Use your widget sidebars in the admin Design tab to change this little blurb here. Add the text widget to the Blurb Sidebar!

Hello. I just got interviewed by Mike Higbee on Vinesauce. It was a nice interview about Qasir al-Wasat and about Aduge in general, you can check it out here.

Hi guys!

Qasir Al-Wasat is going in full steam lately, and we have so many new features we are very excited to show you! But today’s post is about the amazing Global Game Jam and its results.

We already participated in 2010 and 2011 Jams, both with different collaborators in the team, but this year we took the trial to an extreme. Our usual band of six was divided in three groups, mixed with some of our friends.

This year’s theme was:

What? A picture? - And didn’t we made a game like this before?

Super Battle Gunship Oroboros was our entry for the SPJam, themed infinity, mist and/or fire.

 

Oh well. =p  I’m pretty sure we can find a new way to translate this.

1. Team AlexFuu

Vermon (our lead programmer) and Dorte (our colaboring programmer in Qasir Project), teamed up to create a 3d platform game game in Unity. The result is ZVOL - The Walk of Life, a game based on osmosis and choices. You help Johnny Walker (what a fitting name, uh?) go throught life while climbing elevators and solving puzzles.

There are a lot of great ideas here that can be improved and built up to sustain entire games themselves. I’m sure some of them will return in a future Adugan project!

2. Team Twin Birds

Beto, Bruno, Mapperns and myself united our creative forces in a project with an obviously too long name: Roven: Oldman’s Rover Tale or the Errand Aesthete.

The game was born of our deviate rendering of the theme. Instead of infinity, cycle of life or Ouroboros, we decided to see the theme as “symbol”, “symbolism” or “interpretation”. Our plans where a metroidvania-like game, where the protagonist would learn his powers through aesthetic experiences of the world. This would happen through the interaction with seemingly normal objects of the world that would “launch” videos.

Bruno used the chance to play programmer, while I dedicated my weekend to paint scenarios. Mapperns was in charge of the character design and animations, while Beto created the level design. Unfortunately the pipe line + a target that could be smaller left us with more of an experiment than a game. However, we did learn like hell!

A HUGE thanks for Ricardo Toreh, that helped us with sound effects and music, and Gabriel do Valle, that directed and shot the videos used in game.

3. Team Moodsphere Collective

Marcel joined the group of Iuri Kato, Gabriel “Toddy” and Gabriel “Florzinha” Jacobi for the creation of an experience based on the famous Conway’s Game of Life. ByteSelf is a three player colorful game, in wich each color predates another, and the trick for winning the game is making sure your own predator prevails.

I’ve heard rumors that the game will be available in Kongregate soon enough, after some balancing and gameplay improvements. We’ll make sure you are well informed when this happens!

Here in Curitiba we where surrounded by friends and inspirations.


Clockwise: Cattercannon, Everlong , Magnus Opus and Samsara.

Cattercannon was made by Mariana “Bolinho” Tonini and Paulo “Animmaniac” Reihner. The objective here is to take a steampunk catterpillar as far as you can, one segment at a time.

Everlong by Monster Juice is another multiplayer, with an interesting dynamic of dying x returning to life. Each time you die it will become harder to return to the game, but each time you do, you will return more powerful.

Magnus Opus is a tabletop game where you play an Alchemist racing to create the Philosopher Stone before his colleagues. It was developed by the group of Arthur Mittlebach, in about 20h, and was inspired by numerous EuroGames.

Samsara was created by our friend Daniel Rossato, who decided to take his students to the GGJ. It’s about the wheel of fortune and the virtues of Buddhism. We loved the use of comic sans and word art!

In Campinas and Porto Alegre where some of our favorite indie studios, like Catavento, MiniBoss, Taw Studio and SwordTales had their runs. We missed you guys! <3

 


Clockwise: Viktor the Nth (Catavento) , Trapped! In the Chamber of Eternal Darkness (Miniboss) , Soroboruo (TawStudio) and N.E.R.O.T. (Swordtales)

Viktor the Nth has an amazing concept where your past play actually influences your next one. Kind of like a Skyward Sword (with all those diode-type puzzles and obstacles) meet Demon Souls (with the mark of your past deaths clearly visible to you, giving a sense of accomplishment every retry you get past them).

Trapped! In the Chamber of Eternal Darkness is the usual Miniboss jam effort: complete, beautiful and surprisingly well polished for a 48h project. It’s an endless arena shoot’em up with a ton of self-referential material. I was expecting it would have more cows, though. =p

Soroboruo is a stylish action game with a very pleasing (and bold!) eastern aesthetics. Seeing Taw improve this much their Jam results compared to the SPJam back in November brings a smile to our faces. I hope Taw Studio considers using this great graphic style in one of their other games.

Swordtales´N.E.R.O.T. is a running game about a bionic samurai in (what looks like) a psychedelic circular world. In the best style of the Canabalt-like games, there is no time to stop. There is also that Cactus’ vibe and we love it.

Also a shout out for our friend Bolívar, who was participating from Koln, Germany, and helped develop The Tale of Archy!

We are so proud to know so many talented people! Congratulations everyone!

 

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

Just to update you guys on what we are up to lately: there will be a new Semblante version coming soon. December 2nd to be more precise. See you soon.

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!

We do not support Microsoft Internet Explorer.