Bones mobilized!
On Thursday, slash games attended the 13th Gadgetnight at the kopiba in Hamburg. We’ve been showing a mobile version of our prototype Bones for the very first time, which was very well-received by all attendants! Two people even succeeded in solving the prototype level, and have been awarded official slash games supporter shirts:
The prototype of Bones has been developed by slash games, Joschi Baumann, Ibrahim Arous and Stefan Wacker at the InnoGames Game Jam #4 last year. Thank you beebop, Beardshaker Games, Pop Rocket Games, THREAKS and Levire for the great evening!
Poßmoortem Part II
The second part of the post-mortem of our first project, yourfone.de Campus Buddies, is live.We’ve learned quite a lot in our collaboration with Pop Rocket Games and beesocial, and we’d like share our learnings with you.
Take a look at it and share your thoughts!
Poßmoortem Part I
As Nick announced in his last post we successfully launched our first work-for-hire product with Campus Buddies.
Pop Rocket Games lead the development, namely Tahsin Avci. He did a great job talking with the client and collecting information about what they really wanted. Thanks to him we could concentrate purely on the development. Nick and me took care of the backend development most of the time. The frontend stuff was done by Jan, Anke and Michael from Beardshaker Games.
The communication within the team was great and very, very friendly. In my opinion that was one reason that the product became so good in so little time. Everybody on the team loved to work together with the others.
All in all I have to say that the 2.5 months in the office of Pop Rocket and Beardshaker Games didn’t feel like work. It was more of an extended (and paid!) game jam and if you read some of my posts on my homepage you should know that I love game jams 
I not only had a lot of fun developing the platform but made a whole bunch of new friends on the way. What more could you expect from a project?
Campus Buddies launched!
The first project of slash games has been officially launched: yourfone.de Campus Buddies! The website is the result of a lot of hard work, and concludes the first work-for-hire we’ve collaborated with Pop Rocket Games on.
Campus Buddies allows students to promote a special yourfone.de offer, earning points which they can finally trade for attractive rewards like smartphones or Macbooks. The platform features a dynamic news stream for each user, many gamification elements like achievements and user levels, full social network integration (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) as well as SSL encryption of all connections. Just like LinkedIn, Campus Buddies is a stateless scalable Java web application based on the Play Framework.
Clearing the backlog, both Christian and Nick will write a nice post-mortem for you by next week – stay tuned!
Merchandise stuff available!
Slash Games Merchandising
After starting our social media infrastructure with our new corporate identity two weeks ago (see last article) we designed some cool Slash Games shirts and hoodies with spreadshirt. Fortunately they arrived just in time for the Quo Vadis next week, so you should have no problem to find us there!
Spreadshirt design
Designing the clothes with the spreadshirt design tool was simple and straightforward. You can choose from various articles, then from different colors. Finally you can place your images onto them in different areas and move, resize and turn them there. Some tips if you plan to use the site, too:
- The price depends on the number of images you place on the article, so try to combine the images you want to use if possible.
- The colors you can use depend on the technique of printing you use. The different techniques have advantages and disadvantages each. We decided for the Flock technique in the end, even if you have just a limited number of colors you can use. But it feels so nice
- You will need big versions of your images as you can’t increase the images above their original size (the print quality would suffer). Decreasing the size is no problem.
If you like us and want to move around as an advertising pillar for us, you can even buy some of the merchandise articles we designed in our very own Spreadshirt shop.
Photo shooting
To give you an impression of our new stuff, Anke from Beardshaker Games has kindly taken some photos of us. The first spring days in Hamburg fortunately arrived just in time, so we could take them outside.
If you want to see them in real life, meet us at the Quo Vadis 2013 next week in Berlin. Or contact us to arrange a cozy hangout with us here in Hamburg. We promise to wear our best clothes (see above)!
Corporate Identity is ready!
We are very proud to present to you our new logo/corporate identity today!
During the last weeks we were in close contact with Anna-Lena Krüger (www.adalk.com), the designer of our choice. She went with us through the whole process of finding the right design for our new little startup.
Which direction to go?
The first step was to find the kind of logo that fits. Therefore she created three logos which were very different.
Logo: Step 1
We decided to go with the third concept, but stressed out, that the idea with writing the letter ‘L’ as a slash pleases us very much.
Refinement
Anna-Lena took our input and created three new designs based on the third concept.
Logo: Step 2
The idea with the slash in the circle was nice, but we decided not to use it because the logo somehow felt too crowded. The font used in the bottom concepts pleased us more than the above because it looked way smoother.
Colorize it!
So now we already had the style of our logo, the only thing that was missing was the color. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, especially because some cool colors were already taken by other big game companies here in Hamburg (Bigpoint red, InnoGames green, Goodgame blue,…). We definitely didn’t want to use an already taken color. So we really tried a lot of colors:
Logo: Step 3
And except for the C64 color-coded logo, we really took every color into consideration. Finally Nick and I both chose two favorites and we agreed to take the one both of us chose: Bordeaux it is!
Ready for action!
One great thing about our new logo is, that the central circle is self-contained: If we use it by itself it still says s(lash) g(ames). Very useful for icons, etc.
So here it is, our final logo! Let us know what you think about it in the comments, if you like!
Final logo
Final logo icon
The cakes were no lie!
This week was full of work. But it was also full of cake!
Work
While we used the last week mainly to arrive at our new work places, setting up our hardware and software, this week the real work on the project begun.
At the beginning of the week we adjusted the rough timing we made for the project and entered them in a Hansoft project. We also commited to the milestones of the project and the targets we would like to achieve within each 1-week sprint. They are tough (i.e. a bit red time-wise), but doable!
The rest of the week was mainly used to dive into the Play Framework, the framework of our choice. The main points why we decided to use it were:
- Java/Scala-based: We really didn’t want to use PHP and (affordable) .NET servers are very rare. So Java stand to reason.
- Structured: The structure of the framework is clean and plausible and it pushes you to keep your project clean and structured, too.
- Modular: The core framework is nice and small, so you get a good overview very quickly. However you can get additional functionality easily by adding further plugins.
- Tested: First advice to use this framework came from my good friend Jan Tammen, an experienced Java software developer. He made very good experiences with it in several projects. As we heard about later the networking page LinkedIn is using this framework, too. So it can’t be that bad!
- Active development: Just on Tuesday the official version 2.1 was released which points out enough that this project is quite alive.
We will see if we made the right decision, but so far we didn’t find many negative sides.
Cake
The work was fun, but there was one thing which made the week even better: A lot of cake!
I can’t imagine the last time I ate cake every single day of a week. Which is a good sign, I guess, otherwise I would look a bit different today (or would have to do a lot more sports). But this week there were a lot of occasions to get a sweet piece of cake.
Here’s the quick overview:
- On Monday Anke brought some muffins to celebrate the maternity of a friend
- On Tuesday Nick and I brought some carrot cake and pastries for our start in the office (the week before we were too busy because of the game jam)
- The cake and the pastries last for Wednesday, too
- On Thursday it was Lena’s birthday with self-made cake (see picture) and brownies!
- On Friday I finished the last pieces of the birthday cake before Tahsin could throw it away (which would have been a shame)
There is a lot of fun and high spirits here in the office in a normal week. So you can imagine how much fun it was in this year’s cake week!
That said, we wish you a nice weekend! If you can, have some cake! We won’t…
Meet Slash Games in Hamburg and Berlin
Want to get in touch with us? Consider meeting us at these events:
Pre-Opening Party Casual Connect
When? 11.02.2013, 20:00
Where? Park Café Schöne Aussichten, Gorch-Fock-Wall 4, 20355 Hamburg
Info? http://www.gamecity-hamburg.de/
Gamecity Treff
When? 14.03.2013, 20:00
Where? To be announced
Info? http://www.gamecity-hamburg.de/
Quo Vadis 2013
When? 23. – 25.04.2013
Where? Café Moskau, Berlin
Info? http://die-entwicklerkonferenz.de/
If you’d like to have a longer talk with us, just send us a little mail in advance, so we can reserve some time for you. Otherwise address us directly when you see us
We are especially interested in meeting:
- Other independent developers for sharing experience
- Developers (in particular artists, game/level designers, sound designers) for potential collaborations
- Publishers for collaboration in bringing our games to the market
Looking forward to see you!
Shaking rocket beards!
Yesterday we moved into the offices of the nice folks of Beardshaker Games and Pop Rocket Games. We will work here for the next months to realize a first project with them. It’ll sure be fun!
Beardshaker Games is a sweet, little Indie game startup from Hamburg which was founded in 2012. The team consists of Jan Napitupulu, Michael Benrad and Anke Günther. They have already released some really cool games. I can personally recommend NonoSparks: Genesis, a very addicting flash-puzzler. I’ve already finished the game, so I know what I’m talking about!
Pop Rocket Games develops games and gamification applications. Tahsin Avci and Bernd Sanmann therefor often work together with external developers (e.g. Beardshaker and Slash Games ) to create high-quality products.
Benedikt Göpfert and Anna-Lena Remme complete the motley office in their function as freelance developers (hire them if you have any technical or artistic work to do).
We’ve already set up our workplaces, as you can see. Unfortunately Nick got the better seat: My back is facing the Beardshaker crew who is equipped with nerf guns. Some bullets already hit, I’ll seriously have to think about counter-attacks. Any suggestions appreciated!
GGJ 2013 comes to a close
Time to take stock: We’ve successfully used our Hansoft and Perforce servers for the first time (although not being completely satisfied with the latter), and we’ve made our first HTML 5 game based on Crafty:
HeartTracer has been created by Christian Oeing, Nick Prühs, Jo Lott, Christian Küchmeister at the InnoGames Jam Site in 48 hours. The levels of the single-player top-down-shooter are randomly generated at run-time, and the game is fully playable in your favorite web browser (runs best on Google Chrome). Just head over to the game, press F11 to toggle to full-screen (Chrome & Firefox) and play!
You are an antivirus program, and your mission is to rescue the heart of your computer, the CPU.
- Use WSAD to move.
- Use the mouse to aim and shoot at enemies.
- Avoid touching any enemies, or you’ll die and lose the game.
- Kill the virus that has infected your CPU cache before the time runs out.
Have fun!
