Tag «amaze»

Mondar at the A MAZE 2019

We visited the A MAZE this year, and it was relaxing and fun. After missing it in 2018 (we went to the Reboot in Croatia instead), we were eager to meet fellow German and international developers in Berlin again. For those who don't know the A MAZE, it's a games festival with exhibition, talks, live music and workshops (and probably more). The focus is on art/games, and not on the business side or even the development of games. It's all about personal stories, crazy, mesmerizing and/or glitchy visuals, VR/AR/MR/XR/PR and generally digital weirdness. So, we had a good time.

The A MAZE happened at a new location this year, at the SEZ, a big building reminding Friedrich of his former school which was built in the 70s. While the Urban Spree was always very fitting for the AMAZE in our opinion, the SEZ brought the event together well and was also better suited for this year's cold weather. The venue change was good!

In order to justify our visit a bit, we also brought Mondar's Dungeon with us and showcased it for a few hours at the Open Screens (right next to Sos' Open Sound System). Some people eagerly played the game and gave feedback, and overall we are stoked by the positive reception. Mondar's Dungeon was originally meant as our entry for the 7-Day-Roguelike-Challenge (yes, the same event Pitman Krumb was part of, back in 2011!), but we didn't finish in time and instead worked a bit more on it until it felt complete. The elevator pitch: "Mondar's Dungeon is a roguelike, but with cards." While future updates might still come, it is mostly finished and can be played on itch.io for free!

Our friend Björn was also at the A MAZE. He released his game Murder Machine Mini on Steam two days before, and Friedrich lent his laptop so he could present the game at the Open Screens too. He did, and quite a few people had a good look at this retro shooter.

As mentioned before, the A MAZE also offers talks and workshops, and we attended some of these. For example, while Jana took part in a workshop by Anita Sarkeesian about diversity and representation in games, Friedrich was more interested in the technical side of game creation and attended workshops about ray marching shaders and about stage design in Unity. But our personal highlight were the Hyper Talks, where nine creators each had five minutes for talking about everything, from playing with dogs to creativity burn-out.

It goes without saying - we also talked to friends and friendly people at the venue all the time, discussing games, game design and the weather. Jana took part in a podcast (about game difficulty), over at the Saftladen.

Now what does the future hold for Rat King? Sadly, Behind Stars and Under Hills is on hiatus with an unknown fate. But to keep going, we accept commissioned work - the second half of 2018 was dedicated to the game for an app about the sky disk of Nebra, commissioned by MotionWorks GmbH. This sky disk is probably the oldest still existing depiction of the cosmos - we will write a bit more detailed blog post about the game soon.

Of course Rat King is still indie, thus we create concepts and prototypes for different game ideas floating in our collective rat hive mind. This blog will hopefully be more active again soon!

SOLITUNE at the AMAZE and on Steam

Jana's small and short art game SOLITUNE (you might have read about it before) is nominated for an award at the German games festival A MAZE. It's a great honour for us, as SOLITUNE will be showcased next week at the location in Berlin, along with more than two dozens other games! Of course we will be there too - as usual.

In related news, the game went through Steam Greenlight and is soon available on Steam, most likely during the "Games Week" in Berlin (26.-28. April), which the A MAZE is part of.

So if you want to put SOLITUNE on your Steam wishlist, or just marvel at its Steam page, now you can! :-) By the way, if you bought the game on itch.io you should already be able to claim a Steam key of the game. With the release on Steam a few improvements were made, visually and technically. The mandatory Steam achievement and trading cards will be there, and it's now also possible to play the whole experience with a gamepad - perfect for the avantgarde couch potatoes among us!

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EGX Rezzed, Amaze and Making-of part 3

Birmingham - EGX Rezzed 2014

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The REZZED, including 2 days of visiting Birmingham, were a blast! The convention is full of interesting games, diverse genres, from AAA to smaller and very experimental indie titles. It was really fun and rewarding to be chosen for the nicely arranged Leftfield Collection. And to have TRI presented to young kids, families, a whole bunch of YouTubers, and curious players for the first time after two years of work was a really good feeling! Of course, meeting other devs and talking about their games was pretty cool, as well.

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I really feel that I should have written more about the Rezzed, since our days in Birmingham were absolutely enjoyable and also important for us, to show the game around. But unfortunately, we take the final sprint to the release of TRI, which makes writing up all the events nearly impossible.

A Maze Berlin 2014

At least I have to mention that we visited the third edition of Germany's very international Indie Festival A Maze in April, again. Being there is always a big highlight of our year! It feels almost like coming home to the place where you belong. The A Maze is a crazy colorful exhibition with all sorts of games you might or might not imagine. From weird stuff you never fully understand, to multiplayer games you can play for hours, to pieces of art and artistic expression, students' works and polished diamonds smash hits. Not to forget workshops and talks. This festival is always so fully packed with interesting people, enlightening talks and fun games that I just get crazy, not knowing where to jump first.

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Making-of TRI episode 3

For the lack of written blog posts we made this third episode of our making-of story. This time we talk about our first prototype and why it was scrapped, again.

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We soon have some fresh news for you at the end of the month, as we're working on the Steam integration! Until then we need to give this guy here more interaction, voice and animation.

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