Final Fleet, Our new VR Space Shooter for Steam VR, is officially in competition at the 19th annual Independent Game Festival. You can visit the Final Fleet competition page or view all of the IGF submission games at the IGF website. Hope to see some of you at GDC!
We had some time at GDC to yap it up on the expo floor with the friendly people from Design3. We talked about our upcoming game Reagan Gorbachev, Fist Puncher, working with OUYA, making games in Unity, and a bunch of other fun stuff. Click below for the interview.
Before we forget, here are a couple of podcasts that we squeezed in the past few weeks. First up is a Press Pause Radio podcast. It’s a sort of GDC cool down chat that we recorded on the last day of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We’ve been friends with the gang from Press Pause for a couple of years so it was nice to finally grab some time and rap about games with their crew.
The second one is from Go For Rainbow – Jake sat down and talked about OUYA, Fist Puncher, and our upcoming game, Reagan Gorbachev. Enjoy!
Things have been crazy since GDC – we’ve been working hard to meet milestones for Reagan Gorbachev and wrapping up Mac and Linux ports for Fist Puncher. All of this is a weak excuse to say so we haven’t had much time to blog about the show. Anyway, the show was, as expected, a blast. We spent 3 days exhibiting Reagan Gorbachev with the folks at OUYA, and we were right in the company of a bunch of slick titles (Duck Game, Amazing Frog, Broken Age). Here’s a brief write-up from GamesBeat about the upcoming exclusive OUYA titles.
As usual, we got gobs of great feedback and hundreds of people played the first prototype of Reagan Gorbachev. At present the game is coming together as an amalgamation of quick burst action and top down stealth – a sort of “Super Meatline Miami”. We’re currently in the process of starting a complete art overhaul so in the next couple of months we’ll start leaking screenshots. In the meantime, we’ll be in the trenches making games!
Our newest game, Reagan Gorbachev, will be on display at this week’s Game Developer Conference here in San Francisco. Reagan Gorbachev is a top-down, cooperative stealth game set in a 1980s alternate timeline. Players take control of both of the 20th century leaders and must use their unique skills to battle through dozens of levels. We’ll be showing off Reagan Gorbachev in the OUYA booth in the main GDC exhibition hall. Here’s the current demo schedule if you want to stop by to kick the tires on our new game or just get some stickable goodies.
Wed: 2-6pm
Thurs: 10am-2pm
Fri: 10am-3pm
For anyone that missed GDC or didn’t have time to swing by and play Fist Puncher, here’s a few links to some media coverage from the show.
Fist Puncher makes the Paste list of the 10 best games at GDC! We’re pretty proud of this. Lots of time and effort went into Fist Puncher so getting a little recognition is always a great feeling.
Here’s some fun Fist Puncher coverage from Game Fans. Being compared to Garbage Pail Kids is usually/always a good thing. Check out the accompanying video for a little Fist Puncher gameplay.
We had a blast talking with Bengkt from GameReactor. A class guy and a class site.
Finally, the good people from Bunnyhop stopped by to catch up with Fist Puncher at GDC. I like their style – seems like something that you might listen to on NPR while sipping tea and eating a berry scone:
Well, not really. It’s actually pretty tame and generally overflowing with sweaty men and sometimes-amazing facial hair. Here we are one week after GDC, and I’m still recovering from this damn sinus plague (never should have shaken hands with that Somali pirate). But, body malfunctions aside, GDC was, as expected, terrific. Tiring, but terrific. For us, GDC started with the IGN Indie Press Mixer. First, let me just say that Happy Fisting is a real game. I’m not proud of that. That’s simply a fact. But, moving on, the mixer was packed with press, developers and, most importantly, games. Highlights? For me it would have to be Aztez, a visually stunning brawler, and Soundodger, a high octane music-meets-bullet-storm game. Be on the lookout for both of these neat little titles (shout out to Team Bean!).
AZTEZ AT THE INDIE PRESS MIXER:
SOUNDODGER AT THE INDIE PRESS MIXER:
HANGING WITH THE GREAT INDIESTATIK AT THE INDIE PRESS MIXER:
The Press Mixer was just the calm before the storm. We spent the next 3 days exhibiting Fist Puncher as part of GDC Play. Yeah, it was draining, we both lost our voices, and all the standing probably inched us a little closer towards needing to use canes to get around, BUT overall the Play exhibition was a huge success. We had tons of traffic, talked to boatloads of media, met all sorts of great developers and artists, got amazing feedback on the game, and even got a GDC Play “Best in Play” honorable mention. Hurrah! There were also some amazing games besides Fist Puncher in the GDC Play exhibit. Too many to name, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Chasm and Dungeon Dashers. Both of these titles are going to make many a gamer very happy.
FIST PUNCHER AT GDC PLAY:
But, what about the parties, you ask? I’ll be honest, we skipped Pow Pow… and we skipped the Minecraft party… and we skipped the Venus Patrol party… I guess we’re just too cool for school? No, we were just exhausted (but we’re glad we found people to gift our tickets to). However, we did roll to the Adult Swim party where low brow goofs like us were able to mingle with high brow creative types all while watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force. For me, this was possibly the best night of the conference. So many great people attended this one, and the vibe was low-key and relaxed.
ADULT SWIM PARTY:
Although we did cross paths with Misfits Attic, our arch enemies. We went to blows later that night (sorry about the fat lip, Tim!).
MISFITS ATTIC AND TEAM2BIT PREPARE FOR BATTLE:
We also made it out to the Ouya unveiling party. This was also a blast (who can complain about free pizza, vegetarian tacos, and It’s It ice cream?), and getting a chance to actually sit and play some bad ass Ouya titles like Canabalt and Saturday Morning RPG made us believers in the potential of this cool little console.
SATURDAY MORNING RPG AT THE OUYA PARTY:
PLAYING CANABALT AT THE OUYA PARTY:
Some might also know that I used to be an avid classic game collector (Good Luck Charlie Brown! – we owned that!). At the Ouya party we ran into Greg Pabich. Greg owns the rights to Cheetahmen, one of the rarest NES titles ever. This definitely put a smile on my face.
GREG PABICH MEETS TEAM2BIT AT THE OUYA PARTY:
What about loot? Well, I did my best to gather as many stickers, buttons, and t-shirts as possible. No idea what I’ll do with all this junk, but it’s all sort of irrelevant since we scored the crown jewel of GDC swag: a Runner 2 action figure!
RUNNER 2 ACTION FIGURE:
In summary, GDC left us with a little bit of sickness, lots of freebies, and a sweet amount of exposure for Fist Puncher. We’ll be back next year and hopefully Jake will approve the Fist Puncher capes that I want to wear so badly. Onward!
FIST PUNCHER AT GDC:
-MattKain
We’re happy to announce that we will be exhibiting Fist Puncher at this month’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) in sunny San Francisco. The exhibition hall will be open March 27-29 and Fist Puncher will be on display as part of the GDC Play exhibition in Kiosk 24. We’re also happy to announce that we were given an honorable mention in the GDC Best in Play competition. We’ll be giving out stickers and trading cards so stop by to grab some swag and knock in some pixelated teeth. With the Fist Puncher release on the horizon, this is THE best chance to play the most up-to-date version of our retro-styled, side-scrolling beat ’em up. We’ll see you there!
Here’s a couple more webisodes from our trip to GDC. We got some final thoughts on the show and put together some highlights of the hours and hours of Fist Puncher gameplay. Thanks to everyone that stopped by the booth to play, GameSpy for hooking us up with the exhibition space, the other members of the Indie Open House for being supportive and welcoming, Notch for having an inspirational beard, Phil Fish for not swearing at us, and Greg Miller for making the whole show possible by saving the world just moments prior to the doors opening.
One of the more exciting parts of GDC was the rumor that epic videogame super-celebrity Notch, creator of Minecraft, was roaming around the exhibition floor. We tried desperately to hunt down The Bearded One, show him our game Fist Puncher, and hopefully be granted a coveted spot in his CubeCon convention. Take a look at these webisodes that track our exploits as Team Fist Puncher goes In Search of Notch.