We are incredibly excited and honored to announce that The Counting Kingdom took home the overall Grand Prize and the Serious Game Prototype category awards at the third annual MassDiGI Game Challenge!  The weekend was a whirlwind of mentoring sessions, pitching, and swapping tales with other game developers.  This year there was a total of fourty-five teams, including both indie developers and students from around the Northeast.  With a judging panel of industry veterans and a packed house of game developers, the event showcases the growing games industry in the Boston area.

The competition was stiff but at the end of it all we got to bring home two shiny trophies!  This is the first time that a serious or educational game has won the Grand Prize, making the whole weekend extra special for us.  A huge thank you to all of the judges, and to MassDiGI for hosting such a great event and its ongoing support of game development in the region!

I got to chat with John and Landon over at Big Sushi about Disco Dodgeball: http://www.bigsushi.fm/episode-136-erik-asmussen-robot-roller-derby-disco-dodgeball/ I talked about the game’s inspiration, the magic of googly eyes, and my future plans for the game.

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. 

IGC members Owlchemy Labs had quite the month! They had this to say about their latest project, Dyscourse:

We’re happy to announce that our Kickstarter for Dyscourse is successful!!

We thank you, our fans and supporters, for believing in us! Throughout the past month a lot of very cool stuff has happened and we thought we should break it down for everyone:

The CEO of Unity, David Helgason, gave Owlchemy this amazing shout-out!

He also has this stylin new Twitter icon!

We announced an awesome additional bonus story called the ‘Indie Plane Crash!’, starring a cast of intrepid indie developers who may find their game development skills to be a bit ‘useless’ on a desert island!

We’ve put together a mini-documentary on what makes Owlchemy Labs feel super Owlchemy-ey (yes, that’s now a word)!

We also announced that we’ll be continuing in this vein by creating a behind-the-scenes documentary of the development of Dyscourse thanks to our pal Alex Smith!

We also had some really great praise on Dyscourse!

• “What a good art style, and what a good concept too.” – Rock, Paper, Shotgun
• “The game has a bright art style, funny characters, and numerous, vastly different endings.” – GameInformer
• “The style and quality of the visuals are top notch!” – IndieStatik
• “Dyscourse is Owlchemy Labs’ most ambitious project to date” – Joystiq
• “This game looks amazing, and dialogue/storytelling is something that’s a very big deal to me” – NerdyButFlirty

Also, a super minor thing…

Now that we have all your monies, we’re going to party it up really buckle down and continue cranking on Dyscourse! We couldn’t have done it without you all and we’re so excited to show you how amazing this game can be.

-Owlchemy Labs

“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/