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I-smel
Hey look man, my name's "I-smel". What I lack in smarts, I at least pay back in honesty. Boink!

Tom Brien @I-smel

Age 32, Male

England, MAN-CHESTer

Joined on 3/2/06

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I-smel's News

Posted by I-smel - June 17th, 2013


The multiplayer competetive runner as developed by DoubleDutch and published by tinyBuild!!!!!

Hitting Steam Early Access soon, but please play the beta before then so we can make sure nothing's broken.
I'm doing art and animation. It's still in production so GET OFF MY BACK!!!!!
...I'm probably not supposed to put trailers on Newgrounds, so y'know.

Had that one in the chamber for a while. Since last post I've MOVED TO THE NETHERLANDS. It was a whole big crazy thing, this is my first time moving anywhere, and I had to leave all my family and friends behind at the airport. I could talk about that forever, it's a big huge deal, but the most relevant thing is that the official tinyBuild offices will be UP SOON in Hilversum. We're right near and around developers of such games as Awesomenauts, Ridiculous Fishing, Kill Zone 3, and of course the beloved FINGLE.

I seriously have moved to the Netherlands, I don't know any fucking Dutch.

SpeedRunners is an awesome game to play in-person. The screen keeps up with whoever's in the lead, and you have to knockout everyone else by getting them off the screen, like in Smash Brothers. I cam in and started designing characters for it- so far there's 4 in-game, and a tonne of others on my hard-drive. I want a billion fucking stoopid-ass characters to find and collect (and trade? boy I sure hope so)
Can you tell who was in that trailer?? Of course it's fucking world-famous Joshua Tomar.
We actually had Druox from No Time To Explain on standby, so a couple of his lines made it in there too this morning.
This is my first time not 100% taking over control of our trailers. Please complain about it a lot so I get it back next time.

WHAT ELSE WHAT ELSE WHAT ELSE
Possible new multiplayer in-browser Unity game coming from us next week. My 100% most popular games are always the joke ones I make in a weekend, and this one's pretty fucking hilarious. I won't spoil it though.

Ok so here's a space for me to rant a thing; The ex-Call of Duty guys announced their next game last week, and the big ending of their gameplay video is ejector-seating out of a mech, ragdolling up into the sky, and landing on the back of another mech.
I am so fucking pissed off and bummed out by that, because our awesome idea was to make a game all about that. That's some old footage, but you can totally hang on the back and shoot around n stuff now, like in their game. It's gonna look like we're a copy or something uugggghhhh!!!!! I was so happy with this being a fun new idea!!

Anyway who knows what we'll do after SpeedRunners (releasing this year).
I'm thinking of ripping all the characters and story and level arc out of PUNCHgunner and making it more of a Geometry Wars survival beat-em-up. I could release that within a few months!
Which-- by the way 17-Bit's next game GALAK-Z looks pretty similar to that. BBUUUUUHHHHHHH!!!!!!! EVERYONE STOP MAKING GAMES TIL I'VE FINISHED ALL MINE.

Anyway SpeedRunners: play it soon!

Everyone's riding bikes, but when you go to buy a bike it's like 500 euros.


Posted by I-smel - May 20th, 2013


Here again to talk about Newgrounds' best feature: Favourites.
I favourite some seriously cool people, and the feed at the top of my page is great, I get so much cool art and music all the damn time. Here's a sample of some o the people I follow on Newgrounds:
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midimachine - Makes really cool electronic and chiptune music. Check out his new ambient concept album Perpetual Motion, or more crazy upbeat stuff like Victory Road and Four Chord Tropes For Dopes
Pegosho's art is goddamn perfect, and he has a style that's really distinct to himself. If I dedicated myself to just art, I'd go straight for this.
Ephyse also has a really unique rendering style, and ontop of that is capable of some really charming and interesting character concepts.
Lenko! Where'd he go? Lenkobiscuit is one of the people I follow because they had such an awesome creative identity a couple years ago and slowly faded out. I wanna know that he still exists as soon as he submits something new, cos check out his back-catalogue of art on NG, it's like nobody else. I also wish NeoLight would come back.
SineRider, on the other hand, is at the top of his game. He produces so much fucking music, it's a miracle that it's all that goddamn good. SineRider is mostly slow, ambient stuff like this acoustic bossa jazz or bassy country guitar and whatever music words I'm supposed to use on this.
M1asis a fucking nut
If this art from MikeLuckas does anything for you, he's got a tonne of it here on NG, and draws for comics on his website MikeLuckas.com
I can't describe ElleBirdy23's music as anything less than fucking stone-cold amazing.
The idea that I have 8 times as many followers as AntiSkill on this site is straight fucking messed-up, I am serious.
I'm talking right now with Gerkinmann over on his page about the Newgrounds portal system, and Tom Fulp joins in after a few comments. Remember that the conversaiton goes from the bottom-up.
and that's newgrounds! There's more, but I have to cut off somewhere. Following these guys puts a stream of sweet new art and music on your front page.
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Here's what I'm doing right now
I've brought back Secrets of Gaming
. I had this dreamy idea a long time ago that I'd expand it into fake news in time for E3. So I woke up the other day and saw one or two tweets from people saying "I miss this thing" and I made a weak attempt to get back into it. I have to ask though: are the news ones not fucking funny?
It's hard to tell right now cos there's only 2 of em, but I get a creeping feeling that they're fucking lame. Please tell me if they are, cos I feel like the regualr secrets are really good. Oh also if you have any ideas or suggestions, seriously post em cos I was not prepared to bring this back for very long.

Here's a Unity game I made in a little over a weekend. Arrow keys to move- it's Frogger
I wanna submit it to Newgrounds but it needs a couple more things to make it look nice and feel like a finished game, and a couple more laffs. I got a completely out-of-the-blue e-mail a couple weeks ago from Erik fucking Wolpaw who wrote Portal, Pyschonauts, Team Fortress, the other only legit-good comedy games in the world. He said a tonne of stuff about how seriously amazed he was with the intro to No Time, and how it's such a great idea. So since then I've got a serious want to look into comedy stuff again, and I'm back to being super fucking interested in it.

On weekdays I have infinity work to do on this unanounced game, I'll be moving to AMSTERDAM soon to start up the tinyBuild offices.


Posted by I-smel - April 4th, 2013


Open this link in a new tab, watch The Reward. I just spotted it on the front page, but I watched this animated short a couple months ago and it's one of my favourites ever. Newgrounds is fucking ripe for stuff like this, you'll love it. I'm not affiliated with this, I just like it.
...oh I guess if you like more animated shorts you can click here. Ideally you'd click on Newgrounds.com, in a perfect world.

SO I WENT TO GDC LAST WEEK, I went to Flash Game Summit and GDC. It'd be crazy fucking ridiculous to fit my whole adventure in one post, cos it was a big fat 10 days, but I'll try n bullet-point it.

San Francisco is full of fucking homeless people. For a long-post conversation about my stuff in Callifornia, read this thread with me in it!

Anyway I met the Abobo guys, I met Kingdom Rush, I met Burrito Bison, drank some beers with TheVillageBlacksmith, met the guys at GiantBomb, met the developer of SpaceChem outside the Valve party, sauntered out of that thing at like 1am into a limo we couldn't afford, and some guy hopped over said "I'll cover the rest of that limo!"
The fucking developer of Surgeon Simulator, is who that was. Whole thing was nuts. It was a mad-libs of a week, with random game words thrown in.

A bunch of people knew No Time To Explain, I apologized profusely, but EVERYONE fucking knew Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar. It got to the point where I would say "Have you ever heard of Robot Dinosaurs?" and people would open up n shout "OH THAT WAS YOU??" I like it a lot more when people recognize the games I also like.

JuicyBeast already knew about the jet game I was working on? They read my newgrounds blog, it turns out.
That game's on pause now. I'm working with another developer on a different game. We've not mentioned it yet, but it's a multiplayer game and it's fun. It just needs a layer of character and personality that I'm gonna be adding with art n animations, then we'll help give it the kind of attention and sales that our game got, and hopefully have made a friend.
I'm currently really excited about this as a game, and how fun the game is, but MAYBE TELL ME THE DEADLINE BEFORE I DESIGN ALL THIS STUFF AND FUCKING SIGN UP FOR IT?
Lessons learned.

What else what else what else... I dunno. Let's just call that it.
Right before I left for GDC, I sold Mighty Tower to 2PG, a site that exclusively hosts games you can play with 2 people on one keyboard. Ideally I would've converted Robot Dinosaurs aswel, but going back to old games from 2009 is fucking impossible. I animated him an intro anyway. Also I said I'd plug this, but forgot last week cos I just spammed out a big fat post in my hotel room. About how bad flash game sites are! arg, sorry!!!

Welp: better get to crunching on this new project. Sorry in advance there's not 30 playable characters. Who all have individual taunt animations and fighting-game portraits. And their heads won't turn to look at each other in-game, and there probably won't be that speeding train le-- look we'll probably update it all post-release right?
We're not gonna end up DECREASING the quality of this product by adding a layer of really rushed and unfinished features, right?
It'll probably be fine.
Right?

THE BEST ANIMATED SHORT JUST HIT NEWGROUNDS (and I'm back from GDC)


Posted by I-smel - March 23rd, 2013


Hey I'm in San Francisco this week. I'm at GDC! I'm also at the FlashGameSummit. I'm here to learn how to make video games. Before I attend a bunch of lectures on designing a storefront for cosmetic and non-essential in-app-purchases, I've bin wanting to lay out why Newgrounds is still my favourite site for a while. So here it is!

If you're in deep on stuff like review scores, and who gets scouted in the art portal, and who has the most fans: you probably hate this site. I read news posts, and there's a load of people who paint Newgrounds as the Big Bad because Sonic Goes To The Store gets on the front page. It's fine to hate that, because that does fucking suck. Mods are ego-wanking creeps, and your thing will get ten times as many hits if it has boobs in the thumbnail; we all use the Internet,you guys know what's up.
That's kind of the same everywhere, and it's more of a problem with the democratic voting system than it is with this site. Nudes and furry art is always more popular on deviantart and the biggest thing on YouTube is gangnam style and Let's Plays- So let's zoom out from that and look at what Newgrounds is doing that nobody else is.

Web games are stone cold fucking business. Stuff like Alien Hominid or Madness Interactive aren't relevant to the guys on FGL every day. Endless upgrade games designed around a shop screen, 30,000 gold coins in one hand, 50 Gems in the other, this is how you run a business like Newgrounds.
You shop around for a huge investment, hire people to run marketing and development, start doing video ads, optimise the home page to get more ads on eyeballs, get people in and to a new page as quickly as possible, sell NG COINS to use in games, put online poker and free MMOs on the front page... Newgrounds is a fucking laughing stock for NOT catching up on this stuff.
To people like Ebaumsworld, who sold for 17million, or Mochi, or Kong who sold to Gamstop for ten times more; it's crazy that the NG guys are holding onto this giant site that has nowhere near the money it could. Newgrounds fucking INVENTED the flash portal, newgrounds had user-generated content like 5 or 6 years before YouTube, but they've declined offers in the tens of millions over and over again!
WHY don't these guys get onboard?

It's cos they don't want video ads in every game. If newgrounds expanded to be a contender in this kind of market, they'd have to make that investment money back. D'you think hosting Let's Plays in the movies section would earn some money?
D'you think not having to host all that audio in the music section nobody uses would help? They could make the visual aesthetic of the site a LITTLE more welcoming, right? Websites aren't dark grey any more, guys, and developers are only like 0.001% of the traffic, so I don't see why they have to be on the front page... We could be using that space to let people connect with Facebook, really.

Anyway the point is that Newgrounds could be so much insanely bigger-- they have less staff than JUST Deviantart's community team right now- but they WANT to be the only people who let developers post news updates on the front page. They wanna be the only one of these sites to host games, movies, music and art, have a place for animators to meet voice actors and coders to meet artists; they wanna give Swivel out for free, they wanna have no unskippable ads, and wanna have THE BEST, most UNCOMPROMISED section of the Internet they can.
It's truly one in a million how many sites like this don't sell off and quit the next day to go make another start-up in Android games or social apps. Tom Fulp reading blogs like mine, and checking out some fuckin nobody's first flash movie every day is something that just doesn't happen. These guys GOT THERE FIRST to this giant disgusting gold rush, and Cathode Raybots is nothing more sinister than just a sweet game.

So that's in a nutshell my response to any of these weird trolls who still see Newgrounds as like a corrupt ruinner of everything. To me it feels like they're the only guys left. If you still feel like Newgrounds not having the audience of all these other sites is some hilarious pwnage thing, then hey man: Clash of Clans is free to download on iOS, it was a huge success, you should check it out.
Candy Crush Saga is a massive deal for King.com right now, Earn2Die has done great for notDoppler, I can recommend you a whole bunch of places to go for the next big thing.

I missed the Create A Newgrounds Ad Contest. I had a video compilation of stuff people post on their user blogs, like Jazza's tutorials or Evil-Dog's office tour, or ricepirate's monthly video update but it just felt so corny I didn't wanna work on it. I'd post what I had, but I'm in a hotel in San Fran waiting for some meeting to end, so all I can do is type words.
There are SO MANY homeless people here and it's very unsettling.


Posted by I-smel - February 18th, 2013


Last update, I thinik I posted a video of JetGetters, right? Well if I didn't then here it is:

That's a Week 1 prototype, and right now I'm on Week 3. This game idea is more exciting the more I think into it. Stealing enemy's jets, piggybacking on team-mate's jets, hijacking missiles mid-flight and steering them around...
I have 4 classes set up right now- I just described one of them for a whole paragraph but deleted it cos it sounded like bizarre rambling; BUT TRUST ME IT'S THE COOLEST!!

There's loads of potential for it to be a real Team Fortress, except I definately won't be falling back on "This is the Heavy equivalent, this is the Medic, you can unlock hats etc." clone stuff. For a tangent on something I learned about Team Fortress this week, scroll down to the comments. I'd give you a link right now, but it's not much fun for everyone to play one at a time, so what'd be the point in that? I'll organise a beta or something soon enough. Network code is really jerky and imprecise right now- Me n Alex are working on some collaboration and teamwork stuff that's going really well, but I can't confirm anything yet. If things line up, I could end up leaving England and going to live in The Netherlands to work on and release more games- so that's a BIG DEAL!

Mindchamber interviewed me, FUCKING SUCK IT @THEINTERVIEWER, WHAT NOW!!!!!!!?
MindChamber is really good at interviews. I did this one a while ago with Penny Arcade Report, and they sent me 7 bullet-point questions in an e-mail. I filled em in with a load of stuff, and they only printed a couple sentences of me describing No Time, and then kind of wrote a conversation around it. This one I just linked IS basically an improvised conversation, with all the slow boring parts cut out. That's WAY BETTER!!!!! Sorry if any of my answers come off as super hipster indie whimsical.

In November 2011 I went to MineCon, which is the Minecraft convention, and had a booth for some game I can't remember. It was in Las Vegas and there were a few thousand people attending, so that was a big crazy thing. In March this year, I think I'm attending the Flash Gaming Summit, and GDC. Fuck it this post is too long- That's it!

Play my Raybots!


Posted by I-smel - January 26th, 2013


It's not that new, I still make games by myself in my parent's house.
Jus chattin about games I done.

Game's on Steam. THE Steam, that people know about. Before you ask: sales are good, but nothing mind-blowing. I'm not about to leave Newgrounds and ONLY UPDATE MY FACEBOOK AND TWITTER FEED LIKE A DICK any time soon.

Lookin at my last news post, it's just me name-dropping ideas I have for games I wanna make. With that in mind, oh my god, I can't believe I'm about to do this, but I have another idea for a game I wanna make and am prototyping. Yeah I suck dick.
Well the good thing is now that No Time's finally fuckin behind me I can actually do this stuff. Provided sales stay active. Enough.
Alright now everyone forget about that immeadiately forever, right after watching this Russian Lets Play.
side-note: I made more sales with this post of me BEING A HUMAN than Alex did being a marketing adbot. More flies with honey, I'm just sayin.

I'm playing Bayonetta right now. It seems good but it's not really grabbing me. Speakin of which, if you like game design and you like beat-em-ups, keep up with this guy's blog, he's really deep into this stuff.

This is a short one.

IT'S A BRAND NEW DAY FOR I-SMEL!


Posted by I-smel - December 20th, 2012


Here's some things:

I missed the Steam sale. I was really pissed off, cos I had to put all this hard work into it and then the game raped itself in half right at the end and set me back like 2 weeks. I don't even like this game, I'm a hair's breadth away from just not selling it- but that'd be a wholly insensible and irrational reaction. Can't wait til I can get back to making good games that I like.

WATCH TRAILERS. My new thing is sick HD watch trailers. Why spend hours and hours watching Dark Knight and Avengers when you could just watch a couple watch trailers back-to-back? These things are amazing and fucking crazy.

BULLY 2 I made a thread on GiantBomb asking what the schoolGIRL version of Bully would be like, but it just turned out to be like 5 pages of people calling me out for being sexist.
After a couple pages I started just brainstorming it myself, and once I started thinking about it like Walking Dead and Persona 4, I actually started thinking this would be a cool game. Cos much like in the Walking Dead, you always have to sell out SOMEONE in high school, and there's loads of "this is a bad choice but I have to do it" decisions. Like smoking, sneakin out, havin sex, what you spend money on, whther you play nice with both your parents, or one of them, or none of em. And like you CANNOT be friends with everyone.
So yea if I could think of a good UI that'd make that game easy to make, I kind of wanna make a school year of decision-making as a teenage girl.
Maybe I've just gone COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE though.

btw did I never post MegaTennis here?

If this is just a game idea dump, I really wanna make a game called OutRail aswel.

That's it. It's bin a really fucking annoying passed couple of weeks, I hope I can get back to making new games asap.

EDIT- Oh, also this guy took my SecretsOfGaming idea and made it a video and got a billion hits >:(
no- dude- you're not supposed to steal their logo and make it look exactly the same! That way you're just tricking people and pissing them off, this is how you get so many dislikes... URGH this is all wrong!!! The jokes aren't even good, now when I eventually do this I'll look like a ripoff!
Then there was a story about local Kickstarter on the news like 2 years after my one, where was my news interview! Guys it's been an annoying week, I don't know if I've mentioned.


Posted by I-smel - November 30th, 2012


IT'S TRUE! Soon you'll be able to buy my dumb shit right next to Dragon's Lair and Euro Truck Simulator 2. If that doesn't spell out "legit" then I don't know what does.
I'm still conflicted about luggin around this old game I made 2 years ago and selling it- but right now I'm just too excited to be on Steam. I genuinely thought up until just now that EVEN THOUGH we were the 5th highest voted game on there, we'd be on some do-not-greenlight blacklist that I don't know about. Then Alex phoned my phone from Holland and now we're on Steam.
Well in like a week we will be on Steam, I have to add the APIs and stuff. I've bin re-making art and animation assets all week to get a head start.

Anyway I haven't posted in 3 months. YA MISSED OUT, GUYS! I made this whole fake twitter, I got a thousand followers overnight, it was crazy. Then I stopped getting followers so fast and lost interest. I guess I stopped, woops. It was funny though.

I've had to really put PunchGunner (maybe I should call it "Bear Arms"?) to one side cos I've had no fucking money. Y'know what- I don't think this blog gets many hits, so you guys can have the design doc. I mean I post all the concept art on here right? That's the other thing, check out my art page.
So anyway I've bin scrapin up all this kinda work for people. Sometimes when there's no work I join in on things that aren't animation, and nope! That wasn't recieved well. Stick to games in future I guess.

There's a hundred other things to talk about, but hey you guys don't have all fuckin day. I cashed in a shoebox full o change I've had since I was like 12. There's the story.

Oh also shout out to the Newgrounds Audio Portal which is fucking crazy.
Haru Song
Fi's Requiem
Hania and ElleBirdy23 are especially kicking fuck out of everyone, you should check out all their submissions. I swear I'd love to make a video of just things to see on Newgrounds every month, but I can't talk to an empty wall without feeling like a dickhead, y'know?


Posted by I-smel - August 27th, 2012


I didn't realise how much stuff I've done this month til I wrote it down. Hey check out my fuckin minagerie of game-design stuff I posted last month.
Before I go off though, is anyone else using the Newgrounds favourites feature? I discovered it like a couple months ago, and it's SUCH the best thing on the site: Click the heart at the top-right of someone's page, and then every game, movie, artwork, news post or anything they add to Newgrounds will show up in a box on your front page. So people I PERIPHERALLY KNOW ABOUT, like Qikalain's art, or Aigis' comics, are like #1 priority now. For someone like me who's interested in the PEOPLE as well as the content, I check this every day now. I didn't even know it was a feature. Did you notice Terkoiz1 made a news post last week? fuckin FUCK NO YOU DIDN'T!

BACK TO ME, Newgrounds stuff first:
I watched a thing with Egoraptor yesterday, and he's mentioned this more than once now, "I wish someone would make a Lemon 'n Bill animation tool... because it's so easy, but it just takes time."
LEMON 'N BILL AUTOMATIC ANIMATOR!
You just roll over each character, and of course it's dynamic, so you can move the mouse up n down, or left and right, and it'll adjust their... feelings. It's actually kind of difficult to make this a real, useful tool for anyone, so at a certain point I stopped. But y'know-... I'D LIKE TO SAY IT'S PRETTY ACCURATE. Right? I tried to make it accurate to the cartoon, which probably sounds dumb.
I sent him a message on Youtube, but aaaaa the guy probably gets like a trillion messages from everywhere, so I don't know how to effectively send it.

THE HISTORY OF NEWGROUNDS!
This is a script of a 100% true mini-doc that covers the history of Newgrounds, with zero errors, only fact.
I kinda just had this idea in a flash, and barfed it out. Is it funny? Do you get it? It's kinda REALLY inside-joke heavy for people who know about Newgrounds.

I SUBMITTED A BUNCH OF ART
So- a while ago, I started using Photoshop. This is something I've never done before, cos I don't consider myself an artist, and Photoshop is weird and difficult. But I LOVED what came out so much that I've kept using it since.
SO I MADE THIS!
I guess it's a poster or something for this game I've bin making, I was SO PROUD OF THIS!
I'm takin a break from this game for a couple weeks while I do something else. TANGENT, THOUGH: I got some techincal advice from a dude on a forum. Then like the next day I was lookin at some Diable 3 thing someone mentioned and HEY I'VE SEEN THAT AVATAR BEFORE!!! A fucking lead artist at Blizzard is who that dude was! NUTS, RIGHT?? The internet's a small place!

Anyway, from this art I got some art advice from SWiTCH.newgrounds.com, who pointed out some stuff I was doing wrong. So I started a new thing that'd build on that, and it's called...
THE REVENGE OF EL DOROBO!
You can read up on what that's all about on the page.

I'm still drawing this mascot for this site, he's still fun as hell to draw. Did you SPOT HIM ON THE PORTAL THIS WEEK? I did some art for that game. The iPhone version's better than the web game version. It's got a tonne of 5-star reviews on the app store, which I am TO BELIEVE are MOSTLY NOT made by the employees? I'm kind of wondering how far I should go with this joke?
I did have a go at Alex for promoting it through the tinyBuild accounts as "our next game". I'll talk all day about games I worked on, but that kind of annoyed me. As someone who's a fan of the people who make the content more than the actual content, it'd really piss me off if I wanted to look for an Egoraptor game, and I landed on Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Or if the next game by Team Meat was Braid... So- I won't go on about it, but that was a thing that really bugged me this week.

STEAM GREENLIGHT LAUNCHES NEXT WEEK!!
I'm preparing stuff for our page on there now. IS THIS NO TIME TO EXPLAIN's LAST CHANCE TO GET ON STEAM??? ...Yes it definately is! I'm not super confident about it. Who knows what splendorous games we'll be competing with? College projects? Cash grabs? Other XL-sized flash games? How many games will be on Steam Greenlight on day one? 50? 300? You KNOW only one game will be the example that all game sites use when they say "Steam Greenlight launches today, here's a screenshot of what a game page looks like".

THAT'S NEWS POST 99! WILL 100 BE MY FIRST GAME ON STEAM? We'll see what happens with that.
My Youtube channel is still me catching the internet with it's pants down.

EDIT OH OH OH!!!!I went on a binge and watched a tonne of stick cartoons yesterday. I fuckin love stick movies, they're some of the best fucking animators on NG. They definately reminded me that my effects and everything I do suck, I should step my game up. Take a couple minutes to check out:
Breaking Rust
GraFight V
License To Combo
Ghostfight Bos
and just the whole fuckin Stick Movie Collection
These things are TOTALLY stuck in the past, and that's JUST GREAT! It's totally diamond-filtered animation, these guys kick the shit out of all of us.

I-smel's creative blog, episode August


Posted by I-smel - July 30th, 2012


I got a fat list of game designer videos here, but first I want your feedback on a couple things:

^ Here's my current sketch of the intro to this game. The first level is that these two are controlling the suit remotely for a test-run to prove that it's "finished", but then get ambushed and have to fight a tonne o robots all of a sudden. When they bring the suit back to the lab, they HOPE nobody notices that it's not finished at all and they just put a bear in it.
And the joke is that nobody ever notices, for the whole length of the game.
It's kinda hard going from No Time To Explain, which had an intro of 10 seconds, to this. I really wanna take parts out and cut it down, but I also wanna pack more jokes into everything. If I make it too short, will it make sense what's happening? Does it make sense now? I can't get ANY FUCKING COMMENTS on this! I've posted it like 5 different places.
The development of the actual game is going fine. It plays really well and is fun, I'm just having trouble bringing the visuals up to a good, solid, impressive level.
Infact- Speaking of that game, here's a thing I wrote last week about designing it . It's kind of about "what is balance, in games that aren't street fighter?"

So anyway- Did you know that NTTE is on sale now for $3? It fucking is! The joke about being the only sale online was funnier when the Steam Sale was on.
Also I'm still animating these fuckin things so don't forget to comment about how good they are, otherwise I won't know.

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NERDY VIDEOGAME BULLSHIT TREASURE TROVE!
Me and another person on the world wide web have been compiling a list of cool shit to do with how videogames get made. Here are some.

RATCHET AND CLANK 2 PLAYTHROUGH WITH DEVELOPER COMMENTARY
That's right, the people who designed the Suck Cannon (best weapon ever) talk you through how one of the best games on the PS2 got made!

PORTAL 2 POST-MORTEM
It's a fucking post-mortem with the people who wrote Portal and Portal 2, oh my god.

THE SECRET ORIGINS OF EPIC MICKEY
Did you know that Epic Mickey wasn't invented by Warren Spector? It was a concept first established by a 21-yr-old intern at Disney Interactive Studios way way back in about 2003 when a board of higher-ups gave him the brief of "Come up with a Mickey game that people like you would play". Almost a decade ago!

HOW FRUIT NINJA HAPPENED
Shitload of testing and iteration, long-story short.

EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH Bluebaby.newgrounds.com/
Big hour-long talk with your friend and mine, Blubaby.newgrounds.com. There's a very similar one right next to it with Tommunism.newgrounds.com.

EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH GABE NEWELL
This is the one where he directly addresses the big Valve sequel we've all been waiting for, to finally cap off that story after all these years, the one that started it all: Ricochet 2.
Also the Welcome To Valve handbook is just about as inside baseball as it gets. Probably only really amazing if you're completely familiar with how game studios are USUALLY run.

IRRATIONAL BEHAVOIR / IRRATIONAL INTERVIEWS
Podcasts from within Irrational Games about how everything is a giant fucking struggle even though from the outside they look like a huge smart company.
Also Ken Levine interviews other developers and people you've heard of.

HOW BIOSHOCK INFINITE GOT STARTED

CLIFF BLESZINSKI TALKS ABOUT BEING HIMSELF

WHY GAMIFICATION IS SO GREAT
In the futute we'll all unlock achievement points for drinking Pepsi Next!

WHY "GAMIFICATION" IS ACTUALLY THE WORST FUCKING THING AROUND
In the futute, we will all unlock achievement points for drinking Pepsi Next.

SEQUELITIS
I can't wait for the episode about Ocarina of Time.
And then I can't wait for the episode after that about how RAIDEN WAS A GREAT IDEA FUCK YOU ALL!!

CRITICAL PATH
Here's a shitload of designers you've heard of saying stuff at a screen, so have fun getting lost in that for a while. Penny Arcade's stupid sensationalist kotaku thing seems to have a problem with there being no black people or something, but just ignore what they're talking about.

DAVID JAFFE'S PAX KEYNOTE
Incase you didn't know, David Jaffe is the realest fucking guy around bar none.

EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH DAVID JAFFE

EXTENDED INTERVIEW WITH JONATHON BLOW
Remember when I said David Jaffe was the realest guy around? Well it turns out that Jonathon Blow is actually the most realest fucking motherfucker on the planet. I've bin getting more and more stalker-ey around Blow this week cos HE'S GOD DAMNED RIGHT. WE ARE IN A BUBBLE, AND MY GAMES STINK.

JONATHON BLOW GOES INTO MORE DETAIL ON HOW EVIL FARMVILLE IS
As I followed Jonathon Blow on Twitter I found that he thinks practically everything to do with games is completely fucked inside out. From how they're designed to how they're made to how they're sold. And I can't shake that he's always fucking right.

THAT'S BASICALLY MOST OF IT
Alright I can sit here all day linking stuff, but you've got enough to last ya like a fortnight at least right there.

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LET'S END STRONG: PART OF ME WANTS TO MAKE AN ART GAME.
Now-- I know-... I am not an art game person. I think TigSource is bloody stupid, half the time. But I've had this idea bouncing around for a long time, and as I spent one more night lying awake, facing that I'm living my own worst nightmare, it triggered this idea again.
The idea is Legend of Halfbeard. It's basically about the terrifying darkness of being completely alone, in every sense, and not knowing who to blame, what to do about it, or how to fix it. It's about the darkest, saddest knots a life can tie itself in, whether you fear you might be an afront to God, whether you've killed a person, or feel yourself slowly becoming more and more attracted to girls aged 5-8; or maybe you just think you have autism and are too afraid to find out, but also too scared to not know. Maybe you're just fat, maybe you wear glasses, or you can't talk right- as long as you have demons inside you that you don't wanna talk about, and feel like you're a different type than any other person you've met. The purpose of this game is just to reach out and say that I'm here too. To see Halfbeard going through what you're going through, and to read comments from other players, would hopefully go towards comforting you in whatever your predicament is.
But the hilarious reason I'm so hesitant to dive into it is-- would I HAVE FUN making that? I might not have fun... Would it be worth it?

Oh also I added a boomerang to this bear game.
PLEASE COMMENT ON THE INTRO! Or Halfbeard. It'd play like Cave Story, but would more lean on meeting vibrant characters.