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!

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

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

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! ><·>

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!

Hello boys and girls!

It is a joyfull surpriese to discover a increasing number of Brazilian submissions to the 13th Indie Game Festival!  In these few days since the announcement of the full list of entries we ware able to spot no less than 10 games from Brazil!

The first one is easy, our own revisited expressiveness experiment Semblante. Next is our godchildren Studio MiniBoss‘  lovely/grim and adventurous Talbot’s Odyssey. The third known name for us in the list was Cargo Delivery, a beautiful and puzzling physics/logistics game by the Cats in the Sky. The last one already know to us was the cute and iPaddy Jules: Unboxing the World by the Sulistas.
The others we just found after a deeper look in the list and, unfortunately, I did’t got the chance to take a better look on them. Thus, I’m still not be able to write one of those savvy tag lines! But here they are: Ranch Wars by Bacon Studios, TriLinea ReAct by Tendi, Nature’s Protector Remix by FACENS, Lumaki and Freekscape – Escape from Hell both by Kidguru Studios and Bugs: Lights and Shadows by Aleph Games.

That’s it for now, hope I’ll write again soon with more intelligence on all the games! By now I suggest you take a look on them!

Indies, unite!

Although our activities has slowed down and Tsar Project is taking a little nap, Adugans are right now in full speed finishing our Semblante’s port to Scirra’s Construct, along with a quite big remake. (For first time readers, you can find some more information about Semblante throughout our blog)

All this effort is to take part at this year’s IGF (Independent Games Festival), mostly to obtain valuable insights with their feedbacks as Tsar will be a fierce opponent next year! ;B

Soon you’ll be able to check out the results! For now, you can check our team in a serious decision meeting.

The exhibition was about expressive games, games that through game-only means (mostly their rules and mechanics) can express an idea or make some kind of commentary, in the vein of what Ian Bogost calls procedural rhetoric. Short on budget, we had to chose only 7 games to expose, and 6 of them couldn’t be demanding since they would run on relatively weak hardware. We tried to chose diverse kinds of games, but all of them were indie in the end. The exhibited games were: Michael “Father” Kasprzak and co. Towlr (and other puzzles), Jason Rohrer’s Gravitation, David Shute’s Small Worlds, La Molleindustria’s Everyday the Same Dream, Jason Nelson’s Game game game and again game,  Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back and Jonathan Blow’s (and David Hellman’s) Braid.

The purpose of the exhibition was to promote games as a creative and expressive medium and also purge the common misconception, one that is rampant in Brazil, that the game industry and games as a medium can be summarized only by the mainstream AAA games. You can see some photos of the exhibition below (click to enlarge).

An overview of the exhibition space.

Visitors enjoying the games.

Guilherme Xavier from Donsoft chatting with the guys from Ratel Studio.

The minimalist Small Worlds.

The thought-provoking Everyday the Same Dream.

The frustrating experience of Towlr.

The eccentric Game, game, game and again game.

The metaphorical Gravitation.

The difficult, but rewarding, Don’t look back.

And last, but not the least, the time bending action of Braid.

About the MegaMergulho, it was a series of 5 workshops about some (but not all) game development topics: Conceptualization, Game Design, Visual Development, Sound Design and Project Management. The first one, conceptualization, was basically a workshop about going indie, about coming up with a vision and conceptualizing a game that follows that vision. We asked our participants to create a game vision about the theme “Desert”.  The second one, about game design, we showed our own conceptual framework about games and made a comprehensive overview about the game designer and his job. The third one was about visual development, showing our own case on Tsar. The fourth workshop was about sound design with some theory over sound design and then practice by composing sound effects. The last workshop was about project management, we showed our management processes and also we made our own take on Chris Hecker’s finish your game rant from the last GDC, by encouraging everyone to organize, develop and finish their games.  All in all, the workshops were a resounding success and we’d like to thank everyone that participated and contributed to it.

So now that we are relieved of our side questing, we will return to the development of Tsar Project. Expect a Tsar Update soon!

Yesterday was Aduge’s 3rd birthday!!!