We’ve changed the name to something that sounds a bit less rudey.
Here’s a new teaser trailer to commemorate this glorious occasion.
We’re now scheduled for release in February 2017 on Xbone, PS4 and PSVita.
Very exciting times!
They Can't All Be Zingers!
The fall and rise of an ordinary guy with nothing to lose
Category Archives: Games
Update May 2015
Hello! So it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog. Over a year! Bla bla should try and do it more often.
So a whole lot has changed since the last update! Achieved a whole lot and done some ace projects with some new ones on the horizon. Anyway, less chat more updatez!
Don’t Die, Mr. Robot!
This was finally released in North America on 4th November 2014, and 5th November 2014 in the EU. Fireworks night no less! Quite fitting. Here’s the launch trailer:
Avoid Droid ended up being called Don’t Die, Mr. Robot. That’s because Lucasfilm have a trademark on the word ‘Droid’ which apparently they vigorously enforce. We didn’t fancy that so we changed the name. Actually, it was our pal Rob Fearon who came up with the name, so cheers mate!
It did well! Currently at at a metacritic score of 77
It got load of awesome reviews which you can read about here on the ISG blog:
http://infinitestategames.com/2015/03/10/do-buy-mr-robot-reviews-roundup/
DDMR was the biggest release of our independent career so far, so it’s quite a big deal for us to have finished it, got it out the door and well received by critics and players alike. Plainly speaking – we did a great job considering no budget!
Oh, and one more bit of DDMR news – we’re working with an awesome, excellent man to bring Don’t Die to PS4! Yeah! PS4 BABY!
DRM: Vita
I’m now working on the soundtrack to Rob Fearon’s Death Ray Manta for PSVita and PS4. It’s a musical collaboration with the very talented Bristol based singer and musician Jenny Ramage under the banner of ‘Jenny and the Giants’. This is quite an interesting project because it’s the sound track for a game, but also a concept album of catchy electropop songs which tells the story of a girl who’s fell in love with a sentient, omniscient space fish which fires lasers from its head.
The game is due out at the end of 2015. At the time of writing this blog, we’re just mixing down all the tracks. Next week we’re off to the studio to master them, so I’ll probably try and blog about that part of the process because it’s interesting!
Frutorious HD
Remember Frutorious? Don’t worry, no one else does either. However, we do! During the last 2 years while doing all our other stuff, we’ve been quietly and slowly working on the ultimate edition of Frutorious. We’ve fixed all the shitty levels, we’ve put in a new guide line to help you aim – and we’ve given the whole game an HD overhaul upping the quality of the graphics.
It’s playing great, it’s looking great, and when we’ve got a bit of spare time we’ll release it! But only when it’s the right time. One does not simply ‘ship’ a game like Frutorious HD.
Here’s some video of it running –
Wing Kings
Oh yeah! On top of all that, we’re making a new game over at ISG!
Wing Kings is an air combat dog fightin’ roguelike. We’re developing it for PSVita and PS4 for release in North American and Europe (sorry, Japan!)
We’ve hired an artist for this one too (WOWZERS!) He’s an industry veteran who may have worked on some of your favourite games, who knows! Check out this hot mock up…
We’re currently prototyping, and already dogfighting is tense and explosive, while landing is nailbiting and exhilarating. So far so good!
Here’s a Vine of our current prototype we’re using to tweak the flight model
And that’s it! Loads of great stuff going on, and personal satisfaction levels at an all time high – for which I must thank Jenny and Charlie for being my two sources of joy, productivity and inspiration. And thanks, yourself, for reading about my things wot I’m doing!
See you next time!
Update November 2013
SO! What’s goin’ down just now? Well things are ticking along nicely. Let’s do a quick update on where everything is:
Avoid Droid
So working on Avoid Droid for Sony has been just about the best experience we’ve ever had working in conjunction with a corporation ever. They have given us the most important things that anyone can give a developer:
-1 Hardware.
Devkit? Have two! One each! Amazing. Pride of place in both me and Charlie’s workstations (dining tables).
-2 Freedom
We are not being hounded One. Bit. Like, for anything. At the start there was some feedback on the prototype they’d seen which was extremely positive but had a few suggestions from the game consultant who assessed it. We took a lot of the suggestions on board because they were great, but some things we were reluctant to change because it didn’t fit with our finished creative vision of the game. And that was totally absolutely cool with them. God, we love Sony.
-3 Empathy
They understand that we gotta do what we gotta do, and it’s gonna be different from the way most companies do it. They know we aren’t a company with an office and 9-5 working hours and they *understand*. We’ve had Skype calls when sensible people should really be in their jimmy jammers cos it’s the only time we could make it. Nary a raised eyebrow!
So here’s where we’re at just now…
So yeah, we’re really happy. And happy devs are productive devs! We now have the game ported to Vita, so we’re now on to the ‘mystery’ bit of messing around with shaders and gameplay tweaks to make it look and play like the solid, timeless arcade game we want it to look and play like.
The Audio Grill
I’ve teamed up with a lovely fellow called David Burrows to form a two man music and audio team called The Audio Grill.
You can check out our combined music efforts here: https://soundcloud.com/theaudiogrill/
The company’s vision is centred around the idea that the best people to make music for video-games would be a highly trained professional musician (David) and some guy who makes games and music (Me). Therefore, combining my career insight into design and audio implementation which enhanced the feel of gameplay – with David’s training, composing experience and preposterous levels of musical prowess. Thus, the perfect bespoke music and audio conception and production pipeline is born.
We’re also blogging about the games that we’re creating the audio for. It’s just our insights and philosophies we have while making the music for each of the games, so it’ll gradually grow and become more introverted and bizarre, probably. Come read us! http://theaudiogrill.wordpress.com
But don’t just take our word for it! Since forming The Audio Grill, we’ve already created music for what I’m certain will be a it of a phenomenon. It’s called Division Cell. Here’s the trailer…
The game is by a couple of reeeeeally genuinely lovely and creative guys called Hyperspace Yard. You can, and should, check out the Division Cell website, cos it’s got a tasty html5 version of the puzzles you can generate, play and share on there!
http://cell.hyperspaceyard.com/#070884177733056
(p.s I can do that one in 3 moves…)
Update July 2013
Hello, chums!
It’s been a while since I updated my blog, so let’s dive straight in with some stuff I’ve been up to.
Firstly, Nike+ Kinect Training is out. I worked on that while still at the perennially awesome Ruffian Games. My job was to design and implement some crazy games you play to keep fit.
I can’t remember much cos it’s going back a bit now, but I remember doing the game where all the balls bounce towards you and you have to dodge out of the way. I don’t know if it made it in the final build unadulterated but the ball dodging experience I designed was so much fun to make. It was a really fun last couple of months at Ruffian, designing waves of balls in CryEngine, walking over to a devkit and testing the game physically.
It was very gratifying to watch friends at work play my stuff. I think my favourite bit was seeing people go ‘OH, HANG ON! FUCK!’ when my 5 foot high basketball suddenly flew at them at the end of the session.
Secondly, I’m working on a new game! It’s called Avoid Droid.
It’s chock full of HYPER DODGING FRUITY ACTION. It was inspired by a game called ‘Jimmy Dodger’ that our old mate Matthew Downie made for us to play at lunchtimes back in the day at Razorback.
Here’s a video of our E3 reveal trailer.
Thirdly, enormous news, Me and Charlie have been talking to some really really cool guys at Sony, and they’re gonna help us bring Frutorious and Avoid Droid to PS Vita! Imagine that, Frutorious in HD on a PS Vita! Pretty cool prospect, I reckon.
This is great news for a couple of reasons.
1. We get to reach out to a new audience on some incredible hardware.
2. I’ve prove to myself that I can come up with a design, prototype, pitch and sign a deal. And I’m also now a director of Infinite State Games Ltd! Serious sounding business, eh?
Infinite State Games has just been the perfect company to work at for the last few years, and I’ve been very lucky indeed to have been able to play my part in us getting this far. We’re being accepted now as a team who can produce things people want, and that feels so blimmin’ lovely I can’t really put it into words.
We were interviewed recently for 100% Indie, too. It’s quite a nice interview, you can read it here: http://www.100percentindie.com/2013/07/05/infinitely-happy/
So onwards and upwards to bigger and better things!
In-game music for Death Ray Manta ‘Death Ray Manta Anthem’
Just did some in-game musics for my mate Rob and his game ‘Death Ray Manta’
The game is white hot. Imagine you could encapsulate that feeling of sneakily swigging the milk out of the bottle, stood in front of the fridge, knowing any minute someone could walk in and shout at you – into a videogame. That’s how it feels to play. Keep sipping from that sweet milk bottle all you like, but eventually you’ll get busted. It’s probably the most glorious, euphoric, anthemic fun you can have in a game in under 3 minutes.
Rob compares the experience to a videogame being played as a music chart single. I can totally get on board with that. It’s the thrill of driving on the motorway at night with your lights turned off just to see how many seconds you can do it before you bottle it and put them back on. It’s bouncing round your room while your favourite childhood single is playing, the moment made all the sweeter knowing that it will soon stop. But with prettier particle effects.
It’s available to download in ‘Bundle in a Box’ which seems like an unbelievably good deal: $0.99 for D.R.M., Space Giraffe (one of my all time faves) and some other stuff I haven’t seen before but look fresh.
Edge Online gave Death Ray Manta a well deserved 8, and called my composition ‘relentlessly euphoric’ which was lovely of them! You can hear my tune here…
Frutorious released on iOS
Things have been busy! We’ve just put out Frutorious onto the AppStore. This is a big thing for me because it’s a project I’ve enjoyed more than any other I’ve worked on in the games industry. Many many reasons for that, but the main one being because of working the fantastic team of Charlie and Graham.
Here’s the launch trailer:
You can download Frutorious on the AppStore here:
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/frutorious/id524952395?mt=8
It’s getting there slowly! Each day the Facebook page gets new likes from folk from a massive variety of backgrounds, and everyone we know who’s played it has had fun. It’s also got a lot of great reviews on the AppStore which is really really flattering: http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/frutorious/reviews/
Something that makes me quite excited too, we’ve got a lot of really great feedback from players which we’ll put into the next update (along with a very unexpected gaming cross over… more on that soon)
Frutorious E3 trailer!
Here it is, boys and girls!
The frame rate is a little shonky in this video but the game itself is smooth as a peach. It’s just because I’ve had to record the display out on my iPad using this application for Jailbroken iPads called Display Recorder It does the job but it can drop frames a bit.
Anyway, this should give everyone a good idea of how the game looks and plays! It’s still got a lot of art and polish to go in, so stay tuned for more footage soon because it’ll keep getting better and better!
Like Frutorious on Facebook to be sure you’re first for later updates http://www.facebook.com/Frutorious
Blast from the past – Zombie Commander!
Here’s some prototype footage of an unreleased Nintendo DS game that I designed and my main man Charlie at Infinite State Games coded:
Shame it never got bought up, it was made way before Zombies got utterly ruined by the game dev community! Still, a demo lives on and one day who knows, it may find its way to a mobile platform near you!
Frutorious – The folk song
The third in what will probably be an on-going but sporadic series… here’s what the Frutorious theme music would sound like if it were a piece of folk music!
Props to Mr. Pickle for the guitaring x
Frutorious update: FRUTORIOUS LIVES
Here’s a video of the latest Frutorious WIP prototype. As of just now we have some particles, some parallax and some peril! All the levels are randomly generated at the moment but we’re soon moving on to the next stage … making levels! Exciting.
We’ve also got an illustrator on board to paint the intro sequence for us in acrylics and she’s already coming up with some heartbreakingly cute stuff. More news on that soon!
They Can't All Be Zingers! 