Category: Events
Slam Bolt Scrappers at PAX East!
Slam Bolt Scrappers is going to be on show at PAX East as part of the Boston Indie Showcase! That’s right, this is the very first time the public will get to hands, mittens, and other ocular implants on Slam Bolt Scrappers, and get to experience first hand the innovative mix of brawling and building.
And we’ll be in great company! The Boston Indie Showcase was created to show off selected developers of the burgeoning Boston indie development scene. So make sure you come by the Boston Indie Showcase at PAX East the weekend of March 26-28 and try out Slam Bolt Scrappers and the rest of the Boston Indies Showcase games!
March 12, 2010 | | Comments (0)
Category: Events
Tags: Boston Indies Showcase, PAX East, Slam Bolt Scrappers
CGC Marathon, helping Haiti
Yeah, I just did a blog post about this last week, but it’s a good cause so here it is again. The Complete Game Completion Marathon is this weekend and they (we?) need your support! As of writing this we’re just above $2,200, well away from our rock star goal of $10K. Donate if you can afford it! And then check out the website and watch us make fools of ourselves for you and the rest of the intarwebs this weekend.
Not sure how to donate? Click this big link below! Want to see what we’re doing? Check out last week’s blog post.
February 24, 2010 | | Comments (1)
Category: Events
Tags: charity, complete, donate, GAMBIT, game, Haiti, marathon
Fire Hose for Haiti
We’re taking part in the GAMBIT Complete Game-Completion Marathon in two weeks, it’s a fund raiser with all proceeds going to help the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. Over one weekend we’ll be spending tons of time playing some crazy games and trying to get people to donate to the cause. Here’s what we’ll be up to!
Games: It’s the Three Ring Circus!
1. Final Fantasy, All White Mage Run (NES): We will complete the entire Final Fantasy with the worst party possible, four white mages. No partial credit here; we only get points if we finish the game and defeat Chaos.
2. Mega Man 9 Challenge Run (XBLA/PSN/WiiWare): Mega Man 9 is a ridiculously hard game with 50 insane challenges that make the game that much harder. We will attempt to finish AT LEAST 40 of the 50 challenges, with extra credit for each achievement beyond 40.
3. Mario Kart Extravaganza (SNES, N64, GameCube, Wii): We will play through every 150cc cup in every console Mario Kart game. Our success will be based on the LOWEST trophy level we get; thus if we get 19 golds and 1 silver then our performance is rated silver. We will be trying for all golds!
Bonus: While we play we will blog, pontificate, and generally do interesting stuff in front of the webcam for people following online.
Extra New Bonus! World famous Fire Hose artist extraordinaire Jacques Pena will be making incredible video game art of the games we are playing and taking requests during the weekend. Contributors who donate a certain amount (probably $100) will be getting free one-of-a-kind art as a thank you! Details coming soon.
If you want to donate go to our page on Partners in Health, or just click on the big thermometer up top!
February 12, 2010 | | Comments (2)
Category: Events
Tags: charity, complete, donate, fantasy, final, fund, GAMBIT, Haiti, Jacques, marathon, mario kart, mega man, Pena, raiser, thermometer
GGJ 2010: The Most Heartbreaking Laughter
My Team, EL MATADORS: Cole, me, Mike, Nazer, and Matt. You can't tell, but we are each holding little Mariachi band figures that decorate our workspace this weekend.
Global Game Jam 2010 Post #2:
It is 12:30am again. Day two of the 2010 Global Game Jam is in the bag. I planned to post an update in the afternoon, but there was not a second to spare all day. We sprinted through 15 hours of development today, and found ourselves in all three of what I am told are the classic Day-Two moments: a serious talk in the afternoon about what features can be kept and what needs to be discarded for the sake of completing the project, a major technical crisis where the tools broke in the face of our ambition, and reaching a place where the most frustrating and incomprehensible bugs brought laughter instead of tears, where the relief of having gotten this far, and the pleasure in doing this together, won over whether or not the thing we want to call a game ever becomes what we hoped.
And we were not the only ones. I overheard other teams talking about what they could cut and heard heart-rending stories of programmers losing their entire work so far due to a computer error of some sort (even in a 3-day project–or especially in a 3-day project!– a version-safe system is critical). And slap-happy giggles filled the corridors between the MIT Gambit labs in the last hours, developers enjoying after a long day the many interesting ways their games managed to break.
So how is “The Last Bullfight” coming along, you ask? Thanks to the art direction of our good friend Pablo P, in-game art and animation are pretty much complete (at least, sufficiently to show all of the features we planned). The sound work is in good shape, including a powerful song composed by our designer. The code features that have been completed are successfully producing an atmosphere, a sense of perspective and place, and we are happy about that so far. While the back-end code of the basic kill-or-be-killed game play is in, there is no real feedback yet to the player on which is occurring, which we understand is the difference between having a game and having a weird little interactive movie. We hope to have a game tomorrow.
One day left. See you on the other side,
Jason
January 31, 2010 | | Comments Off
Category: Development Blog, Events, Games
Tags: game development story, Global Game Jam 2010, Jason Wiener, MIT Gambit, The Last Bullfight
IGDA Rapid + Iterative Prototyping Slides Available!
By popular demand, here are the slides from my web based talk on Rapid Iterative Prototyping. Take a look why don’t you! If you’d like to present this to a class or to someone else feel free to do so, please just give me a credit somewhere.
If you have questions on the talk or one that didn’t get answered during the presentation please feel free to ask in the comments section and I’ll answer it there, alternatively you can just e-mail me. And if this is your first time here then welcome, and be sure to join our twitter/facebook/rss feeds!
Oh man, I’ve gotten soooo many good suggestions for awesome web comics from this talk 
January 27, 2010 | | Comments (10)
Category: Events, Words of Wisdom
Tags: comics, Eitan, Facebook, IGDA, iterative, lecture, presentation, prototyping, rapid, rss, slides, twitter
What I learned at Boston GameLoop
This past Saturday was the second (annual?) Boston GameLoop. It was a day long unconference organized by Darius Kazemi and Scott MacMillan. This year it was pretty big, and had some 70+ developers who participated in a bunch of random talks and roundtables. It was quite fun with lots of interesting discussions. So what did I learn?
- There are a lot of indie devlopers in Boston, but almost no one else is doing XBLA, PSN, or WiiWare games. I guess the lure of PC and iPhone games is pretty strong.
- Some people will do anything for Xbox achievements, including putting together a B.S. session just to get their gamer score about 10K.
- It’s super hard to find really talented artists who also understand art direction. Speaking of which, if you happen to be an artist we’d love to hear from you.
- Programming languages like Chef, AAAAAAAAAAA!!!, Brainfuck, and INTERCAL are always good for a few laughs.
Overall the conference was a lot of fun. If you want to see detailed info on any of the sessions you can follow the event recap page as descriptions go up.
August 16, 2009 | | Comments Off
Category: Events
Tags: Boston, Darius, esoteric, gameloop, indie, Kazemi, language, macmillan, programming, Scott, unconference
The Fire Hose D&D Campaign Begins!
Here is a guest post by Josh Diaz, a good friend of mine who has been helping me out with this D&D campaign. We’ll start a separate blog of our D&D adventures, more on that soon. And with that I’ll turn it over to Josh!
On Monday evenings, a group of heroes gathered in a crowded town square, uniting to help protect their homelands. At the same time, a group of game developers gathered in a dingy dungeon, to help learn the origins of their craft.
That’s right, Fire Hose is running a D&D campaign! I was invited by our Dungeon Master, Eitan, along with a select group of the realm’s finest scholars and sharpest blades, to come around and play in a game of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. 4th Edition is an updated version of the long-running game, and some of the design changes look back to both the original ‘tactical wargaming’ history of its predecessors, while also drawing on the immediacy and class balancing of modern computer and video games.
The rules are long, bookish, and copyrighted — so I’ll direct your attention to Eitan’s simple, but beautiful world. As Dungeon Master, Eitan is artist, writer, programmer *and* executable: he sets up the world our characters will inhabit, and keeps everything moving while we react to new events. As such, he’s come up with a little slice of a world that was richly represented with just a little bit of advance work. Pulling from real-world sources, our characters meet in a small and frozen town stuck on a peninsula behind a mountain range. ‘What’s exciting about a small frozen chunk of isolated no-man’s land,’I pretend to hear you ask? Well, in this case, the town is host to a small magical gateway that leads to a much larger town, and acts as kind of a trading post for the peninsula and it’s inhabits. With a hook like that, characters drawn from all over the world — an elf scholar who came to visit the big city from his wooded homeland, a dragonborn mercenary from a rural mountain rookery — are given both a reason and the means to gather. But if we can get there, where else can we get? And *who* else has access to the portal?
Oh, I haven’t mentioned the invasion, the ambush, or the kobold slingers with their potions of explodey doom yet. But one of the neat things about D&D is that in the course of play, you always end up with more threads than you planned, and that just means there’s something to think about for next week. Adieu!
July 31, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Events, Games
Tags: adventure, D&D, diaz, dragons, dungeons, fantasy, game, josh, kobold, playing, role, rpg
Happy Birthday To Us!
YESSSS! We are one year old today! Woo-hoo! We celebrated this weekend with an awesome BBQ. The weather was perfect, the food was awesome, and the cake was almost entirely typo free. Tons of fun! Want to wish us a happy birthday? Do it in the comments section!
Special thanks to all of the people who made hitting this milestone possible:
- The amazing talented Fire Hose Team
- The various friends, interns, and freelancers who provided us with help over these past few months
- Our awesome advisors who give us the best advice and feedback.
- MIT, GAMBIT, the Ed Arcade, and their super encouraging environments
- And most importantly our families for sticking behind us while we walk the tight rope that is the start up world.
Here’s looking forward to year two!
Lots more awesome BBBBQ pictures after the jump. (more…)
July 21, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Events, Random
Tags: BBBBQ, BBQ, birthday, cake, family, food, friends, grill, old, one year, thanks, typo
IGC East Powerpoint Available Here!
Today at the IGC East Ethan and I gave a talk called “Rapid, Iterative Prototyping, or How to Rip Off Dinosaur Comics”. A lot of people were asking, so here’s the slideshow from the talk. Enjoy! I’ll gladly answer any questions in the commnets section.
May 7, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Events, Words of Wisdom
Tags: comics, conference, dinosaur, east, Eitan, Ethan, Fenn, IGC, iterative, prototyping, rapid, talk
2 Boston Talks: IGC East and MIT BiG
Fire Hose has some talks coming up! Back to back talks in fact, on May 7th and 8th. Both are in Boston, so if you are in town be sure to stop by and check them out!
What’s that? Can’t afford the conference tickets? Never fear, I’ll be posting a short synopsis of each talk right here on this website. Here’s a sneak peek:
Thursday, May 7th, 10:30 – 11:20 – Rapid and Iterative Prototyping, or How to Rip Off Dinosaur Comics
Ethan and I are going to talk about how to make video games quickly even if you don’t have all the pieces in place. We’ll keep things exciting with lots of jokes, and we’ll be showing off early builds of our current game to illustrate points. The talk is guaranteed to entertain, or we’ll go back in time and save you the 60 minutes by telling you to skip it. You can read more about the talk here or on the conference’s website.
Friday, May 8th, 11:45 – 12:30 – Digital Distribution Panel
I really have no idea what the panel is going to be about beyond the title, but I bet it’s going to be pretty interesting as all three of us panelists come from pretty different backgrounds. My friend Al Reed from Demiurge Studios will be there, and he knows a hell of a lot more than me, so I’m exicted to see what he’s got to say. You can read more about the speakers here but I don’t see a page for our panel. Scot Osterweil and Dave Edery are doing a panel on Serious Games which should be pretty cool too.