Continue reading »]]> Every hero needs a sidekick, and Orion should be no exception. We knew that one character couldn’t carry the whole game by them self, so we needed to come up with an appropriate foil that would play off of Orion’s wacky personality in a natural way. Again, we looked to Hands On! Tangrams for inspiration.

The kid holding the balloon, the very first puzzle in Tangrams, was named Ryan during that game’s production. It was an inside joke, the same that also earned Orion his name; the large number of people named Ryan who were working at Island Officials at the time. Quickly we realized that this was the perfect sidekick for our hero. Since Hands On! Pattern Blocks’ primary demographic is children, giving Orion a buddy they could relate to made sense. Plus, what little kid wouldn’t want a robotic best friend?  Ryan was a natural fit. Once he was given the Matt McKenna style make over, all we needed to do was give him a personality.

LEFT: Concept art of Ryan from HO!PB. RIGHT: Ryan's artwork from HO!T.

At 7 (and a half!) years old, Ryan only has two modes: Super hyperactive or insufferably bored. Upon seeing Orion for the first time, he becomes really excited by the possibilities come with having his very own robot, but it takes a lot of convincing on Orion’s part before Ryan can understand how awesome his building ability truly is. After that, Ryan becomes convinced the two are a super hero duo and the two become inseparable.

Usually Ryan plays the role of the straight man to Orion’s antics, yet he has a few quirks of his own. He has a thirst for adventure but doesn’t like to stay in one place for to long, and has a tendency to speak faster than his brain can think. In short, he’s a kid; ambitious, manic, playful and wired all at the same time. Most importantly though, he provides Orion with companionship – which is good, because Orion will need all the help he can get when traveling in the strange world of Hands On! Pattern Blocks.

Continue reading »]]> What is LangGuini-

LangGuini is a multi player card game for 3 or more players. The game was designed during the 2011 Global Game Jam in Philadelphia, PA. last year’s theme was “Extinction” so we decided that the English language has been deteriorating rapidly, so we needed some new words. Being big fans of party games we wanted to make a social game,we created LangGuini. After almost a year of play-testing and messing around with the mechanics we really want to print this game and get it out there.

The game was officially funded on Kickstarter on January 16, 2012 thanks to 144 amazing backers. We are currently in production for the first sampling of the game.

For more information on LangGuini please check out the website here.

Continue reading »]]> The SRI Growler Station App for SRI Discount Liquors in South Plainsfield, NJ allows you to access what beers are currently on tap at their 14 tap Growler station. The app also has a listing of what beers are on deck for the station and an event listing for any up and coming events. It even has a section to open your mind to some newer beers at the store and educate you a bit. The on tap section gives you the name of the beer, the ABV percentage and the price with a brief description on that particular beer. You can FaceBook update and/or tweet your selection and share with your friends. Get the current selection in real time as SRI will be updating whenever a keg is kicked.

We update constantly and try to keep you up to date on what’s happening, hope to see you at the SRI growler station soon!

Continue reading »]]> We’ve managed to get out of the studio a few times during the course of the production of Pixel Lincoln, and a few of those times we headed to local conventions. We’ve done a few Too Many Games and Video Game Trader shows, and each time we tried to top the last one. Next time we’ll need to top a 7 foot Lincoln, and Lincoln himself appearing at our booth… which might be tough.

Check out our photo gallery below.

Continue reading »]]> Guys and gals, I feel like I owe you all an apology. I’ve been so excited introducing you to the characters, the story and world of Hands On! Pattern Blocks, I forgot to introduce the most essential element; the game itself!

Pattern blocks are geometric manipulatives, much like tangrams. The objective is still to fill in the outline given to you using the available shapes. For anyone who’s played Hands On! Tangrams, the game-play should feel familiar. The simplicity and intuitiveness of the controls were a part of what everyone loved about HO!T, and it was important for us to maintain that level of quality. That doesn’t mean there aren’t changes, however!

The biggest change, other than the pieces themselves, is that you aren’t limited to one of each piece: you’re allowed to bring out up to 30 of any piece you need in order to solve the puzzle. In order to keep things clean and manageable for the player, we opted for the sidebar to use easily distinguishable buttons that can generate the desired piece on the fly; just press and hold the button and slide the piece off of the sidebar. This not only makes for a clean, easy to use interface, but also fits within the context of Orion’s building ability in the story. If a piece needs to be deleted for whatever reason, it can be picked up and put back on the sidebar and it will disappear, almost as if it was being put back where it came from.

Another change is that, unlike tangrams, where a puzzle can only have a few solutions, any pattern block puzzle can have dozens if not hundreds of perfectly acceptable solutions. While this makes them inherently easier than tangrams, it also offers the player more creative freedom. Lack of variety was an often cited criticism of HO!T, so in Pattern Blocks we used the open ended nature of the puzzles to create all new mechanics and features, many of which you’ll be reading about in the coming weeks.

One puzzle, multiple solutions

One mechanic I do want to talk about is the game’s scoring feature. In most modes, once the player has solved a puzzle, they will receive a score. Each piece has a fixed numerical value, which has been tuned to deal out more points for either efficient or particularly clever styles of play. This score then gets added into an overall lifetime score. The score isn’t just for bragging rights however; it also serves one other important function. What is it? Keep checking back to find out!

Continue reading »]]> After two weeks of describing the initial card game, and the team behind the game, we’re finally ready to discuss the actual game! So what is Pixel Lincoln all about?

Pixel Lincoln is a side-scrolling video game, with retro-styled graphics, inspired by such classics as Super Mario Bros. 3 (simplicity), MegaMan 2 (difficulty), and Earthbound (humor).

You start out the game as Lincoln, aboard the main cabin of Rail Force One. After Lincoln’s hat suddenly blows off of his head and right out the window, he searches and encounters enemies, makes friends, and ends up in areas that he never expected. Lincoln just wants his hat back, but he doesn’t realize the power that it holds! And if that power gets into the wrong hands… (SPOILERS: It does)

Lincoln appears to be your average pixel president, but with a few hidden surprises.

Is that a boxing glove?
Yes! Sometimes you just need to knock someone out.

An arm cannon?
Yes! Loaded with all of the finest projectiles.

A beardarang?
Yes! Lincoln’s beard is his main weapon (of course). And just like a boomerang, it comes back. Well, actually.. it grows back.

As for the enemies…

This is Booth, Lincoln’s nemesis.

Booth has band of disguised henchmen, wearing their elusive mexican wrestler masks.

And here is the first of our non-human enemies. It’s an annoying smiling slime that just gets in your way.

Check back next week for a photo recap of the initial reveal of Pixel Lincoln, mega Pixel Lincoln, and much more.

Continue reading »]]> When it was originally decided that we were going to make Pixel Lincoln into a video game, myself, George Tagmire, and the Ryans from Island Officials started to assemble a development team. We needed a medium sized group made up of artists, designers and programmers.. and it all started to come together quickly.

I was new to the group. My background in game design was only tabletop games at this point (with a little bit of RPGmaker thrown in), but these guys all went to school for game design. They’d previously worked together as a team, so everyone was comfortable from the start.

The team was made up of: (pictured from L to R)
Jason Tagmire
Nick Passamonti
Jordan Hample
Brandon Kavitsky
Long Nguy
George Tagmire
Tom Ash
Jon Fisher*
Jason the Intern (not pictured)*

and since then we’ve added:
Marty Cobb
Paul Weinstein a/k/a Chipocrite

*no longer part of the team.

Although we were working under Island Officials, we still wanted to come up with a unique name for our group. We tossed around a lot of ideas and ended up with Faux Robo. Three of us loved the name. Most hated it. I convinced our illustrator (at the time) to come up with a logo to help sway the votes to Faux Robo. It definitely helped and after a lot of back and forth, Faux Robo became our name.

But it could have been much different. Here is a list of the names that could have been.

Antumbra
Ascendant/Ascendancy
Atomic Engine Games
Atomic Fueled Games
Atomic Wind Creations
Blast Door
Cannonball
Data Parade
Deep Impact Studios
Deep Space Games
Discrepancy
Epic Year Games
Exosphere Productions
Faux Robo
FryWave (1950 scifi blaster shooting frenchfries)
Full Force Games
Holoverse Studios
HyperGo
Ionosphere Games
Jump Kick Studios
Known Space Creations
Lazy Leviathan
Lionship
Lost Knowledge
Mesosphere Games
Realityscape Games
Sensory Deprivation
Shadow Ware Studio
Taxiderby
Thirsty Viking
Timescape Productions
Turtle Tank
Typecast Games
Warp Speed Studios

Turtle Tank was really close to being our name. So was HyperGo.

A few months after we formed.. after all of that work, we ditched the name and started to work as Island Officials. The week that we wasted coming up with a name seemed more of a waste than we originally thought. It was fun though, and it was our first project as a group. We still bicker about things as tiny as a single pixel, but it’s because we’re all really passionate.. whether it’s an awesome name (“Faux Robo”) or a terrible name (most of the list) it was definitely a glimpse into the future.

And speaking of the future.. next week we’re talking all about the game. What is is actually all about?!? Check back next week.

Continue reading »]]> Available now for both DROID and iOS devices!!!

Joe Canal’s Route 45 in West Deptford, NJ Has an 8 tap Growler station available to its customers.  The app allows you to access what beers are currently on tap and get some information about what beers are on deck, event listings for the store, directions to the store and information on some new brews.  The app will be debuting at the 4th Annual Craft Beer Tasting happening Friday, September 23, 2011 at Toscana’s Restaurant, Mullica Hill, NJ 08062 Tickets are $40 in Advance or $45 at the door. Sample a wide variety of specialty imported and craft beers as well as some other super rare surprises!

Here is the link to the official apple app store site. Here is the link for the DROID app. Enjoy!

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been working on Pixel Lincoln in various forms for a few years now. Right now, it’s a side-scrolling action/adventure game that’s in development for the Nintendo DS by Island Officials. But a few years ago, things were very different.

It all started out as a card game. In late 2008 I decided that I was going to create a few card games and get them printed by a short run card game company. I really wanted to make a side-scrolling card game that played like an old NES game. Before there was a theme to the game, I was using cut-out pieces of paper that were glued on top of Pokemon cards (commons only… of course!).  The cards were placed next to each other and the player would travel from left to right using a grid on the cards.

We needed a token to represent the player. Back then I didn’t have a ton of tokens lying around, so I went with the cheapest token available…. a penny. This evolved into thoughts of Lincoln as the main character and an image and name was born!

Pixel Lincoln. He was short and squat like Mario, which is the complete opposite of Lincoln’s shape. I think that’s what I loved the most about it.

We also needed enemies, lots of them. The game was going to be Lincoln (represented by the penny) going around defeating enemies and navigating the level. So you really never saw the Pixel Lincoln image while playing the game. We needed enemies that were as cool as Lincoln and I struggled. I made a quick farm level and made a pig and a crow and it was terrible.

I reached out to some creative friends online (many of which are contributors on FruitlessPursuits.com – Luke, Suzanne, Taylor, Grug, Stryder Wolfe) and started a message board thread called “Create A Pixel Enemy for Abe Lincoln!”. The enemies came in quick, and they came in AWESOME. The pig and crow were tossed and we now had tiny T-Rex’s, Puking Turtles, various Pixel dictators, Cave Apes, Caped Wolves, Laser Sharks, Fireball Shooting Ducks, Smiley Slimes, and much more. The world of Pixel Lincoln was formed.

We made 6 levels that were classic retro sidescroller levels mixed with Lincoln specific ideas. There was a grass level, underground level, a water level and then Ford’s Theater, heaven and the future. We also made cover art that was HEAVILY inspired by old NES art mixed with Megaman (and many other games) style of showing super detailed artwork that looked nothing like the character that was made up of 7 pixels.

Eventually, the game was released. It came with a penny (which was kind of an issue because you cannot sell currency) but I wanted it to work outside of the US. I bought a few copies to distribute myself. It was and still is available online (http://www.championland.net), and it’s sold pretty regularly at it’s exclusive retail location, Guild of Blades in Madison, WI. It’s gotten some good feedback online, but I think it’s well overdue for a rule update. It was one of the first games I made, and probably the most well-known.

So how did it become a video game? Check back next week for part two, Pixel Lincoln: From Card Game to Video Game.

Continue reading »]]> You may have noticed this if you’ve glanced at our team page, but we have quite a few artists on our team considering the size of the company. We’re fortunate and thankful for each of them, because it takes a lot of art to make a game. Unfortunately, many talented artists’ work goes unnoticed in the broad scheme of things; consistency is very important when defining an overall look and feel for a game, so the unique styling that each person brings to the table can get lost in the mix sometimes. Since Hands On! Tangrams was designed with something of an activity-book-esque style in mind, we decided to let our different talent shine by letting different people draw each level. Our goal was to maintain a certain level of quality as well as showcase the many talented people we had working on the game, and overall I feel we accomplished this in spades.

Hands On! Pattern Blocks, however, was steered in a different direction. It was always planned to be more of an adventure game, so we went the more traditional route of defining a distinct style to bring credence to the world of the game. If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you know we were already in love with Matt McKenna’s unique approach to cartooning, so much so that we picked one of his drawings from Tangrams to be the main character for our new game. We went a step further and made Matt our lead concept artist. Matt’s breezy and quirky style was exactly what we needed to bring the game to life.

Matt's concept art was the first step to setting up the cutscenes for the game itself.

In order to finalize our living, breathing world, we needed locales and cast that could populate it. This is where the original story concept from John Sabin, creative producer Ryan Harbinson and I came in. John and Ryan came up with different scenarios and locations for Orion’s adventure, and Ryan and I filled it in with the written dialogue you’ll eventually be reading. Thankfully, conceptualizing and and writing the game was an absolute blast, with Matt’s art making it really easy to come up with many zany characters and situations.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the fun so soon, but in the coming weeks we’ll tell you more about Orion’s adventure and the people he’ll meet a long the way. For now, I hope you enjoyed reading about the conceptual process that went into creating the world of Hands On! Pattern Blocks. Stay tuned for future updates, but in the mean time, why don’t you check out Matt’s art blog and web comic? I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

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