At this year’s Child’s Play Auction Dinner Fire Hose Games was pleased to donate the oppurtuinty to have your name placed into our game. This was accompinaned by a framed piece of artwork created by our own Jacques Pena.

We are happy to announce that the winner of the auction, with an impressive personal donation of $300.00, was number 520, Don F.

We will be in touch soon, and will share updates on the blog!

For more information on how you can donate to Child’s Play please visit their website.

This holiday story belongs to yours truly, and it is less of a personal tradition than it is a story of a time honored ritual that I walked into, unknowingly, when I took up a job at the fine dining establishment known as Hillbilly Junction.

I worked as a server at Hillbilly Junction, a combination gas station, gift shop, banquet hall, buffet, steak house, and eatery when I lived in Willow Springs, Missouri. It was a mystifying place and a rather magical time in my life. A time of change, a time of reflection, a time of half off bacon cheeseburgers during any evening shift.

Yeah, that’s me rocking a Hillbilly Junction apron. Hillbillies Holla!

But never was Hillbilly Junction more entertaining than at Christmastime. Right after Thanksgiving, Jani, the manager, would pull out boxes upon boxes from the storage/liquor closet and open them with care.

Dust,  and tiny bits of yellowed Scotch tape filled the backroom like an allergen blizzard as Jani went through each box gingerly removing the holiday decorations. There really was a feeling of joy and astonishment as the restaurant, usually decorated in a “Tex-Mex” style, was transformed into a winter wonderland (mostly by putting hats and wreaths atop the wild game on display throughout the place.)

This is my first Christmas in Massachusetts, and I doubt that I will find any Christmas taxidermy to make me feel at home; but a girl can hope.

Nothing says fine dining like taxidermed animals. Nothing says “Happy Holidays” like covering those animals with poinsettias.

If you find yourself in Willow Springs, Missouri this holiday season, or at any point in your lifetime, be sure to stop by Hillbilly Junction; home of the John Wayne steak and a heck of a great staff.

The holidays are fast approaching, and with them come days steeped in tradition.  There are plenty of time honored rituals that demand reverence… this is not necessarily one of them.

Instead we will look at the home-spun tradition of Adriel; Fire Hose Programmer and resident Unicorn Tamer.

About ten years ago Adriel’s step-mother thought it would be keen to have her family create Christmas ornaments from scratch. Gathering up glitter, glue, construction paper, and other craft essentials, the family made several ornaments including some terrible looking reindeer, an awful angel (the angel’s head is a gatorade bottle cap with a smiley face drawn on), and some ‘actually pretty decent’ snowflakes.

Enraptured in the merriment of ornament creation, and more than likely tapping into some sort of Martha Stewart magic, the family soon came to the inevitable conclusion that they would construct a paper taco.

“We combined our efforts to create tiny little strips of green for the lettuce, red for the tomatoes, yellow for the cheese, and all sorts of other ingredients.”

-Adriel

The result was a thing of beauty: the Christmas Taco. Every year it is placed front and center on the family Christmas tree.

A teenage Adriel places the angel atop the tree directly above the awesome Christmas Taco. This is an actually old photo. No Instagram here. Photos just used to look like this after they were developed from ‘film’. Weird, right? 

We will be looking at some other Fire Hose staff traditions over the next few weeks. Do you have a wacky holiday tradition that you would like to share? Tell us about it on our Facebook page or send a tweet our way!

The Child’s Play Charity Auction and Dinner is happening on December 8th 2011 in Seattle, and Fire Hose has a pretty sweet set of items for the auction block.

Before we tell you about that though, how about a bit on Child’s Play?

Child’s Play was started in 2003 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins (you may know them better as Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade fame) in response to the media’s negative portrayl of video gaming culture and of gamers themselves. The two called the gaming community to arms and asked them to donate to the Seattle Children’s hospital during the holiday season.

In that first year the charity raised over $250,000 worth of toys, games, and other gifts; the charity has raised nearly 10 million dollars to date.

The goal of Child’s Play is to positively impact the life of a child through the power of play. Tonight you can bid on items donated by people throughout the gaming community the proceeds of which will go to Child’s Play.

Last year we auctioned off a limited edition poster signed by the dev team and the oppurtunity to name one of the characters of Slam Bolt Scrappers.

This year we have donated the opportunity to immortalize yourself in our game, Go Home Dinosaurs! The winning bidder will get to see his or her name as a dinosaur, on a store sign, on a badass weapon, or something so cool that we have not thought of it yet.

The winning bidder will also be given a one of a kind drawing from Jacques Pena as well as a copy of the game.

Not going to the auction? No worries! You can still donate to this great cause by following this link.

People attending the auction tonight will have a chance to bid on this ridiculously awesome piece of art penned by Jacques Pena!

“ As an artist, there are creations that fall under a greater a message, and this one was a major one. Out of anything I create over the next year, this one will always be special.”

-Jacques Pena

Fire Hose Games artist, Jacques Pena, has just returned from Autodesk University, the annual Autodesk conference in Las Vegas. It was at that conference that the Art For Hope exhibit made it’s debut.  

Artists from all over the world were asked to participate in the project. One of the participating artists is our very own Jacques! (we imagine his lack of bragging is due to jet lag)

VIZ Media announced the project several months ago. In a unique collaboration with Autodesk, the Art For Hope project is a limited edition digital anthology which features forty pieces of original art. A selection of the pieces were displayed during this year’s Autodesk conference.

The anthology will be available for a limited time, from December 1, 2011 to May 31, 2012, for $4.99 through VIZManga.com and the VIZ Manga App for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. 100% of the proceeds go to fund Japan relief efforts.

Jacques created, “Love,”  the stunning piece shown above, using Autodesk SketchBook. You can read more about his process on his blog, here.

The digital book made its debut this past week and is available now for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, or for web browsers.  It is on sale through the Apple App store and through VIZ Manga.

Buy it here: App Store | VIZManga.com

]]> http://www.firehosegames.com/2011/12/art-for-hope-available-now/feed/ 0 http://www.firehosegames.com/2011/11/fire-hose-artist-places-3rd-in-the-3ds-max-design-hero-competition/ http://www.firehosegames.com/2011/11/fire-hose-artist-places-3rd-in-the-3ds-max-design-hero-competition/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:11:19 +0000 kate http://www.firehosegames.com/?p=3198 Continue reading →]]>

Is that a photo of an engine? Nope. Jacques Pena.

Fire Hose artist Jacques Pena has recently been awarded third prize in the Autodesk 3DS Max Design Hero Contest. 

Yes, this does mean that Jacques is officially a hero. A design hero.

The contest asked designers and artists to:

portray inventive concepts or renderings of architectural design, mechanical, or industrial/product designs—from buildings, bridges and vehicles, to furniture and consumer products.

Jacque’s entry, entitled O.E.M., uses automotive design as its base; but there is more to it than that.

“I went to work with automotive because it opened me up to creating something more…” explained Jacques, “something crazy and abstract. I wanted something overzealous, something that you would never see in the real world.”

And it was also to incorporate robots.

“A good majority of the stuff that I do is mechanical and [with this contest] I was able to show off my love for robots.”

For Jacques one of the main challenges was in the preparation; how to best combine the science fiction and wonder or robotics with the cold yet powerful aesthetic of automotive design.

Over one hundred entries were judged on imagination, innovation, and ingenuity. Jacque’s entry is a clear stand out evoking thoughts of both familiarity and the uncanny. It gracefully combines the known imagery of an engine while also being outlandish in design.

Congrats to Jacques for a well deserved win!

This year at Fire Hose we had Link, Lady and Lord Gaga, a gameboy, Harray Caray, The 10th Doctor, Ninetales, a Lemming, a tuxedo-clad deer, and not one but two Batmans.

Batmen?

Halloween is a time for gathering with friends, dressing in a ridiculous manner, and demanding candy from strangers. Recently a storm swept through Massachusetts that threatened to put Halloween on hiatus; but our party beat the storm by a day! We were able to drink, be merry, dance, and play Rock Band to our heart’s content all before two feet of snow found it’s way to Massachusetts.

We would love to know what you are all up to this Halloween. Did you dress up like a Splicer to frighten your neighbors? Put together your last pieces of battle armor to trick-or-treat Spartan style? Whatever it is that you were up to, send us some pics of you in your costume and you could get featured on an upcoming blog!

Don’t forget to “like” and look at our Facebook page for more up to date information and contests. Twitter is a good place to keep an eye on too. ^_^

The 14th Annual IGF is boasting a record breaking 568 entries into this year’s main Indie Game competition, and of course you know that Go Home Dinosaurs is one of them.

The IGF is like The Sundance Film Festival, but for games. It is held in conjunction with the Games Developers Conference where an Independent Games Festival pavilion is set up to show off the competition finalists.

What does the IGF mean for Fire Hose? It gives us and other indie game developers a chance to give our games a nice spotlight. It also allows us a chance to look at what some other indie studios are up to.

Speaking of other indie studios (slick transition right?) Outer Space Studios caught our tweet about IGF the other day and blogged about it on The News from Outer Space . ^_^

(You are following @firehosegames aren’t you?)

You can check our IGF entry out about half way down the page here!

This weekend, Boston Game Jams ran Cardboard Jam, a game jam where everyone made board or card games instead of making digital games. I have to say, I think I had way more fun at this game jam than at almost any other digital jam I’ve been a part of for a few reasons.

First, there’s no tech choices or learning curve. At digital Game Jams, the first thing you have to do (once you have a game you want to create) is decide what technology you want to work in. This can be tough when you have multiple people who all come with different tech backgrounds and make them try to work together. Either you end up choosing teams based on tech that people know, or a few people end up working in tech they are unfamiliar with. This can make many digital game jam more about overcoming technical challenges, rather than overcoming design challenges in the game.

Second, other than the theme of the materials, there was no theme for this Jam. Though originally I thought this was a detriment, I am beginning to think that the lack of theme contributed to making this Jam awesome. In every game jam I’ve participated in, the themes have been aesthetic. They’re themes like “immigration,” “extinction,” or “deception,” and although they offer a good constraint on the Jam (and place everyone on equal footing for implementing an idea), they force most Jammers to think in terms of aesthetic first, mechanic last. This is why most Jammers can’t “finish,” because they’re actually pushing for an aesthetic, rather than mechanical goal.

Last, jamming in board games meant that iteration cycles were really, really fast, which meant that you could focus on and tune the game and the mechanics quickly, which resulted in better games across the board. The game I worked on took about 10 minutes to play, and after initial discussion, we did nothing but play it, with short discussions in between. We probably play tested the game 50 times, each time with slightly tweaked rules to attempt to address problems we were seeing in the previous play through. Iteration times like this not only let you learn more about the game you’re creating, but more about game design in general, since you see the results of you actions quickly. This speed of iteration and learning would have been impossible in a digital game jam, since implementing rule changes requires too many cycles. In digital game jams, if you get two to three full playtests in before time is up you’re lucky, and that’s including for teams that use prebuilt engines like Unity.

So in closing, if you get a chance to participate in a board game jam, you absolutely should. There’s less stress, more learning, and way more collaboration. That, and you end up with an actually complete board game at the end, which is super awesome.

[For more insights from Jeff, stop by his blog at JeffOnGames.com and follow him on Twitter at @FuzzyBinary]

Starting at 4PM today, one of our superstar programmers and GAMBIT alum, Sharat, will lead the folks at GAMBIT through the journey that was the development of Slam Bolt Scrappers. As you may know, SBS has gone through a number of iterations, and Sharat will be showing off those early prototypes while discussing the different elements we changed between each and why we decided to change them. The original post can be found here: http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/2011/04/friday_games_gambit_040811_-_a.php.

GAMBIT holds a special place in the hearts of everyone here at Fire Hose Games, so we’re very excited that they’ve invited us to come talk about Slam Bolt Scrappers today for this week’s session of Friday Games at GAMBIT! Friday Games is a particularly interesting series at GAMBIT where each Friday they take an analytical approach to looking at games and games issues from the past, present… and FUTURE. Recent sessions covered the history of Tetris, the censoring of sex in games, and, of course, the history of Michael Jordan in video games, starting with 1993′s NBA Showdown. A list of events at GAMBIT (including past Friday Games) can be found here: http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/events/.

Hope you can make it!