Pro’s and Cons

I’ve not had chance to sneak and post as boy they’ve been busy.

I’ll start at the end, they were off last week to the NLGD Festival of Games 2010 and came back buzzing.

They saw an amazing project developed by students for the rehabilitation of people who have suffered strokes. Using a control system where you can move your arm in three dimensions to control your character on screen and calibrated for each individual. The game ‘Birds’ was visually appealing and deceptive in it’s simplicity and  they won the Diamond Trophy, the best of show award, I think they may have been a little envious of that one heh heh

There was a  game engine keynote that was less formal than they expected thanks in part to a blue screen in the best tradition of live demonstration.

An eye opener for sure. Has them drooling over game engines, makes me feel like taking a shower if I’m honest but it would get my felt all soggy.

They met a representative from Emergent who was preforming his last task for the company and talking about gamebryo lightspeed and it’s broad range of tools and range of possibilities.
Stuart Radforth has now branched out with his own company making smartphone apps for conference attendees to manage their schedules without the need to carry a piece of paper or access the internet, they wish him every success with Aszart Conference Technologies.

Ian Livingstone was giving a talk about living in a van, the start of Dungeons and Dragons and the birth of Tomb Raider, I’ll post a link to the podcasts from the Con as soon as it’s available.

They also met up with the Dutch Game Garden and look forward to attending their lunches and forming new contacts.

In the meantime Darren the programmer had been over for a visit, was all a mile a minute while he was here and watching the guys come back a little tipsy warmed my cold old heart lol.

For all that Animal Alphabet is coming on in leaps and bounds, they’re talking of doing some website development and Darren sounded pretty motivated for moving over here to the Flatlands which is an interesting development.

Sarah had bumped into some cool cats from the investment sector on one of her travels to the UK, Larry T and Nick S have spent some quality time with the Hatstand team, although drinking and eating amazing lunches seems to have been a lot of it, they’re also helping in any way they can with Kevins net-runna system, he sounds like an interesting man, south african and a genius to boot. He’s also kindly offered to help these kids out with producing a demo for Path of Totality, which would be an awesome coup, and start the witchtrials of finding a publisher hehe.

So although this was all the beginning of some hardcore mutual appreciation these are all developments which Hatstand is not quite yet poised to take full advantage of but better sooner than to late I say and more power to them.

I must just mention Tripped out Psychotic time agents, there that’s done, find their blog for more information if no more enlightenment, I warn you it’s only for the brave.

Until then, keep it under you hat

Black Hat

Tickletumm launches with a giggle

Well it’s been a hell of a week here at Hatstand HQ, they’ve been working like beavers to get the new website complete and Tickletumm.com went live last night in a flurry of activity. The Hatstand Gaming main site had an update to accompany this and a lightly new look.

I’m glad it all came together for them, been some hair pulling in the week as Steve was learning Flash on the fly, but the boy done good, that ebook has worked out a treat, Sarah has as usual supplied some gorgeous artwork for the site and hopefully the bright colours and fun themes will appeal to young and old alike. There’s plenty of content still to come too, with the interactive Animal Alphabet top of the list and looking great so far.

I’ve been playing the cupcake game, it’s strangely addictive lol, and bopping along to the train game and poop pooping along with the sound effects. If I can just get someone to cook up another batch of those Brownies…

Moments after that they had conformation that the Tickletumm app had finished the approval process and gone live as well! Perfect timing.

The Tickletumm Art Competition launches on May 1st with a 250 Euro prize, need to get my crayons out.

Hatstand are finally on the map, it might be a small one but it’s a start indeed.

The 2d Map Editor ‘Top Hat’ was delivered by our man who can Darren this week too, and is looking great, a few tweaks remain but they’re mostly aesthetic.

I hear a rumour that the Morphus Online Homepage will be getting a tarting up, it will be an under construction page but boy do they have big plans for it. The next project will be Lullabai, which is a musical nightlight for your iphone, one that listens for your baby and soothes them off to sleep using sound and a light show!

Well, time to make my move, fingers crossed that Tickletumm does well and that I can sneak some vodka and raise it in celebration tonight

For now I’ll raise my hat to you

Curious Beginnings

This is a direct transcript of what I overheard, they get asked a lot how this all started…

The ‘story’.

Way back in 2008 I had a random thought which collided with another thought, I pondered this a while and formulated an idea, it seemed valid, I talked about it a little and asked some questions and life moved on.

The idea persisted however, the more I thought about it the more interesting and far reaching it seemed.
Now this wasn’t an idea for a game or a game world or some new haircut for an MMO, nothing like that and in fact to me it seemed very obvious and now I’d thought about it thought it a little odd that no one was doing this already.

It’s not a complicated idea. But of course I’m not going to tell you what this idea is, but with a little luck and a lot of hard work one day you’ll find out because we’ll have made it the thing that makes our MMORPG Morphus different from the games that have come before.

Ok so time past and midway through 2009 I was sitting by a pool in Turkey with my now business partner Stephan and I told him the idea, finally it hit fertile ground and he saw what it could mean in terms of gaming and he agreed that an MMO was the best platform to make use of the idea, we spent most of that day a happy pair of geeks, brainstorming daydreams of impossible size, but as the sun set the conversation turned more serious, how in reality could we do something with this idea, quite frankly we didn’t even know how we’d go about selling it, what it would be worth if anything, sad that we wouldn’t get to midwife the idea into reality and see the game clutched in sweaty gamers hands on launch day…dreams all gamers entertain at some point.

But then looking at each other we asked the question ‘why can’t we do it ourselves?’…ok we know that’s a dumb question in many ways, but we were not impeded with the knowledge of why that wouldn’t be possible, if fact our ignorance was like an armour saving us from fear at the impossible task we’d have to attempt.

So other than fleshing out and planting the seed of Morphus as a game world over the next 5 days we enjoyed our Holiday then went home, myself to Wales and Stephan to The Netherlands, both fired up with a dream and the desire to make it reality.
I spent a few days typing up the idea, making it clear on paper, Stephan made an appointment with a Start up Business advisor who has knowledge of casual gaming.

That meeting cemented the path we’ve taken in many ways. We were told that the idea was indeed valid and had great potential, on it’s own it had sizeable financial value but the advisor agreed that if we sold it we’d be selling ourselves short.

Stephan and I talked about this a lot, what was going to be needed from us in terms of commitment, Stephan in a moment of total lunacy offered to work and keep both of us so I could focus 24/7 on the project, so I needed to move to Holland to make that practical. In the meantime I was making best use of the amazing pool of talent hidden away in the small welsh village I was in, and through a series of amazing coincidences and chance meetings had made the idea something that was growing and inspiring other people, the paperwork was getting more fleshed out in terms of the game world.

I booked a trip out to Holland to see if that was liveable and to meet with our advisor.

That second meeting brought us down to earth, truth normally does that to dreamers

We would never gain investment for Morphus without a solid track record as game developers. We could either sell the idea, not the first choice. Gain industry jobs and be patient or try option 3 start small, develop our own small titles and learn on the job working on larger and more complex projects until we can hopefully produce a demo for Morphus and attract serious investment.

We left that meeting feeling that although this wasn’t quite the overnight life change we’d dreamt of it was an honest and welcome challenge and we were up for taking it on, the long haul wasn’t going to scare us off.

So we started cooking up some new ideas, we decided to start small and the iphone app market was a good place to start for many reasons. Lenlem was the first concept on the table but we decided that was too complicated for our first and chose Tickletumm as being simple, fun and having a decent potential market.

So here you find us 6 months later, The company is registered, the website is up, Tickletumm is being coded as we speak (I should be working on animations but tea and cake happened) I’m living in Holland, Stephan hasn’t tried to kill me yet, we have a cat! I’m too busy for words but I wake every morning with a smile on my face and a list of things to do as long as your arm (thank god for Magic Whiteboards) I go to sleep thinking about what we need to get done…the business plan is huge lol.

It’s a risk, nothing is guaranteed, but we’ll learn as much if not more from failure as from success, we’re just going to try to make the best quality products that we can, that we find fun and easy to use or play, Morphus may be on our far horizon but it fills the sky.

We’re at the start of the journey, we hope you’ll come along, share some stories round the camp fire and find Hatstand a place where you’ll be happy to hang your hat.

Game on.

Facing up to it

Well suck me a lemon and call me skippy they finally pulled their finger out and sorted out a Facebook page.

http://bit.ly/ary7NK

The forum is coming along, looks like they’re looking for some beta testers to help spot the obvious mistakes, only way I guess use it til you break it hehe. Those interested in giving it a whorl can check it out via Facebook.

Some sad news about the death of Gen Con uk today, let’s hope something rises phoenix like out of the ashes for gamers in the UK.

These guys have some tentative plans for publishing Role Playing Games and board/card games in the future, any interested parties should get in touch I think they’d get a kick out of backing the right material, all for the good.

Right this is only a quickie, suns shining and they’ve stepped outside, weird.

Need some shades that work with the hat

TTFN

furry friday

Well been a change of pace here, the arrival of the company cat has been wildly distracting, he was going to be called Rasputin but it didn’t suit so they’ve gone with ‘Morphus’ what a moniker for such a small mite. But Mo for short works pretty well.

The hunt has started for a flash designer to help making assets for the Tickletumm website, seems most of the work they’re viewing is po faced and corporate which isn’t what’s needed as the target here is kids under 5, I wish ‘em luck with that as they project sounds like a blast for the right party. If you know any likely Flash masters give em a poke.

Lots of talk about the competition to be launched alongside Tickletumm: front-runner looks to be a contest to design a new character for the app, much talk of prizes, seems they’re going to go with a cash prize, always nice. Thinking there is offering hardware etc will be preaching to the converted or at least to those with an iphone already, they flirt with an ipad, but hey time will tell. If you have design skills and can channel cute this could well shape up to be the contest for you.

Categories for the comp are yet to be decided but a couple already touted are Monsters/Dinosaurs, Spacemen/ Robots sounds like fun for the boys to me and what’s wrong with space faring dinosaurs huh?

Better keep my hat down

Black Hat

Black Hat beginnings

Welcome to the start of the Black Hat Blog.

Sitting in a prime viewing location here at Hatstand gaming I’m privy to all the strange work that happens here, in between coffee guzzling these guys are busy bees.

I’d have a better idea of where I was if I could see out of a window but we must be in some post modern bunker as there’s only daylight from above, at least the entertainment is good.

Plenty of interesting images on the walls, looks like a concept art bomb has gone off, things only stick where there’s no magic whiteboard, they claim that particular invention was a lifesaver, go figure.

There’s a 3D dragon hanging from the ceiling, maybe that’s a nod to Terry Pratchetts stuffed alligator hanging in a wizards study, lord knows they’re attempting to cook up some magic.

They’re working on an app called Tickletumm right now, it seems to be going well enough, they’re new to the process but learning fast, they were recording sound files for it the other night, gave me a chuckle, mostly they were giggling like children but hey that’s what they needed to record…cute giggles, and a few other sounds you normally need to apologise for after making.

The animations were a triumph, that little chap Speckleberry wiggling about on the screen.

If simple is a good thing then I think they’re on to a winner.

The progress for Lenlem is well underway too, that’s a way more complex animal.

Ok gotta go they’re back from lunch, I’ll be posting late or when I can get my mitts on the keyboard, but for now it’s back up on the Hatstand for me…Remember, keep it under your hat

Black Hat  

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