“Exhaust” is ready for a test drive

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Two games in a week? mindful xp is releasing our second game this week, Exhaust. To not spoil anything, it’s a game where you drive a car.

Exhaust was an attempt to do a quick pivot and see how quickly we could make a meaningful game. We spent a day and a half on it and focused on a single interaction. So play it on our site or Kongregate and let us know what you think!

All three of us are now off to GDC next week. We’ll be hobnobbing with fellow game developers and hope to come back a little smarter and re-energized for a second half of game creation. Thanks to everyone and their support during the 1st half of this project! We’ll be back soon with more exciting stuff.

The Path Taken art and direction

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Hello everyone!

As mentioned The Path Taken was more of a prototype and not a finished game. We had a couple of concepts and mechanics in there and not all of them made the cut. I thought I’ll like to share some the art that didn’t (and some that did) make it through and talk a bit about our art direction.

So if it isn’t obvious Zelda played a big part in the visual style. We thought a dungeon crawler was a good genre to explore the feeling of regret and I looked at various Zelda games as a reference. However there are some design choices in the game that made a bit different. Let’s take a look at this process shot:

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“The Path Taken” released!

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mindful xp is releasing our 4th game, The Path Taken. Guide a young boy as he descends into his village’s temple as part of his coming-of-age.

First and foremost, we’d like to declare this as a prototype, and not a finished game as such. Ultimately we’re leaving it unfinished in order to move on to another project, since we feel that in order to execute fully on our original concept would take a much longer time than we’re comfortable with.

While The Path Taken may not be as meaningful or elegant as we’d have hoped for, it does include some of the things we were trying to go for in terms of making a meaningful experience. Please feel free to play and comment!

STATTMEDIA Game Contest – 3rd place!

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Our game R-evolution placed 3rd at the STATTMEDIA Game Contest! We mocked this up for a laugh:

Competition laurels are possibly one of the lamest forms of self-aggrandizement

As we mentioned before, R-evolution was a finalist in the 5 BUTTONS Competition being run by Experimental Gameplay Project. Because of that, we had the awesome opportunity to be displayed at the Stattbad Wedding gallery in Berlin for people to come play our game among all of the other finalists.

As reported to us by one of the organizers, R-evolution was played in three sessions during the night. R-evolution isn’t the most, uh, friendly of games, so the first and second times it was played the players couldn’t get to the end. 🙁 But, a daring group of friends wanted to try it out, and as the third time was the charm, they finished it to “an  amazing roaring clapping and yelling from the public.” So awesome!

We’d like to thank all of the organizers as well as congratulate everyone else who were shown or entered – it’s incredibly thrilling to have independent games exposed to the public-at-large – shows like the STATTMEDIA event, NYU Game Center’s No Quarter, and venues like Babycastles go a long way in showing people the wide range of non-commercial and non-industry games out there, and us here at mindful xp are super happy that we could be a part of it.

We should have some pictures from the event posted shortly, and also releasing R-evolution on the site, so stay tuned!

 

Meaning and moving on

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Last night we decided to put our 3rd game, Scott Told Himself, on developmental hiatus as we continue with different projects.

This was not an easy decision. A major component of our project with mindful xp is creating game after game in rapid succession. We’ve been working on Scott Told Himself for 10 days now. Typically we had hope to spend about a week per project, but with Scott we pushed ahead after our deadline hoping that one last major push would finish things up. Yet even with these late nights the game is still incomplete, a bunch of systems lacking any connective tissue.

With most projects it would make sense to release a prototype and move on. Especially with rapid prototyping not every game idea will work out and there are valuable lessons to be learned from every experience. With Scott Told Himself, there are a few lessons from its short development that we feel are important going forward.

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What a Quirky Post-itÂŽ Note Mural!

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Here at mindful xp we try and nurture the creative energies of our development teams as much as possible! They’re free to decorate their OpenCreativeGroupClusterSpaces™ however they want, because we want YOU, the best and brightest minds in the industry today to let loose the dogs of innovation, vision and energy that will be at the forefront of tomorrow’s games!

Are you pumped and passionate about creating the next gen entertainment experiences that gamers worldwide crave? Does being part of a fast-paced and constantly changing electronic frontier excite you? Do you like being able to bring your best four-legged friend to work? Do you love adrenaline-charged cinematic competitive military gun bonanzas/social games with cutting-edge, state-of-the-art monetization systems?  Apply today to mindful xp, we’ll pay for dinner!

 

JOB QUERY SEARCH RESULTS:

Unfortunately no positions are available at this time. Sorry!

Project 2: A game about romance and junk

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At mindful xp we don’t have the luxury of any significant downtime after each project. Prototyping a new game very week means our turnaround time needs to be pretty immediate. And so the night we finished wrapping up Connections we were already starting on our next project.

So here is a screenshot of our 3rd game. With Valentine’s Day coming up it occurred to us that creating a relevant game for the season could be a lot of fun. So we’re working on a game that’s about the small moments and awkwardness of being attracted to someone.

It’s all still very early, but here’s a screenshot for your eyes only.