Dejobaan Will Loan You $100 to Submit to Steam Greenlight

// September 5th, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, Indie News

If you want to submit to Steam Greenlight, but feel you can’t because of the required $100 Child’s Play donation, I want to make it possible. Here’s my money where my mouth is:

  1. I will loan $100 to one awesome aspiring indie developer. (Read on.)
  2. I’m calling on other established indie developers to do the same.

(Update 1: If you’re an indie willing to do put up $100 as well, please drop me an e-mail at support@dejobaan.com.)

(Update 2: The outpouring is already fantastic. Indies and non-indies want to help folks make great games.)

(Update3: We’re all done. Results to come.)

It’s been my experience that indies help each other out. We spend countless hours sharing successes and mistakes in talks and e-mails, and over the phone. When I started, over a decade ago, there weren’t many of us, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to hoard everything I’ve learned in the intervening years.

This blog post isn’t about whether Greenlight is good or not. I’ll leave that to you to decide. (Ed: I love Steam and Valve. I think they’re pretty awesome for indies.)

The biggest piece of advice I have to those who are working on a new title is this: I’ve seen people who are dead serious about their games. There is nothing in the world that will stop them. We eat ramen for months. We sleep on couches when we need to. All to get our games done. You’re able to create a game? You are pretty goddamned smart! I know you can find a way to make it a success, if you stick with it.

But you ain’t alone, right? Look: I’ll loan one indie $100 to submit their game on Steam’s Greenlight platform. For consideration, you must do this:

  1. Email: (Update: We’re done. E-mail submissions closed. Results forthcoming!)
  2. Say: In the e-mail, a) tell me a bit about your game, b) tell me a bit about yourself, and c) promise me that you realize that nobody owes you anything, and that you’ll pay me back before the end of the year.
  3. Disseminate: Spread the word so that other indies will offer similar loans.

By the end of this month, I’ll pick someone I feel is awesome, and loan ‘em the cash.

Again, I don’t care a hoot about whether Greenlight sucks, or is the best thing since pet monkeys. This blog post won’t solve world hunger. It may not even solve your problem. But it’s one way to help.

Guys and gals: Keep making those games.

- Ichiro

Getting to the Core of Drunken Robot Pornography

// June 1st, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, DRP

We have once again called upon the artistic talents of Amy Mazzocutelli to add some titillating tones to our Titans in Drunken Robot Pornography.  As seen in the photos here, she is focusing on designs for the “core” pieces now.
In each fight, players must ultimately destroy a core to topple each Titan. The Titan’s core becomes exponentially weaker as players pick off its limbs.
Eventually there will be over a dozen different core shapes, but she’s working with circle-based cores now. The above photo is a small collection of some quick sketches. “I want the cores to stand out, since they’re one of the most important parts of the Titans, so I thought they’d be a good place to start,” Amy says.
This sketch has a more refined core, with a few extra arm-like pieces to flesh out that particular style a bit more.
Not shown: the other vitally important parts–weapons. In general, we want a smooth, sleek, shiny look for the Titans.  Did I mention *shiny*?
Next on Amy’s plate is prototyping some of these designs to put in the game, but that’s a blog post for later.

Monster Loves Your Story/Event/Dialogue Trees

// May 31st, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, Monster Loves You!

Monster Loves You!, the upcoming RPG/Tamagotchi-like being co-developed with Andy Moore, progresses with news of its narrative trees. This narrative is where the bulk of the game content and heavy allure will be, Andy says. Therefore, he wants to make sure the text is robust so that players have a rather fresh experience each time they come back to play.

Andy presently has some working choose-your-own-adventure dialogue boxes that are all designed by custom JSON. Since many visual workflow editors such as the one pictured above (NOT from Monster Loves You!) export to XML/JSON, we’ll have a really slick and easy-to-use content generation tool.

Once Andy hammers out this tool, he will be able to hand it over to Ichiro to work on content. Andy aims to have this implemented by the time Ichiro returns in several days from France!!

Ugly Baby’s Birthing Canals: Skyboxes

// May 23rd, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, Ugly Baby

Skyboxes paint a 3D scene’s background elements – the backgroundiest background layer. For Aaaaa!, it’s static images of cities or planets or what is essentially “infinitely far away” from the player’s standpoint:

Most of the skyboxes we’ve used in Ugly Baby so far have been really simple gradients. In the below image, for example, we just do a fade from blue to white:

That’s because we initially wanted the player to focus on the foreground content. But screw that. Now we want the skybox to throb with the music, resulting in something that might look like this:

Visual Inspiration?

That’s not Ugly Baby, but we are researching visualizers as a source of inspiration. We’re aiming for this to be more than an aesthetic change, as we’d want to tie the music in with the visuals. John piqued Ichiro’s interest with idealizing having throbbers that signify events or (intensity) gameplay shifts.

This exciting idea, while tied to skyboxes, is actually part of a bigger problem: having events sync up at run-time to random music. To solve this problem, our research to find patterns and algorithms to detect those patterns continues.

Drunken Robot Meta-Pornography

// May 21st, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, DRP

Today, Elliot Borenstein discusses the “metagame system” of Drunken Robot Pornography, which gives players an always-weird, always-wonderful experience outside of arena combat.

Elliot says the plan is to have a big city represented by different locations that players can travel around. At each location, different events trigger based on what players interact with and what their attributes are (such as strength, looks, reputation, and perhaps gravitational pull, if you’re fat).

For example, if you try to enter a fancy club before making a name for yourself, you won’t get very far. Similarly, if you are super strong, a little old lady may ask you to carry her groceries and then give you a giant box of muffins in return.

Q: What do you do with the muffins?

A: You’ll find out!

Scattered around the city will be entrances to various arenas, many of them less-than-official. These will take you into the core gameplay of fighting Titans.

The metagame system’s goal is to build up the world and story around the frantic jetpacking of DRP, and to help make the game deeper and more interesting. Also important: we want to let you make obscene gestures with hotdogs. We’ve finished the latter, so we’re now working on the former.

Right now, the metagame is all squares and programmer “not-art,” but it’ll eventually be even better-looking than Ichiro’s horns. The code shot below shows a little bit of an encounter with a hotdog salesman, including a few of the choices the player can make. The game shot above shows the lobby of a stadium and a few choices the player has about what to do when s/he comes face-to-face with a concrete wall.

And there you have it. Adding more depth to the game for you and yours.

Dejobaan and Radial Games Impregnate You with a Monster

// May 18th, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, Monster Loves You!

We are working with Steambirds-creator, Flash dev extraordinaire Andy Moore of Radial Games on Monster Loves You!, that’s part Tamagotchi, part RPG, and 100% awesome game for mobile.

We interviewed Andy for his perspective on Monster Loves You!’s development. He describes it as “Not one that’s cheap and full of those little draws that get you to come back just because they said so. No, no! This game is better than that. We want to make a version of the game that moreso relies on content to draw the player back than anything. I think it’ll be a blast.”

But just how did Radial and we begin courting? Andy recalls, “I think we both awkwardly just kinda looked at our toes at the high school dance and neither of us wanted to ask each other out. But one day we got drunk and just blubbered over each other, and next thing I knew I was pregnant with this game!”

What’s with the name Monster Loves You!? The name was actually “Alien Baby” for the longest time. Andy shares, “We finally got sick of it and started an email thread, bouncing random ideas off of each other. As soon as someone said ‘Love’ I think it struck a chord; we knew we wanted the game to have the kind of attachment that makes the player more attached to the creature. We kinda riffed off of that for a bit and ended up with ‘Monster Loves You!’. I think it’s a Dejobaan-y style game name.”

As for why this game is “being,” Andy says it will offer something that currently doesn’t exist. “I think the closest I’ve really come to playing an enjoyable ‘pet’ game is The Sims 2, which was an excellent title but just demands WAY too much of my time. I want a similar experience – something with all that drama, character development, and ups and downs… but that I can play on the toilet.”

We asked Andy what the world should know about him, and he was extremely modest. “Aw shucks. I don’t think the world really needs to know about me, in general. I’m just a dude that’s trying to make a good game that people will enjoy. I don’t particularly care if I end up living out of cardboard box if the game flops, but I’m trying to avoid that too.”

This monster… loves you.

Ugly Baby: What’s Taking So Damned Long

// May 16th, 2012 // 2 Comments » // Dejobaan News, Ugly Baby

We’re back on track to create the dazzling 3D shapes that decorated Ugly Baby’s stages for the past few years — while it’s taken us longer than we initially hoped, so many great ideas still reside in the womb that are alive and kicking, and we can’t wait to see where the baby’s future leads us.

The game started out using 3D Game Studio, and we released an early playable version on Steam during the Portal 2 ARG last year. It was the same engine we’d used to create AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, but we’ve switched to Unity for both Aaaaa!’s sequel as well as Ugly Baby.

Since we at Dejobaan are still unlocking the hidden powers of Unity (Owlchemy Labs helped us with Awesome and F=ma), we turned to Defective Studios to create a prototype that could analyze music and implement some new aesthetics. Based on this, we’re working on the Python end to allow Ugly Baby to recognize different types of music, which will allow us to craft levels unique to those sounds.

So, what are our next steps?

  1. Step back and pick up Unity.
  2. Bring Ugly Baby Unity up to where Ugly Baby 3DGS is.
  3. Team up with a great artist to complete the game.

That is all!

Drunken Robot Pornography is Press Released

// May 14th, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, DRP

Dejobaan recently announced Drunken Robot Pornography, and we were met with some fanfare. Over the past couple of days, Shack News, Blues News, and Indie Games Magazine picked up our story. We also received some love on Reddit, in both gamernews and IndieGaming, thanks to user DemanRisu.

We didn’t opt for full press-release distribution. Instead, we hit up most of the indie-friendly sites.

  • Ars Technica
  • Joystiq
  • Eurogamer
  • Rockpapershotgun
  • Destructoid
  • Videogaming 24/7
  • Shack News
  • Indie Game Magazine
  • Indie Games
  • Blues News
  • Beef Jack
  • PC Gamer

About a quarter posted our news, which is good, but we need to up our game!

Here’s the press release:

Dejobaan Games has announced development on Drunken Robot Pornography, a first-person shooter about demolishing titanic, flying robots, piece-by-piece. The award-winning studio has screenshots of the initial prototype at www.dejobaan.com/drunken.

In Drunken Robot Pornography (DRP): You’re a small, fleshy human with a jetpack and a gun, and your opponent is a robot centerfold that dwarfs a city block. The robot — called a Titan — tries to cut you apart with lasers and missiles powerful enough power to crumble the buildings you’re standing on. Pick off the Titan’s cannons, fry away its carbon fiber armor, target a joint, and tear off a claw, leaving it writhing. Your furious opponent spews raw plasma at you, so you shoot up a force field and duck behind it. Who will win? The crowd cheers your intimate-yet-deadly dance.

And if fighting giant robots isn’t enough, you can fashion your own multistory Titans to unleash on other players. Start with a skeleton of titanium girders, then mount pulse cannons and shielding over hard points. Add actuators so your Titan can flex its arms or tentacles, and jets for locomotion. Pick your materials carefully — an aluminum finish may be pretty, but graphene armor will better withstand attack. Finally, fuel it up with isopropanol for speed, methanol for strength, or ethanol, if you just want your Titan to end up really, really angry.

Having introduced a playable prototype to PAX East ’12 convention-goers to good effect, Dejobaan Games projects a 2012 PC/Mac launch.

Three Years of Ugly Baby Screenshots

// May 11th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Dejobaan News, Ugly Baby

This is about three years of dev screenshots for our upcoming Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby. We are still not finished with it. I will finish it if it’s the last thing I do before my company implodes into an indie singularity.

Thanks to everyone who’s cheered us on over the years!

Drunken Robot Pornography Three Months Ago

// May 7th, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, DRP

Drunken Robot Pornography has come a long way in a short time, evolving from a basic look to is present gleaming white aesthetic. We’ve cut a few features to keep the prototype tight — one being the mechanic of disappearing platforms.

Specifically here, killing a Titan caused the platforms the player stands on to start blowing up — players need to keep aware of their surroundings. Seen Tron?

It’s something we didn’t include in the prototype, as we wanted to focus on core gameplay, but an unsteady terrain is still interesting to us.

Coincidentally, Jarrett shared a similar suggestion on Facebook this week.”The floating platforms make for cool potential. My thought is that every time a robot is defeated, not just the boss but the platforms rearrange themselves.” Good suggestion, indeed, Jarrett!

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