2011 June

Five most recent posts:

February 15th

Valentine’s Wizardry! by Mikael

February 1st

Trine 2: Director’s Cut Gets Updated and Now Available in AU/NZ by Mikael

January 18th

Delays with Director’s Cut Update and AU/NZ release by Mikael

December 5th

Miiverse is artsy by Mikael

December 3rd

Frozenbyte Xmas / Wii U Launch Party by Mikael

Splot on different devices
June 29th, 2011 by Mikael | Category: Splot

Splot is our up and coming cartoony puzzle platformer, that will be out soon for a variety of systems. The game will run at a whopping 60fps on high end and still at a very playable 30-40fps on lower end devices.

The mobile systems we have here are iPhone 4th Gen, iPod Touch 1st Gen, iPad 1st Gen, HTC Desire with Android and Nokia N900 with Maemo. We will also support Flash with a likely Facebook integration and of course a native application for PC, Mac and Linux.

All in all we are not sure if all of the mobile platforms shown will be supported, but Apple devices will definitely be there. Also cross-platform saving is high on the priority list, so you should be able to continue your game when you transition from Facebook Flash back to you iPad.

Splot will be out soon, first we just have to give it a final polishing for that fresh out of the factory shine.

-Mikael

Comments (21)
Old School Game Design
June 28th, 2011 by Susie | Category: Frozenbyte

Have you ever met someone who has known what he/she wants to do for a living since childhood? When I was a toddler and someone asked me ”What will you be when you grow up?” I answered ”I want to be a cashier lady” because I did not know any other occupations. Later I wanted to become a police officer, photographer, detective and hotel manager.

When FB’s CEO Lauri was an 8-year-old kid, he got his first computer, a black and white PC with a 086 processor. He had a dream: some day he would be a game designer. He knew that there is no shortcut to happiness, and so he decided to start right away. Why wait if you know what you want to do?

He started designing a game called Space Adventure, ”Avaruusseikkailu” in Finnish language, a text adventure game. There were four questions in the game. Each question had three answer alternatives, one leading forward and two leading to Game Over. The goal was to survive from an attack of a mean spaceship.

When Lauri was in junior high school, he made another text adventure game called School Game (a popular theme for Finnish text adventures, I hear). In the game the player was supposed to escape from the school. There were more questions than in Space Adventure and different paths through the game. School Game was extremely popular with Lauri’s classmates. It might have had something to do with the question ”Would you like to blow up the Principal’s car?”.

Later Lauri made more small games and eventually he started up Frozenbyte with his friends.

-Susie

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Making of Trine 2: Exploding Boxes
June 22nd, 2011 by Mikael | Category: Making Of, Trine 2

All games have glitches and bugs. Good ones have very few of them, but it is impossible to go without any. Sometimes bugs are accepted as a part of the game, thus becoming features and some even work as a point of inspiration for something totally new and exciting.

In this video we take a look at a small glitch where boxes are dropped at a rate that is a bit too fast, so they end up making a very cool looking explosion.

This will be fixed for the final game of course, but somethings just need to be shown, even if they don’t become a part of the game.

-Mikael

Comments (4)
Kids say the darndest things
June 20th, 2011 by Mikael | Category: Splot

I just heard the cutest story. As you know, Splot is coming out soon and FB’s project manager Tero has been busy with this awesome game since 2007. He is the father of the whole project and very proud of the game, as he should be!

He is also a happy father of two kids. Once he asked his children to test the game. They did and reportedly were quite satisfied with their father’s and his team’s work. Just one little minus.

“Not enough fairies”, was the judgement of Tero’s daughter.

Tero considered these wise words. “Why not?” he thought and decided to put a fairy into the game.

Nettle was born.

She is fast as light, strong as an ox and cute as a kitten. Nevertheless, she is also so tiny that she can live in Splot’s mouth.

In the picture you can see Nettle as the small ball of light and as many of you may have already found out, she plays a very integral role in solving puzzles and general gameplay.

More on Splot and Nettle very soon, as we are nearing the launch of the game.

-Susie

Comments (6)
The Basics of Serving Your Customers Better
June 16th, 2011 by Susie | Category: Frozenbyte, Humble Bundle

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In April of this year, Frozenbyte’s teamed up with the humblebundle.com guys and worked their butts off preparing the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle campaign. It was not easy for many reasons. First of all, there is a 10 hour time difference between Helsinki and California.

From what I heard, it was a bit challenging to arrange telephone (read: Skype) conferences… They also had to solve many technical difficulties and be prepared for customer service.

But the campaign was a success and the Frozenbyte team had great conversations with their customers and fans via the online chat application. Here are some of the most memorable comments and questions and some answers for them as well.

1. “What name you would give to our computer game company?”
Belgian kids asked our sales and marketing manager Mikael.
“J.D.T.F.B (Just Doing This For Beer)”, he suggested.
[The company actually exists nowadays.
You can find it here: http://jdtfb.webs.com/aboutus.htm .
Note Mikael's name on The People list!]

2. “Who’s your favourite pornstar?”
“?”

3. “What do you do at Frozenbyte?”

4. “What does a producer do?”
[Writer's note: We will tell you more about this later.]

5. “Would you go on a date with me?”

6. “How can I get a job at Frozenbyte?”

7. “Can I sleep on your couch this summer?”
“Unfortunately, I am not a member of the couchsurfers’ clan…”

8. “Why don’t you serve me faster?!”

9. “I just paid $0.01 for your games.”
“Thank you!”

10. “Humble Bundle is really cool, thanks!”
“You’re welcome.”

11. “How can I become a game developer?”

12. “How can I play these games?”

13. “Will you be my girlfriend?”
“I’m a man…”

14. “Do you have a vibrator?”
“???”

15. “Zomg halp mah computah is frozen!!”

16. “Zomg halp this bundle is too cool for mah computer!”

17. “Can I have a free code?”
“You can pay like $0.01… it’s not much, is it?”

18. “I love you! <3”
“We love you too! <3”

Scriptwriter Maija also served a Spanish customer and a Russian customer with help from Google Translate. She was pretty sure that they both got what they wanted. Possibly.

Frozenbyte wants to thank everyone who bought or were otherwise involved with the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle! Thank you guys, you are amazing!

-Susie

Comments (8)
Susie Can Play: Chapter 2
June 14th, 2011 by Susie | Category: Frozenbyte

When I was a kid, my dad bought us kids a game called SimTower. In the game you are supposed to construct and manage a skyscraper. There were offices, condos, restaurants, movie theaters, boutiques, hotel rooms, garages, elevators, escalators etc. in the tower.

I really liked the game and it was one of my favourites. I was fascinated by being able to decide what to build and in which order.

Unfortunately, I did not care about the logic of the game. I started with offices on the first 5–10 floors. Then hotel rooms and condos. But no offices and condos on the same floor! Or condos and hotel rooms. It would have been illogical, as it was very important to do everything in particular order. Who would want to live next to hotel rooms?! Rule number two: not too many elevators/escalators because they did not look nice.

I guess this was fatal for my tower and it did not work as it should have. You see, first I had to lower the rents, because my tenants were unhappy.

Then the restaurants lost their customers and went bankrupt.

I found stinking cockroaches and had to re-build the hotel rooms.

Not to mention the bomb threat I got…

I was a lousy tower manager. As a result I ended up destroying my tower and constructing a new one. I did not really learn from my mistakes, I did not care about the money, I just wanted to plan and design the building.

To tell the truth, if I wanted to design a skyscraper nowadays, I would buy some kind of house design software. At least yucky cockroaches would not haunt me anymore!

-Susie

Comments (3)
And so the circle closes..
June 10th, 2011 by Mikael | Category: Frozenbyte, Humble Bundle

As Frozenbyte meets Notch, the only thing I could think about was that I wonder where Garry Newman is. But it was still awesome to see the person who did contribute the most to our charitable Humble Bundle.

Also since it is Thursday, it means that E3 is over and we must say goodbye to the hectic halls filled candy to the senses. So this is over and out from LA and more next weekk from sunny Finland.

P.S. the previous posts are now fixed and the pics work again.

-Mikael

Comments (0)
Advertising at E3 runs rampant
June 9th, 2011 by Mikael | Category: Frozenbyte, Trine 2

As I said in the previous post, I believe that Atlus has an incredible advertising campaign here at the E3. Lots of the other companies are putting insane amounts of money into ads all around the place, but Atlus decided that having one on every expo goers neck would do just fine.

Also Trine 2 got nominated for the best graphics of E3 2011. Let’s see how that one pans out.

-Mikael

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Trine 2 at the Atlus booth
June 8th, 2011 by Mikael | Category: Trine 2

This years E3 has started of with a bang. Not too huge of a bang according to some people, but lots of news worthy releases either way.

Being somewhat partial to the work that Atlus does, I still have to mention that they had one of the best marketing stunts in the whole E3. Basically every person who had a ticket/badge, also had an Atlus ad hanging around their necks. I will try to get a photo of that tomorrow.

Also their booth is in a very special area of the convention center called the “concourse hall”, where there are mostly just meeting rooms. Still I am very convinced that they have achieved the best possible visibility, while using their marketing budgets in a smart way.

Plus all the people who visited the Atlus booth sure did seem to enjoy it too.

-Mikael

Comments (0)
The difference between an “exhibit only” and an “exhibitor” pass..
June 6th, 2011 by Mikael | Category: Frozenbyte

So I just got my E3 passes from the LA convention center info and apparently there are two different kinds of passes. The “exhibit only” is your regular pass that you get to see the main areas with. I got one of those.

Then there is also an “exhibitor” pass that you can use to get into virtually every corner of the center at any given time. I wouldn’t need one of those per se, but Atlus was kind enough to supply me with one of those also.

So I took full advantage of my super pass and walked straight into the main exhibition areas. Once I took out my camera and was about to spoil this bastion of game heaven in progress, I figured that I might get into actual RL trouble if I did that, so instead I chicken’d out and took some photos of the toilets.

More actual material from the show floor tomorrow..

-Mikael

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