.

Also big love to Alex May for the bed for the night and the 2am omelette feast, and Micheal Brough for being a magical wizard and bringing his iPad and dev build of Glitch Tank.

Amazing to meet up with all the London bunch, old friends and new. Best ever Christmas “office party”! I think I’ve shaken off the hangover now.

(ah, oh yeah: listen out for the next episode of 99coins. They’re doing a report on the awards and I’ll hopefully be on it talking about… whatever it was I was talking about. If I’m struggling to suppress a giggle it’s because Charlie was performing a lewd dance in the background)

I forgot about tumblr for a while… need to get back into the habit! For now, here’s a quick “we’re not dead” post:

Currently we’re working on a content milestone (in a very loose sense) for the 20th: New animals, new “portal” effects and musical score and various refinements and improvements to how things are communicated. After that, we’ve a new block of content to add into Autumn; currently the emptiest season, except the deliberately empty one….

All this is going a bit slowly because I’m only working on this in my spare time, but I hope we’ll be able to release early next year. COMING Q1 2012, one might even say.

More realistically: It’ll be done when it’s done, but we have a pretty clear idea of the content of the release, so it’s not going to creep in scope too much.

Here are some links about stuff that’s happened over the past few months:

• We won the Audio award at Indiecade! (And also had an amazing Yosemite-Death Valley roadtrip organised by Doug “J.S. Joust” Wilson)
• I spoke to Lewie Procter at diygamer.com about Proteus after showing it GameCity in Nottingham (also mentioned in the Guardian piece here)
• Robert Yang and I had a very enjoyable rambling discussion about games and exploration for his “Level With Me” series on RPS
• Electron Dance posted a lovely write-up of a Proteus preview build. The video is one of the nicest bits of Proteus feedback I’ve had. “Very very day” is now a stock phrase in our house. It’s also slightly shaped the direction of the game. I hope Joel’s son likes the effect!
• We submitted Proteus to IGF. Fingers crossed!

What else…

So this thing happened:

You can read the full list of finalists here, and read a PC-centric write up from RPS here (the very kind words about Proteus at the end made me well up a bit whilst on the train back from London)

It’s amazing to be part of this. I’m really looking forward to meeting lots of great people that I only know online and catching up with friends who also got shortlisted.

Some picks of finalists that I’m especially excited about for various reasons:

At A Distance - I played a very early development build of Terry’s game, but so far not in the way it was intended: Two indirectly connected players, exploring and shaping the world. The graphics bring back fond memories of 3D Construction Kit on the Spectrum.

Ordnungswissenschaft - Because this.

FEZ - Indie dev legend. Almost finished apparently!

Geobook - Really fascinating concept of an interactive textbook. Reminds me of reading through this textbook to get into a good mindset for world generation.

Pewpewpewpewpew - microphone-controlled co-op shooter. Bound to be hilarious to watch

Hohokum - Made by some good friends. I played briefly at IGF and I’m looking forward to see Ricky madly coding up new features on the exhibition-floor again.

J.S. Joust - Another game-meets-public-performance, I played this at the Wild Rumpus event in London last week. Supposedly we’re going to be playing a tournament on top of Clouds Rest in Yosemite on a camping trip before heading down to Indiecade. Not quite sure why I signed up for that now.

But there are too many to mention!

Oh, ok, one more: Skulls of the Shogun looks like a fun slant on the turn-based tactics genre, and amazingly polished.

We’re going to L.A.!!!

I think this came up in conversation on twitter a few weeks ago.

About 19 years ago, issue 33 of Amiga Format landed next to my A500+. One of the coverdisks looked like this:

It was a fractal landscape generator. Even back then, the images had a weird grainy charm to them and I spent many days setting up renders and waiting for the results. At the highest detail it took about 45 minutes to render an image, leading to some tense moments turning the TV back on to see if it had got to the final stage of rendering where the image started to become visible. If you were unlucky a piece of terrain that hadn’t appeared in the lower-resolution previews would have popped up in front of the camera and ruin the view!

If you take a look at the “Pages” links on the right hand side of this page you can flick through the tutorial that came in the magazine, including some lovely example shots of a virtual Yosemite valley.

When I have time, I might try and set up WinUAE and render some Vistas for old times sake and post them up, no doubt with more nostalgic blubbing :)

Edit: Fixed the link above, and here’s an image cropped from the magazine scan: