Crazy Monkey Studios recently started the production of a game based on a prototype by PreviewLabs.

The game, still unannounced, is mentioned as ‘Undisclosed color puzzle game’ on our projects page and is being developed for the iPhone platform.

Steven Verbeek, Director and Founder of Crazy Monkey Studios stated:

We’ve successfully used the prototype to pitch the project to publishers at the Gamescom event. Now that we know there’s enough publisher interest, we started the development.

The prototype was made in no time and made it really easy to make the publishers realize the coolness of our game concept.

We wish Crazy Monkey Studios good luck with this game!

Last few weeks have been extremely busy, finishing several prototypes for companies that are going to to pitch their game ideas at next week’s Game Developers Conference Europe and gamescom events.

PreviewLabs will be present at these major game industry events from 16-20 August.
If you’re interested in meeting us and finding out how our services can help your company, feel free to contact us!

June 3-4, we attended the Festival of Games in Utrecht, the Netherlands. This event was a good opportunity to talk to other people in the game industry and spread the word about our rapid prototyping services. A big part of the Dutch game industry was present, as well as companies from all over the world. Once again, we met a lot of talented people, of which many understand the necessity of doing more rapid prototyping.

No proper video game conference without a party! This time, the place to be was ‘club monza‘, a fancy club in the center of Utrecht. After a day full of meetings and talking, it can be a great to shut up and dance…

There is a nice article about game prototyping on casualgamedesign.com. William explains briefly one of the reasons of prototyping and gives an overview of what it is all about:

Coming up with an original idea for a game can be hard enough, but how do you know if your idea will actually work? Of course, you could just trust your own design skills and start implementing the game. That’s not an approach I’d recommend, though. No matter how good and experienced you are at game design, an idea can always turn out different than you think and it would be a shame if you found that out when you’re already halfway through development.

[Read the full article]

It is always great to see one of my idols explaining some of their success stories. Catmull appeared at the 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. One thing he told was:

We had a review process that was actually a combination of some things that Jonda learned from Disney, along with tinges that were at ILM at Lucas Film. But is was unique because of that combination.

But what it amounted to was that, in the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now, this is counterintuitive for a lot of people. Most people – if you can imagine this – you can’t draw very well, but even if you can draw very well, suppose you come in, and you’ve got to put together animation or drawings and show it to a famous, world-class animator. Well, you don’t want to show something which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right. And the trick is, actually, to stop that behavior. We show it every day when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it does it every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative. And that’s – as I say – it’s not obvious to people, but starting down that path helped everything that we did.”

This is exactly what is happening in the game industry too. A lot of game developers keep on polishing a title before showing it off. Often this results in a nice looking game with a lack of gameplay… This is why rapid prototyping is so important. You have to figure out as soon as possible if the game has potential!

The event in Hamburg was great. We’ve met a lot of nice people who liked the concept of rapid prototyping in the game development process. Mostly people with a lot of experience in producing games recognized the problems caused by underestimating the value of rapid game prototyping… Hopefully we’ll add some new clients to our portfolio.

Of course there where also some nice parties. Like this one in club HALO.

Next week the European Casual Connect will take place in Hamburg. We will be there from Wednesday till Friday noon. If you come over, don’t hesitate to contact us…

You can check out our game in your web browser or download the build from the Global Game Jam website.

For those who understand Dutch, you can see a total fake movie about the Belgian Global Gam Jam 2010. Most of the video is set up and is not real. The guy even hadn’t enough pizza for all of us… But it is still cool to see yourself on screen.

Pizza delivery op de Global Game Jam from Gazet van Antwerpen on Vimeo.