Month: March 2010

Make love, notgames.

Notgames is an initiative that we started in the wake of my New Years Resolutions. It has been growing behind the scenes and is already a nice place where developers can meet and share experiences. The purpose of the Notgames initiative is to encourage and support the development of digital entertainment and art that is not games. You can read more about our intentions here.

The most active area of the initiative is the web forum where we discuss development and theory, each other’s work and that of others. There’s also a Tumblr feed which acts as a kind of collective stream of consciousness in images and words. And we recently started a blog and a Facebook page.

The initiative is open to anyone with an interest in the creation of leisure software outside of the confines of games. It’s a supportive environment for the exploration of this vast new terrain. Register for the forum if you would like to participate in the discussions, the Tumblr feed or the blog. Or simply become a fan on Facebook to stay in the loop.

The Path Anniversary: last words

Thus ends our celebration of The Path’s one year anniversary and 11 years of collaboration. Here’s a summary, in case you missed something.

We published The Path postmortem chronicling the making of the game. This was a great way for us to look back on the history of the project, even if it is impossible to describe 3 years of development in a summary fashion!

On The Path blog there were 10 days of posts written from a very personal perspective to supplement the grand postmortem essay. These stories were full of insights about the Red Girls and their Wolves. And we uploaded tons of work in progress imagery, drawings and screenshots covering the entire development, on Flickr on The Path Archive. So if you are curious about the making of the game, have a look at all the Anniversary posts listed there.

We had a very fine sale where all our games were available at 50% off. Even if you missed it you will find everything we’ve made reasonably priced for download.

Also:
The Path translations patch for windows received an upgrade. And these translations are now available for our Steam players as well.

We published 2 new interviews with artists that we consider inspirational and whom we wanted more people to know about.

And we announced the coming of The Path Soundtrack which will be available next month!

So, now, we move on.
To those who celebrated with us, we thank you!!

Interview with Fuco Ueda

Fuco UedaIn April 2009, we had the honor of interviewing Japanese artist Fuco Ueda, thanks to Miss Ellie Nagata’s kind offer to translate. Miss Ueda’s work has been a great source of inspiration and strength when we were creating The Path, as her work also seems to deal with the pleasure and pain of being a girl. In a way, the Red Girls are some kind of estranged cousins of the skinny contemporary nymphs in the pictures by Fuco Ueda. So it’s only appropriate that it’s our girls who do the questioning in the interview.

Enjoy the short but sweet interview (English and Japanese)!

The Endless Forest: ABIOGENESIS for the Red Girls

Nothing like a little party to end our anniversary celebration of The Path. And there is nothing like an ABIOGENESIS party in The Endless Forest! So please accept this last minute invitation to join us in the forest which has been shrouded in mist. Let’s bring some color back! If you don’t feel like running with the deer just open up the game and follow us in ABIOGENESIS Camera mode by hitting CTRL-W. It’ll be wild! We’ll probably crash the server! But it’s not a TEF party till SOMEONE crashes the server!

Download The Endless Forest for free here!

The Path Anniversary: last days of sale

The Path is 1

Our celebration of the one year anniversary of The Path ends tomorrow. Until then, you can still buy all of our titles at half the price.

The limited Anniversary Edition USB drive will remain available after the sale. Until they’re sold out.

The Path Soundtrack is coming in April

The life of a working musician is even busier and crazier than that of a game developer! (^_^)
Jarboe and Kris Force have been working on extended versions of songs that they made for The Path off and on for a year. All the while Jarboe has been touring practically non-stop and Kris has been balancing sound design for commercial productions and playing in her band and other collaborations.

All their work and all your waiting will pay off next month when the waiting will be -over! We are finalizing things so we don’t want to say too much… BUT What we can say is that The Path original soundtrack album will be published by UK label Paradigms Recordings in April 2010. There will be a specially packaged CD and t-shirt to be had. And we will figure out the best way to sell the album digitally, because we know a lot of you want that.

The tracks are named after the Wolves. This will not be your typical game soundtrack album. And it will blow your mind + possibly your speakers.
Needless to say, more details coming soon!

Interview with Ray Caesar

Ray Caesar: Blessed

When creating the art style for The Path, we were influenced by several wonderful artists. We are trying to interview them all. Our interview with Lisa Falzon was published a while ago. And the interview with Ray Caesar was done in that same period. But we never got around to publishing it. What better moment than the first anniversary of The Path to share this very insightful and inspiring interview with one of the world’s most imaginative contemporary artists!

People think I paint pictures of children… I don’t! I paint pictures of the human soul… that alluring image of the hidden part of ourselves… some call them ghosts or spirits but I see them as the image of who we truly are, made manifest with all the objects and bruises that filled the story of each life.

I look at the game industry today and see only one game… it starts the same and ends the same and it’s sold in a variety of names and packages and has no mystery because it is not utilizing creativity as well as it could…

Enjoy the interview!

The Path Anniversary: postmortem 5: conclusion

The final chapter of our postmortem of The Path evaluates the very personal creative process and makes notes about lessons learned. It’s been quite the emotional roller-coaster for us to go over this immense production again. And there’s so many things that we haven’t even touched upon. But the text is long enough as it is. :) We feel older and wiser now. And stronger with experience. The Path is our most successful project to date. But that success came at a price. Six innocent girls found their end in the process -it was unavoidable. And grandmother is always sick.

Read the conclusion here.

The Path Anniversary: postmortem 3

The third chapter of our postmortem of The Path is about what we think went right and what we think went wrong during and after the production. Several items on the list are not so black or white, as they have positive and negative sides. Overall, releasing a game like The Path probably has a similar effect on its creators as giving birth on a mother: the baby is such a glorious thing that you forget -or trivialize- all the hardship and pain that preceded its existence. Still, it’s good to stop for a moment and evaluate the entire project, in the hope of avoiding mistakes in the future, and repeating successes.

Please read on.