Hello there! One week after the official announcement of Qasir Al-Wasat I’m here to present some of the wonderful feedback we had with it!

It all started with our dear Cassandra Khaw’s post over Indiegames.com! The day after new reviews of the trailer started popping on “the internets”(sic), with JovemNerd.com.br‘s Stephan Martins writing our first Brazilian review on the 21st! Here is the list of original posts, so far:

Indie Games
Game Side Story
Game Set Watch
Game Dot
Seand Knight IGN Blog
Igrorama
Indie Shelter
No Name Radio
Joven Nerd
Gameplay

Meanwhile, the trailer itself (if you  haven’t seen it yet pray go check it on vimeo!) is getting astonishing (at least for our humble expetations) view counts! By the time I’m writing this it’s far over 9000!

If you spot any other review please leave a comment with it, send us an email [aduge (at) adugestudio (dot) com] our tweet @aduge!

So we are back to work, rushing with the development ahead of the Beta2 release in the next few weeks, and checking our fellow entries on 2012 IGF! (we’ll post a list of the Brazilian ones very soon!)
I’ll post some sort of Art Director’s Production Diary ++ very soon! Stay in the loop!

Ok, if we believe there is something important everybody in and around the game industry should be doing is watching Extra Credits. The ever inspiring presentations written by James Portnow, presented by Daniel Floyd and rendered by Allison Theus are one of the most competent and noble effort to push the bounds of games as a media we have seen, both to prove it’s qualities and to clarify it’s flaws. Watching Extra Credits shows us a brighter future for games, and we are glad for that. But most important, Allison, Daniel and James have the bravery to stand out for what they (and we) believe is true, fair and important for this incredible media.

While you three stand out there, boldly conceiving the next episodes, preparing for storms after pointing the worst flaws we as industry and public do and what we could be doing for a better future, while you are there, know you have our love, respect and gratitude.

The Adugans

Hey everyone!
This is the result of our Global Game Jam 48 hour effort: Mnemons! This year’s GGJ theme was Extinction.

Mnemons is a top-down 2 player co-op game taking place in a childish memoryscape. Players controls toys that must retrieve important objects from the memoryscape in order to avoid the complete extinction of that memory.

The players are, however, suffering from a condition similar to neurological extinction, where two identical, symmetrical, inputs makes them inoperable or inefficient.

You can download the game at it’s Global Game Jam page

Hello again and welcome to one more update of Aduge’s Strategic Plan!
Today was a long, full of expectations and as productive as the first one (or even more).

We woke up early, thinking already of today’s main goal: to find out our next Vision statement. And what is it? The situation where we’ll be in a future moment, projecting our conquering vision and what does that means.

The starting point was a well known script for those used to a Strategic Planning (and this time we’ve learned a lot about this topic and caring a lot more for keeping it simple). Analyze the internal and external environment, understands your positioning to the next years, and understand where your target should be. Then you just need get ready to throw the dart! (And don’t worry too much, you’ll only understand all this after learning a little bit on the way).

To begin with, of course, a good coffee from Espírito Santo. From that point on our morning went through with talks about our market: other independent group, festivals and distribution portals, looking to identify significant attributes to a quick understanding of the market. That, along with our yesterday work, helped us to raise the Opportunities and Threatens that we have in our field of vision. We ended this part of the day in a detailed talk about the experience acquired with the project and through living, pointing out equally the problem as much as what went right.

Starting with these we could list with precision (at least, with as much precision that we needed) internal elements that are Strengths and Weakness of Aduge, that we can consider as the box that we found (or missed) the tool that which we can build games. A brief stop for a vegetarian nachos for lunch, funny talks and some more episodes from Extra Credits. After that an essential thin for all the warmth that is here at the beach: ice cream, lot’s of ice cream!

Time to be brace! “Where will Aduge be in March 2013″ is, well, a harsh question to realistically articulate. But with different fronts of talks we became less and less wimpy and took the chance to bring an answer to the main topics: how many games should we develop? which festivals will us take part? how will the internal and administrative  be? Where is the fish?

The afternoon went on quickly while we synced our mental images, using from a more theoretical to absurd metaphors approaches and exemplifications using glasses. To find a vocabulary wasn’t an easy task, but in the end we got to our objectives in a natural way, focusing in the moment of delivering the projects.

So where will we be in March 2013? A little bit of mystery doesn’t hurt anyone, so we live to you to find out while and when we announce our next projects! But we promise, lot’s of news soon, stay tuna! ><·>

Hello y’all!

We’ve reached the first night of Aduge’s 4th Strategic Planning and boy, I’m impressed! We’re productive, the mood is good and solutions come smoothly. After 3 and a half years living with my 5 goodfellas I still get impressed with the Adugan workteamenship and problem-solving capacities. Yet more impressed with how it worked today. Let me explain:

We’ve started with a retrospective since june 2007, our first Planning, reviewing the conferences we’ve attended, the trips, studies and researches we’ve done, the prizes we received, and specially, the projects we’ve started, delivered and archived. This was as much motivational due to our achievements as it was a rant on our past faults. This retrospective dictated the tone of our conversations and prepared ourselves for the next step: what Aduge is for each of us?

Almost two hours of dialogue and team dynamics explaining our expectations towards Aduge, and our personal and professional goals. As expected, specially after almost six months of forced recess, not all ideas converged at the beginning. The bright side is that in the last months we’ve reached the conclusion that well… they don’t need to. Aduge is the sum of 6 different people, and it is possible to build it according to the different wishes of those people. And at 6:00 PM one of the biggest wishes of the Adugans was coffee.

Coffeebrake done and we aim for the next step. Understanding our individual differences and planning from them we’ve done a brief revision of our organization chart. More specific decisions on this matter are to be done in one or two more days, based on the future strategies that we’re still to define, but some basic features are settled.

One more brake, this time with soda and pizza. Then we watched some inspirational episodes of Extra Credits, a weekly show by James Portnow, Daniel Floyd and Allison Theus for The Escapist. Considering their insightful words and what we’ve thinked during the whole day we moved to the most crucial point of the day: revision of our corporate values and mission statement.

It wasn’t a easy task, and to look again at the terms we’ve defined 3 years ago presented a true challenge for our mutual understanding. Surprisingly enough we’e passed the ordeal with ease. After all, a great deal of those last 3 years were invested in studies that aided us in better understanding what we’ve been looking forward and where we want to take Aduge from now on. A little change in our values and a complete rearrangement of the mission statement could seem a bit drastic, but fundamentally what we’ve done was to make it more clear and simple the same goal we always pursued: to push the boundaries of game expression.

Following our commitment to keep in touch with our readers, here is a batch of fresh news to you!

From the 08th to the 10th of November, Aduge was in Florinópolis to the SBGames 2010. Between the usual networking, inspiring keynotes and long treks under the sun, we had the surprise of Sembante, in it’s Global Game Jam incarnation, being awarded on the SBGames’ Indie Festival. The awards were the 2nd “Best Game Overall” and “Best Game Design”. Thanks to the judges! To everyone that is coming here to the Ghostboard because of Semblante, make sure to try the updated, IGF version.

Also among the best paper awards we had our share of surprises: congratulations to our two dear adugans, Bruno Bulhões and Thiago ‘Beto’ Alves, for the award of best paper on the Art & Design track.

Going forward a little, it is with great relief that we can announce that 5/6 members of our team already presented their graduation projects. Our positive energies stay with the 1/6 that didn’t. =]

And with this we finish this particular brief round of updates. When we recover from the excitement of these past few days we will return full speed ahead!