After a whirlwind week and a whole lot of dedication from the team over the weekend I’m very proud to announce that we made our deadline, and have a very tidy demo to show off at the DICE conference for which I am about to depart. I’ve thrown in a few shots to whet the apetite, and can now promise that with solid foundations laid on both the visual and technical sides, the content will be coming in thick and fast.

And you know what content needs? Testers! That’s right we’re now very close to putting this thing out in the wild and are super excited to be moving from a very “under the hood” mode into an iterative relationship with an eager group of testers. This is the fun bit

Links we thought were awesome this week:

Jamie Oliver gives an amazing talk on the vital role of food in our future at TED

This sure is a Mosquito getting disintegrated by a lazer

Scuba Divers ambush Google Street View van

Robot Unicorn Attack might be one of the best Flash games ever

What a full on week! We’re getting some great momentum going for the new year leading up towards the two big conference deadlines of DICE and GDC. We took part in the Global Game Jam over the weekend, which meant we started off the week a little shattered but still full of energy and insight after getting three games together over 48 hours. You can check out the games we made here.

We then had Emma arrive from Germany after a grueling ~35 hour trip with 4 stops along the way. So we now have the whole team on site here and we’ve been having a lot of fun throwing ideas around while testing, breaking, and iterating through some of the mechanics for pollination and general environment interaction in Flutter. The weather in Dunedin has been epic, lending itself well to outdoor meetings and making the butterfly exhibit and the Otago Museum incredibly hot (35+ degrees on the top story). We visited this afternoon and got a huge amount of reference photos, some of which you can see in the Flickr stream (super awesome thanks to Emily Hlavac for her amazing photos)

And we decided on a logo! Wow that was a mission, but we’re incredibly happy with the result and have just ordered some super sweet business cards which should be ready in time for DICE. Thanks Hayden from HAMR for such an awesome job, and sorry for being such a fussy client.

This week also sees us approaching completing of the new rendered and level editor, which together with our new dynamic tree construction system will give us so much power in iterating through our level designs. We’ve had to be very patient so far this year as the visual and technical sides ran seperate from each other to establish solid foundations. Very excited to see the progress culminate in a new playable early next week.

Links that rocked our world this week:

This Global Game Entry is a real scream

Sonic 4 (you can do it Sega!)

My life ends when Civilisation comes to Facebook