mike's blog

The Breakfall crew sent a delegation to the Carleton University Global Game Jam for the second year in a row, and it was a huge success! This year's awesome theme was "extinction". Our game, Eats, Shoots & Leaves was voted favourite game by Game Jam participants at Carleton, and given an honourable mention by the judges for "most mature execution"! The game features a panda with a shotgun who tries to swap the endangered status of both pandas and mankind.

Check this out:

http://www.swingswingsubmarine.com/2010/10/26/a-trailer-for-seasons-and-a-new-title/

One of the guys from Swing Swing Submarine just saw our trailer and sent us an email to say hi and talk about some similarities between our games. It's a comparison that's certainly welcome, because they're game looks SWEET.

Independent developers are doing some amazing work out there!

We finally have a video preview of Marvin's Mittens! We're very excited to show Marvin in motion, enjoy!

Ok, this is almost as much to test our brand new SoundCloud account as it is to provide you with sweet, sweet tunes. But this is a rare glimpse into Mike's late night piano-bangin' proclivities before things get cleaned up and arranged for the game.

SoundCloud is pretty cool, although as we're currently on a free account, it's only cool if fewer than a hundred of you actually listen to this. But check it out, I changed their default orange to match the Breakfall orange! Tech-no-logy!!!

A mysterious and incredibly fast moving creature has been spotted in the woods behind Marvin's house. Rumours are circulating that it has a strong natural affinity for warm winter garments. Strange music plays whenever it's present. What is the mysterious Mitten Thief? Will Marvin's mittens be spared? Can he track this creature to its lair to learn the potentially horrible truth?

Listen now!

When Andrew first designed this logo, I thought it was pretty cool. Making Flim Flam Fernandez out of plasticine was largely my idea, because I thought I was hot stuff with plasticine (I'm serious, that's something I claim to be good at). By the end of the Game Jam, everyone had made some pretty cool stuff (several people actually turning out to be better than me... grumble grumble), but Andrew revealed himself as a modeling-clay-mastermind, and in addition to some really cool foliage for the game and a bunch of other assorted visual bits, he did all the title lettering.

Marvin's Mittens still isn't quite done, but with a pretty darned good looking Demo version (with about a third of the levels playable and a majority of our features in place) we have entered the 2011 Independent Games Festival! The competition is tougher than ever, and there are almost 400 games this year, but we're very excited to see what sort of feedback we get from the judges. It also feels really good to have a build that people can... you know... play!

We're still working on an installer that isn't totally broken so people can try our little two-player Game Jame entry. But until that's ready, here's a video of the game in action.

We're humbled by the responses we've been getting to the artwork we did for Flimflam Fernandez. We're still trying to get a stable build posted for people to try out! But while the programmers occupy themselves with the flurry of frustrations causing failure to finish Flimflam Fernandez, others on the team are back at work on Marvin's Mittens art. This screenshot composite shows off the way that our "3D" snowflake particle system and light bloom effects can make fresh new rock and snow art look even more snazzy.