Crunchtime Documentary on Youtube

 

Crunchtime Documentary

All 3 episodes edited into a single video

Crunchtime - DTBD documentary

So that time is finally upon us: the documentary shot last year during Dare to be Digital is going to be screened this week:

Dare to be Digital televised in C4 documentary

Long-running student development contest Dare to be Digital is to be featured in a new three-part Channel 4 documentary in the UK.
Called Crunchtime, the show is being produced by Headlight Pictures and follows 15 international teams as they compete in the University of Abertay's challenge to create a working video game within just 10 weeks.
The first part of the documentary is due to air on Sunday, March 27 at 7:25am GMT and shows teams from as far afield as China, Sweden, India and the US acclimatising to the Scottish environment and beginning their projects.

 Read the rest of the article at: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-03-21-dare-to-be-digital-to-be-televised-as-crunchtime

So depending on the editing choices made by the production team, this time next week the Bears with Jetpacks could either be hailed as superheroes, idiots, or we could have been cut out completely. I for one am desperate to find out which it is (and also a little bit terrified)




Also: http://www.develop-online.net/press-releases/70037/Crunchtime

Dare to be Digital Videos

Every so often during the competition a guy with a video-camera would come round, stick it in peoples faces until they felt obliged to say something, then dissapear again. He would also occasionally take me away for an interview (at least that's what I'm telling everyone we were doing).
All this footage got cut together into a great video that was shown during the awards ceremony at Protoplay, and has now been uploaded to Youtube.

There are actually 4 parts to it, and currently you have to goto the Dare channel to see the other sections, but hopefully they'll fix that soon.

This is of course not the only documentary the Bears With Jetpacks have been featured on, we're also part of "Crunchtime" a Channel-4 series about Dare 2010.

(Yup, that's Mark, me and Amila in the top left photo)

Bear to be Digital

The feature on our game has gone up on the [Adult Swim] page!

http://www.adultswim.co.uk/blog/bear-be-digital

It's great to see our team featured on such a large website, even if the team photo they used makes it look like I spent 10 weeks eating cream-cakes instead of working on the game (it's the wide angle lense I tell you!).

New Trailer

One of the most interesting things about writing a dissertation is the number of ways you can find to procrastinate. Having backed up my computer twice, learned morse code and seriously considered taking up karate from one of those youtube teachers, I thought it was about time I did something productive, and decided to make a new version of our trailer.

Now that's done I think I'll go and see how many marshmallows I can fit in my mouth at once.

Fan Artwork

Fan Mail!

Check out this awesome picture that Nathan Fletcher did for us.

If anyone else wants to see their drawings of the Grrr! blog then send them to thomascrofts@gmail.com

Tom

Protoplay 2010 and awards

Phil, Amila, Tom, Stefan and Mark collecting their award

Well it's all over and Bears with Jetpacks have come away from Dare to be Digital 2010 as award winners!

We won the new [Adult Swim] award for creativity and unique game play! A fantastic award to take home as all competition we have prided ourselves on having a very distinct game in respects to both looks and gameplay.

Protoplay itself was a fantastic experience, although exhausting. From 10 till 5 every day we were constantly busy with people wanting to play the game, and the vast, vast majority seemed to really enjoy it. Over the course of the weekend we had loads of people come back to play again because they had enjoyed themselves so much the first time round, and quite a lot of grudge matches and ad-hoc tournaments sprung up. We also had people asking when the game was going to be released and where they could get it, which was incredible for the team and really made all our hard work worth it.
While it did get wearing teaching hundreds of people the same controls it was hilarious to see dads annihilate their 10 year old sons and dance around fist pumping, only for their sons to demand a rematch and destroy them.

We learned a lot about the game and how to teach it, and found that if people didn't pick it up straight away, after two or three rounds they could give anyone a good match, which is a real triumph for our simple control system. Also every character seemed to have their fans, and there was a fairly even split between people's favorite maps as well, which we again feel is a great testament to how much time we put into designing them all.

Overall we're all really pleased with how the game came out, and can be really proud of what we've accomplished. After speaking to mentors and the public about our game we are sure that if we continued to work on it, we could release fairly soon and it would be a relative success. Whether we get to do that or not mainly depends on how people find themselves after we've finished university. While we'd all love to continue working on Grrr! I'm sure none of us will want to turn down a job at a major studio, so we'll see how things go in the next few months.