Official Website

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)!

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!

Birthday 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!