I’ve used the Internet before, I know how this all this ‘hyping’ nonsense works.

Before I issue a high-res, crisp and clear screenshot of the game in-action, you get a grubby, blurry one which was hastily-snapped with a crappy digital camera.

For the sake of OMG SPOILERS, I’ve hidden the image ‘after the jump’, which apparently is another trendy thing you need to do when hyping stuff. This is easy. Are you hyped, yet? I bet you are.

continue reading "The ‘Time, Gentlemen Please’ Hype Machine Starts Here"

Poor Cruxade. what with all the excitement of Ben There, Dan That! doing so damned well, I’d sort of forgotten it existed, to be honest with you.

Which is a shame, because I fired it up last night to see if it was as much fun as I remembered, and wound up losing an hour and a half before I knew what I was doing.

I haven’t really spoken about it, or promoted it anywhere. It’s sold a couple of copies, but I think everyone just assumes it’s the Match-3 game that Indie Devs are obliged to make. It isn’t really, it’s more of an homage to one of my favourite games of all time - Lumines, although it has its own unique mechanic, obviously. I’m no cloner.

Alright, so it doesn’t have any unnecessary jokes about wanking in it (missed a trick there, dammit) or little dinky mines blowing peoples’ faces off, but it’s still a damn fine and solid game.

It was written so I could learn the basics of XNA before doing something serious and grown up, and it served that purpose well. If you enjoyed Ben There, Dan That!, but don’t want to just give your money away for no reason, have a look to see if you like Cruxade, and buy a copy if you do.

Or at least have a download of the demo, and let me know what you think…

In proper news: I think I’ve picked a winner for the Star in an Indie Game contest, but there’s still time to wow me with your entry if you fancy it.

Here’s a pretty cool prize: how would you like to see a tiny pixellated version of yourself in one of those trendy ‘Indie games’ everyone’s going on about these days?

I’m giving away a cameo in the upcoming Ben There, Dan That! sequel Time Gentlemen, Please, so if you’ve ever wanted to see yourself digitised, reduced to pixels, and making inappropriate jokes about wanking on people’s computer screens the world over, here’s your chance.

All you have to do is come up with an interesting character that you’d play. Maybe you’d like to be a Space Pirate called Ian, or a ghost who thinks he’s a piece of bacon. Maybe you’ll go all meta and play a man who won a competition to appear in a video game.

Whatever your stupid and diseased fetish, type it up in words and send it in.

No doubt you’ve already played and enjoyed and donated to the FREE, EXCELLENT, award-winning, and well-loved Ben There, Dan That! so you’ll know that pretty much anything goes in our universe – we can wangle near any monstrosity of a character into our improbable plotlines, so let your imagination run riot. Maybe you’d play a character whose imagination has literally run riot, and he’s constantly chasing after it with a net! Who knows?

You can leave your entry in the comments thread below or, if you’ve got a lot to write or a drawing you’ve done in crayons you’d like to show off, pop your entry into this forum thread. Double points if it’s done in MSPaint!

Make sure I can get in contact with you by using a proper email address.

Small Same-Sized Print:
I’ll pick the best and most-deserving entry. I reserve the right to tweak the winning entry to fit the game’s ‘tone’ and ’storyline’. My decision’s final. I also reserve the right to change the rules whenever I like so that this doesn’t all blow up in my face. If no one enters, I’ll code a void in space-time in your place which boots the player out to the desktop if you try to interact with it. Competition closes ‘soon’, so get your entry in today! Enter as many times as you like, go nuts. Any entries for silhouetted wibbly purple characters will be discarded.

As you know, Ben There, Dan That! is gloriously free to download, but we very much appreciate the odd donation. It has brought in some cash, but not enough to really justify the amount of time I’m going to be spending on a sequel.

The ‘if everyone who downloaded it paid £1‘ thing sounds good in theory, but in reality it just doesn’t work. BTDT hasn’t brought in anywhere near enough to fund more higher-end games from the studio, not in all honesty that I ever expected it to.

But the main goal here is quite simple: bring in enough cash to make games full time. Not only that, but proper, exciting, swishy games with some of those oh-so trendy graphics ‘kids today’ seem to enjoy so much. Unfortunately, Donationware doesn’t really bring in the necessary levels of wonga for all that sort of jollity.

So, the question is this: would you pay to play the sequel?

Just so you know, Time Gentlemen, Please will be a much tighter game, with better puzzles and a proper ‘plot’ with antagonists and everything. All in all, it’ll be a better game, which I think is an important point to make.

I’m perfectly prepared to give it away as Donationware, and I’m assuming whole-heartedly that’s precisely what I’ll wind up doing… but I’m not discounting other options just yet.

If you’d like to let me know what you think, there’s a clicky-clicky poll on the forums, you can leave a comment below, or drop me an email… thanks!

Yesterday, at an undisclosed location in Central London, there was a make-or-break meeting between myself and Ben There, Dan That!’s intrepid co-writer, to discuss the logistics behind the possibility of some sort of sequel.

Prime concern was where to take the two characters, and how we could pin an enjoyable adventure on the original game’s cliffhanger ending.

It didn’t really go too well at first, as we struggled fruitlessly to find a satisfactory way of resolving the issues that were left veritably teetering at the arse-end of Ben There, Dan That!

Then, after a few glasses of traditional Lion’s Roar brew, I suggested the inclusion of Robot Zombie Dinosaur Nazis, and everything slotted into place. It’s going to be awesome. We’re on.

If you want to keep bang up-to-date with work on Time, Gentlemen, Please, the BTDT sequel, the smartest thing to do is to sign up for The Forums and join in the fun for a whinge and a giggle. If you hate socialising, as many of BTDT’s fans so obviously do, have a click of our RSS feed over to the right there and subscribe - I’ll update the News page when there’s something new.

Time, Gentlemen, Please could be made in a matter of months, it could be lots of months. It could get canned. Who knows? Isn’t independent game development exciting?

PLEASE NOTE: number and placement of commas in the game title still very much TBC, obv.

Oooh, Ben There, Dan That!, eh? Ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, didn’t it? I wonder how veritable heroes Dan and Ben get out of that one.

Shame there’ll never ever be a sequel, simply because Donationware doesn’t really bring in enough cold, hard cash to make it economically viable.

That said, Ben There, Dan That!’s ‘big number two’ Ben and I are meeting in a pub tomorrow night, and item #27 on the agenda (we have an agenda) is to discuss the vague possibility of sitting on our hands and vehemently not making a follow up to pointy-clicky smash hit Ben There, Dan That!.

Out of pure interest — because, as I said, there’s no way we’re making a sequel so get that out of your system immediately – what would you want from a Ben There, Dan That! sequel?

Already on the list:

- Smaller and tighter.
- Better puzzles.
- Marginally nicer graphics.
- More jokes about wanking less jokes about wanking.

Where do you think Ben There, Dan That! could have been improved? Likewise, what stuff did you really like, and would want to see carried over to a non-existent sequel? Now’s your chance to speak out because it turns out we have a comments section.

Please note: we’ve already had every idea ever, so any good ideas you might happen to enter into the comments section below was technically our idea first, so we’re totally stealing it.

What a momentous occasion – Ben There, Dan That! has just had its 10,000th download. Thinking about it, that’s quite a lot of people. It’s certainly exponentially more people than we ever imagined would play it. It’s all very exciting indeed.

People have been saying some very nice things about it on The Internet, and thanks to a glowing review at JayIsGames.com (go there! vote us a five, you don’t even need to sign up!) we’ve been seeing an awful lot of traffic and lots of lovely downloads over the last couple of days.

Hello to all the new people. Why not pop over to The Forums for a whinge and a giggle?

The game’s made us a couple of hundred quid so far, thanks to some amazing donations by some very generous people who obviously dig what we’re up to here at Zombie Cow Studios.

All donations get plugged straight into future releases, so you know that money’s not just being spent on Lion’s Roar bitter and SMACK and whores, it’s helping make even more awesome games for you to play at some point further down the line. If you played BTDT and enjoyed it, please do consider a little donation:

I’m not sure how much money ten thousand £1 coins is, exactly, but it’s almost certainly lots. For every person that chucks us some cash as a thank you, the next game gets closer and better.

Talking of which, I’ve had a play about with The Engine for The Next Game and it’s even more advanced than I could possibly have hoped for. Let’s just say the word physics is involved.

We’re all in for a bit of a treat, I think. Already we’re next year’s Braid.

As part of the TIGSource ‘Bootleg Demake’ competition, a couple of guys from the Zombie Cow Forum ‘demade’ Grand Theft Auto 4 as Large Scale Vehicular Stealing, a dodgy knock-off for the NES.

It’s a surprisingly deep mish-mash of the first GTA, with Double Dragon stylee fighting bits thrown in for good measure. It’s completely free to play, simply follow this link.

Well done seregrail7 and Nickenstein, you’re both completely awesome! I feel privileged to even be allowed to stand near a copy of Large-Scale Vehicular Stealing, let alone be associated with it.

MASSIVE THANKS ALSO TO CHARLOTTE, who did the amazing box art up there. That’s me and seregrail7 and Nickenstein, and the car/ chopper from hit 80s TV show ‘Magnum p.i’, in case you’re interested. Regardless, it’s an amazing piece of work and I’ll doubtless wind up putting it on a T-shirt sooner or later…

I suppose it’s time to start talking about what Zombie Cow Studios going to be getting up to next.

I can’t tell you much. Not due to some big clever hush-hush drip-feed hype marketing, but mainly because there isn’t much to tell yet.

You’ll be pleased to hear I’ve enrolled some sort of ‘best of the best of the best’ team to help me out on this next game. Jon ‘Log’ Blyth and Steve Hogarty of PCZone fame are helping out with the writing and designing, as is Ben Ward, Ben There, Dan That!’s plucky cohort.

Lemmy, professional coder and The Forgotten Element’s chief compiling guru is currently beavering away at a swishy trendy engine which will not only be used for this next project, but also for The Gibbage Sequel waaaay down the line, somewhere.

Hopefully The Forgotten Element’s Captain Binky will be around to help out with art consulting, as well, if he finds the time. Excitingly, Mike Watts of Encore Music is also on board to help out with the clever music bits- he did the music for Gibbage and Ben There, Dan That!, so you know he’s utterly brilliant at what he does. It’s an exciting team indeed.

The whole thing’s being done in XNA, with the ideal of distributing it through the likes of XBLA and Steam.

The game itself? It’ll be a 2D platformer affair with a heavy emphasis on comedy. Think a two-dimensional Psychonauts and a story revolving around a couple of dysfunctional robots, and you’re pretty much there. I’m really looking forward to getting my teeth into it, it’s going to be amazing. As I said, it’s early days yet, but with the likes of Log, Steve and Ben helping out you can be fairly sure it’s not only going to be awesomely good fun, it’ll be funny as fuck to boot.

So now you know. More when there’s more.

Until then, why not join in over at The Forums?

There’s a massive, beautiful, interesting article in the latest issue of PCZone all about the making of Ben There, Dan That! Worth sneakily opening the little plastic bag it comes in while you’re killing time in WHSmiths, certainly.

If you’ve found us via that massive beautiful interesting PCZone article, then welcome! If you haven’t installed Ben There, Dan That! off the coverdisk yet, you might like to download the version from the BTDT game page instead, which fixes a couple of issues. Also, do pop into the forums and say hello.

In other news: work is progressing nicely on The Next Project; key members of the team, which excitingly includes Log and Steve from PCZone, met in an overpriced London pub last week to knock out some plot and gameplay basics, and I’m really excited about where it’s all going. We’re still very much at the early stages, but I’m confident it’ll be amazing. More on that soon, I hope…