Two days before the GDC starts and I got one hell of a cold. Maybe it’s better this way, at least now I got a couple of days to shrug it off (thanks Rodi for the vitamine C boost drink). But back to the topic at hand, tomorrow I’m flying to San Francisco for the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC). Got loads of meetings planned, so it will be an interesting week for sure. WEBER is part of the Holland Pavilion, our booth looks crazy (but in a good way ). There’s a Starbucks right next to my hotel, so that means Strawberry Frappocino at 4 in the morning!

Roderick was kind enough so send me the outtakes of a little video we shot just before I went to Hamburg for the Casual Connect. Won’t tell you yet what it was for, but as you can see we had a lot of fun. ‘Awareness test, did you spot the dancing monkey in the back?’

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I’m sorry…but this is too much, even for me. But I’ll bet Jason the Nintendo geek at our studio would wear this, it’s Mario after all! If you want to see more (or actually make your own if you’re skilled enough) go here.

Been working on the last boss of Arctic Heroes (prepping for the animation crew) and I just wanted to share how awesome the game is turning out to be. The final boss is a giant robot with a holographic skull. If you shoot it enough (and manage to stay alive) his chest will explode and your true enemy (yes, it’s an evil penguin) will be visible. After defeating his robot exo-skeleton the evil mastermind will fire up his jetpack in stage 3 and start  firing his dual blasters at you. Arctic Heroes will be totally over the top

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Since our current website is almost three years old, it was time for something new. We’ve grown alot in those three years and we wanted our website to reflect that. The new website will be bigger, stronger and faster (wait, that sounds like a cheesy movie subtitle ) Anyway, you can expect the launch of our new website at the end of the month (and hopefully before Mass Effect 2 will hit the streets hehe).

Yes, after neglecting my blog for almost 2 months (hey, been really busy with a couple of online campagnes during november and december of last year) my first post of 2010 will be about….a Lego MMO Good thing I didn’t have this game when I was a kid, since it took me the better part of 5 years to finally stop playing Warcraft. More at http://universe.lego.com.

Hurray! Our first iphone/ipod touch game is available for purchase on itunes! Junglestew is a fast paced action game that takes the classic ‘Whack-a-Mole’ gameplay to a new level. And it’s cheap too, only 79 eurocents If the damn thing sells well we’re gonna make a sequel named: ‘Junglestew 2: Revenge of the Livingstone‘, where you can play as Dr.Livingstone instead of the canibal you’re playing in the first game. But let’s not get ahead of ourselfs hehe…

Want to know more? Click here for the Junglestew website.

Today a delivery truck stopped by our office and gave us this delicious apple-pie. I was a bit puzzled at first, but when we saw the sign on the pie (meaning ‘Polish Applepie’), we knew it was from a client for who we just released a game in Poland. Thanks Ivo!

This friday and saturday Tom and me gave a workshop about the artwork of Dreambear at the GameXperience in Hilversum (Beeld&Geluid). After a brief introduction about our company, Dreambear and the Dreambear trailer, people got to see Tom in action with his Wacom Cintiq. In the final part of the workshop we introduced a little contest for the children: they could design their own Dreambear character! The most inspirational design would actually make it into the final game. We got a lot of cool designs so it will be hard for us to make the final choice. The children that didn’t want to draw on paper could check out the Cintiq (which turned out to be a big crowd pleaser). Some of the kids couldn’t reach the tablet, but that didn’t stop ‘em .

Both sessions were great fun and I would like to thank the people at the GameXperience (especially Vlad Micu) for making it happen.

Here’s the new poster for our upcoming casual MMO game ‘Dreambear’ (aimed at children age 6 and up, due to arrive Q1 2010). I absolutely love it! Some people at the studio saw that King Wulong (the big panda with the golden crown) looked a bit like ‘Paul de Leeuw‘, and we fantasized a little bit about getting him to voice to king for the final game. The development budget of the game will most likely take a huge hit if we do hire him, so at the moment that’s probably not a good idea hehe.