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

Hey everyone! Time for a bit of report on our whereabouts! Here come some busy weeks!

We’re continuously working on Qasir al-Wasat translations and updates, the portuguese version is around 70% of it’s first draft! On separate threads, our localization collaborators around the world are doing their magic bringing the game to many many different languages! This release, when it arrives, we’ll be truly special!

Qasir has been reviewed and spotted by some neat sites by now, and we’re extremely happy with the reception! We’ve been seen in RockPaperShotgun and beyond, in Poland, Italy, Portugal and even here, in our native Brazil, at Gamesfoda and ArenaIG! This is just the begining, and we expect to see the game gain more traction as the Goeatian word is passed on!!

Speaking of traction, festival season is nigh!!! We’ll be at some of them and hope to meet y’all there!

ALL

This is a quick schedule of our trips:

INDIECADE - Culver City, California
4-8 October

also: our Guys and Gal will arrive  in Culver one day earlier, and stay in California for a few days, this should make it easier to meet everyone!

BGS - BRASIL GAME SHOW - São Paulo
11-14 October

SB-GAMES - Brasilia
2-4 November

BIG Festival - São Paulo
28-29 November

If you want to meet us please reach us on twitter @aduge! Or talk directly with @maperns and @vermonde!

 

Aduge’s back from Independence Day’s holiday ready for work, actions and stories planned and with clear deadlines. Plane tickets on hand for the SBGames 2011, around half of the Adugans will be there, and we await the results of our submission of Qasir Al-Wasat for Brasil Game Show.

Well, while we don’t drop the bomb itself, a small drop for everyone:

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 again!

As promised, today I’ll present a more complete review of what we’ve seen in Rio during the SBGames. Yesterday we had our weekly meeting and basically discussed about the Symposium. Undoubtedly the most important aspect of our participation in the event was the networking we did there: game industry consultants, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture (MinC), publishers incubating programs, fellow developers, students and researchers. Secondly we agreed that the panels, as Bruno said three days ago, were the highlights of the event. Two of them, on Game Development Education and Governmental Policies, promoted some good discussion, but sadly also highlighted some misconceptions that are still deeply stuck in the minds of many in the Brazilian Game Industry and Educational System. Some of these include: the belief that is by trying to do the “Next Halo” – as put by Jason Della Rocca – that new developers will prevail, that there is no opportunity in remaining independent and in small business, that games should be viewed as simple entertainment industry goodies, that the artistic aspect of a game is limited to it’s visual aesthetics, that sound design is something alien to game development, that Game Design has more affinities to Product Design than with Chess, and so on. But don’t worry, as a coin has two faces there’s always the bright side. We discovered that the MinC has a very interesting opinion of Games and their artistic value, found some small developers and starter teams with some nice ideas and made some good acquaintances. Jason’s keynote was a very interesting and provoking exposition. Talking about the trends and the innovative cycles that permeates our industry, Jason urged the Brazilian developers to ignore the mainstream box (big budget, big teams, blockbuster AAA titles) and look for other ventures (indie, casual, advergames, etc.) to flourish. We hope that those wise words will be heard by the Brazilian developers.


Other remarkable pieces of the Symposium were the Indie Game Festival and the VideoGame Art Exhibition. Despite the short time we had to appreciate all the material in them, both seem to be great initiatives and had some good material to present. The sad part is the huge disparity of the contents. The Art Exhibition presented some concept arts and visual assets with artsy aesthetics (although in general the final assets tend to completely destroy the most beautiful and experimental concepts trying to look “realistic”), a nice character design competition (with both good ideas and childish-awesome-super-ultra-characters) and specially good exemplars of games with artistic meaning, such as the indies Passage, Gravitation and I Wish I Were The Moon. On the other hand, the games in the Indie Festival, as we were able to percieve them, lacked in general the deeper meaning and potential to transform a player through reflection and/or more experimental mechanics that are among the key features of many indie games done around the world. Many of the games in the Indie Festival had more garage-made-like, low budget features, and a clear desire to be a mainstream game, instead of focusing on innovative and experimental ideas, creative freedom or meaningful experiences. Once again we spot the evilness of the “Next Halo” Syndrome, even small teams tend to believe that the best way to go is, with a team of less than 20 people and a small budget, try to do something that will compete with EA, Ubisoft and Activision-Blizzard. So, remember Jason’s words and let’s start thinking out of the box or, even better, show us that there’s already more than meets the eye in the Brazilian industry. As I said in the first lines of the post, the greatest treasure of the Symposyum was networking, and people we met in this and the past SBGames give us hope that the second option is true. Some of them are our friend Guilherme Xavier and his team from Donsoft, the developers of the great winner of the Festival, the promising Capoeira Legends.

So, creative minds, bold designers, indie developers from Brazil, we call you all, we ask you to show yourselves!

notindie

So you heard that in 2016 we’ll have the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Pretty cool, uh? But 2016 remains a year far far away by now. For what that matters, the next big thing in Rio is SBGames 2009, between October’s 8th and 10th. The Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment is in it’s 8th edition and this time will focus in the so called Convergence issue.

I’ve been in the last edition, Belo Horizonte 2008, and the event turned out to be much more interesting than I’ve anticipated. A good surprise indeed. So this time all the Adugans are going, and the expectations are considerably high. Aduge will be flying to Rio this week and we hope to send you some news from the new Olympic city soon.


We do not support Microsoft Internet Explorer.