ripples! (believe it or not)

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also i'm done with school as of last week and i'm not going back next year. That means i'm officially a full time indie game developer.

My computer died during GDC, and apple fixeded it for me.

Also this

The 3 IGF nominations Closure received encourages us to get off our asses and actually release a damn trailer!

Well here it is:

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(new site coming pretty soon too)

3 NOMINATIONS!

Excellence in Audio!
Technical Excellence!
Nuovo Innovation Award!

Root for us in March and congrats to the rest!

(we submitted the new build, not the flash one)

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/
521353

ENJOY.

Also, we should really get pretty links for portal submissions in our blog posts.

The flash version of Closure was nominated for Bytejacker's Free Indie of the Year award.

Go vote for it here
http://www.bytejacker.com/
(right side of the page, under the game of the week poll)

There's lots of competition, so go vote!

Copy and pasted from my dev blog. To see the pictures, read it there
http://www.closuregame.com/blog/2009/1 0/indiecade_08.html

Prepare for a looooong blog post, filled with interesting pictures and stories from my week in Culver City.

Closure and Aether were both finalists in the festival. Because Edmund McMillen was listed first on Aether and I was listed first on Closure, there was a mix up and the two games were placed in separate galleries. The event was split up amongst 3 buildings, which I didn't realize at first or else I would have let them know. Not a problem, I thought, they'll supply the computers so I can leave my booth to walk around, and Edmund would arrive on day 2 so he could watch the Aether booth if necessary and I'd only have to cover both day 1. I'm foreshadowing disaster here. You'll see.

Anyway on Wednesday, I arrived in LA and spent the day with my uncle (who's also doing the music for the game). We talked about the atmosphere and mood and he worked on the music a bit, and we got something really great coming soon music-wise. On Thursday, he drove me into Culver City where I met up with Mike and Greg and Daniel Benmergui. We were splitting a room a few blocks away from the event so we wouldn't have to spend much money for a hotel.

Day 1 begins. I wanted to show off the new version of the game, despite submitting the flash version to the festival. They had mac towers to show off with (cause I didn't get the controller working with windows yet), but unfortunately they were older PowerPC macs, so I had to set up my laptop as the demo station. This was my station:

So, the room was kinda cool. I was right underneath a whole ton of original Disney and Simpsons animation frames. But unfortunately, since my laptop was now my demo machine, I couldn't leave it alone to go watch other booths or other people's stuff unless someone was there. Not a huge deal, really. Enough people were around that I could talk to and show the game to, but not too many, so I could take breaks.

The judges and press came around that day and I told them about the game. Then the opening party was that night. It was at a gallery a ways away, where art was hanging on the walls, music was playing, and the waitresses, dressed up as french maids, served us free food and drinks (delicious food too). The art in the gallery was pretty cool

But some of it was pretty questionable

I gave my "mini-microtalk" for Closure, which consisted of 12 slides at 16 seconds each. It was fun struggling to keep up with the slides but it went very well.

Day 2 was a normal day. It turned out Edmund was sick and might not make it to the festival, so Aether went unwatched that day. I tried to check up on it. The awards ceremony was that night. If Aether won an award, I was to call Edmund and he'd say some words through the phone, through the microphone. Jon showed up that day too, with Luis and Nick. Jon and Luis had a lot of fun at the award ceremony. Perhaps, too much fun?

Lots of free food at the ceremony too. Free food is always good. The Sony Pictures Building was massively huge, my camera couldn't take a good distance picture in it. Oh ya and Closure won for Gameplay Innovation. The trophy looks like a bong. And weighs like 20 pounds. And there's no way I was gonna get it on to the airplane.

My uncle was nice enough to ship it out for me. It's crazy how much family I have all over the country and how willing they are to drive me around and ship stuff for me.

Day 3 came. There wasn't much to say about that day, other than the fact that Tim Langdell showed up. He's infamous for suing the hell out of people that "infringe" on his "famous" trademark "EDGE", and fairly universally hated by the independent gaming community right now, so it struck everyone as a wtf moment when he showed up to INDIEcade. Maybe he's looking for more trademarks, considering EA is ripping him a new hole and using the courts to strip him of his precious trademarked words. I should register Closure sometime soon come to think of it. I have protection by default at least, and I can use the "tm" symbol whenever I want, so you may see that start popping up soon for my own good.

Day 4 was interesting. It was a short day, followed by a second awards party. I found out Edmund went into the ER in the morning. I had no idea what was going on. At the awards ceremony, Aether won an honorable mention, so I called Edmund to see if he was good enough to say something. His wife Danielle picked up, and said he was "unconscious", and everyone was a little worried. Later in the evening I got the call from Edmund, he had gallstones and his gallbladder needed to be removed. Not life threatening at all, but extremely painful. Also he doesn't have insurance, so if you want you can donate some money to help him foot the bill.

This was our prize. Not as cool as a 20 pound cast iron sculpture of death, but interesting nonetheless. I had to assemble it myself.

The game developers life is fun. Unfortunately these types of events can't last forever, or else we'd all be having too much fun to actually make games. So, back to work for me. Next major festival is GDC in march, so I have quite a bit of time to *yawn* actually do some work instead of goofing around with fun people.

Go team Closure GO!

Ok ya I had to wait a little bit to get FP post back after the first bit of PAX news.

Here's some videos, starting with gameplay of the demo I showed off (minus 2 levels to fit into 10 minutes). While the video shows a 10 minute demo, most people played for 30-45 minutes trying to figure out puzzles. We got a good list of points where people got stuck, and a lot of misc. glitches and other things to fix. Here it is though:

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Also I was on G4:
http://g4tv.com/videos/41247/Brutal-Le gends-Tim-Schafer-Does-PAX/

If you're in the LA area around October 1-4 be sure to go to the Indiecade festival. Closure and Aether are BOTH finalists. I will be manning the closure booth and showing off the new version if they let me. Also, bring your friends. They didn't do too good of a job promoting the event but I still want it to draw a crowd. please don't leave me alone... Also Will Wright is gonna be there so there's some celebrity endorsement if that's your thing.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=
37254
There's a photo collection for you to see.

I'm incredibly tired and sick right now, so I don't have much to write about today, but I'll post the whole summary sometime this week.

10 DAYS TILL PAX! OMFG

I plan to show off the new Closure. Of course, the game is not quite... presentable yet... and we have 10 days to get it presentable. 10 days. You know what that means? It's SUPER CRUNCH TIME GO!! for me and Jon.

YOU BETTER SHOW UP AT PAX or else all this effort is WASTED

also vote for closure