Two weeks ago I was able to attend my first ever PAX, which is a massive and beloved consumer gaming show. The kind that attracts real gaming fans who will happily give up their weekend, pay for tickets, and queue in their thousands to be the first ones into the show. The kind that sells out of tickets on a regular basis. Just attending would have been extremely interesting to me but I had the opportunity to do something even more incredible: I was able to showcase the game I'm working on to thousands of potential fans. WOW. Read on for my full postmortem.
Archive for the ‘Company News’ Category
A Beautiful Partnership
I'm very glad to announce that we have partnered with Versus Evil to publish Guild of Dungeoneering!
This means we'll have more time to focus on making the game as amazing as it deserves to be, while Versus Evil looks after everything else for us.
This also means we'll be able to showcase the game at several upcoming gaming expos including PAX South, GDC, PAX East, and EGX Rezzed. Exciting times!
There's a full press release for those of you who are into that kind of thing.
Now Hiring: Game Designer!
Note: this position has now been filled!
Hi folks!
I'm looking for a talented game designer to join the team here at Gambrinous. The ideal person would
- love creating engaging, elegant systems that are a joy to play, learn and master
- have a deep interest in board games and card games and what makes them tick
- be keen to apply board & card game mechanics to a digital game
- have a portfolio of previous games or prototypes they have built
- enjoy working in a small team where everyone's effort makes a big difference
- get to focus on gameplay rather than monetisation (we don't do F2P)
That person will be joining a team of four working on Guild of Dungeoneering, which is due to come out on Steam and tablets in mid 2015. More info on Guild of Dungeoneering can be found right over here.
We don't know what we'll work on after that but you can bet it will be something boardgamey and full of juicy game design challenges. We are based in Dublin, Ireland but I'm also willing to talk about working remotely with the right person.
Interested? Great! Drop me a mail (colm@gambrinous.com) and tell me about yourself. I'd also love to see some of your previous work and get an idea of your salary expectations.
Cheers,
Colm Larkin
Guild of Dungeoneering – coming to Steam!
Guild of Dungeoneering is coming to Steam!
Thank you for all the support, votes and comments on Greenlight!
The game is currently in active, open development. If you want to see the latest updates I'd suggest checking out this devlog thread on TIGSource, where I talk about what I'm working on next, share first looks at new content, and take feedback and suggestions from YOU the player!
There's also @gambrinous on twitter and the facebook page.
If you want to pre-order the game right now you can do that here. Pre-orders will get the full game on release (including a key for Steam). You can also play the latest alpha version of the game at that page.
If you want to find out what it takes to get through Greenlight in 2014 check out this AMA I did on reddit last week. I'll be writing up a blog post about it very soon, too.
Some Announcements: Trailer, Greenlight & Fulltime Indie
The last week has been an important one for me. I've given up my job and become a fulltime indie game developer, I've released the first trailer for Guild of Dungeoneering and launched the game on Steam Greenlight.
Indie can be hard to define and is definitely a bit too overloaded these days, but it explains quite well what I'm trying to do. I'll be mostly working by myself making games. I like to compare myself to a writer who has decided to give up the day job and focus entirely on finishing that first novel.
A wild TRAILER appeared!
So this has been in the works for a couple of months. Fred (who is doing all the art for Guild of Dungeoneering) came up with the script, the jokes, did all the animation, picked the music and even did the voiceover for it!! Talented fellow! Have a look yourself:
We released this last Wednesday at the same time as a big press blitz I coordinated which has led to quite a few people writing about us, which is fantastic! I'll write up a longer post about the experience later on.
For Your Consideration
We also launched on Steam Greenlight at the same time, to try and maximise any press exposure we got for the trailer and convert as much of it as possible into Greenlight votes and attention.
So far this is going well, though not quite the rocketship to the top I was hoping for. As of this writing we are 42% of the way to the top 100 with 2,910 yes votes. Sadly a massive proportion of visits to the page has been from within Greenlight itself, so despite getting some big numbers to the main game page in the last few days they haven't quite translated into Greenlight traffic. That said, I'm sure anyone who's looking at the game page and clicks through to greenlight is pretty likely to throw down a yes vote.
I do have some more ideas to get extra traffic onto greenlight so more on that when it's ready. I'll also write up a much longer post on the whole experience once we're through. Oh and if you've voted for the game - Thanks! It's really appreciated!
Guild of Dungeoneering – now available for pre-order!
"Recruit adventurers to explore dungeons for the glory of your Guild. Build the dungeon room by room, fill it with monsters, traps and treasure .. and hope your dungeoneers have what it takes to return victorious!"
[A dungeon crawler where you don't get to control the adventurer. Instead you lay out the dungeon one room at a time (including treasure & monsters) and he proceeds according to his AI. You want him to explore, level up, find treasures and ultimately survive - but you don't get to directly control him.]
Playable Alpha & pre-orders now available here:
http://gambrinous.com/games/dungeoneering/
A Short Talk On Flash Game Development
As part of an interview for a change of company in my day job (web app developer) I gave a 20 min presentation on a topic of my choice. I went with an overview of Flash Game Development – how you can easily do it as a programmer, and how you can make it work as a business. You can view the full presentation on slideshare by clicking the image below – just make sure to switch the comments tab over to 'speaker notes' (below the slides) as everything will make a lot more sense then!
Screenshots From The Past Year
One great thing about working with version control (here at Gambrinous Towers we love Subversion – and so would you if you just gave it a chance) is that you can go back and look at snapshots of your game as it was in the PAST. And that's just what I've been doing recently, rebuilding older versions of the game prototype to look at all the delicious progress that's been made. And I've decided to share the screenshots with you! Enjoy!
Revision 11. It didn't do much more than you can see here.
Here's the oldest build saved into our SVN repository, from November 2008, representing the first few weeks of getting my head around Flex and tiling. There was no animation or smooth scrolling yet, the little guy just jumped around on screen as you clicked on a target space.
How We Built a Game Portal Faster Than You Can Say "Gambrinous Games Rulez, OK".
In Part I, we announced the launch of our brand new game portal, GambrinousGames.com. I'd like to take a few minutes of your time to talk to you about how we launched our portal in record time, and how this same process can be quick and painless for you too. Gather 'round everyone and let me guide you through our journey to Game Portaldom.
Read More »
Introducing GambrinousGames.com
We've been busy beavers over here on Planet Gambrinous the past couple of months, and we're finally ready to announce the fruit of our labour! Our very own brand spanking new flash game portal, imaginatively titled: Gambrinous Games. Well, as some of our more attentive readers might attest, it's not that brand spanking new. It has been hanging around for a little while now, and has already gone through one iteration already, and we're working on a new design as we speak — but it's our little experiment and we finally feel ready to formally announce it. Read More »
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