The Cartrdge Blog
Month
With Halloween behind us, it’s time for the November Challenge! For this months theme we’ve chosen ‘Animated Voxels.’ The inspiration for the theme came from two sources:
So for this contest, your task will be to design a scene using voxel art, and then animate it. You are more than free to use any software you’d like for the art as well as the animation; Qubicle, Hexels, Maya, C4D - it’s your choice! For those of you just getting started, MV does provide a nice option for beginners to jump in and start voxel arting (and now animating as well).
We can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with!
For monthly challenges, judging is determined via community vote
1st Place
2nd Place
3rd Place
The Space in the Fall contest has officially wrapped up! A big thank you to all our participants; we’re a still growing and plucky community, so we had a small number of entries - but the creations from each of our five participants are gorgeous!
And with that it’s time to vote; the poll is below. Please choose your 3 favorite creations, in no particular order (four of the five entries have the same name, so make sure to choose the right ones :). You have a week to vote; the poll will close Thursday 11/3 at 11:59pm EST.
Here are each of the five entries, which you can also view here
Space in the Fall, by Joyce Plokker
Artifact site, by Callum Harwood
Space in the Fall, by Brunna Giovanna
Space in the Fall (a video of an actual demo level they made!), by Stevie Cole and James Feakins
Space in the Fall (also a cool video of the scene!), by Justine Raymond
Screenshots from top left: Campo Santo, Trudi Castle, Orsi Spanyol, Gurmukh Bhasin
As the leaves change color and the air becomes crisp, as you don your favorite cardigan while sipping a pumpkin spiced lat…alright alright, we’re done with the fall clichés. But it’s true that this incredibly festive season has arrived, and with it the Cartrdge October challenge!** **
This is the beginning of monthly challenges on the site, and we wanted to kick things off by celebrating this awesome time of year. And so we present you with this autumnal theme: Space in the Fall!
As the name suggests, you’ll be imagining what fall might be like in space, and using that to design a part of a level. Let your imaginations run wild on this one; it could mean designing “fall-looking” spaceships, thinking about what the season would be like on another planet, or what the void itself might be like if it experienced seasons. Feel free to use whatever art style you’d like, and to team up with as many people as you want.
A quick note; moving forward, the first place winner of each monthly contest will have their entry featured on our home-page banner!
For monthly challenges, judging will be determined via community vote
1st Place
2nd Place
3rd Place
In anticipation of some major feature releases over the next few months, we’ve just made a really cool improvement with the addition of autocomplete tags. Check out the video below:
As you can see, the autocomplete triggers after you’ve typed in two letters. It will suggest up to the five most used terms based on those letters, in descending order of most-to-least used. Autocomplete has been built into post, project and user-profile skill tags.
Tagging your posts and projects, as well as adding skill tags on your profile page, is already important and useful. But this will become even more apparent with the upcoming features we have planned. Stay tuned!
You may have noticed that when adding a new post to a project from the Create a Post form, you’ve needed to input the various bits of information each time. No longer! As you can see in the video below, we’ve massively improved data inheritance for this functionality.
Moving forward, when creating a new post and adding it to a project, the Controls, Platforms, Genres and Engine information will all get inherited from the project automatically. We’ve heard from a lot of you that this is functionality you want, and we’re pleased to finally have it in your hands. Enjoy!
The Art and Animation contest was our first ever event, and a fantastic way to kick things off! There were a wide variety of entries, each celebrating in their own way the important roles that both art and animation play in video games. You can check out all the awesome entries here!
The submissions were judged by our fantastic and diverse panel; Orsi Spanyol, Glauber Kotaki, James Benson and Jobye-Kyle Karmaker. We also want to say a big thanks to our sponsors, SideFX, Allegorithmic and Sketchfab.
Alrighty, it’s time to meet our winners!
Climb, an entry by teammates Sarah Doyle and Callum Harwood, was fueled by their love for classic RPG’s, adventure games and platformers, 2D Zelda and Final Fantasy meets 16-bit Mario and Sonic!
The adorable Eggbot is the product of teammates Trudi Castle and Cristian Villalobos. Trudi started things off with the art, with Cristian then taking over to animate it!
A solo effort from Kathy Diaz, this concept character named Kira is shown in an awesome “fighter” idling position, ready to strike. Congrats Kathy!
Thanks again to everyone who participated! This contest was the first of many, and we’re already planning our next fun event. Until then!
Welcome to the first ever Cartrdge contest! To kick things off, we wanted to celebrate the collaborative and diverse nature of video games with something that encourages teamwork.
And so we present to you the Art & Animation contest! For this challenge, each submission will be an entry that displays your skills in - you guessed it - art and animation! We chose this theme because of the important role that both of these things play in a video game, and even more so to encourage collaboration and engagement in the community. We know that many of you can do one but not the other, and so we very much encourage you to team up for this contest!
For some of you that’ll mean getting to work with your specialty, but for others we want to encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and try something new. We also know that there are many of you that can do both art as well as animation, and so while team-based entries are encouraged, you can enter solo if you’d like to.
If you want to participate and need a partner but are having trouble finding someone, we started a Slack channel for everyone to chat in during the contest. If you’d like to join it just fill out this Google form and we’ll send over an invite.
We have some fantastic prizes for you, including licenses to software from our awesome sponsors Allegorithmic, SideFX and Sketchfab!
1st Place (per teammate, max of two)
2nd Place (per teammate, max of two)
3rd Place (per teammate, max of two)
Criteria: final entries will be judged on the quality of art and animation, but mostly just based on how awesome they are.
We have a fantastic panel of judges with a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences. These four hail from across the industry and represent its diversity well. And as mentioned, they will be hopping on from time to time during the contest to check out WIP and give feedback. So if you’d like to take advantage of that as you work on your submission, we highly recommend posting your WIP over the course of the three weeks.
Glauber Kotaki is a pixel artist and animator based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. His current projects are Chasm and Duelyst, with previous ones that include Rogue Legacy.
James Benson is an animator based in the UK. If you hated Firewatch or Ori and the Blind Forest, you now know who to blame.
Jobye-Kyle Karmaker is currently a Senior World Artist at Monolith. He was previously a Senior Level Artist at Ubisoft, where he worked on franchises that included Far Cry, Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six.
Orsi Spanyol is currently leading the art team at Thekla Inc. She spent the previous four and half years working on The Witness, responsible for one third of the island.
- Dates: June 29th to July 20th at 11:59pm EST.
- Each submission must be original artwork by you and your teammate, and of course must be animated.
- The art style, length of the animation and all other details are completely open. We want to encourage a variety of entries and participants, and likewise can’t think of a better way to celebrate the diverse nature of video games themselves! This is our first ever contest, so we thought that leaving it open ended would be a great way to kick things off.
- All entries are to be submitted using a Project page. The project will contain your final entry, which will be a single post showcasing the best combination of art and animation you/your team can put together. You will also need to put up at least 2 WIP posts, and if you’re a team then that means at least 2/person. There is no guideline on when to put up the WIP posts, but we encourage you to post throughout the contest as our judges will be dropping in from time to time to comment and provide feedback. And besides, it’ll be more fun if everyone is posting regular updates!
- Final entry post can be in the form of a gif, video or animated Sketchfab model. WIP posts can be images as well.
- We ask that each submission be an original piece for the contest.
- Tag your Project: ArtandAnimationproject
- Tag all WIP posts: ArtandAnimationWIP
- Tag your final entry Post: ArtandAnimationFinal
- Social media hashtags: if you want to talk about the contest on Twitter, FB etc, we recommend using the #CartrdgeArtAnimation hashtag so that everyone can keep up with the conversation!
- The official Slack channel for the contest. You can sign up for it here in this Google form. It will convert to the official Cartrdge Community channel after the contest.
- Useful blog posts: creating a project & a how-to guide for collaborations
We’re very excited to announce that our first ever contest will be kicking off next week! Stay tuned for more details in a few days, but what we can tell you is that the theme will be “Art and Animation.” We have four incredible judges from across the industry, and some fantastic prizes as well. One more hint: we just published the “Collaborations how-to guide” ;)
More soon!
We just launched Social Signup and Login! You can now signup for a Cartrdge account using either your Facebook or Twitter accounts:
You’ll then of course be able to login to Cartrdge using either one (and note that you’ll still be able to create a separate password and then login using email/password, if you’d like):
What if I already have a Cartrdge account, you’re thinking to yourself, but still want to use FB or Twitter login? You can connect them from your profile settings!
As you can see above, once an accounted is connected the box will un-grey. In this case, the FB account is connected and the Twitter is not.
We hope you enjoy this new feature!
Collaborations is a feature we built into our project pages, allowing multiple Cartrdge users to belong to a project and to add posts to it. Here’s a quick guide on how collaborations work!
You add collaborators in the project settings page. You can do this when creating a new project, or of course for an already existing project. Scroll down the page, right below the tags input box, and you’ll find the collaborators section.
As you can see above there are two columns. In the right column are the users who are already part of the project; the person who created it will always be part of it, and cannot be removed. The left column is where you’ll search for collaborators. As you type in the searchbox (you can use either a name or username) results will begin to appear:
To add a user to the project, just click on the ‘+’ next to their name. They will then be moved into the righthand column:
If you’d like to later remove them, simply click the ‘-’ sign and they’ll be off the project.
Once a user is part of a project, a few things will happen. Their avatar will automatically appear on the project page, which makes projects an awesome way to show off your team:
Each collaborator will also be able to add posts to the project, which can be done in several ways. The first is from the create a new post form. As you can see in the image below, when creating a new post you will have the option to add it to any of your existing projects (and a search box to help sort in case you have many to look through):
You’ll also be able to add existing posts to a project from the project settings page. We used the same two column approach, with the left column used to search for posts and the right column displaying posts already part of the project. An additional detail we added is the ability to add any or your collaborators’ posts to a project. They’ll appear in the left hand column along with your own!
Something to note is that currently, all collaborators on a project will have near-admin privileges. This means they can edit the settings, but not delete the project entirely.
And that’s your Collaborations how-to guide. We hope you enjoy this feature!
Today’s guest post is by composer Robby Duguay, writing about the dynamic ways you can compose music for your games!
A long time ago, in the halcyon days of the early 90s, a young Robby (then, Robert)
came to realize something while playing Super Mario World. It was a simple detail, yet
something that would go on to shape how I view game audio today: when Mario is on
Yoshi’s back, you hear jungle drums. Not just a sound effect, or an ambient tone - a
new, synced part of the arrangement made a simple change to the feel of the music,
and there was no way to jump onto Yoshi to make it sound wrong or out of time. The
game’s music adapted to one circumstance of gameplay.
What was happening? As simply as I can explain it, the jungle drums were always there
as one channel of the music, but that channel was muted. Jump on Yoshi, that channel
turns on. Jump off, mute channel. This was possible then because of the way sample
synthesis works on the SNES. Once games moved away from MIDI-style music
triggering, memory space and processing power became major limiting factors for multi-
track music - but with today’s technology we can achieve the same kind of interactivity
with even greater fidelity and flexibility!
So what does that mean for us, as composers and game designers today? It means everything. If we’re writing music with only the same linear mindset as when composing for film, we aren’t capitalizing on the creative opportunity we’ve been handed. Games are interactive, so we should use every tool we have available to make our music enhance the players’ experience.
Here is a more recent example of dynamic music, using a slightly different approach:
Destiny.
When fighting a boss, you want the player to be hit with all the right beats at all the right moments. The problem is, one group might take 5 minutes to beat it while another takes 15. That’s too wide of a margin to write a linear piece of music that will match the action - you have little to no chance that the climax of the piece will line up with the boss’ final moments. The solution, in the case of Destiny, is checkpoints. At the beginning of the fight “section A” plays, and if you don’t make any progress that 16-32 bars of music will loop forever. Once you’ve beaten the first wave, drums are added (section B). Halfway through the boss’ health, the next loop switches to section C, and adds a swell and horns at 25% health. Once the boss falls, the next loop switches to a victory fanfare and conclusion. With this system, the length of the music scales to the player’s experience, no matter how long it takes them to beat the boss.
If you’ve read Winifred Phillips’ book “Composer’s Guide to Game Music,” you are already aware of a few different ways music can be interactive in games. The two most straightforward and satisfying methods I’ve recently used are ‘vertically adaptive’ music and ‘horizontally adaptive’ music. Vertical adaptivity is like Mario World, where the layers of instruments are added, or track volumes are adjusted by the gameplay. Horizontal adaptivity is a system like I described in Destiny, where game variables dictate which section of the music is played next and when to progress. These two techniques are often used in conjunction with each other to create some very interesting variations, sometimes even ways of playing your music that you hadn’t initially considered!
When I was composing the soundtrack for Fate Tectonics, I saw a major opportunity to make the music dynamically follow the player’s progress. I set out to make all the different elements of the game into a member of an ensemble, and let the gameplay dictate how those parts would be heard. Each character has a voice (Penelope is a Flute, Hogweed is a Bassoon, etc), and they are arranged in such a way that the music will always sound like it belongs together. You only hear certain instruments when their associated character or element is present in your game. When you use grass tiles a lot, you’ll hear a string accompaniment. If you use water tiles most often, the accompaniment will be clarinets. This layering is the “vertical” adaptivity of the music. Composing in this kind of system takes a lot of time and forethought, but I feel it was definitely worth it.
The arc of the game is separated into three “acts.” For each act, I composed 5 different
sections of music, labeled A to E, all of which looped and could transition nicely to any
other section. Originally they were played in-game using preset forms, like A-B-A-C-A-
D-E (to anyone who is classically trained, this is not a new concept). Eventually the
developer used those forms to create a system that determined which section should
play next, procedurally (this is called a Markov chain). This is the “horizontal” adaptivity
of the music. Progressing from one act to the next served as a major checkpoint, all the
while the volume of up to 16 instruments change on the fly at the same time. Even
though I only really composed 15-20 minutes of music (if all instruments are at full
volume), but because of the dynamic system it’s “performed” a little differently every
time you play.
At first glance you might feel a bit overwhelmed - because that’s starting to get pretty
complicated, but there are many games that push the envelope of dynamic audio even
further. For starters, you can check out Disasterpeace’s January to catch snowflakes
and hear a tune at your own pace. Dyad’s whole music system is based on an in-game
sequence of instrument samples. In Sound Shapes, the level is a 1:1 visual
representation of the audio sequencer. There are a ton of creative ways to make music
dynamically performed in-game (here is a cool look at some others). “Vertical and
horizontal adaptivity” are just terms we use to try and describe the ways we make our
music tie in more closely with gameplay. At the end of the day, my point is to make you
consider how we can do this more effectively and maybe inspire you to come up with
new and interesting ways yourself.
Try a simple test: instead of bouncing a whole track as a completed mix from your DAW,
export the percussion parts separately from the rest of the music (make sure they are
exactly the same length). Play both of these files at the same time in the game, and
then adjust the volume of the drum track depending on the game state or proximity to
an enemy. It’s possible to set up this kind of interactivity in an engine like Unity, or
middleware like FMOD without too much of a learning curve (here are some tutorials).
For Fate Tectonics the developers had already made a custom mixer system in their
engine, so I made changes from an external xml file. It takes different implementation
for different kinds of tech, but in the end it’s the same result: dynamic music.
The more you can connect the elements of your music to the interactive elements of
gameplay, the more your music will become a part of the gameplay. Don’t be afraid to
have multiple variations of a piece based on a player’s choice - file sizes are becoming
less and less of a problem. You don’t have to go completely granular, but if you even do
a small layer of interactivity, your music and your game will benefit immensely from it, I
guarantee it. Let’s use the tools we’ve been handed to compose better gameplay
experiences!
Now that Cartrdge is completely open, we thought it would be cool to do a recap of everything that’s happened since we first launched.
The site went live the night of June 28th, and the next day Theresa Duringer became our “patient zero.” We spent the next two weeks onboarding about 10 additional users, people we’d become close with in the months prior, and making minor fixes here and there. On the evening of Wednesday August 12th we sent out the launch emails to everyone who had signed up for our private beta, and off we went.
The site was fairly simple when we first launched. You could only post images or gifs, and as you can see there was a very limited homepage feed:
It was just the thumbnails of every post as it was uploaded, in chronological order. The thumbnails themselves were much simpler than they are today as well; no stats on them, and no user avatar.
The first real feature addition we made was embed support. We tackled videos first by adding Youtube and then Vimeo capability, next moved on to interactive 3D models by supporting Sketchfab, and finally rounded that out with SoundCloud embeds to get the sound people involved - an all too often neglected group in our industry! Here’s what the form looks like today:
One issue we were having was that we had zero control over what our feed looked like, so we eventually built a Staff Picks section. This gave us control over what content would show up on the homepage, which is important as your community begins to grow. We als improved our thumbnails with additional stats, and changed the navbar from that lowpoly red pattern to a more transparent and dark color:
Up next was our first massive feature, project pages. We decided to create projects to give our users an organizational tool for all of their posts, and we tailored them specifically with video games in mind. Projects most certainly do not need to be for a game, but in case they are we wanted to give you a way to display all sorts of relevant information. And because games are so often a team effort, we added in the Collaborations feature a few months later so that you can show off your team, and allow each person to share exactly what they’re making for that game/project.
After the debut of projects the user base began to grow more rapidly, as did the amount of content. However navigating the site itself was actually quite difficult. So the next step was to make nearly of the tags clickable, and to soon after add in a search bar as well. Search is still simple compared to where we’ll take it, but it’s a been fantastic addition.
We were starting to get closer to a point where we felt comfortable opening up the site, but a crucial feature still missing was Notifications in the UI. At the time, the only way a user would know if their post received a favorite or a comment was via email - there was no activity tracker of any kind on the site itself. This was a really important addition, and one of the few things we wished we’d had at our initial launch in August.
Before completely opening up the site, we wanted a chance to test out the product and our infrastructure with a larger userbase. So in conjunction with the debut of collaborations, we also launched a user invite system where existing users would each get a certain number of invites to give out.
After a few weeks we felt comfortable from a technical perspective, but realized that the product itself wasn’t quite ready to be opened up. The problem would be curation, and so we built Following to give each user the ability to customize their own Cartrdge experience. Your homepage is now a feed of posts from the people you follow.
We went live eight and a half months ago, but in many ways it feels like we’ve only just launched. Doing recaps like these reminds you of how much has actually happened and how much the site has changed and improved. Can’t wait to show you all what’s next!
Cheers,
The Cartrdge Team
Some exciting news: we’re going to be completely opening up Cartrdge next week! Starting on Monday anyone will be able to sign up and use the site, no invite required.
It’s been nearly a month since we came out of private beta and launched the invite system, and we now feel ready to scale. We’ve taken the time to make the necessary adjustments to our infrastructure, and feel that the feature set is in a really awesome place. Our goal is to build the best portfolio community for the video game industry, and we think we’re well on our way!
Not too much else will change. Stay tuned for Monday - it’s time to grow the community!
We’ve received many requests from the community over the past few months to build Following. Ask and ye shall receive - we’re happy to announce that the feature is now live! You’re now able to follow each other, and moving forward your homepage when signed in will be a feed of the posts from the people you’re following, starting with the most recent.
We’re super excited about this, as it means that you can now personalize your experience on Cartrdge! If you want to follow only programmers who specialize in procedural generation, go for it. Or perhaps you’re interested in animation, and only want to follow the people who do that. Or maybe you’d like a mix of artists, composers, game designers and trailer specialists. It’s completely up to you! And we’ll still have the Staff Picks and All Posts feeds accessible so you can easily discover new people and the things they’re creating.
As you can see below, the Follow button will appear in several places and function predictably. Follow a user and their posts will begin populating your feed.
Here it is on a users’ profile page:
On an individual post page:
And on the user thumbnails:
We plan on giving you the ability to follow projects soon as well. What that means is that any post added to a project by one of its collaborators will show up in your feed, even if you’re not following any of those people. It’ll be a great way to keep up with a particular game or interest (remember, projects don’t have to be games specifically), without needing to see all of that users posts if you don’t want to.
We’re pumped to have following in your hands, and of course curious to hear what you think. Feel free to reach out to us at this email with any feedback, or even just to say hi!
Until next time,
The Cartrdge Team
The day is finally here. We launched Cartrdge as a private beta seven months ago, with a small group of users and without much of the functionality you see today. We’ve worked so hard since then to steadily grow the community, all while listening to your feedback and adding awesome and useful features to the site. We feel really great about where the community and product is at, and are ready to open things up!
So without further ado, allow us to tell you about the features we’re launching today and how exactly we’re going to be coming out of private beta.
Collaborations
Starting now, you can add additional Cartrdge users to a project as collaborators. Each collaborator can contribute posts to the project, and will have their avatar displayed on the project page.
With Collaborations, you can show who your team is that’s working on a game or project, and each of you can share what you’re doing for it. The designer can add gameplay gifs and videos, the artist shots of assets they’re working on, the composer soundcloud embeds, etc. In that way it can even be used as a collaborative devlog.
Collaborations is one of our favorite features, especially when we think about it projected out a few years. As you make your own games, take part in game jams, work on side projects or just practice a new skill, your Cartrdge profile will get attached to each of these projects. Over time, your profile will become a visual representation of all the work you’ve done, who you’ve worked with, the different skillsets you’ve picked up, and so on. Pretty cool!
Is the person that you’d like to add as a collaborator not yet on Cartrdge? Well then go ahead and use…
The Invite System!
Our brand new invite system is how we’ll be coming out of private beta. Instead of completely opening up signups, we’ve decided to try something a little different.
Each Cartrdge user now has several invites to send out. And each of these new users will in turn get invites of their own, and so on. Invites will be limited, but we’ll be refilling them from time-to-time based on a variety of criteria.
When you have invites to give out, a pixelated coin icon will appear in your navbar, along with a number indicating how many you have left:
We chose to go with an invite system for several reasons. For one, we’re a small team so managing our growth will be important to ensuring we scale correctly. We also think that by putting the power of growing the community into your hands, it will help keep it a fun and positive place.
And with that, we’re officially out of private beta! A big thank you to everyone who joined from the beginning and helped get us to this point, we most certainly couldn’t have done it with you. We have one more big feature in Following, but moving forward we’re largely going to let things settle in and focus on growing the community. That means doing fun things like Game Jams, hosting guest bloggers and just making this an awesome and vibrant place.
We can’t wait to see where it all goes!
Cheers,
The Cartrdge Team
We’re excited to announce that after 7 months in private beta, we’ll be opening up the Cartrdge community this Monday with a brand new invite system, while simultaneously launching the most incredible feature we’ve created - Collaborations.
Here’s a quick rundown on Collaborations and how the invite system will work. We’ll go into more detail next week when we officially launch!
We’ve had tons of requests to give Cartrdge users the ability to work together on projects, like they do in real life. Great idea! Ask and you shall receive. Starting Monday, Collaborations will allow you to add other Cartrdge users to a project. Once someone has been added to a project, they can add posts just like the project creator can. It’s a perfect fit for game jams, devblogs, #screenshotsaturday, promotional game pages, studios, and any kind of group collaborations. We can’t wait to see what people come up with. Seriously, we’re shaking. We are that excited :D
This is it. It’s really happening. This is how we’ll be opening things up, by putting the power of growing the community into your hands. On Monday each of you will get invites to send to friends, colleagues or just people you’d like to see join Cartrdge. Invites are limited so we can maintain a super high quality community and handle what will almost certainly be epic viral growth. Over time we will refill invites.
We’re stoked for Collaborations and to finally open up the Cartrdge community, and can’t wait to get these features into your hands.
See you on Monday!
The Cartrdge team
Hot on the heels of clickable tags, we’ve now officially added a search box as well!
As you can see in the screenshot above, you’ll find the search box in the navigation bar. It functions like any other, and allows you to quickly search the site and find what you’re looking for.
Right now, search results extend only to content; that means posts and projects. Just like when you click on a tag, you’ll get a result of all the posts and projects - separated by tabs - that fit your search term.
Let’s use the term “procedural” as an example. These are the results we see first, for posts:
You can then easily toggle to the relevant projects:
One cool little detail we added is that on the search results page, we have another search box that’ll include the term you just searched for. You can use that to then put in another term, or just have it as a reminder of what the results are for.
Pretty easy, and a big jump in functionality and discoverability for the site! It’s now even easier to find the things that interest you within the gamedev world.
Searching for other users! In the near future you’ll be able to search for names of people, and get User results. We’re still thinking through how this will work and how the design will display everything, so feedback is of course quite welcome.
Thanks and enjoy!
We’re pleased to announce that discovering people and the amazing work they’re posting on Cartrdge just got a whole lot easier. Starting this very moment, most of the information on the site is clickable!
As you can see, this functionality extends past the tags you can add to a post or project, or the skill tags on your profile. We’ve made the Platform, Controls, Engine and Genre fields clickable as well!
As you may have guessed, what this means is that when you click on one of these bits of information, whether it’s a tag, platform, engine etc, you’ll then see a search result related to that term.
Let’s use content (posts/projects) as an example. If you click a tag on a post, you’ll get a search result of all the other posts that also have that tag. Even cooler, on that same page you’ll also get a result of the all the projects with the same tag, separated by tabs like we do on the home page. See below:
If you clicked “voxel” from within a post, then you’ll land on the post results first. If you clicked on it from within a project, then the projects will show up. Pretty simple!
The same goes for user profiles. When you click on a skill tag, you’ll see a search result of all the other people on the site who have that skill. Looking for someone who excels at 3d art? We’ve got you covered:
At the moment, this is the full list of terms that are clickable:
These are clickable on User profiles and will return a User search:
While these fields are clickable on a post or project and will return a Content search:
Until now you might’ve been wondering why we ask for so much information, whether it’s when you’re creating a profile, post or project. It’s a fair question, since you couldn’t really do much with any of the info. That changes today! Being able to click and search through all of these fields will make the site a much easier and more interesting place to discover not just new work, but also the people creating it.
We’ve got lot’s more functionality planned for search, and this is just the first step. But making all of this information clickable will greatly enhance the browsing experience, and make Cartrdge an even better place to share what you’re working on.
We hope you’ll enjoy this and find it useful. And as always, please do get in touch with any feedback or suggestions on how we can improve things.
Cheers,
The Cartrdge Team
Time for another projects showcase! This is the fourth edition of the showcase, and we thought we’d try something different and give it a theme. As the title suggests, this week we’ll be focusing on projects using a pixel art style. Let’s get to it!
Who’s making it: Johannes Märtterer
Path to the Sky is a roguelite platformer that lets you explore a beautiful world of flying islands with randomly generated caves, monsters and treasures. Climb your way to the top while combining items for unique combat effects each run and enjoy the mix of retro aesthetics and modern visuals.
Who’s making it: Stephan Hövelbrinks
Death Trash is a modern post-apocalyptic roleplaying game with influences of cyberpunk, science fiction, horror, the grotesque and trash-talk humor. It features a world full of dialogue and interesting characters, item crafting and realtime combat. Player freedom is emphasized and combat is not the only way to survive. Inspired by classics like Ultima 7, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout.
Who’s making it: Adam Nelson
Glow Flower is an action/adventure game with a strong emphasis on exploration. The game will give players freedom to explore anywhere at any point but players will have to survive as well as use their wits to explore it all.
Who’s making it: Bc Likes You
A Small Robot Story is an adventure-platformer where you play as Rae, a small robot who activates and has no programming, so you need to set out and find out what’s up!
Who’s making it: Anthony Pendley
Master powerful magic, venture through dungeons, and explore the monster-filled forest of Equica! Complete all 10 dungeons to prove that you’re tough enough to take on any dangerous quest!
Hey Everyone! We haven’t done a showcase in a while, and it’s time to start the series back up again. We previously called it the “Games Showcase,” but now that project pages are up and running perhaps a more appropriate name is “Projects Showcase.” A big improvement here is that all useful links we used to include in the showcase are now already built into project page itself!
Alrighty, let’s get to it and check out some of the awesome projects Cartrdge community members are working on.
Nice Dudes project page. Being made by Eeve Somepx
Nice Dudes is a weird male model agency simulator. You play a guy who’s promoted to manager of a male modeling agency when his boss suddenly has to leave town. Only it turns out that his boss had recently taken out a loan from a local mob loan shark, and has only 30 days to pay it back. Good luck!
The Deep Dark project page. Being made by Conor Mccann
An adventure game about navigating a deadly maze. The game has a minimalist look to it, and seems to be making gorgeous use of greys and whites.
Totem Teller project page. Being made by Benjamin Kerslake and Jerry Verhoeven
“This world is a damaged story, soon to be forgotten. Plot holes must be closed and the story retold. That is the duty of a Teller.”
Totem Teller is an open world, point and click adventure story with rich colors and ample glitch effects.
Derbytown project page. Being made by Ted Martens.
Derbytown is an off-road racing, action-adventure game about a quirky little town that loves racing and crashing! It’s still super early in development.
Now that Projects are live, we thought it’d be a good idea to publish a quick post explaining how to actually create one. For more on what Projects are, you can read this blog post or head straight to the site.
Alrighty, let’s get to work making a Project!
Step one is to go to the Nav bar, where you’ll now see the ‘+Project’ button. Click that and you’ll be taken to the Create a new Project page:
As you can see, we’ve upgraded the image uploader so that it now has drag and drop capability. You’ll also have the option of inputting various bits of information about what you’re working on; release date, controls, platforms, genre and engine, as well as a description for the project. You can also give it tags, which we recommend as they’ll help in discoverability once Search is implemented. And on the right hand side are the inputs for supported links; a homepage, Twitter, Facebook, Steam, GoG, itch.io, Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Patreon.
Now we get to the fun part: adding and creating posts!
We’ve built a few things here, so let’s break it down.
The first thing to notice are the two columns; on the left is “results,” which will automatically populate your 10 most recent uploaded posts. For any post not displayed, we built a search box right above the results column! As you type, the relevant posts will populate below. When you’ve found the post you’d like to add to the Project, simply click the ‘+’ button and that post will move over to the “added” column.
But what if you’d like to add a brand new post, directly to the Project? You can now do that! That’s where the ‘create a post’ button comes in:
When you click that, a pop-up form will appear allowing you to create a new post that’s added directly to the Project. The best part is that it will automatically inherit all the information from the Project, so that you won’t need to enter the engine, controls, platforms and genres every time. We’re going to continue to improve this, so that soon you’ll be able to add a post to a Project from that individual posts’ settings page as well. Coming soon!
So that’s how you create a Project. As mentioned, this is a work in progress that we’ll continue to make better - which means we want to hear your feedback! Let us know what you think, and please feel free to get in touch with any ideas or thoughts. We’re all ears.
Enjoy!
We’re very excited to announce something that’s been in the works for a very long time: the launch of Projects! Projects represent the biggest addition to the site since the beginning, and we’re excited to finally have them in your hands.
What is a Project?
Projects are where you’ll organize all the information about a game or project you’re working on, and where all the uploads related to it will be displayed.
As you can see, a Project will display all sorts of information. The platforms a game is available on, the control inputs it supports, the engine it’s running on, the genre it belongs to, and it’s release date. You’ll also have the option of displaying various related links; the first section is for Social platforms, the second for Purchase (Steam, Itch or GoG) and the third section is for Support and crowdfunding (Indiegogo, Kickstarter or Patreon).
Projects will also solve a pain point that a lot of you have brought up: the need to enter the same information every time you upload a post. As of now, you can create a Post from within a Project, and all that information will automatically be inherited! And we’ll eventually build the ability to add a Post to a project from the Post upload form, or from a Posts’ settings.
We want to quickly point out that you should feel comfortable creating a Project for something that’s not technically a game. Perhaps you’re practicing your 3D artwork and want to organize it on Cartrdge, so that it’s searchable by others in the industry. Go for it; it’s why we called these Projects as opposed to Game Pages (the original name).
What’s next with Projects?
We’ll be tightening up the UI flows quite a bit, all the while listening to feedback on other changes to make. And without giving too much away, the next big step in Projects is to make them a bit more “Collaborative.”
Look out for this in a few weeks!
Site Changes
The addition of Projects brings with it a few changes to the site, but for the most part things will function in the same ways. The home page will still be the feed of staff picked posts, and there will still be the All Posts feed easily accessible from there. What we’ve added is a feed exclusively for Projects, which will be accessible from the main feed as well as the nav bar:
We actually think the pairing Projects with the social aspects of the site will be pretty fun. As folks create Projects and fill them out with content, that will then make the various feeds a more vibrant place to check out new posts. They’ll each ‘feed’ into each other, if you will ;)
We also made a tweak to user profiles, adding a tab for Projects right next to all of their individual posts for easy navigation:
That’s about it! Wrapping up this announcement, we wanted to mention that as with everything on Cartrdge, Projects are an ever-evolving thing. So please do feel free to get in touch with feedback.
Enjoy!
It’s been almost 3 months since we launched the site and began the private beta, and in that time we’ve of course grown a bit. To be sure, the size of the community is still being kept intentionally small as we work through feature releases and product kinks here and there. But the number of posts is now at a point where we felt it was time to change how the homepage feed works.
At launch and up until now, the feed of posts was essentially a chronological timeline of uploads, with the most recent one at the top. We had a light curation tool but rarely used it. This system was never the end goal for the homepage, which I’ll expand on in a bit. As with many other things, we wanted to launch and this was a good enough way to kick things off.
Starting yesterday, the home page will now be a feed of staff picked posts. You’ll also notice that we added a navigation tool above the feed, so that you’ll be able to switch over to All Posts with a click. This feed will be strictly chronological, with every single upload showing up there.
Why’d we make this change? For one, it’ll allow us to curate more effectively, which is important as the number of community members and posts goes up. Secondly, if you feel like uploading a bunch of your work all at once, there’ll be no need to worry about hogging the entire front page. And besides, who doesn’t like getting their work staff picked? All we need now is a sweet little badge. (Update: badges added!)
This is by no means the end-goal for the home page. As we’ve mentioned in the past, as soon as we build ‘Following’ the home page will become a feed of posts from the people you follow. And once we finish the private beta and the community is larger, we’ll be able to build other feeds such as Popular, special themes, etc.
Lots more to look forward to!
Today’s piece is our first in what will be a long history of guest posts, where we invite one of our wonderful community members to write about whatever subject they’d like within the world of video game development. Big thanks to Zach Soares for this amazing post on Voxels in games. Enjoy!
By Zach Soares
Hi, I’m Zach and I’m a professional voxel artist who’s been making voxel art for a variety of projects. I’m writing this piece to talk to you all about the implication of voxel art in video games and where I see that going. Voxels are a rendering method that have existed for a long time, in fact, it was in early competition with polygons as the rendering methods for games and well…. we saw how that turned out.
Polygons!
While polygons have been the way games have grown and evolved artistically, voxel art has slowly started to make a push in the medium.
Only recently have voxels started to make a major push as an alternative form of art for video games. The reasoning behind this is the growth of rendering tech and hardware being a lot more capable. Computers would original run solely off of processor chips since graphic cards weren’t common. Now we have graphic cards that can offload a lot of information and processor chips are capable of so much more computing from back when (before 1990s). Although you can attribute the growth of the artistic form to those who make voxel editors. A way to edit voxels outside of the game engine and later passing that over to the game space is extremely important. This impact is the same impact that 2D editing software’s had on games prior to what they were today (what you’d call “programmer art” was what was used before editors and full blow game engines existed).
Thanks to softwares like Qubicle, MagicaVoxel and VoxelShop, artists have been able to express themselves via games using voxels. These tools have the ability to not only export models and pieces as raw voxel objects, they are able to export these models as usable Polygon objects. Now yes, I know earlier I spoke about how voxels and polygons are two different things. I might be contradicting myself at the moment on what is a voxel model but what we’re talking about is voxel art. The art in which voxels are the root or implication.
Voxel art is an interesting thing. It can be seen as pixel art in the third dimension or a totally different thing. It’s best to separate voxels from all other things. It is the only way to really figure out what voxel art is; the same way polygons are separated from 2D illustrations. Pixel art does lend itself to voxels, it does indeed help with the development of the form but it can also restrict the style. Voxels are 3D and thus need to be thought of that way when working with it, otherwise your work will come off as 2-dimensional even if it was being projected in a 3D space.
There are many types of voxel art but I’ll just list and explain a few below.
These are the four varying forms of voxel art I can distinguish. They each serve their own purposes and can impact the style, and feel of a game tremendously. What’s very important to note is that to be voxels or voxel art it needs to be perfect at the pixel level. A cube is a cube in the same way a pixel is a pixel. They do not bleed into one another, they do not clip into each other, they are stuck in a grid. That is the primary constraint for voxel art that needs to be distinguished although it can be circumvented if you were to make objects individual from one another and later put them together in a 3D modeling software, or engine. To be clear, these are not all the styles that exist for voxel art. I’ve personally made a handful of different looking styles but above is what I would consider the 4 circles.
After looking at the Venn Diagram above you’ll notice some styles can bleed into one another. This hints to the fact that more styles can come from what is already established. The reason why I’ve made these 4 styles the pillars of voxel art is because they are so different from one another but can still lend to each other. A perfectly good example would be games like Trove or Vox which uses a mixed style between Freeform Voxel art and Blocky Voxel art. Their styles work well with SSAO and still have a relatively high level of detail (the voxel resolution/density in models).
This is all I have to summarize when it comes to voxels and their involvement with video games. Unsurprisingly voxels can be used for many other things outside of making models. A good example of its external application would be the particle effects system in Unreal Engine 4 which uses voxels to do advanced dynamic particle systems. Even outside of the realm of games you can use voxels as a means to demonstrate live data since a single voxel can represent a subset of data. This is something used in city rendering but can be very process intensive. All of this is to say that voxel art isn’t a fad, nor is it dying out. It still has room to grow and can very much become a viable way to make high level AAA games, and mobile games alike.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon!
Zach Soares aka “y2bcrazy”
As we often state, one of our biggest goals is for Cartrdge to be the place where all creatives in video game development can share what they’re working on. In adding support for Soundcloud embeds, we think we’re now pretty close. This means you can now share images, gifs, videos, interactive 3D models as well as audio from your games.
With that, let’s welcome game audio to the site! Embedding the Soundcloud player will work just like any other embed, as you can see in the image below. One of the cooler things we’ve been able to do thanks to SC’s api is bring in the existing thumbnail image, so that audio posts will blend into the site seamlessly. And as with all other embeds, you’ll still have the option to upload a different thumbnail image if you so choose.
Audio posts will look very similar to others, with the SC player taking the place of an image, gif etc:
(big thanks to Matt Hamm for pioneering audio posts on Cartrdge!)
We’ve added support for the major media types, and it’s now time to turn our attention to the first major feature addition, called Game Pages. We talked a bit about them in the launch blog post, and will give more details as we get close to release in a month or two. Can’t wait!
We’re very excited to announce that we’ve integrated Sketchfab! This means you can now post interactive 3D models on the site. With this feature we’re one step closer to our goal of making Cartrdge the perfect place for you to showcase and share your game dev work, no matter your specialty.
If you’re not yet familiar with Sketchfab, they make an amazing viewer for 3D files that allows for both animation as well as annotation of your models, meaning you can really tell a story with each post.
3D models will make the site even more fun, giving you the opportunity to share aspects of your games in a more interactive way. You can check out the first 3D post on the site, a model of a space civilization in the game Groundfall by Zach Soares.
Like with all other media formats, posting 3D models is easy and done from the Post on Cartrdge page. As you can see below, simply paste the URL of your Sketchfab model into the highlighted form field, fill in any other info you’d like associated with your post, and you’re all set.
Just like with video posts, you can still upload an image file along with the embed if you’d like to customize the cover image/thumbnail. If you don’t then no worries, we’ll still pull a high-res thumbnail from the model itself. It’s up to you!
We’re really excited about this and know you’ll enjoy having interactive 3D models on the site. It also means we’ll be able to get even more people in game dev involved in the community, and that’s awesome.
Until next time!
We’re back for round two of the Games Showcase! If you missed chapter 1, what we’re doing with these is highlighting a few of the games our users are making, and have posted something from. We have another four great ones for you below, let’s get to it.
Community member: Gary Lloyd
Some useful links:
About Sublevel Zero
Just released last week (go buy it!), Sublevel Zero is a first-person, six-degree-of-freedom roguelike shooter set in a universe where reality is falling apart. Step into the cockpit of a lone gunship and navigate your way through a labyrinth of procedurally-generated 3D levels, puzzles and foes to source valuable ancient artefacts. Descend into a vast underground facility in your mission to loot and craft ancient technology which holds the key to your clan’s survival. Inspired by gaming classics such as Descent and Forsaken as well as contemporary shooters like Teleglitch, Sublevel Zero’s gravity-defying combat is driven by modern looting and crafting. Every shot and every decision counts as you navigate each hazard before it is too late. The emphasis is on survival and ammunition is scarce so you will need to strengthen your tactics, adaptability and skill in order to survive enemy encounters.
Community Member: Ben Ruiz
Some useful links:
About Aztez
In Aztez, you are responsible for expanding and maintaining the Aztec empire with turn-based strategy gameplay, and managing violent outbreaks with real-time beat ‘em up gameplay segments. But your actions in one gameplay type directly affect the other! A game of Aztez doesn’t take to long to play, but it is designed to be hugely replayable, as every game of exciting empire management is different from the last; different events will occur, different challenges will emerge, and different spoils will be taken every time you play. Inspired by the timeless surprise gameplay of Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space and the deeply and expressive action gameplay of Bayonetta, Aztez is like no other game you’ve ever played.
Community member: Stephan Hövelbrinks
Some useful links:
About Death Trash
Death Trash is a modern post-apocalyptic roleplaying game with influences of cyberpunk, science fiction, horror, the grotesque and trash-talk humor. It features a world full of dialogue and interesting characters, item crafting and realtime combat. Player freedom is emphasized and combat is not the only way to survive. Inspired by roleplaying classics like Ultima 7, Planescape: Torment and Fallout.
Community Member: Mike Reñevo, Louise Palomar, Chelsy Garcia
Some useful links:
About Dungeon Souls
Dungeon Souls is a 2-D top-down hack n’ slash/RPG game with roguelike elements. Each level is randomly-generated so each playthrough and game strategy is unique. As you play the game, you will have to search and activate all the marks (on the floor) that will unlock the key to take you to the next level. While you continue the game, you will be encountering different obstacles such as spawning dungeon creatures with unique abilities. There are also a lot of items you can collect that will help your chosen dungeon hero’s ability and strategy more interesting and powerful.
Hey everyone! With this post we’re going to try something new. In an effort to help highlight the games that our users are making, we’ve picked four to showcase below. We included a bit of info about each; the Cartrdge user who’s working on it, some useful links on where to find more info about the game as well as the user, and a summary of the project. Some of these are still in development, others already released - in general we tried to be as diverse as possible.
We’re thinking this could be a pretty cool regular feature, and a way to give the awesome games our community members are making some more exposure. Let us know what you think, and enjoy!
Community members: Zach Soares, Ryan Brooks
Some useful links:
About Groundfall:
Groundfall is empire building game which tasks you to fight the odds in creating an empire that’ll sustain human life along with protecting it. As you develop the necessary stations to gather resources you’ll need to find ways to expand your empire past the initial solar system. Think of the game as a Macro-based city simulator in space.
Community member: Karen Teixera
Some useful links:
About Oceanheart
Oceanheart is an open sim-like adventure game where you play as Mami - explore seas, islands and bond with sea creatures while making yourself a home in a whimsical world. You’ll be able to fish, cook, craft, maintain your boat, decorate your cabin, grow and care for sea life and discover mysterious magical places.
They’ve been developing the game since late April (2015) and it’s still in a very early stage. Oceanheart is being developed in Unity and they’re considering PC/Mac and possibly other platforms.
Community members: Thomas Noppers
Useful Links:
About Penarium
Penarium is a frantic 2D arena arcade game where you control quirky anti-hero Willy. Willy is a kid trapped inside a sinister circus called; the Penarium. Willy’s only hope of ever returning to his beloved father’s farm is to run, jump and avoid an array of killer deathtraps while being cheered on by a sadistic crowd that is out for blood; his blood.
Community member: Atem
Some useful links:
About prog-1
prog.1 is a twitch-puzzle platformer starring a computer program aptly named “prog.1”. After the failed experiments of the Hypercollection: Atom, an attempt to create life in a virtual environment, one scientist decides to play God by introducing his creation, prog.1, into the system.
As we continue to build Cartrdge into the best place to share your game dev work and connect with each other, we’re excited to announce our latest feature: video posts!
Videos will expand your ability to share work on the site; trailers, dev diaries, examples of game design - whatever you can dream up. This will also allow more people within the industry to get involved in the community.
Posting videos is pretty self explanatory, but we’ve included a small tutorial just in case.
To post a video, head on over to the create a post page as usual. As you can see in the image below, we’re starting off with support for Youtube embeds but will soon be adding Vimeo as well.
Once there, simply copy and paste the Youtube url of the video you’d like to post into the form field. We’ll handle the rest.
You’ll also notice that you can still upload an image file. It’s optional, but what this does is allow you to add a custom cover image if you so desire. Youtube doesn’t always choose the best/most high quality portion of the video to display as the thumbnail, so this gives you a bit of control. If you don’t upload a cover image then no worries, we’ll go with whatever Youtube provides.
That’s it! We’re trying to keep things very simple and easy, and think videos will add a whole new layer of awesomeness to the site.
Enjoy!
Testing on Cartrdge started with a small group at the end of July, but we really only launched the private beta two weeks ago. I thought it might be useful to share a few of the lessons we’ve learned over the past 14 days.
Keep things simple and intuitive
The first thing we learned is that a lot of people were confused about what Cartrdge is, and how to use it - so we made some quick changes.
There’s now have a banner right below the nav bar, with different messages depending on the state of the person visiting the website. If you’re logged out it has a simple message describing what Cartrdge is, if you’re logged in but haven’t posted yet it encourages you to post, etc.
We also made the upload page much more intuitive to use, for instance providing clearer placeholder examples for each field in the form.
The lesson here is that quite often in the beginning you need to tell people what your product is, and it doesn’t have to be in a fancy way - you can do so using simple text. Your users/players will appreciate it.
A private beta was a great idea
It’s kept our growth intentionally slow, but doing a private beta has allowed us to not only test things out in a manageable way, but also set the future tone for the community.
Cartrdge is a portfolio site at it’s core, with a focus on individuals showcasing their work (as opposed to studios as a whole, for example). This is a somewhat new type of community in game development, and so keeping the size of the user base low has been vital in helping to shape how the site will look moving forward.
Design does matter
Many things on the site still need improvement, but we did put care into the overall design. And people are noticing! One of the most frequent pieces of feedback we’ve gotten is that “the site looks really great.”
You don’t need to obsess over every pixel, but if it’s obvious that you care about how your product is presented to the world then others will care as well.
Talk to your users often (it’s fun)
I’ve had the opportunity to talk with and get to know quite a few of our first users. Not only has it been incredibly insightful, but it’s also been really fun. It’s invaluable in informing you what the most pressing needs are, and believe me - there’s no better feeling than when someone gets excited about what you’ve made.
Our feature roadmap is fairly aligned with user requests
As I’ve mentioned before, we launched Cartrdge with a lot of the features we have planned still missing. This was a fluid plan of course, as we figured we would adjust as user feedback came in.
So it’s been pretty cool to hear many of the feature requests we’re receiving are things we planned to build anyway. Particularly video & 3d model embeds, search, and Game Pages for better organization.
There’s more, but these are a few of the things I’ve noticed that I thought might help others, whether you’re developing software or a game.
- Ron
What a whirlwind this past year has been. The idea for Cartrdge was first mentioned in passing to a friend, and then validated over many Skypes, coffees, lunches and beers - huge thanks to all of you. I’m pleased to announce that tomorrow we’re finally releasing it to the world (ok, a few hundred beta participants).
We want to try something different with this “we’re launching” blog post. Instead of focusing on the journey, which is a story worth telling but for another time, we’d like to tell you a bit about what Cartrdge is today, and much more importantly lay out some of our plans for the future. We haven’t been secretive about this project from the start, and want to continue being as open as possible about our plans.
The Product
So what exactly is Cartrdge? How do you use it - why would you use it?
Cartrdge is a community for the people making video games. More specifically, it’s a place to showcase yourself and your work, in a community designed for the members of the video game industry. It’s a place to connect with one another, to offer and get feedback, and to find inspiration. A place to get noticed for your work, and to find others doing amazing things with video games. But you come first. There are many online communities where games can be profiled, but none where you, the people, take center stage. We think that’s a problem worth solving.
So what can you actually do with the product? Today, you can create a profile of yourself, upload an avatar and header image, write a small bio, tag your skills, location, and role in the industry. All this information is important in helping to make the community more searchable, and therefore your profile & work more discoverable.
You can then start building out your portfolio by uploading your work. One of our main goals is to make it quick and easy for anyone in the industry to have a great looking, discoverable portfolio. At launch the media formats we’re supporting are images and gifs. With each uploaded post, you’ll be able to identify the game it belongs to, the controls for that game, the engine it runs on and platforms it’s available for, as well as tagging it with any relevant information.
We’ve also added some light social features. You’ll soon be able to follow each other, and in fact your homepage - when logged in - will be a feed of the most recent uploads from the people you’re following. You can favorite individual posts. We’ve also built a comment section into each post; feedback and (constructive) criticism are so important in game development, and we want to make sure that’s an integral part of the Cartrdge community.
Peering into our future: the product roadmap
Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be making improvements and adding features we think you’ll enjoy. We’re also going to be listening closely to your feedback, and when we hear consistent requests for a new feature or criticism of an existing one, that’s something we’ll pay close attention to. We just ask for a bit of patience, we’re only two people working on this.
So what can you look forward to?
There’s a lot here, and we know the dangers of setting expectations and then not being able to deliver. But we’re going to do our best to come through on these, and promise that if there’s a feature here that we end up axing, it was for a good reason. The only thing worse than not delivering on a feature is spending time on one that nobody wants.
Rolling out Access
We’re kicking things off with a private beta, which will help us out in testing features and performance in a manageable way. We have a fantastic group of first users, and we’re going to pretty much keep it to that but will allow additional folks in from time to time. Send us an email if you’d like to take part.
When will we open up Cartrdge to everyone? To be honest we don’t have a set date to end the beta. When we feel the site is in a great place, and we’ve done the testing we want to do, then that decision will be made. We’re also considering different ways of opening things up, so stay tuned!
Today marks the real beginning for Cartrdge. We’re really so excited to finally be out there, and think you’re going to love what we’ve made and what we have planned. And don’t be shy; reach out to us with feature requests, criticism, complaints, or just to say hi.
Looking forward to hearing from you and seeing you in the community.
Ron Golan
Founder/CEO
If you’re reading this, you probably know that GDC’s been over for about two weeks. So we’re a little late on this one.
We left for San Francisco early on March 4th, not knowing what to expect. And when I say we, I mean me. We’re a two person startup, so traveling can be prohibitively expensive. With that in mind, I’m going to write the rest of this post mainly in the first person.
I’d never been to GDC (or San Francisco) before and was definitely a bit nervous. We’re still a few months from launching the beta, and are relatively unknown in the industry. So I wouldn’t have too much to show in the way of our product in time for the conference. This would be a trip solely to meet people and spread the word on what we’re building. Piece of cake!
Before getting to my experience, a kudos to the organizers. On the plane ride back I started chatting with a guy who used to attend GDC in the mid 1990s, when it was still just a couple thousand industry pioneers gathering in different locations each year. All big things start small, but this was shocking to me; official numbers aren’t in quite yet, but 2014 set an attendance record with over 24k attendees. I was also struck by the sheer amount of things going on at once.
The main trade floor was enormous, with a combination of AAA studios and indies showing off their latest projects. The bigger studios have conference budgets, and it shows - their booths are so sweet. The fanciest ones even build temporary office space for executive meetings (which make them a great place to try and intercept industry big wigs for a quick meeting).
In stark contrast, an indie booth usually comprises of a table, a tv or two and a couple of chairs. But there is something so charming about walking up one of these, really connecting with the game and then talking to the actual developers behind it. I certainly enjoy my fair share of AAA games, but spent significantly more time around the indie booths this time around.
Apart from the trade floor, the main draw of GDC for many of its attendees are the lectures, which begin two days earlier and last the entire week. Top notch folks from across the spectrum of the industry give talks on a variety of topics; I would’ve loved access to these, but a pass that includes the lectures is almost $3k! Maybe next year ;)
If you do have a full access pass, your days are most likely packed with meetings, networking, lectures, trying out some new games, and then a party or three at the end of the night. This year was my first foray to GDC, and so it was mainly just hustling around and introducing myself. But for those who’ve been in the space for years, the week is an exhausting, thrilling blur.
For me, it was mainly cold networking and recruiting for the upcoming beta. This meant walking up to developers manning booths, hearing about their game and studio, and then pitching them on Cartrdge. No easy task, as they paid money to be there and pitch you. I also spent time walking around and chatting with other attendees, and in fact had some of my most interesting interactions this way.
A few takeaways from the show:
On the whole, was the trip worth it? The jury is still out, since connections made at these events can take months or even years to fully flesh out. But if you’re willing to really put yourself out there, it’s a great opportunity to meet your compatriots in the industry. And as a character building exercise for young entrepreneurs, I couldn’t recommend it more.
Last Thursday, the news came out that Radio Shack was filing for bankruptcy and finally closing it’s doors; the writing had been on the wall for some time.
While this was not technically “video game industry” news, it still had us feeling extremely nostalgic. Shortly thereafter, the tweets of old Shack commercials started pouring in, and that gave us an idea. Why not do something similar, but for old video game spots?
Fueled on nostalgia and cheap Maxwell house, we got to work. We concentrated primarily on older consoles and their games, since this made our search more specific - and they were a lot easier to find on Youtube.
Over the course of a half hour, we tweeted out 15 different spots, and found out some pretty funny things along the way. Who knew Paul Rudd was in a Super NES ad from the early 90’s, or that Pete Rose was schilling for Atari all the way back in ‘78? Sony has always made their Playstation ads a bit on the weird side, and Nintendo and Sega were duking it out for years until the latter finally exited the console business.
Anyways, we put all the tweets into a storify and embedded it below. Hopefully you’ll enjoy them - we’ll definitely be doing this again!
Hi everyone, thanks for visiting the Cartrdge tumblr blog! We’re going to start posting here more often, with topics covering the whole range of the video games industry. There will be posts from our team, but more importantly from guest contributors covering topics we think you’ll find interesting. If you’d like your work featured here, or see a specific topic covered, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!