Garbalicious won Best Concept award!

The Norwegian Game Awards 2010 is over. A lot of interesting games were showed at the games expo, and the many winners of their category was rather impressive. We won the “Best Concept Award”, which (besides the cash) gives us the inspiration and morale needed to get going and start working for real on the project. The event was extraordinary, with lots and lots of nice people, awesome games, and of course the stormtroopers! We would love to return to the event next year, hopefully battling for the Game of the Year award!

” It was a close race against Noah’s Archive, but in the end Garbalicious won thanks to its focus on basic playability and peculiar mood-setting graphics. The chosen visual style allows the action to move in numerous different directions while still delivering a very consistent experience, and the entire jury were instantly hooked by the promise of enormous bosses as part of the 2D landscape itself. Garbalicious has a strong potential to become one of those games you keep playing just to see how the scenery changes. Our main recommendation for further development is to ensure that the “flip-screen” mechanics become an integral part of the game play rather than just a gimmick. And that we get bosses, lots and lots of huge bosses!”

To read more about the other winners, check out this link.

Garbalicious nominated in Norwegian Game Awards 2010

A few weeks ago, we decided to sign up for Norwegian Game Awards 2010, and worked towards that deadline, filled with inspiration and willpower. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the chance to finish additional content for this event, but apparently someone enjoyed our creations. Some days ago we got the good news, that we were nominated for “Game of the Year” and “Best Concept”.

We’re thrilled about it, and looking forward to go to Trondheim at the Award Ceremony, August 27th. Best of luck to all the contestants, and see you there! More updates regarding NAG10 coming over the weeks ahead.

Development back on track

We’re happy to announce that we’ve now started the development yet again, with the aim of having several new levels fully complete by the end of the summer. This time we’ll have a go with a slightly different approach on the level building and testing, which hopefully will give us some feature packed levels and content in far less time than earlier.

The plan is to have a fully packed demo ready by the end of August, with several levels, updated and polished visuals, epic boss-fights, “The Hideout” feature, and much more.

Make sure to check back for updates!

Imagine Cup and the future

The results is out, and out of the 150 teams battling for a place in the finals, the 6 teams have been chosen. Unfortunately, we were not one of them, but congratulations to the teams going to Poland this summer! Here’s a short list of the finalists:

Fomis Team
EMuS
Gears Studio
JubJub
By Implication, and more, and more
PapaPuré

Our participation in Imagine Cup this year, a first for us all, has been incredibly rewarding. We’ve done countless of errors and mistakes, which we only will benefit from in the future. The competition spans almost a year, but in reality it feels like we’ve built a game from scratch in a few weekends in total! Project management and planning is sure to take place on a completely different level in the future. Overall, every aspect of the competition has been truly valuable.

Despite not advancing to the finals, we will keep developing Garbalicious. After receiving the huge amount of positive feedback we cant thing of anything else! Aside from all the nice words we’ve gotten from other people and contestants, we’ve received some really inspirational comments from a Producer at DICE and a veteran games journalist among others. We’ll keep updating this blog over the summer, with the aim of having a feature-packed demo, with at least 2-3 levels by August. Now we just have to finish off our exams for the semester, then its back to Garbalicious!

See you around!
- Team Flop

Updated build, and demo!

Now that we’ve submitted the last build for Imagine Cup 2010, we want to share the brief demo with anyone who wants to test it. Its only one level at the moment, the introduction level, but the time attack is there as well as the normal mode, which serves as a little taste of whats coming in the upcoming levels!
Download in .zip format (Requires XNA Game Studio installed)

Beware of minor bugs and issues, and keep in mind that this is barely an alpha version of the level, purely to illustrate the concept. There’s still balancing and tweaks to be done. Any feedback is more than welcome!

And if you’re not interested in downloading and testing it, check out the updated video preview below.

Deadline closing in..

With less than 2 weeks left until the next imagine cup submission, we’re back at work on our precious little game project. We have a lot of work to do the following weeks, and hoping for a good and well polished product until then. Best of luck to all the other participants as well!

We’ll be back soon with new updates, previews and footage. Also, we would like to state that whatever happens, we’ll still be working on the game in the future! Maybe even a public, finalized little demo by the end of the summer? :)

Stay tuned!

Round 2 here we come!

So after some delays, we finally got the results from round 1, and among the 700 teams participating, we ended up within the top 150, thus proceeding to round 2!

We’ll work hard the following weeks, with the goal of proceeding to the finals, so keep checking back for updates. Also expect a new trailer very soon!

Official word on the round 1 delay

So after some time, the public got some official response on the delays in the cup. Check it out

Game Design Competitors
The participation in this year’s Game Design competition has been record breaking! The Round 1 entries have been incredible and due to the high number received we need more time to thoroughly review and judge each one.

We know you are anxious to find out who advanced to Round 2 and we will post the results on the Game Design Leaderboard on April 10, 2010 at 12:00 A.M. GMT.

Round 2 will now begin on April 11, 2010 at 12:01 A.M.GMT.

Thank you for your patience!
The Imagine Cup 2010 Team

Now lets just wait a bit longer..!

Round 1 confusion

March 29th, we were all suppose to get the results of round 1, but some weird stuff happened over at the Imagine Cup results pages, causing a lot of confusion.

They released a list over the 696 teams participating this year, but never showed who actually went on to round 2. Apparently, every team in the competition also got the message “We’re sorry, but your Round 1 entry did not qualify you to advance to Round 2 – Worldwide Finals Qualifying. See you next year!” A couple of days later, there is still no official word from the IC staff, other than that the results will yet again be published 4th of april.

We’ll wait and see what happens! Set your mind to be a winner ;)

Round 1 is over!

Now that round 1 is over and we’ve submitted our demo, its all about waiting for the results! We worked hard the last weeks before the deadline, and it feels like we put the game together in 2 weeks, even though we worked on it since last year.

Many things worked as it was planned to do, and we’re happy with the result. Some things didnt make it to the demo though, like the vital things as the bottles and garbage our lovely main character is suppose to gather and recycle, but hopefully we get another shot at continuing the development of the game for Imagine Cup 2010 in round 2! Great work by the team, and i thank them for that.

See you all in round 2!