Category Archives: Random

Egg on our face time!

I’ve gotta own up. Last week at the post mortem talk about Slam Bolt Scrappers I misspoke and inadvertently misrepresented the current state of Gamebryo. I said that it was dead, which is not the case – in fact it the engine is very much alive and is still in development thanks to Gamebase Co., Ltd. What I should have said during the talk was that the uncertainty of the future of the Gamebryo engine is what had us concerned.

I apologize for the confusion that my misstatement caused. Working with Gamebryo on Slam Bolt Scrappers was an absolute pleasure and Emergent (and more recently Gamebase) went above and beyond in terms of being a good partner for our studio. I’d definitely recommend the engine to any devs looking for a great cross platform solution for their game.

Whew! I feel better. Time to go play some Mrs. Splosion Man. That game is awesome.

The one man powerful enough to make video games develop themselves, Ichiro Lambe from Dejobaan, needs your help. He’s been involved with some shady business lately, and as of yesterday afternoon, I think it’s finally caught up with him – he’s completely disappeared. Was it the mob? His secret dealings with shadow governments? An alien abduction? Friends, I believe it may be much more sinister than that.

Ichiro’s been keeping me posted on the Valve PotatoFoolsDay ARG, which has mysteriously involved a few of his games (The Wonderful End of the World, Aaaaa!, and 1 2 3 KICK IT).  I’ve gotten plenty of updates from him over the course of this ARG (or is it real?) as he continually linked me to sites reporting new discoveries in his games.  Yesterday, things finally got weird.  He sent me a link to this confidential document begging for help.  I was all, “Go on…” and Ichiro followed up with, “Right bef,” and that was IT. THAT WAS THE LAST I HEARD OF ICHIRO.  Needless to say, I’m very concerned.  He was obviously saying, “Right before…” but right before what? WHAT WAS THE END OF THAT SENTENCE?

Intrigued? You should be.  Jon Myers and Darren Torpey have done a MUCH better breakdown of the whole situation on the Boston Indies site, so have a look and figure out where Ichiro is hiding (or has been taken).  Remember, tweet with the tag #whereisIchiro so I can follow all the developments on Tweetdeck without actually searching for anything.

And we’ll be at Boston Post Mortem tonight so come say hello if you see us.

Hit the jump for a collection of all the Ichiro related image memes I’ve seen on Twitter today (Warning: There is a potentially offensive Bear Grylls image meme, so proceed with caution).

Continue reading →

Hey Scrappers,

So, we’ve been getting a bunch of fan mail. Pretty awesome, right? The post office actually sends a second mailman to our office each day with an entire truck full of letters just for us. Well, some of them are probably bombs, so we open 25% then throw the rest into the Charles River to be safe.

Getting fan mail has been really eye opening. People have made a few suggestions (*cough*onlinemultiplayer*cough*) about SBS and I wanted to see if their ideas generally ring true with the rest of you, so I’m going to post one of our first pieces of fan mail. Let me know what you think about these suggestions in the comments below.

To the dudes at Fire Hose games:

Slam Bolt Scrappers is really, really fun. I downloaded the demo on Tuesday the 15th, bought the full game almost immediately after, and have been playing it ever since. So first and foremost, I want to say THANKS for making such a super fun game!

My girlfriend and I have started playing a version where it’s 1 on 1, and you aren’t allowed to attack the other player; we are having a great time with this variation, and it’s given me a couple of thoughts:

1. The “monster” (green ninja) powerup is waaaaaaaaay overpowered in regards to being able to decimate your opponent’s tower in seconds.
But more importantly,
2. The game itself would also be incredibly fun if you could turn off the brawling, and just let it be “my tower vs yours”.

Thanks!

Tyler

Thanks for the letter, Tyler!  So, what say you, dear readers? Is the monster power-up unbalanced? Should we add a mode where players can turn off fighting? We crave your feedback, leave it in the comments.  Before you do that, though, I stumbled across this gem earlier today:

WHERE IS MUSE FOR SLAM BOLT SCRAPPERS??

-Eric

I’m not sure what he’s asking for, but you can find the music video to Knights of Cydonia by Muse here.

So, there you have it, folks.  Is the green monster power-up overpowered?  I’m particularly interested in this concept of playing without fighting.  Do you guys want that?  Would that mode make the game better?  I haven’t tried it myself but I think I will now.

Remember, we also love hearing from you by email (info@firehosegames.com), FaceBook (http://www.facebook.com/FireHoseGames), and Twitter (@FireHoseGames), so go ahead and talk our ears off!

Hello True Believers,

As Alec noted last week, Issue #1 of the new FF series (the successor to Fantastic Four, now that Johnny Storm has been killed, penciled by Steve Epting) shows Franklin Richards (son of Reed and Sue) playing a video game he has just lost, and that game is Slam Bolt Scrappers!

The shot is from SBS circa Fall 2010 (after PAX Prime, when the health bars were vertical instead of horizontal, many months before release).

Here is the actual image they found on the web and used!:

And here is a side-by-side of the comic art and the original:

As far as we can tell, they set the Hue (in Hue/Saturation) to 180 and then the Cutout filter was applied (before the non-SBS text was overlayed).

In the process of unraveling this, I started playing with the Cutout filter and the Hue/Saturation of other shots from the game. Here were some of my favorites. What do you think? Any of these worth a spot in the Modern Museum of Art?

And the ultimate question: Are the results as cool when this is tried in other games, or is it only in the splendid chaos of Slam Bolt Scrappers?

–Jason

P.S. Hey Steve Epting: next time you are in Boston, come visit us!

Hey readers! Now that Slam Bolt Scrappers is out on PSN (didn’t you hear!?), a lot of fascinating, new stuff has been happening at Fire Hose. To quickly touch base with everyone, I decided to pose a simple question: “What’s something you learned today?” Responses were pretty interesting and varied, so they seemed worth posting here. Without further delay, here are a few things people at Fire Hose learned yesterday.

Eitan: No matter how cool it looks in video games, motion blur pretty much always looks terrible in still screen shots. And Amazon web services has a free tier if you want to try out cloud hosting for free: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Ethan: I learned that putting stars in a level makes it more fun for the players and the developers.

Jacques: Thinking ahead. Organizing and Prepping files for fast turn around, for projects that may be due the same day. If you carefully think ahead, and take the time to know the ins and outs of your current project, you can save your self time and headaches that occur when not being prepared for a deadline.

Alec: TIL that if you have any doubts about how well an image “reads,” you should trust your instincts and take action to improve the clarity of the image.

Jeff: People are doing some interesting things with smart cameras, like the Predator:

Sharat: There is a walking quadruped robot called BigDog:

So, that’s what we learned. What’s something you learned today?