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Jottobots Releasing Soon!

Jottobots Releasing Soon!
Hey internet. I've had this project sitting around since about 2009 called Jottobots. It was originally a game created for the ARTxGAME collective, which pairs artists and game designers up to create something awesome. I collaborated with J. Otto Seibold (hence the name Jottobots) and it was a lot of fun! He created the characters and a lot of the artwork in the game, and I did all the programming and designing. I did some additional artwork as well, like the explosions and what not.



Jottobots turned out to be a miniature exploration game with arcade style scoring. The game is played under a time limit (which starts at 5 minutes but can be increased through time bonuses) and the goal is finding the exit but also grabbing a lot of points along the way. There are a couple of power ups and a decent sized map to fully explore, and the only way to get those maximum high scores to hunt down every secret the game has to offer.
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jottobots yay! artxgame
Posted November 7th 2012 7:38 PM (Games)
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Pax 2012: Day 4

Pax 2012: Day 4
Oops! I totally meant to post this way earlier, but I got side tracked by some other things and totally lost track of time. Anyway, it's a little late, but here's the last post about PAX2012!

I scheduled my flight out of Seattle for 8:20pm since I didn’t want to feel rushed to get to the airport in the morning or afternoon. At least, I thought I wouldn’t feel rushed to get to the airport.

We had closed the windows the night before since the sounds of dentist drill birds, hell hounds, and yelling people usually has been waking us up at 6:30 in the morning. This tactic seemed to work, except for the fact that the room we were sleeping in was now pretty warm and that can sometimes cause additional sleep to happen… or standing around for 10 hours a day talking to people and demoing games can also do that.

I woke up at noon and I think I could barely hear the hell hounds barking outside of the closed windows. I was amazed at how tired I still felt for it being noon o’clock, and I looked around the room and nobody else was up yet. I ended up laying back down and falling back asleep for what I thought was maybe only a half hour or so. I ended up waking back up at 3:30pm, and nobody else in the apartment was awake still.
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pax10 pax snapshot offspring fling
Posted October 15th 2012 3:15 PM (Events)
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Pax 2012: Day 3

Pax 2012: Day 3
The dawn of the final day has arrived. I think I’ve forgotten to mention the unique sounds that emerge from the city surrounding the apartment I’ve been staying in. When I first arrived, Dave and Matt warned me about the construction that was going on right across the street. The construction supposedly began right as the clock struck 7am, but starting on the morning of my visit the construction stopped. It was Labor Day weekend, so that made sense.

However, it turns out that there are some other things that produce noise that don’t take breaks for Labor Day. The first thing I noticed was actually on the morning of the first day of PAX. At about 6:30 in the morning, I was still half asleep and I was hearing the strangest noise and I couldn’t make sense of it. It was super loud, and it just sounded like a chorus of horrific tones echoing through the alley. Eventually I fell back asleep for an hour or so. When I woke up again, the noise was still happening.

I was a little bit more conscious than before, so I could more easily decipher the sound. It sounded like fifty hounds of hell shouting out into the night, but it was actually just two dogs below the apartment that were barking and yelling into the alley. The sound bounced off the nearby walls so many times that it sounded like fifty different dogs yelling at different tones. When I was half asleep, I thought it was someone's alarm clock going off.

On top of the hell hounds, there was also one specific bird that would make its presence known at the crack of dawn with a loud shriek at a perfect 5 second interval that actually sounded like a drill at a dentist’s office. The bird wasn’t alone though, because for some reason on this particular day of PAX there were also two people outside in their back yard that were literally screaming and yelling about something. Not angry screaming and yelling, just pure excitement. What the hell they were so excited about at 6:30 in the morning I’ll never know, but how those two had that much energy at that hour of the morning is a god damn mystery to me.
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pax10 pax offspring fling snapshot
Posted September 24th 2012 3:35 PM (Events)
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Pax 2012: Day 2

Pax 2012: Day 2
Saturday sort of began as an adrenaline rush after I got to the expo hall. I had left most of the stuff at my booth at the expo hall overnight, which is what most people do. Nobody is going to steal anything from other exhibitors, and plus there’s security roaming around. However, I did have this paranoid fantasy that I would forget something integral to the whole Super Pretendo set up.

When I got to the booth I started setting up everything and then I freaked out when the announcer called over the loud speaker “15 Minutes until the expo hall opens to the public.” I couldn’t find my SNES controller, and I was thinking “God damnit, that SNES to USB controller is actually pretty rad and someone would take it if they realized what it was…” and I frantically searched all around the booth for it. I wasn’t just going crazy for no reason though. See, back in E3 2009 I was demoing the first version of Snapshot at the IndieCade booth and someone actually did try to jack my Xbox360 controller from the booth overnight. Somehow we were able to find it a few booths down (we knew it was mine because it was specifically marked and it was actually pulled out of the computer by the connection at the end of the cord and not the actual USB plug.) Ever since then I’m always paranoid about leaving stuff in expo floor booths overnight.

After about 10 minutes of searching I moved my backpack and out from underneath it came the SNES controller. I calmed myself down and got everything set up and ready to roll for day 2 to start.
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pax10 sushi pax offspring fling snapshot
Posted September 17th 2012 7:06 PM (Events)
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Pax 2012: Day 1

Pax 2012: Day 1
I accidentally left my phone in complete silence mode all night. I actually thought it was in “Alarm Only” mode but apparently I hit the button one too many times. I ended up waking up at 7:30 to the sounds of Dave checking our Steam stats for Snapshot. I wanted as much time as possible to set up the booth for Offspring Fling, so we were pretty much out the door in a flash.

Setting Up Offspring Fling!


If any of you remember the Offspring Fling trailer that was brilliantly put together by the wonderful and talented Kert Gartner, you’ll recall that it had a big focus on the whole Super Pretendo thing. My idea for the PAX10 set up of Offspring Fling was to fully embrace that once again. Alec showed up all the way from Winnipeg with the FC Twin, the box, and the cartridge in hand.

After getting my laptop safely tucked away underneath the black curtain that surrounded the table, I set up the “Super Pretendo” on the table with the Offspring Fling cartridge in it. The FC Twin had all of its cables, including the power and the composite cables for video. The TV I was using had a bunch of input options, including composite. I plugged the FC Twin into the side of the TV where the composite input was, so it totally looked like the game could be running off of the actual cartridge.

The next step was to use an SNES controller that was wired up to USB. I borrowed this from my pal Matthew and it was going to be the demo controller for the entire weekend (which means at this point I should probably rub it down with some cleaning solution.) At first I had this elaborate plan to try and cut a hole in the table cloth so that I could run the USB controller through it, and then out on the other side I would be running the actual FC Twin controller, so that it would look like the SNES controller is actually plugged in. I ended up scrapping this plan when I realized how convincing it looked when I simply had the FC twin go behind the table, and the SNES controller come out of the table at the same point.
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pax10 pax offspring fling snapshot
Posted September 11th 2012 4:38 PM (Events)
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Pax 2012 - Day 0

Pax 2012 - Day 0
PAX Prime has come and gone once again and I’m feeling absolutely obliterated mentally and physically, and maybe even emotionally. This particular PAX was pretty insane for me because I was actually a part of two different booths for two different games! First, the Indie Mega Booth came back around for another go since its successful run at PAX East 2012, and secondly my solo project Offspring Fling (featuring music by Alec Holowka) was picked up as part of the PAX10! Fortunately Dave Carrigg (the Snapshot programmer) and WiL Whitlark (the Snapshot composer) were going to be at PAX with me so that they could cover the Snapshot booth, and I could be with my baby throwing game in the PAX10.

Snapshot is Released!


The first thing to note is that I really cannot stand flying anymore. I don’t know if it’s the rough flights I’ve experienced in my life, but at this point the thought of flying drives me crazy, and so on Wednesday night before PAX I got little to no sleep because I was so anxious about the trip. The other thing to note is that we actually released Snapshot on the Thursday afternoon that I would be spending on a plane to Seattle, so stress levels were a little on the high side. I guess I should actually talk a little bit about that Snapshot release since a lot of people just went “What da fuek?!” when we released it without much notice.

We’ve been working on Snapshot for a long time, a long ass time one might even say. With PAX coming up for us once again, we couldn’t bear the thought of standing at our booth for the fourth time saying that Snapshot was still “Coming soon, we promise.” We were presented with the opportunity to actually release Snapshot on Steam days before PAX started, and we wanted to go for it.
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pax offspring fling snapshot
Posted September 9th 2012 2:47 PM (Events)
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