I’ll be flying out to the event in Culver City California next month to bring sunshine, love, and high-pitched screaming to a state famous for its short days and dreary cloud cover. While there, i’ll be able to try out some of the year’s most talked-about indie titles, and i’ll get to hang out with an absolutely stellar group of independent game developers, many of whom i’ll likely have regrettable and unfortunate sex with. i’m creeping all their Facebook photos right now, trying to weed out the ugly ones.

Also in the running are Toronto’s Capy/SuperBrothers with Sword & Sworcery, who developed the game directly across the hall from the Untold offices under our meddling eye. And you may not yet have heard of BigPants or their selected stereoscopic game The Depths to Which I Sink, but that’s another Toronto game by none other than Jim and emilie McGinley, co-founders of the weekend-long TOJam event where Cassie and i developed Ponycorns. Finally, Gamercamp co-founder Jaime Woo had his “real” game Gargoyles selected to be part of the expo.

And it won’t just be Toronto finalists attending – there’s a whole gaggle of us from the TDot flying out, including Mathew Kumar, the indie journalist behind EXP, Shawn McGrath, who’s currently building the trippy PS3 game Dyad, and indie dev Michael Todd, who gets a front row seat to my orgiastic debauchery because we’re splitting a hotel room. This just further solidifies Toronto’s reputation as the hub of indie game development in North America, and perhaps the world.

While i’d love to bring Cassie to the event, one of the drawbacks to being an indie is that you’re constantly down at the blood bank trying to sap enough haemoglobin to make rent. i could get her a plane ticket, but then of course i wouldn’t be able to act up at IndieCade, so i’d have to bring her mom … and if i brought Cheryl, i’d have to buy a ticket for Cassie’s little sister … and if you’ve ever seen our family pack for a 2-day stay at Grandma’s, you’d know that we couldn’t stop there – we’d have to charter our own cargo plane to transport all the “necessities” that two little girls require so that the day doesn’t devolve into a competition to see who can shriek the loudest. In short, i don’t have the means.

Ask Me About Loom™

While i’ll be happy to talk Ponycorns and its upcoming Japanese translation, i feel the game has about as much press and attention as any indie title will ever get. As IndieCade fast approaches, we’re working hard on playable demos of our upcoming games, Putty Crime: On the Trail of the Foxy Badger, a puzzle game modeled entirely in clay, and Spellirium, a post-apocalyptic word puzzle adventure game.

See you at IndieCade!

Canadian game studio strives for something different

TORONTO, ON – March 17 2009 – Untold Entertainment Inc., a Canadian game studio specializing in online casual games for kids, happily announces the development of Kahoots™. Kahoots™ is a challenging game of nonsensical crime and silly intrigue, modelled entirely from plasticine.

The game is set in Londonton, a fictional and foolish vision of London England. Drawing its inspiration from British board games like Cluedo (AKA “Clue”), and absurdly humorous series like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The League of Gentlemen, Kahoots™ immerses the player in sepia-tinged Edwardian (fake) England at the height of a crime wave. As Spotland Pond’s newest detective, the player must track down cabals of criminals, all in pursuit of the evil mastermind behind their reign of (mostly harmless) terror.

A Very Hands-On Approach

Kahoots™ is being modelled from top to bottom in plasticine. Every character, set and prop is lovingly (and squishingly) hand-crafted by the team at Untold Entertainment. The world of Londonton is being brought to life through careful photography and digital image manipulation, resulting in a seamless (but smudgy) game experience. The creators hope that the game’s clay graphics will set it apart in the unfaltering flood of casual game titles. Kahoots™ is set to launch online and on the iPhone and iPod Touch in Q2 2009.

About Untold Entertainment Inc.

Untold Entertainment is a fresh new venture formed by Toronto’s leading casual kids’ game experts. Primarily an interactive service shop catering to kids’ television production studios, Untold Entertainment is thrilled to be embarking on its first original casual game title with Kahoots™. Untold Entertainment privately owned, proudly Canadian, and seeking distribution partnership for its wonderful and wholly-owned IP, including Kahoots™. The company is also seeking strategic partnership with an equally energetic television production team.

To follow the Kahoots™ developer diary, or to learn about Unold Entertainment’s interactive services, visit http://www.untoldentertainment.com.

###

Worldwide Media Contact:

Ryan Henson Creighton
(416) 944-8290 x5281
info *at* untoldentertainment *dot* com

Screenshots

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Intrigued? Keep an eye on the Fingerprints tag, or get the inside scoop on the development by following our Twitter page.

We’ll be announcing the name of the game and more details shortly.

Let’s see … what more can we say? Fingerprints is a puzzle game (but NOT a Match-3 game) with multiple modes and variations. It’s being built in plasticine, as you can see.

The game will be released for the browser in Flash initially. Then we’re porting it to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Click the fingerprints tag to keep up with progress on the game, or for the ultra secret inside track, follow our tweetage on Twitter. We’ll be announcing our alpha test phase soon, and you won’t want to miss it!

1. Towningham
2. East Westinghamshireham
3. Nobswallow
4. Flooming-on-Smimsbee
5. Tinklesmith
6. Vicar’s Bottom

Thanks so much to everyone who helped us out by responding! To track progress on this project, follow the Kahoots tag. We’ll be running a closed alpha in a short while, so if you’ve ever wanted a testing credit on a game, here’s your chance!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

When i bought my wife a knitting class for her birthday years ago, i picked her up after the session and she was in tears. She thought she’d be a total pro, but her project looked like someone had had a grand mal seizure while playing cat’s cradle.

My whole life, i’ve adored the work of Jim Henson, to the point of changing my middle name to “Henson” (while on the run from Colombian authorities during my tomb-raiding escapades searching for the legendary South American jewel of Toh-Tallei). i finally had my chance to try it out during a workshop with the Nanalan’ / Mr. Meaty puppet troupe The Grogs, only to find that my arthritis and inflexibility kept me from lifting the puppets far enough over my head. It never dawned on me what a physically demanding job puppeteering was. Acting, puppet construction, improv – i could handle all that. But lifting my arm and keeping it straight? Impossible. Another dream crushed.

Down but not Out

Another dream of mine is to create a video game that uses physical, photographed objects as graphics. i want to either make some kind of game from clay, or to build a graphic adventure-style POV game (think MYST) where the whole set it made of physical stuff, and i just drop a camera inside the set and take pictures that serve as the graphics. The player would feel as if he’s inside a dollhouse, i think. i dunno. i haven’t done it yet. Maybe it would just stink?

i’ve also been burning to do a game in clay. “Like, Claymation?” everyone asks. No – not exactly. Stop-motion animation is incredibly time consuming. i just want the look of clay. i need a game with static graphics that are programmatically animated. That way, i can build the elements in clay and simply photograph still shots – no animation needed.

Clay Achin’

i got my chance a few weeks ago while building a game for the Chumby. It’s a simple card game, and all the cards have symbols on them. Why not build the cards and their symbols in clay? i could scratch the itch in the course of a weekend!

My family was taking a trip away, and i had a bachelor Saturday ahead of my, so i siezed my chance. i ordered a pizza, turned on Goodfellas, and set up the camera and tripod. i took a little desk light from my office and shone it on a white piece of paper – that was the extent of my set. Then i modelled nine little shapes and photographed them all. In a few hours, i was able to knock out all the backgrounds and lay the pngs down in my Flash game.

Here, friends, is the assy result:

It’s embarrassingly bad. Like really, really horribly awfully bad. And bad, bad, bad. Just – just no. Just a failure. A horrible, horrible embarrassingly bad failure. But i decided to write a post about it, warts and all, in the hope that some readers would offer advice, or that i’d encourage someone else who was facing the same challenges.

Here’s a short list of things that went wrong:

1. a poor workman blames his tools, but my camera – particularly with its macro focus – is not that stellar
2. i don’t know a thing about lighting.
3. the shadow cast by the yellow clay shape was also yellow, which made it very tough to separate it from the background. i somehow expected a grey shadow (?) Clearly, my scientological understanding of optics is flawed.
4. i’m not the best hand at Photoshop. Whenever i tried to change the colour of the shapes, they’d lose all the wonderful texturing that made them look like clay (that’s why all the shapes are yellow. They’re actually supposed to be different colours)

Ply, ply again

Unlike puppetry, knitting, and championship weiner-eating, i’m determined to keep at this until i get it right. i think my main stumbling block is the photography. If you have any advice or tales from the trenches, speak up! Meanwhile, enjoy a few screenshots from some games made out of clay: