Stolen Notebook

The Winter Milestone is evolving quickly. We’ve been kicking around ideas, prototyping and refining gameplay mechanics, and developing the overall theme of the game. The majority of the game mechanics are decided and tested. Now we’re focusing on the style of the game.

Denrei has been creating a lot of concept art at these early stages of development. Here’s one of his stage concepts. Who are those dark silhouettes in the tall grass?  Answers to come.

Winter got you down? Perk up! Stolen Notebook is readying a new milestone just for you!

This milestone’s theme is arcade style action and strategy. Think Bubble Bobble, Buster Brothers and the like.

The great thing about these games is that they are simple to pick up and play while offering a surprising amount of depth. We’ve come up with a game idea that is easy to get into but with enough depth to let the player use the simple game mechanics strategically. We are specifically targeting the round or level based simultaneous two player style of these games that makes them games so competitive. Nonsensical story to be included.

Expect the flourishes of the arcade game on your home PC. Expect Radiance.

Stolen Notebook will be attending the next IGDA Madison meeting on November 21st at The Casbah. The meeting features a keynote by Alex Seropian, founder of Bungie and Wideload.

Stolen Notebook will see you there!

The IGDA has started up a Madison Chapter. The first meeting will be held on September 28th. More information is available on the Madison IGDA website.

Needless to say Stolen Notebook will be attending. See you there.

A video of Pub Crawl is now available! The streaming version is available below. A high quality Xvid version is available here.

The video features the music of James Whitman who has been making a lot of great music for us. Expect more videos and great music in the future.

After enjoying a playable version of PubCrawl for a little over 2 weeks, we’re finally comfortable in our new headquarters and are ready to release. The goal for this playable milestone was to create a simple environment which would test our new Maya driven script node system. The system has proven itself to be extremely powerful and extensible. We ended up being able to achieve far more complexity than initially expected.

While the world of PubCrawl is a first step toward what Outland Inc will become, we hope you will find the gameplay to be fondly inspired by DOS era adventure games.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

Download PubCrawl Now!

A video of PubCrawl is avaialble here.

View the PubCrawl gallery

Pub Crawl was feature complete Sunday. However, it was decided to delay it’s release. This weekend Stolen Notebook will relocate to it’s new penthouse apartment/offices at 210 N Charter. There will be some down time while we move in. We decided to spend our remaining time expanding Pub Crawl instead of starting a new milestone as we pack up and move in.

EDIT:

Check out the most recent pictures in the SN Gallery!

The next milestone is scheduled for completion Sunday. This milestone will focus on scripting. The goal is to allow users to define script information in Maya and have it export to the game. The result of this milestone will be a pub with many scripted events and interactive objects.

In just over 24 hours we have taken a game from whiteboard to computer screen. Our goal was to test the usability of our in-development engine and tools. The result is CrossBlast: Struggle of a Lifetime, a fast paced and deadly futuristic game of high-stakes goal making. Included in the release are the tools used to create the game. A theme song, created by Matt Hammer, is also available (play it on loop in your favorite media player). Try out the game and tools and let us know what you think.

Download CrossBlast and Tools (Endurance Edition)
Download CrossBlast Theme Song
Download SNtools

Check out each team members’ thoughts on this release.

Chris — Engine / Tools
Denrei — Art
Gavin — Business
Tony — Game Code

View CrossBlast Gallery

The Final Hours of CrossBlast

Like any game development company our deadline has slipped. But we are not dragging our feet! At our release meeting we decided to spend a few extra days to develop a small, simple game using the features we have completed. It will certainly be more interesting and entertaining than our previous plan: a number of spheres and boxes that can be pushed around.

So, what is this game? It’s a secret. You’ll have to wait until it is released later this week. For now, here’s a photo of it in development.