Featured Game - Thong Shot
What do you get when you cross "Revenge of the Nerds" with "Animal House"? A new movie from Universal Studio's called "Accepted". Blockdot developed a suite of 3 games for the new movie. Read More
Featured Illustration
I've always been a big fan of Legos and super heroes and I smashed the two together with a series of illustrations. Each illustration focuses on one City of Heroes character created as a Lego character.
Flag Football Season is Over
Well it was fun and definately educational but the 2008 season for the Grand Prairie Seahawks has come to a close. It was my first attempt as head coach and I think it would have probably been better to focus on a sport I have more experience with, but hey I think most everyone had a good time even if our record was a little less than stellar.
Special thanks to all the parents, Coach David, and Coach Casey for hanging in there with me and especially to the kids for giving it their all.
Austin Game Developer's Conference '08
This year's Austin GDC continues with just as many changes as last year. The biggest of which was the scheduling. For the past six or so years the Austin Game Conference has been a Wed-Friday event. This year they decided to make it a Mon-Wed event. While that does mean there's not a rush as the bars on Thursday night, for the Texas football game it also means people have to get back to work the day following the event. At around 1:00 on Wed the event was a ghost town, and there was still the "big party" scheduled late that night. I'd really like to see photos of that event to see if ANYONE actually showed up.
Another big change, and it's most likely a sign of the economic times, was the people that did and didn't show up on the expo floor. You could always count on big developer names like Lucas Arts, SOE, Midway, Blizzard, NCSoft to have a booth. This year it seemed like 70% of the developers were a no-show (at least on the floor) and in their place were schools of game design and other back end system guys. What does that mean? The verdict's still out, but it was a little odd to see.
Grand Prize Winner - Gametrailers/Toyota Machinima Contest
8 Baller, one of my City of Heroes characters, has done it again! This time he is the winner of the GameTrailers/Toyota Machinima Contest. The machinima I created for the contest features 8 Baller and his arch nemisis 8 Brawler fighting side by side against an incredibly powerful common enemy.
I've always had the urge to try out machinima, but never had the proper motivation...or time. When GameTrailers and Toyota threw in an xBox 360, PS3, Nintendo DS, and just about every superhero game on the market...and then they crammed it all in the rear of a brand new Toyota Matrix. Well...I couldn't pass up at least taking a shot at it.
The cool thing about sticking with 8 as a character is that it gave me a chance to tell a little more of his story. The contest was fun, the competition was awesome. There was a ton of outstanding entries.
8 Baller Gets His Own Site
He's got his own comic book, his own movie trailer, and now his own site. 8 Baller is one of my early City of Heroes characters. Thanks to various City of Heroes contests he's become...you might say...well known in the City of Heroes community. So I decided to create him a small website to stick all the information about him in one place.
At the site you can download his comic, the follow up story, watch his movie trailer and even download a 8 Baller desktop (yeah, I was bored).
Call me "Coach"
I'm still trying to track down exactly how THIS happened, but somehow I've become the head coach to Connor's flag football team, the Grand Prairie "Seahawks".
Wish us luck as I've never been the coach of anything before. Must...now...find the rules to flag football.
Austin Games Conference '07
This was my third annual trip to Austin for the Austin Games Conference, and this time above all others I was in for a surprise. In more ways than one. My guess is the main reason behind these changes is that the conference is under new management. It's now run by the same people that put together the Game Developers Conference (and now carries the name).
I guess the biggest disappointment/change was their redefinition of the word "online". In all previous versions of the conference the term "online" referred mainly to casual or web-based games. This usually meant that any discussion that included "online" in the title would be staffed by members of Pogo, Wild Tangent, or Skyworks. However, now it seems, you can pretty much exchange the word "online" with the three letters "MMO". Discussions about monitizing demo versions were replaced by MMO micropayment discussions. Discussions about the viral approach to marketing games where replaced with....well pretty much anything with either "Blizzard" or "World of Warcraft" in the title.
Don't get me wrong, they were all informative and interesting discussions. It's just when you go in expecting one thing based on the previous three years, and getting something quite a bit different, it makes it a little hard to adjust to.
Ye Ol' Daba daba doo!
Kraft and Blockdot team up once again to send Fred and Barney back...or uh...forward to the Middle Ages. In this suite of games players race down rivers and solve puzzles to find out who stole all the Cocoa Pebbles in the kindgom.
It's funny, when I was 10 or so I remember spending hours in a book called "How to Draw 50 Cartoon Characters". One of those characters was Fred Flintstone. I never though nearly 20 years later I'd be trying desperatly to recall those skills in an effort to draw Fred for Kraft.
City of Hereos Comic Contest Winner!
I'm very proud to say my entry into the City of Heroes Comic Contest won the grand prize in the contest for "Best Overall Comic". The comic, stars several of my City of Heroes characters. It's centered around 8Baller's story and it's entitled "8Baller - Alternates".
It can be viewed online in PDF format at the City of Heroes site here.
I'm really pretty honored since there were some REALLY good entries and the judges themselves were; Marv Wolfman, creator of Blade, Bullseye and the genius being Smallville's version of Lex Luthor. David Nakayama, awesome comic book artist, and Matt Miller, Lead Game Designer of City of Heroes.
Mowing Down the Competition
Take your everyday riding lawn mower, refit it with a turbo engine and a starting line and let the races begin. Home Depot teamed up with Blockdot to create "Mower Mayhem" for Father's Day. Plow through fences, hedges and dog houses atop these over the top mowers on your way to the finish line. Officially I can't endorse the use of a riding mower as a drag racer...but come on...who hasn't thought about it at one time in their lives?
A New Definition of Rock Star
Postopia and Blockdot team up, along with Fred, Barney and the whole Flintstone's crew to create a suite of games for an "American Idol"-ish competition. These simple games are designed around music, performing, and what it really takes to be a "rock" star.
Such a Deviant
After a looooong time away from it (basically because there hasn't been a real need), I'm drawing again. I don't know that I've really drawn anything since college. These days I've moved away from traditional paper and pencil and gone digital.
I find it a ton of fun and a great way to kick back and relax. With the discovery that I still like to draw, I stumbled across the Deviant Art website thanks to the great folks on the City of Heroes boards.
The communities on both the CoH forums and the DA site has been fantastic and a real inpiration to create new things.
So drop by my DA site and check out the latest random things I've been playing around with.
Donruss Two-Minute Drill
It really is such a small world. Today Blockdot launched a new game, this one, believe it or not, was for Donruss. Irony is such a funny thing. The game was a unique twist on a sports trivia game. As the player answered trivia questions correctly he advanced his football down the field. The goal, of course, was to move the ball all the way down the field for a touchdown...before time ran out.
Treehouse Testdrive
What do you get when you cross a treehouse with a spaceship, a roadster, a pair of huge legs, and a giant mechanical shark? You get Lunchables Treehouse Testdrive racing game of course. This game launched by Blockdot was a multiplayer online racing game where players used over the top powerups and vehicles to take crazy shortcuts to come out victorious.
Thong Shot Breaks 1,000,000 Game Plays
Less than a month and a half after launching, "Thong Shot", one of the games created for Universal Studio's movie "Accepted", breaks the 1,000,000 game play barrier.
NFL Rush
I remember playing touch football with the crew in the neighborhood. Since we usually played with 4 to 6 people we had the standard 10 second rush rule in affect. At times it felt like this project for JC Penney's and the NFL was playing by the same 10 second rule.
We had an incredibly short timeline to put the game together but thankfully with help from the folks at Atmosphere BBDO and the outstanding team at work (Blockdot) we were able to score before time ran out.
Development for the game took just over 2 weeks.