Official Website

FreudBot Announced!

In the spirit of International Games Week Berlin, we are really, really excited to unveil our very first own title: FreudBot is a casual mobile single-player game for Android and Windows 8!

FreudBot

Help Steve, a fearful clerk working in a local super market, to survive his work week! In sixty comic levels you’ll face the challenges of everyday life: Strange mothers, complicated girlfriends, crazy naked costumers, dangerous youths, aggressive bosses and … your own Fear! The wonderful and unique FreudBot, robotic psychoanalyst, will teach you to defend yourself against all of their bad vibes. Unleash the power of the Id, Ego and Super-Ego- and the FreudBot power Ultra-Ego to beat fear, doubt and aggression and master FreudBot’s „Game of Vibes“! Finally you can take control again of your puny human existence.

FreudBot is scheduled for worldwide release in June 2014. However, you can meet us at Quo Vadis to get your hands on the latest version of game this week! And for your very own private session with FreudBot, head over to freudbot.slashgames.org. 

InnoGames GameJam #6

50% of Slash Games joined the InnoGames GameJam this weekend. It was already the 6th event organized by InnoGames and the main organizer Michael Indyk.

The Jam started on Friday at 6 p.m. After the theme Ridiculous was announced, the teams were formed and first game ideas were brainstormed. We had time to develop our game till Sunday noon, even without the one hour we lost by the stupid change to daylight-saving time this was very short.

But we managed to build a nice, little two-player fighting game where you collect your weapons to make a fool of your opponent and become the most ridiculous, eehm, powerful wizard of all times! Connect your gamepads (you can also use the keyboard) and check out the game:

Play Epic Mage Battle

Epic Mage Battle

Our team consisted of 4 programmers, 3 artists and a sound guy. We were using Unity3D plus our own framework which worked very good. Really thinking about publishing it… Maybe after our current project which we will announce very soon, so stay tuned!

Thanks to InnoGames and especially Michael Indyk for the great organization!

Happy new slash year!

First Birthday

Timeline

February 4, 2012

Nick is busy fixing a Raid at Daedalic Entertainment. During the week he had to take care of several projects in his role as Lead Programmer.

Christian is thinking about a tricky artificial intelligence problem. The AI ships in Kartuga, a 3D browser title from Ticking Bomb Games, don’t just yet do what they are supposed to do.

February 4, 2013

Nick and Christian sit in Christian’s apartment. During 2012 they met a lot of times to discuss the possibility to work on own games as Indie developers. They worked out a plan to finance the whole (ad)venture by working part time for other companies together for hire but never to lose sight of their big goal: To make a living by developing and selling their very own games.

Christian just printed out the shareholder‘s agreement and they both sign it. Slash Games is officially born!

February 4, 2014

Nick and Christian sit in Christian’s apartment. Nothing changed? Well, not exactly.

2013 brought up two big work-for-hire jobs, two conferences, dozens of new contacts and an awesome self-organized event which was the first of its kind in Germany. But first things first…

Continue reading →

Running Unity3D without a graphics card – An odyssey

UnityEditorFailedGraphicsSquareCut

You probably landed here because you are a Unity3D developer like I am. More or less experienced with the “normal” handling of the Unity Editor. And now you want (or have to) go a step further and make Unity running on your server, e.g. for automatic regular builds with Jenkins or another continuous integration tool.

If the situation sounds familiar to you, go and read on, hopefully my experiences will help you to get your system running more quickly. If you think what the heck the first sentences were all about: Here is some cat content for you!

The Situation

So, let’s see what our concrete situation was like:

  • Unity3D mobile game
  • Running Jenkins build server
  • Windows Standalone build of the game works
    (with options -batchmode -nographics -buildWindowsPlayer)

Not bad for a start, the builds ran daily and allowed us to always test the current version of our game. But only a standalone version unfortunately. We wanted more!

Continue reading →

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:

Gadgnetnight

Gadgnetnight

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 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.

yourfone.de Campus Buddies

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 Spring Collection

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)!