Level up! My team has just won the MSC IP Creator’s Challenge pitch. We have been awarded a grant of RM 50,000 to create a game within 6 months, along with two other winning teams. That’s seriously the first time I received a freaking big cheque lol, size-wise and finance-wise.

More photos of the pitch are available at http://cmc.msc.com.my/event_detail.php?ID=242. Man I look so stupid in the first photo :S Thanks to Sora for the link!

The team celebrated in Chilis One Utama. You have no idea how hard it was to hide that cheque while walking towards the restaurant. Not something you wanna show to the crowd you know. Though after dinner, Nyin waved the cheque all over the place :S

(L – R)

My close sisters, Leeyean (Interface Designer) and Leenyin (Art Director). Nyin was the interface designer for Ballistic Wars (except the crappy main menu, done by yours truly :P). Yean is the artist for the upcoming Puzzerella Pizza game, which is coming out… uhh, soon *sweat*

Beside them is one cool guy.

Daim (Character Designer) couldn’t make it for obvious reasons, so we connected to his hologram projection unit in Tokyo. He created those ball-ish characters in Ballistic Wars.

The one showing the thumbs up in style is Aidi (3D Modeler and Animator). He has the word “future” written all over. He also created the enemy ships in The Last Canopy.

And Adrian (Lead Programmer) is new to the team, so everyone say hi! He’s my good friend whom I’ve known since college days. And he just continued WoW! Hooray!

Let’s talk a little about the game. No Straight Roads is an arcade shooter that was inspired by arcade titles such as Rail Chase and House of the Dead. Basically we will spoon-feed the action for you. We’ll change the camera angle and add rich visual narrative to the playing experience.

All you do is just move the mouse to shoot and drive. You only do one of the two at any given time. No matter how intense the action or point-of-view is, you just need to use your mouse to shoot and drive. That’s what makes the game casual enough for everyone to play.

The game is also inspired by Gurren Lagann and Speed Racer. In other words, it’s gonna be an AWESOME experience. The car is gonna skid on the walls, its movements are clumsy and we will have crazy boss battles that needs your wit to defeat them.

No Straight Roads will be in 3D, with the characters being 2D (billboard images in 3D space). It will be downloadable on the PC. I have a partnership link with a New York-based publisher at the moment, so I will use that to propose this game as a console downloadable as well, on PSN, XBLA or WiiWare.

The screenshot above is done by Leenyin. She did a great job compiling everyone’s work to create such a vibrant and exciting scene.

The story is set in a future post-apocalyptic world where an evil company reigns to take advantage of the situation. They are called Straight Roads Inc. Hence the game name.

Ayola (the girl on the right) is part of the rebel force (hmmmm this is starting to sound familiar…) that opposes the company. One day, she fought them on her bike, but lost completely. Trying to run away, she hailed a taxi that belonged to Marty (the guy on the left). Reluctantly, he let her in, and drove the taxi out of the city. The game starts here!

Of course, Daim did the character designs, which are excellent as usual :)

And this is the futuristic taxi that Aidi built. His sense of how the future looks like never fails to amaze me, and he has put a lot of thoughts to come up with such a sleek-looking car. Kudos!

I still haven’t figured a name for the car yet. Anyone have any ideas?

And this is the logo of No Straight Roads, done again by expert visualizer Nyin.

Nyin has also done an amazing job with the pitch document, taking everyone’s drawings and my writing, then montaging them nicely into a great page layout. This is a one-page preview of the pitch document, and no doubt it has helped a lot to win the hearts of the judges.

So yea that’s the game. I couldn’t have done it without this team chock full of talent and dedication. Ah to be surrounded by geniuses, I’m so blessed. :) Thank you so much, team! We have finally done it, though the true work starts now! Korekara mo yoroshiku onegai shimasu. (I shall depend on you guys even from now.)

Oh speaking of which, Daim with a beanie reminds me of a game character…

You know what makes a game designer really happy? It’s when you have fans posting up video walkthroughs of your game on YouTube!

I dunno who this Pseani is, but damn s/he’s good! Even though I know the game in and out, s/he’s so much better than me! On the hardest mode (You’re nuts mode), Pseani could make it through the first 3 levels with 14 lives left :O The fairy was hit only once! Nuts!

I don’t think I ever won You’re Nuts mode before, kakakaka. Yup, I can’t beat my own game :P

Because of the 10 minute limit, Pseani posted 4 videos for the Hard mode walkthrough, and another 4 for You’re Nuts. Here’s the video of the last level in the hardest mode:

Walkthrough of Final Stage (You’re Nuts mode)

Whoever you are, Pseani, thanks for posting the awesome vid. You got some mad skillz there!

If you don’t even have a fraction of Pseani’s skill, how about hacking it instead? I dunno what software is used, but your life could be reset to 999! Look at the vid below.

Hacking The Last Canopy

And on a related note, The Last Canopy is chosen as the Friday game of the Buried Treasure week on Kongregate. Get over there and earn some badges while you’re at it! The comments there are interesting to read too, coz it’s obvious that they either love it or hate it. It’s hard to strike a balance when the casual community is massive. Go to http://www.kongregate.com/games/ahbonk/the-last-canopy.

Big congrats to Jayisgames.com for being featured in G4TV’s Attack of the Show. In case you didn’t know, G4TV is a TV cable channel in the US dedicated to video game lifestyle.

Great effort has been put in by Jay and team to feature a whole array of casual games reviews and to nourish the casual game community. All that hard work has been paid off.

As Jay likes to put it, Wooty tooty! \o/

And to ride in on their glamour, short footages of The Last Canopy were shown before they talked about the site. Yay! It’s a bit here and there, but I’m still very happy =) Here’s the video:

Congrats to Jay and team, and The Last Canopy team as well!

Woohoo, featured twice in a month!

The team has been featured in The Star, and now we’re also in GameAxis magazine June edition. Super thanks to sub-editor Lim Kuan Keat for writing an awesome three-page spread!

You know what the title reminds me of? Nacho Libre. “Take it eeeeaaaaaasssssyyyyy”, with the signature Jack Black teeth-grit lips.

I just realized that I have such a fake smile in the photos =_= I’m so not photogenic. The whole team looks good though. It even has Dzaid’s progressive fairy drawings, Daim’s character designs and Aidi’s ship designs as part of the layout. Speaking of which, Daim, wish you were in these photos too :(

And the last page even features the designs for the upcoming two games: a detective point-and-click game, designed by Chen Li (*ahem* where are my room drawings?! keke…); and a match-3 puzzle game, designed by my two great sisters Nyin and Yean.

I blurred out the text to encourage you to buy the mag, of course! It’s only 7 bucks, and it’s packed with glossy colorful goodness, rich with features, game reviews and coverage of the local scene. Go get it!

Away with the bad news, and on to some good news!

My team and I were featured in The Star In-Tech section today! My god, was I so shocked to see my big, hideous face across the whole section cover.

Sorry ah, my scanner quite small!

Thanks to Madhavan for the awesome article, very well-written! And also thanks to my close buddies Nyin, Yean, Aidi and Dzaid for making it to the photography session. Wish you were in there too, Daim :(

Full story available online @ The Star Online (click here).

You can pre-arrange an autograph session with the team, but only if our busy schedule allows ;) Book early!

“A good shoot’em-up is like a symphony. The enemies are the musicians, the bullets the notes. And the player is the soloist at center stage, riffing a melody over the chaos, flirting with death, performing miracles. Wan Hazmer is the conductor, who must have a deep understanding of the rhythms that bind everything together.

And The Last Canopy is just awesome.”

Click here to read the rest of JayisGames’ awesome review!

In a rather surprising turn of events, Kunal Joshi of the Jayisgames community mentioned about Penny Arcade speaking highly of Ballistic Wars! Yes, it’s THAT Penny Arcade, the super popular video game web comic.

Here’s the original article: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2008/02/25/

The article was published a month back though, and I didn’t know anything about it!

Yea the guy has a point, how come I didn’t propose it to be retailed instead? Now I’m quite motivated to come up with the actual proposal. Its sequel (!) is gonna come out soon, so watch out for it.

If you dunno anything about Ballistic Wars, it was the first official creation I made under my company Easy Only! Games, together with Daim and Nyin. You can still play the game! Click here to hit some balls.

If you are into video games and you dunno Penny Arcade, shame on you.

Oh wow, I’m still in a huge state of disbelief :o

Was very anxious about the result last night, so I didn’t sleep well at all! Then at 12 noon today, the voting closed and the page refreshing began! *refresh* *refresh* Keep refreshing for 3 whole hours! No announcements =_= Then I gave up, and went to the Registry Office to get my birth cert. Then Dzaid texted me…

“Have you seen it?”

Man, my heart skipped a beat! I called him and he told me the great news :D

I still can’t believe it, but yes, The Last Canopy won FIRST PLACE in the Jayis Game Design Competition #5! Thanks to your votes, it has also won the audience award for having the highest amount of votes! w00t!!! \^o^/

Here’s the competition result page: http://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/04/cgdc5_results.php

The game would be nothing without all of you playing the game, so really big thanks for enjoying the game. And super duper thanks to those who voted! The donation shall be used to buy a PS3 create more games in the future!

In fact, three games are already in the pipeline. To give you some hints, the games will be about pizza, knight rider and wayang kulit! Keywords, keywords…

Of course, without my cousins, The Last Canopy would be about a box shooting a bunch of boxes, and that would be so uncool. Aidi, Dzaid – this is our win!!!

EDIT: Whoa, looks like we’re not the only ones celebrating!

Out of 1,300 or more fan submissions, only 163 were chosen to be included in Udon’s Street Fighter Tribute Artwork, and Daim’s artwork is one of them! I have seen him draw SF tributes since the beginning of time, so he truly deserves this honour.

Btw, Udon here is not only that noodle thingy k, they’re the official comic artists licensed by Capcom! Congrats dude! A round of applause for Daim! You can check out his BLOG: http://www.daimation.com.

Go Spytech! (personal joke, feel free to ignore)