Alex of Owlchemy Labs announced a launch date of March 25th for Dyscourse during the Indie Megabooth Twitch stream at PAX South!
The Twitch Stream from PAX South was the first time that Dyscourse has ever been streamed live. You can check out a recording of the stream HERE.
Saam Pahlavan of The Loading Screen Podcast interviewed Alex about Owlchemy Labs, chopping wood, Kickstarter, and Dyscourse!
Link to the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/loadingscreenpodcast/loadingscreenpodcast-16-alex-schwartz
Both Jack Lumber and Snuggle Truck now have Steam Trading Cards, Badges, and Emotes! For those of you who are into that kinda thing, you should check em out!
To celebrate, both games are 50% off this week! Check out Jack Lumber and Snuggle Truck on Steam today!
The IGC showcased some of our projects at Boston FIG this weekend! It was a fun event that got us all a lot of great feedback.
In the Tabletop games section, Michael Carriere showed Pleasant Dreams, a card game by Aerjen Games and Zapdot, Inc. It’s a fast and tactical two-player game, where you prevent your dreams from turning into nightmares! You can check out the game here.
Legends of Beforia was also shown off at the Tabletop games section. This simple storytelling card game was created by Patrick Rodriguez of Patchwork Games, and Carrie Witt of Owlchemy Labs has been working with him to create the illustrations for it! It’s a playful game that has players create their own myths based on templates and cards they draw, replicating the evolution of oral storytelling. You can read more about the game here.
In the Digital games section, Jenna showed off a demo of The Counting Kingdom for the very first time! Jenna crafted all kinds of wizard goodies to hand out, like super awesome wizard wands. Judging from the smiles on everyone’s face, this game really is something special! You can check out the game here.
Owlchemy recently hosted an event in Boston called the Boston VR Bender — a week-long series of 3 events starting off with a weekend VR game jam, and ending with a VR drinking night at the Mead Hall in Cambridge. Unity did a post on their blog all about the event, so instead of paraphrasing, I thought I’d quote some of Pete Moss’ words, who was a huge help at the event!
From: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/02/vr-game-jam-in-boston/
Date: July 2nd, 2014
Over the last days of May and into early June, over 50 people from in and around the Boston game community gathered together for a VR game jam. The event was organized by Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs in conjunction with devs who saw VR demos back at Steam Dev Days and wanted to do a VR Jam. So Valve and Unity went out to help. The purpose of the jam was to expose developers to positional tracking and low persistence.
To enable this, Valve brought along some prototype headsets with positional tracking using desktop IR cameras. A couple of us from Unity went along to provide support and witness the creativity of the community first hand. The event gave us all a chance to test the excellent new SteamVR Unity plugin being developed at Valve.
The participants split up into teams, some with just a couple of folks, others with full teams comprising programmers, artists and designers. There was only one rule – teams had to hit 95 frames per second (the refresh rate of the Valve prototype hardware).
Here’s a video of one of the VR games created during the jam! Carrie teamed up with Robot Loves Kitty to create this wacky game where you act as a pilot of a toy robot destroying / building a toy city.
Thanks again to Unity, Valve, and everyone who participated! It was a KILLER event!
Alex and Devin at Owlchemy recently gave a talk at Steam Dev Days called “Wild West of VR – Discovering the Rules of Oculus Rift”.
Through developing Aaaaacuus!, one of the first commercially available Oculus Rift games, the team at Owlchemy Labs has come to realize that 2013/2014 is truly the Wild West of VR development. In this talk, Alex and Devin cover the many revelations we’ve had during development, such the importance of respecting the player’s head direction, reduction of motion sickness, the complete reversal of UI and HUD paradigms, the introduction of developer fatigue, and realizations about subtle visual cues and the sensitivity of the inner ear.
You can watch the full talk on youtube here.
Carrie Witt of Owlchemy Labs and Eric Asmussen of 82 Apps just participated in the Supershow Collective Marathon! As quoted from the official page, “The Supershow Collective Marathon is a 48+ hour event that showcases over 60 indie games and their developers. Tons of gameplay, special guests, Q&A’s, giveaways, sneak peaks, cake, and more!”
Eric participated in Greenlit Gaming’s “Indie Showcase”, and showed off Disco Dodgeball to the masses.
Carrie participated in Robot Loves Kitty’s “Indie Dev Supershow”, and did a live-drawing and a Q&A session about Dyscourse!
The Marathon was a great event, and gave us a chance to interact and have fun with fans and new friends alike from all over the internet.
You can read more about the event here: http://robotloveskitty.com/supershow/
PC Gamer recently posted a collection of what they’re calling “The Best PC Games of 2014”. The Indie Game Collective had three games by our studios featured on the Adventure Games section! Pretty impressive, right? The article features Dyscourse by Owlchemy Labs, Captain Astronaut’s Last Hurrah by PopCannibal, and Elegy for a Dead World by Dejobaan and PopCannibal.
Check out the nice things they had to say about us here.
“What a good art style, and what a good concept too.” I couldn’t have said it better myself! Alec Meer at RPS recently wrote up a lovely piece on Dyscourse and our Kickstarter.
Check out the full article here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/11/06/lost-with-a-plot-owlchemys-dyscourse/