If it sounds simple, it’s because it is! But more important, the game is FUN in a way that most games have forgotten how to be. It’s frustrating difficult but easy to keep playing, the environments are beautiful, and the levels well designed and frequently amusing. We’ve been playing it almost exclusively at lunch time the past week.

Nico, our lead animator, is obsessed: “Trials is like someone is dangling a Snickers bar in front of your face, and then they take it away at the last minute. But then they give you another chance right away. When you do something smart and clever and awesome it is really rewarding. It isn’t a game you think too hard about, which makes it awesome. It is just fun.”

Trials Evolution is out on XBLA for 1200 fake Microsoft funny money points, or $15. If you have a 360 grab it!

We all had a fantastic time showing off Go Home Dinosaurs! at this year’s PAX East. People love the game and have had some very complimentary things to say about it:

“…Go Home Dinosaurs is an absolute speculator game to play. The tower defense genre has never been so much fun. “

-Greg Laporte | GamerFitNation

“Go Home Dinosaurs is bringing more of the cutesy charm that Fire Hose debuted with Slam Bolt Scrappers”

-Tony Wilson | FrontTowardsGamer

“Fire Hose [Games] have another winner on their books with Go Home Dinosaurs”

-Dave Bolton | BostonInno

“The aesthetic of Go Home Dinosaurs is charming, and presents the quirky and distinct look offered by Fire Hose Games’ previous title. ”

-Dave Voyles | Armless Octopus 

“Apparently, dinosaurs love BBQ and gophers use coconuts as currency – who knew?! … this game is all about silly fun…”

-Mike Gnade | The IndieGameMagazine 

Of course one of our favorite parts of PAX is being able to interact with fans. There is nothing more fun than handing a mouse to a fan and talking to them about their experience. Several of you made a point to stop by our booth just to say hi and see what we have been up to. You all rock.

————–

Eitan’s note:

One really sad thing we learned about at PAX was the passing of one of our biggest fans, David Roberto. David was an enforcer for us at PAX East two years ago when we were in the Boston Indie Showcase. It was our first time showing off Slam Bolt Scrappers at a big convention and we didn’t really know what we were doing, and he was super helpful. However the really incredible thing was how much he liked our game – he kept playing and playing, and by the end of the show was as good as any of us on the dev team.

David kept in touch with us and would always come and hang out at our booth at PAX. He would tell other people to play our game, and he’d talk to us in the down time about our game and other games. You can imagine how sad all of us were when his brother Michael paid us a visit this year on the show floor and told us the tragic news.

Here’s a picture from March 2010 of David (in the background, red enforcer’s t-shirt) playing SBS and becoming a fan for life.

Thanks for playing our games, you’ll be missed.

Have you met Compy yet? If not you probably should!

Compy is one of several dastardly dinosaurs coming after your BBQ from our game Go Home Dinosaurs! Compy has been making the rounds, boasting his own flickr account, posting on our twitter account, and most recently infiltrating PAX East.

Several PAX goers took a Compy home with them after the show and they have been posting pics of Compy’s new adventures.

As part of the Indie MEGABOOTH, Fire Hose Games was one of sixteen indies that formed one massive PAX presence. Like the Power Rangers, we are powerful on our own but combined we created an Indie MEGAZORD! (err booth) And while we did not fight against the evils of Rita Repulsa, or anyone else for that matter, we did have a great time showing off Go Home Dinosaurs to all of the PAXers!

All of those adorable Compys that you see on that Fire Hose sofa have migrated to PAX EAST!

We are selling them at our booths (663 and 680) for a “I have totally have that in my pocket” amount of $10.00.

You can also WIN A COMPY

Here’s How:

If you are at PAX East swing by our booth and take a picture with a loaner Compy. Then follow us on Twitter, Like Us on Facebook or both! Upload your Compy picture to either the @Firehosegames Twitter feed or the wall over at facebook.com/Firehosegames with the hash tag #PAXEast and you could win!

Not at PAX? Don’t worry! Head over to GoHomeDinosaurs.com, pick your favorite dino and draw us a picture. Send that super awesome art to us and you can win a Compy from afar.

Hey Super Fans! Want to check out an early build of Go Home Dinosaurs!? Able to make it to Boston this coming week for PAX East? Then do we have some good news for you!

Fire Hose will be at the show, and we’ll be showing off the latest and greatest dinosaurs at booths 663 and 680. We’re also part of the Indie MEGABOOTH! Come by and check the game out, it’s a ton of fun.

And did we mention we have plushies? WE HAVE PLUSHIES.

This little green guy is the Compy. Smallest of the dinos, he thinks he’s tough but really he just wants to fit in. Can be dangerous in packs because hey, he’s a Compy!

I’ll also be giving two talks, both of them on Sunday. One is an indie developer rant, the other is a panel on a day in the life of an indie developer. I’ll probably scream and shout and make a nuisance of myself in both. Come and see what I have to say, or to throw tomatoes. Your call.

See you this weekend at PAX East!

The Game Developer’s Conference is a celebration of games and game development and is punctuated by talks from game developers from around the world. Both Eitan and Jeff held talks at this year’s GDC. This year the schedule boasted over 100 talks and panels spread over three days. At the beginning of the first day, speakers are invited to pitch their upcoming panel within a 45 second time limit.

Eitan decided to sing “Little Green Frog” instead.

Check out some of his impressive timbre in this video via The Verge; they took the entire hour and a half presentation and condensed it to the best 90 seconds. Eitan’s song and dance routine spans across nearly 20% of the video.

I am hoping for either Old Man River or The Time Warp next year. Fingers crossed….

BAM! Here are my slides from the talk I just gave in San Francisco on how to effectively prototype innovative video games. If you didn’t have a chance to catch the talk poke through ‘em now! There’s lots of info on what we did while we were making Slam Bolt Scrappers, Go Home Dinosaurs, and the prototype of Dance Central.

Like the talk or have questions for me? Drop a comment and I’ll be sure to respond. ROCK!

If you are at GDC in San Francisco this weekend then come check out my talk titled “Rapid, Iterative Prototyping Best Practices” on Wed at 3:30. I’m going to go over the design and production process behind the early versions of Slam Bolt Scrappers, Dance Central, and of course Go Home Dinosaurs. It’s gonna be a blast!

Not in SF this week? Never fear! I’ll post the slides from the talk up here as soon as it’s over so you can follow along at home.

Live broadcast by Ustream

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in the Crappy Game Complaining Marathon, a charity fundraiser being held at the Singapore MIT GAMBIT Games lab. I’ll be playing Kaizo Mario with Ichiro Lambe of AAAAA! fame and Geoff Pitsch from Harmonix. Watch me on their website or on the Ustream video above!

For those of you who don’t know, Kaizo Mario is one of the most hardcore, insane, and hilarious mods of Super Mario World ever made. It’s basically nigh impossible to beat, and it’s amusing as hell to watch as a result. The three of us will be hitting our heads against the game from 2-3pm Eastern Time and it should be a lot of fun, tune in and check it out!

If you’re feeling generous then please consider donating to our charity, the Cambridge Boys and Girls club. It’s for a good cause!

Here’s a clip of Kaizo Mario to whet your appetite:

At the Global Game Jam this past weekend, I was part of a team that created a Commodore 64 game called “Sleepwalking Backwards.” It’s a short narrative experience, written and designed by Jonathon Myers. Go play the game here!

Why a C64 game?

The C64 is the first computer I had as a kid, and the machine I learned to program on. The programs I would write would be simple things written in BASIC. They might ask you questions and give simple responses, or draw some ASCII art on the screen. Most of them would involve rapidly flashing the colored border around the screen, because it was an easy and fun effect. I remember filling several floppy disks with these little experiments.

Early last year my interest got rekindled in the old machine, and I started playing around with programming for it again. I remembered several things that I wasn’t able to figure out as a kid — machine language, bitmap graphics, sound — and thought it would be cool to go back and figure these things out. It sort of felt like I was taking care of some unfinished business from over two decades ago!

Why at the Game Jam?

Actually trying to make a Commodore game was the next logical step. I posted to Boston Indies (a local group of independent game developers) and gathered a crew of other interested people, and we started playing around with some ideas while I was building a code base and tools. But, it became clear after a while that we were all too busy to actually make it happen. It was tough to even get more than two of us together at a time, much less keep forward progress going on a game.

When emails started going around about the Global Game Jam late last year, a solution presented itself: I could make a C64 game at the GGJ instead! An ambitious (maybe insane) plan, to be sure. But, it solved the problem of having to regularly coordinate get-togethers. The beauty of a game jam is that it represents a commitment from everyone who participates: you’re never sure exactly what you’ll get, but everyone who shows up is going to have some kind of game to show at the end of the weekend!

How’d  we make it happen?

We didn’t create a game completely from scratch in the weekend. Instead, I worked on a game framework in advance of the jam, to support a basic level of art and audio creation. The result, which I chose to call comma8, is available here.

Another tremendous asset when tackling such a project is the existence of emulators such as VICE. These emulators carefully simulate every aspect of the original machine’s behavior, right down to all of the bugs in the hardware. Because of this, we could work on modern machines for the whole jam and have confidence that the final product would actually run on the original hardware.

Transferring the built game to the original hardware is an interesting problem: to do this, you can actually play the data as audio from your computer’s sound card, and record it to an audio cassette! The Commodore has a “datassette” peripheral that allows it to save and load data from a regular audio cassette. This isn’t the fastest way to transfer data between these generations of computers, but as far as I know it’s the only one that doesn’t require any custom equipment. How computers store data has changed a lot in thirty years, but audio is still audio!

How’d it go?

The project was a big success, as far as I’m concerned! We produced a Commodore 64 game in a weekend, and had it running on original hardware at the end of it. The game, although short, also had a really well conceived atmosphere and overall dramatic shape.

Trying to make a game on a challening platform had a benefit I didn’t expect — it naturally helped us keep the scope of the game really small. We weren’t tempted to try to get too many features in, because we knew that each and every feature that we tried to add would entail some challenges. So in the end we actually ended up up with a game that was pretty polished as far as game jam games go.

In short, it was a really fun and productive weekend. I’d like to thank the organizers at GAMBIT, Rik Eberhardt and Courtney Stanton, and the team members, Arshan Gailus, Greg Kinneman, Elliott Mitchell, and Jonathan Myers, for making it such a good time!