Photo via IndieCade flickr stream
Hey Sportsfriends fans!
In addition to our big J.S. Joust tournament, we’re also running Hokra and BaraBariBall tournaments this coming week:
– PAX East, Saturday, March 23 - Hokra+BaraBariBall biathlon at the Kickstarter Arcade
– GDC 2013, Tuesday, March 26 - Hokra tournament at the Rumpus Royale
At PAX East, we’re also doing a Sportsfriends panel on Friday, March 22. Moderated by Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera!
More details after the jump.
J.S. Joust at PAX Prime 2012 (photo via Penny Arcade Report)
Heading to PAX East?
We’re running an official Johann Sebastian Joust tournament this Saturday, March 23, from 7pm to 9pm. Get there early if you’re participating!
The tournament is open to 48 players and will feature teams of three! (so, 16 teams)
Sign-ups begin Saturday morning at 10am. Interested players should head to the Console Tournament room to sign-up. It’s best to sign up with a team, but if you don’t have one, sign-up anyway and we’ll try to find you a team (but no promises!)l
Logistical info here, and more info about the tournament structure after the jump.
Yup, that’s my leg/shoe in the very bottom of the frame.
Now that we’re one month into the new year, I want to take a moment to reflect back on my favorite games of 2012.
In 2011, I published this list of my favorite games of that year. I feel like it was a pretty solid list, but this year I wanted to do something a bit different.
All too often, we talk about “games” as objects, systems, products – as readily identifiable things that we can evaluate in the abstract or download onto our computers. That isn’t untrue, but games are also so much more. They’re events; social contexts; play enacted by specific groups of people; particular moments in time.
Colloquially, there’s another meaning of the word “game” – game as a specific instance of play, a specific match, i.e. “Did you see the Knicks game last night?” It’s what Bernie DeKoven means when he talks about the “well-played game.”
In this post, I want to pay tribute to my favorite “games” of 2012 – specific performances, instances, and events that really meant something to me. The list is admittedly idiosyncratic, subjective, and a little self-indulgent. And that’s the way it should be, I feel (um, unless you’re a journalist or something), because games, at their best, are deeply personal affairs. Games generate memories, and I want to share some of mine with you.
(Note that I’ve deliberately left out any games of Johann Sebastian Joust, which I want to deal with in a separate post)
Last year, I posted a list of my favorite music of 2011. I guess I should post my 2012 favorites too, huh? Better late than never!
Favorite Tracks of 2012:
1. Discoverer – Circular Motherboard [retro-futuristic]
2. Panabrite – Index of Gestures [kosmische, synth]
3. Shigeto – Huron River Drive [beat]
4. Discoverer – Data Pool [retro-futuristic]
5. Lone – Stands Tidal Waves [album preview] [ambient]
6. Lone – New Colour [album preview] [dance]
7. Efterklang – Dreams Today [preview/video] [indie]
8. Synkro – Memories of Love [r&b-ambient]
9. Studiocanoe – Discipline [album samples] [indie]
10. James Blackshaw – Her Smoke Rose Up Forever [acoustic guitar]
Ten more tracks (and more music favorites) after the jump!
Sunset in the valley of the Deerman.
Concept work for Alpenland the comic book and video game. Alpenland loosely connects to Where is my Heart?
(Alpenland Concept Part 5 here)
[Cross-posted from our Kickstarter page]
(Thanks Ian for the gif suggestion)
Now we get to finish all four [Sportsfriends] games and share them with all of you!
It truly was a communal effort. Just when things were looking grim, all of you helped fuel a big come-from-behind push. Some of you tweeted, others increased their pledge, others even published enthusiastic articles and videos about the games.
Suffice to say, we’re humbled and honored and, well, totally floored.
We want to thank all of you for all your enthusiasm and support. Special thanks to all our colleagues who gave us advice and contributed games, video testimonials, footage, photos, designs, music, help at events, and other support. We also want to thank the team at Sony’s Foster City office for championing the concept and making the PlayStation side of the project possible.
Looking to the future, we’re so, so excited to get these four games finished, and to share them with the broader world. If you contributed at the early alpha tier or above, expect to hear from us in the coming days about your Hokra and J.S. Joust builds. We plan to get those out this month, and then BaraBariBall in January. And then more rewards after that!
Your Best Sportsfriends Forever,
- Bennett, Ramiro, Noah, Doug -
In case you missed the news, we’ve finally announced our release plans for Johann Sebastian Joust. We hope to release the game as a part of Sportsfriends – a compendium of four sports-themed local multiplayer games.
The other games include Hokra, BaraBariBall, and a new version of Pole Riders.
We plan to bring the package to PlayStation 3, and then PC/Mac/Linux.
We’re crowd-funding Sportsfriends on Kickstarter in order to raise funds to finish the games and hire expert programmers to port them. We’d love any support you feel like giving us!
This series of posts will be dedicated to sketches, be they quick or meticulous concepts, environments, moods, level designs or character sketches. Each post will have its own topic, so let’s start with “ideas.”
When making sketches you often have to visualize an idea out of your head, which is both fun and frustrating, but more fun the more you draw. The following sketches show the first draft of B.U.T.T.O.N. characters, an idea for the musical gardens for Mutazione, some drafts for a Where is my Heart? box art which we never ended up using, and a ridiculous game idea sketch about riding a bike with balloon wheels in a bouncy landscape.
J.S. Joust in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. (Photo by the inimitable Sara Bobo).
Big news – we’re opening a new outpost of Die Gute Fabrik in New York City!
Er, well, that makes us sound larger than we actually are. By “opening an outpost” I mean that I’m personally moving back to America (my home country). Nils and Christoffer are staying here in Copenhagen, and we’ll be working together remotely.
I’m moving for a whole variety of reasons. I was born and raised in New Jersey, and so after over a decade in California and Denmark, I’m finally returning “home.”
But the move is also motivated by some professional reasons. In the last few years, New York City has become a real hotbed of game dev talent. As far as I’m concerned, NYC is the place to be for cutting-edge game development these days. Institutions like Babycastles, Eyebeam, Come Out & Play, and the NYU Game Center are running innovative events and programs that are galvanizing community and building bridges between games and other cultural domains like music, art, theater, and academia. And so many of my colleagues and favorite game designers are in NYC. Suffice to say, I want in on that mix!
If you’re in NYC and want to say hello, drop us a line! I should land next month, just in time to speak at NYU’s PRACTICE conference. Exciting!
Nicklas, Ricky, Brandon, and others play a game on Standoff. Nicklas is already eliminated, Ricky shoots the sky, and Brandon shoots himself. (Photo by tigershungry).
Time to teach another one of my favorite folk/playground games!
Standoff is a simple game for two or more players – ideally a group of 5 to 10 people. It’s kind of like Rock-Paper-Scissors meets John Woo action flick.
I learned the game back in college, through my then-roommate John Shedletsky. The game and its variants go by many different names, but “Standoff” is the name that I use these days. In this post, I’m going to explain several variations of the game, including my own favorite version.