submitted by Rami on maart 5, 2013 |

#radicalfishing  #ridic  

In the meanwhile, maybe play some Radical Fishing?

submitted by Rami on februari 25, 2013 |

#radicalfishing  #ridiculousfishing  #wasteland-kings  

If you’ve been paying attention, you probably followed the development of Wasteland Kings during our participation in the annual Mojam. We’re extremely proud of the $450.000 raised for charity during the whole event and just as grateful for all your support, the nice comments in the chat and your enthusiasm for the game.

However, Wasteland Kings was not all we were working on: while Jan Willem and Paul were jamming away on Wasteland Kings, Rami, Zach and Greg wrapped up something else over in New York: we submitted Ridiculous Fishing to Apple.

This was a long time coming.

On December 7th, 2010, we started on the iOS version of our debut game Radical Fishing. Things started when Brandon Boyer introduced New York City-based conceptual artist and developer Zach Gage to our little Flash game. Brandon put us in touch and with us being big fans of Zach’s lose/lose and Zach being a big fan of Radical Fishing, we decided to work together on iRadical Fishing.

Within the next two months, the three of us got in touch with Greg Wohlwend, back then best known as the artist for Solipskier. He was instantly sold on the project and quickly added to the roster. We finally reached out to Super Crate Box musician Eirik Suhrke to work with us on the project as well. We had an amazing team and our output was far above expectations. This was a project we couldn’t stop being excited about.

Greg immediately sent us the above image: he had come up with an amazing art style based on 45 degree angles. Eirik sent us some amazingly fitting audio mockups. Zach was coding, Jan Willem was spending time on the Serious Sam: The Random Encounter project while designing Ridiculous Fishing and I was working on Serious Sam: The Random Encounter and the usual Vlambeer stuff. Within weeks, the game was fully playable and we were halfway before we knew it.

Obviously, things were perfect like that until six months into the project. The same Brandon Boyer that put us in touch with Zach Gage notified us of a clone of Radical Fishing, and it was going to launch on iOS before we would be ready to launch. We argued, we discussed and we negotiated – but ultimately it turned out the cloners never intended to yield: they admitted to ‘being inspired’ by our game and launched their game to great success. With that, our motivation and progress suffered a blow we didn’t recover from for far longer that we are comfortable admitting.

Progress on the game was slow for months, all of us being demotivated from working on it. We would’ve killed the project right then and there if it wasn’t for the enormous outpouring of support from fans and press alike. Still, opening the project files would just remind us of the critical and financial reception of the clone – and reminded us that when we’d launch, people would just see Ridiculous Fishing as a clone of the clone. We worked on different projects; Zach launched the absurdly succesful Spelltower, Greg worked on Gasketball and Hundreds, Eirik launched Spelunky and we worked on whatever wasn’t Ridiculous Fishing.

There was a small boost in morale when the game was unexpectedly nominated for the Independent Games Festival in early 2012, but even that couldn’t persuade us to work on the game. We had all gained a lot of new responsibilities with our new releases and painfully struggling through the accursed development of a game that’d be received as a clone wasn’t something we had time for.

We almost killed the project, but we couldn’t give up on it either. So it lingered and lingered in the back of our head. We spoke about the dangers of cloning at conferences, we gave interviews to newspapers and television. Ridiculous Fishing wasn’t moving forward, but it was always there. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Ridiculous Fishing nearly ended Vlambeer.

The ball started rolling again after PAX Prime 2012. Zach, Greg, Greg’s MikenGreg partner Mike and I spent a week in a car driving from Seattle to New York to try and revive the game at Zach’s apartment in New York. Over the course of the week we stayed in Manhattan, the three of us managed to push the game forward just a tiny bit.

That turned out to be enough to slowly snowball into serious progress. A few weeks after our stay in Manhattan – or almost five weeks ago – Greg traveled from his place in Chicago to move in with Zach for as long as we needed to finish the game. Jan Willem and I set aside our work on LUFTRAUSERS to make sure no momentum was lost on the project again. Eirik set aside all of his work to make sure the game sounds perfect. Suddenly everything fell into place.

Two weeks ago, Zach and Greg declared the work on their end was done. Jan Willem slaved away for two full time weeks checking up on final progress tweaks, Eirik worked on additional sound effects. Then, during my recent stay in New York City, Zach and I found ourselves staring at the App Store submission screen: a screen we thought we might never see.

So, this is it. No more talking about clones: Ridiculous Fishing is something we’re too proud of to be discussing its value in terms of another game. It’s time to focus on what we made: Ridiculous Fishing has been submitted. We’ll be back with more news as soon as Apple approves the game.

submitted by Rami on januari 24, 2012 |

#gungodz  #radicalfishing  #ridiculousfishing  #scb-ios  #events  #talks  

Some pretty busy weeks have passed lately, with the Super Crate Box iOS updates taking up most of the time that wasn’t invested in Ridiculous Fishing or GUN GODZ. One thing we’ve been working on behind the scenes was a talk about Game Cloning that we wanted to give over at the Game Developers Conference.

After being through quite an episode with Radical Fishing being cloned, we believe the industry is approaching the topic from the wrong angle – one that is focused on what we cannot do about the problem – and we want to offer an alternative and reignite the discussion from a more constructive perspective. It was just confirmed that we’re actually giving the talk and we’re thankful that we’ve been offered this chance to speak at the Independent Games Summit, an amazing venue to kickstart this new discussion.

In 2010, Vlambeer created Radical Fishing, released it as a sponsored Flash game and began work on an iOS version. As we were working, a third party suddenly released a game – which, down to the upgrades, was almost identical to Radical Fishing’s design. This resulted in a lot of thinking about defining cloning, the dangers it poses to upcoming indie developers and the variety of strong opinions that keep the issue from being debated in a useful manner.

Vlambeer will talk about the practical dangers of clones to our industry and what we CAN do, instead of discussing only what we cannot do. We want to pick up the discussion at its impasse and provide a starting point for a new, more practical conversation about cloning.

Further details and the exact timing of the talk will be announced over at the GDC Schedule Builder.

Unrelated: we’re hoping to push the Super Crate Box iOS update this week & will be attending the Nordic Gamejam in Copenhagen. It’s a busy week, but it’s going to be fun!

submitted by Rami on december 7, 2011 |

#radicalfishing  #supercratebox  #scb-ios  

It’s been way too long since we had any real news on Super Crate Box iOS, so we thought we’d pick it back up again at some really good news: We’ve just submitted the game to Apple for review! Admittedly, it didn’t make that original release date as the entire Radical Fishing cloning thing went down. On top of that it turned out the original Super Crate Box code is kind of a mess and the game is filled with little details that were hidden somewhere completely irrational deep inside the code. Halfbot has been doing an amazing job at finding and porting all that stuff for the past few months.
continue reading… »

submitted by Rami on november 30, 2011 |

#awards  #gungodz  #not-vlambeer  #radicalfishing  #ridiculousfishing  #sstre  #scb-ios  

We won a Dutch Game Award. It’s the biggest thing you can win in our home-country of the Netherlands and therefore it is quite a humbling thing to get such recognition from the industry around here. Radical Fishing took home the ‘Best Online Game’-award.

GUN GODZ is nearly done, so for all you Venus Patrol backers, we’ll have some news on when that’s available soon. For now, we thought we’d give you a short sneak-peek at it. Since the game is a polytheistic hip-hop inspired first person shooter, the best way to do that is release one of the songs the amazing KOZILEK made for us for you to listen to.

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