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

EDIT: Ops. Looks like we will miss the deadline because of some health problems (and some pendent graduation project errands). New version should be uploaded tomorrow (December 3rd).

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!

And here it is: Semblante 2.0, the IGF version. It’s a full revamp of the previous version, as we ported the game to the Construct Game Creator.

As it is a full port and a redesign, pretty much everything is changed between visuals, mechanical tweaks, level design etc. We will improve this version as the time goes by as since we had more than 48 hour to develop Semblante 2.0 the code and all the production pipeline is much simpler, which makes improvements, bugfixing and asset implementation way easier than what we could achieve on the Game Maker version.

And yes, Semblante is one of the 391 games competing at the 13th Independent Games Festival. We submitted it for all the tiny bits of publicity we can get and to receive feedback from the judges and peers.

To download the latest version of Semblante click here. Or you can go grab it on the game’s main page.

See you.

I’m very glad to announce that Tsar Project is now officially  in production!

The next Tsar Update Bruno will lay more details in every department’s work, but for now I’ll give you a shot from the studio and some information on my work:

In the background our beautiful 64sq ft pinning board, full of references and WIPs, including beta versions of the game’s map, sound design equalization and chord maps, plot drafts and else. It is a greatly useful feature for a creative studio, indeed.

Those in the foreground are little models I’ve done recently of two types of guards we’ll have in the Kremlin, they’re made of platicine, and still WIP, but are already useful in finding the right angle for their sprites.

Behind them you can (NOT) see three models of our protagonist, in whom my work is focused now, primarily in doing his basic movements animations and sprites.

Last but not least there is the Tsar Project logo!!! We have decided to use the same principle of the studio’s visual ID in our in development projects, so the typography is the same Cedilha Script and the logo in a brush stroke monogram of Tsar (actually, Царь).

Type to you later, and have a nice week!

Yesterday was Aduge’s 3rd birthday!!!

After a long era of post starve, we have fresh news that just came out of the oven! And smells like cherry!
We are eager to say that Aduge is now an official supporter of N Design 2010, the National Conference of Design Students from Brazil, which will happen from 11 to 18 july in Curitiba, Paraná.

N Design is an event that brings together design students from all over Brazil to discuss topics related to design, generally speaking. This year the event’s theme will be “Immersion”, proposing to have more in depth discussions as well as the participants enjoyment of the event, caring about the continuity of the activities after it. The main activity format will be the “Divings”, workshops from students for students about something related to design (or not).

You may ask yourself what does it have to do with us, huh? We’re doing some interesting things for this event. It’s a very special package filled with:

· The MegaDiving, that is a series of divings with the theme “game developing”. It’ll be five days with activities about concepting, game design, graphics, audio and project management focused on small team game development. Our intention is to spread the indie word, looking forward to stimulate people to take part of the indie movement.

· An exposition about Art Games on which we’ll expose ten games that can convey the concept of games as an art form, so that more people can get to know about it. We had not yet decided what games will be there, but we’ll have a post about it later on.

· The organization of a gaming space on the Event’s Living Center. Thanks to the coordinator of the Positivo University’s Game Course, Rafael Dubiela, who is also assisting 4 adugans with their graduation projects and helping us make the exposition possible.

· Run the project management system of the event. This item may seem kindda funny and needs a further explanation. Two adugans (Ingrid and Marcel) and Florzinha (which helped Aduge on the Global Game Jam) joined CONDe (N Design Organization Committee) to manage the N 2010 project. They became part of CONDe family, ended up proposing the exposition and the MegaDiving, to then make this support formal so that all of Aduge’s effort towards N could be grouped in one place. Apparently with only an indirect link with a game developer, Project Management is a well esteemed area of Marcel, one of Aduge’s business differentiation and a subject that we put a lot of effort on our graduation.

We at Aduge are very pleased with the opportunities that are arousing through N Design! If you are a Brazilian design student don’t miss this event! (and if you are not, you should consider tenderly visiting us for this nice conference =)

If you want to know more about N Design, access ndesign.org.br (portuguese only).

More info about our work coming soon!

What must mark the beginning of production is a stage where we do not have any kind of uncertainties or doubts and can work on a “final” version of the software, without getting around different ways of doing things and without any big scope or feature changes.

The Production Planning we discussed the answers to questions that our testing and experimenting didn’t solve 100% and even the ones that testing and experimenting themselves had raised. The end result of our planning was excellent. More details… on the next chapters!

By the way, the one posting is Marcel Pace, executive producer of Tsar Project. (I rarely post here… You know, sound, music, project managing and process managing… kinda busy here, hehe! )