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.

Deadline day

So it's deadline day...well not exactly, but we're probably not going to be sleeping before the deadline so it's close enough.

Everything has gone to plan and we're happy with our timing, just getting the last few tweaks in and adding a bit of flavour to the menus, then will be playtesting late into the night.
In the morning it's pack up and then relax, hopefully we'll not be too tired, but who knows what will happen between now and then.

Also here is our updated gameplay-trailer, hacked together in movie-maker:

Grrr! Trading Cards

Today is your lucky day.

Today you are witnessing the release of the first 4 Grrr! trading cards.
Only winners of Grrr! matches at Protoplay (or anyone with a printer) will be able to get their hands on these INCREDIBLY collectable cards.

Will you be good enough to collect the whole set?

More sand

Hot on the heels of the first screenshot of the beach comes a video of some gameplay.

This isn't really representative of how the final game will be (and still has the old lighting on), but we thought it would be worth showing exactly what the game looks like on a proper map.

A few other things making their debut in this vid are:

• Particle effects: explosions, gunsmoke, jet-exhaust, 
• Death animations
• New cursors

And for those of you wondering what we picked for the unicorns attack, your ears should give you the answer. Yes, that is the sound of a unicorn vomiting a rainbow and yes we're keeping it.