We were recently listed as one of Sweden’s 15 hottest young game developers in Metro Teknik, which is an honor. It’s great to see so many promising Swedish game developers being out and about. It’s also nice that 4 out of the 15 (Tarsier Studios, Spelgrim, Blazing Red and us) are from Karlshamn, all of which have been sitting in the same building as us for a long time, although Blazing Red just moved out.
Boingo was recently mentioned by Bytejacker, as one of their Gamerdrome picks of the week (fast forward to the 5:30 mark). The Gamerdrome is Bytejacker’s own game specific video community, where you can upload any game related videos that you might want to share with the world.
This week we started working on the third big iteration of Boingo, which we will tell you more about in the weeks to come. Those of you who have followed the project since the beginning might be wondering what’s been taking so long, so I thought I’d try to shed some light on the whole thing. In order to do that I need to back up about 15 months, to the end of February 2008.
I (Peter) had just gotten back from GDC in San Francisco, where I had presented a prototype of our first game concept Bacteria. The prototype had been made in about six weeks, and I can readily admit that it wasn’t that much fun to play. It was met with an overall cool response, but I at least received some useful feedback which I took home with me. Back at the office I sat down with the team and we discussed our options. Based on the feedback that we had received we decided to can the project, but only if we managed to come up with a new, better concept that same day.
The pitch document submission deadline for the Swedish Game Awards was just 24 hours away, so we needed to put something together sooner rather than later if we were to be able to participate. We started discussing some ideas, whipped up some sketches on the whiteboard, and presto! The original Boingo concept was born. I then went on to create a pitch document for the Swedish Game Awards and managed to get it delivered on time. During the following twelve weeks or so we developed the first prototype, which went on to win the award for Best Execution as well as the Gamer’s Choice award at the Swedish Game Awards. Below you can watch a trailer that was released previous to the awards ceremony, showing the game as it was then. We went under a different name at the time, which is why the logo in the beginning doesn’t say Black Drop Studios.
We are just about to board the train to Stockholm and the Swedish Game Awards ‘09, which takes place tomorrow on Försvarshögskolan. Since Boingo was one of the games to receive awards last year, we have been invited to participate in the event. When we get back we will tell you what happened with Boingo after last year’s event, leading up to where we are today.
So what have we been up to these past months? Well as some of you may know, we were granted development funding for Boingo from the Nordic Game Program this past december. We began working on the new prototype in January, and in March we showed the prototype at GDC in San Francisco. We now feel that is time to show you some footage of this prototype and see what you think of it! Feel free to post your feedback as a comment, we greatly appreciate it.
So here it comes, the new Boingo prototype footage, enjoy!
After a long silence we are now back with some exciting Dev Blog material. We have not been sitting idly on our hands during this time, but rather been following up on post GDC stuff, as well as some other things that you might get to see in the near future. I will now pass the torch to Sofie, who will give you a really nice walkthrough of her creative art process.
Best regards, Peter
Hello dear readers!
Sofie, the lone artist of Black Drop here. The 15th of April SoFE, School of Future Entertainment held their annual game festival, the Game Concept Challenge at the East Pier in Karlshamn. During these days they also held a few competitons for the public, such as 24 hour Code and Concept art challenges. I was fortunate enough to have the day off, and decided to participate in the festivities and compete in the 24 hour Concept art challenge. The Challenge was held by Tarsier Studios and the theme was ‘Warrior God in Motion’.
The art was judged based on three criterias: motion, technical and design. There were many talented artists there, mostly students from BTH and SoFE, but also some who had traveled a long way to compete. The Concept art challenge was won by a talented girl named Jenny Chen, check out the winning art here.
I was happy with my own submission, which took me a little bit over 12 hours to complete, and I actually won second place. As a bonus for you readers I decided to share the process of my piece ‘Aztec Chaos Twins’.
Hello everyone! Peter from Black Drop here, and I am going to try to summarize the experiences amassed during the week, meaning GDC. It has been non stop action from the beginning, with meetings, lectures, parties and other things taking up all available time. That’s what’s caused the lack of updates on the site, ergo massive summary post.
It’s now less than 36 hours until we’re leaving Karlshamn for San Francisco and GDC. As usual there’s a lot of stuff that needs doing before the event, so the last week or so has been quite intense.
One of the things we have been working on are the materials that we’re bringing with us, like one-pages, portfolios, business cards and last but not least posters. We just came from the print-shop where we picked up all of the stuff, some of which you can see in the image above (click for somewhat larger image).
We also picked up the brand spanking new Boingo poster (below). As a treat we have provided you with a nice high resolution version of the poster. Just click the image to see it! Or if you prefer you can right click on this link and select Save as to download it directly.
Stay tuned during next week for updates from the show!
We are getting closer to our departure to San Francisco, with Game Connection and GDC on the agenda. To celebrate this occasion we will entrust you with a little story about the last time we were there. It is about what can happen when blindly trusting your instincts, after having a few drinks too many in a city you don’t know all too well. It is safe to say that this wasn’t one of our brightest moments, but now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Since we released the images of our new character design, old Boingo has been behaving quite erratic. This might also have something to do with the fact that we have begun calling him Bingo.
Today he went so far as to attack Elvis Stitch and then plant himself atop the Swedish Game Awards trophy where he proceeded to shout out his defiance across the office. Although we are quite understanding when it comes to an identity crisis of this magnitude, we have to draw the line somewhere.
In the end we had to send in Cloud to take care of things, Advent Children style, which resulted in a tiny little mess with orange tufts splayed across it. Though a bit shaken up, we think Bingo has learned his place for the time being. Time will tell if he can start leading a normal life in the office, or if we will have to send him back to the jungle.
We are still at the office, polishing the GDC demo of Boingo and writing gibberish on the blog. The new version is beginning to take on solid form, and it feels good to be able to show it off in just a couple of weeks.
We recently showed you the design process behind the main character used in our initial Boingo prototype. If you missed it you can check out Part 1 - The Missing links (opens in a new window), and if not you can just jump ahead to Part 2!
The initial Boingo prototype was developed from scratch during a period of about ten weeks and has since then participated in a couple of competitions and won a couple of awards. During the prototype’s lifespan we have received lots of feedback and criticism from many different people, including publishers and other industry people.
With the completely new version of Boingo that we are currently working on, we are aiming to make the most of that feedback by addressing some of the issues that has come to our attention. We are also striving to enhance almost every aspect of the game, technically, visually and gameplay-wise. One of the things that we have been working on is an enhanced look for our main character, and we are now going to show you how we went about doing just that.
