Help us out and become a tester for Dreambear’s closed beta. We got 500 spots available so hurry up and register at www.dreambear.nl.

This year, at the Festival of Games,we will be unveiling our very own social game for children age 6 and up called ‘Dreambear‘. It’s been a long road and we’re very happy that we can start with the closed beta testing in a couple of weeks. Speaking of the closed-beta, two lovely ladies will be handing out these cards at the Festival of Games:

In a way it’s quite funny that prince Growl is asking the players for help. He’s the brother of the king and the main baddie of Dreambear. But since he’s one of our favorite characters he made it onto the Dreambear beta-key card.

After two days of visiting companies and lectures I was ready for some meetings of my own. When I arrived at the Holland Pavillion around 11 o’ clock (had a meeting outside of Moscone Center) it was already pretty busy. The rest of the pavillion looked great, it even got the nice Dreambear poster on the side wall.

After the Dutch Business Breakfast our tourbus did a quick stop at twinpeaks, so we could enjoy the view of San Francisco.

Our first stop was at the headquarters of EA in Redwood. It’s a massive campus which houses around 1400 EA employees. At the entrance we were welcomed by Dante (from the upcoming game ‘Dante’s Inferno’.

The visit at EA was great. We got to see presentations from Bryan Neider (CFO EA) and Jonathan Knight (Creative director and executive producer Dante’s Inferno).

After our visit to EA we went back to San Francisco to visit Plug & Play, an incubator and housing facilities for startup companies.

Since we joined the dutch trade mission to the GDC, our first to days were visits to a couple of companies in Sillicon Valley. Our first stop was the Ex’pression college, a very cool school that thaught you to become a digital artist or sound engineer. After visiting Ex’pression college we went  to the Dutch embassy where we had several lectures from (mostly) Dutch entrepreneurs about starting our company in the US. Very interesting stuff from the guys at Hippo and Zecco.

The new location of the Dutch Support Office (part of the Dutch Embassy that helps Dutch companies settle in the US) was amazing. Located on the 31th floor, the view was incredible. Our tax euro’s hard at work! (but in a good way hehe).

A the end of the day there was a fancy party at the embassy celebrating their new office in San Francisco. We all got an invitation but they almost didn’t let me in since I wasn’t wearing a jacket (I was rocking a polo, jeans and a 14 day old beard). Since I was yelling ‘I know Peter Laanen, I know Peter Laanen’ (the bold guy on the photo), they let me in anyway (unlike al the other badly dressedgame developers who had to stay downstairs haha).

To make a long story short: Missed my plane to the GDC due to the damn snow, traffic and morons causing all kinds of accidents of the highway. Thanks to a very helpful lady from the KLM I got re-booked to a flight from Delta airlines to Detroit (and from Detroit to San Francisco).

The plane from Delta airlines was brand new and had a nifty personal entertainment system. They even had Susane Boyle in the music section (hurray! lucky me).

I travel 8.5 hours to detroit and what do I see when looking out of the window: my old enemy ’snow’.

Rookie mistake: Never order a ‘large’ coke in the states, so matter how thirsty you are. Because when you do you’ll get this beast. I looked liked a fool crossing the street back to my hotel with this baby in my hand. I arrived around 11 o’ clock in my hotel, 25 hours after my trip first started in Arnhem (ouch).

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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