From Indy back to Indie

Colors!, LucasArts, New Projects, Personal

Today marks my official “File > New Project” day. It’s with deep gratitude that I’m handing back the Design Director baton to MachineGames and am returning to my previous role as a design consultant.

Working alongside Jerk and the rest of the Uppsala crew on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (DLC drops September 4!) has been a privilege – and, of course, an Adventure (Daa-da-da-DAAAAAAA!). I’m incredibly thankful for the chance to contribute to such an iconic IP together with my “forever” dev family. And hey, the game turned out alright! Phew.

So going from Indy to Indie, I’m now eager to focus on some of my other passions for a while. First some love to colorslive.com (Switch 2 obvs…) and then onto something a little bit bigger. Too early to say where it will all lead, but I genuinely believe we’re living in the golden age of video games – there’s so much to create and I’m here for it!

Jens

Call to a AAA adventure

LucasArts, New Projects, Personal

It’s been 12 spectacular years for me as an independent developer. Since leaving LucasArts in 2010, I shipped one of the best rated 3DS titles of all time with Colors! 3D, had the honor of receiving a BAFTA for our lovely open-world pinball game Yoku’s Island Express, and even built custom hardware through our Kickstarted game Colors Live (a perfect Christmas present hint hint).

But I’ve now taken the next big step, which is to join MachineGames as Design Director on Indiana Jones. This is also redemption. When I went accepted the offer to go to San Francisco in 2009, it was to lead the design on an Indiana Jones game, but that game got cancelled before I even got there. Now, I get a chance to do what I original hoped to, but this time with I get to do it with some of my oldest and best friends. Joining MachineGames is like coming home — amazing people I worked with during Riddick and Darkness, but also teeming with new ones, whose talent daily blow me away.

I’m so excited about what we are building, and the way get to do it — featuring one of most iconic characters ever, in collaboration with my friends at Lucasfilm, published by one the biggest publishers in the world, and doing it at an amazing studio like MachineGames.

This will be something very special.

Jens

Colors Live releases Sept 14, 2021

Colors!

We are happy to let you know that we’ve finally set a release-date for Colors Live on the Nintendo eShop: September 14, 2021. While most of our fantastic Kickstarter backers and late pledges have been using Colors Live for quite a while now, we’ve held off on an official eShop release because we wanted to release a physical version at the same time!

After the massively successful Kickstarter campaign last year, we teamed up with Nighthawk Interactive to figure out how we could Colors Live in stores all across North America and Europe. Check it out now on store.colorslive.com!

Johannes and the Colors Team

Yoku@BAFTA

Personal, Yoku's Island Express

Thursday night was such a huge night. We won a BAFTA with Yoku’s Island Express for Best Debut. Getting up on the stage in from of the world completely threw me off in a way I didn’t expect, and I didn’t manage utter more than some quick thanks from my memorized list of all the amazing people that was part of its development. I’ll try to correct that here instead.

Continue reading Yoku@BAFTA →

The future of Colors! and Yoku’s Island Express

Colors!, New Projects, Yoku's Island Express

This June, it will be 10 years since I first released Colors! as a prototype for the Nintendo DS. Since then, it has lived on a multitude of platforms like iPhone, Android and PSVita, but no version has been so successful as Colors! 3D for Nintendo 3DS, which still is one of the best sold titles on the Nintendo eShop and one of the top reviewed titles for the platform.

With last week’s launch of Nintendo Switch, we’ve gotten questions about the future of Colors!. Continue reading The future of Colors! and Yoku’s Island Express →

Draft/Ban poker game

Game Design

While grabbing coffee at the office today, I started chatting with some of Arrowhead’s game-designers. We were talking about MOBAs and since I haven’t really played any of those, I asked them to describe the drafting process I had seen on the TV broadcasts of the recent world championships. I found it very fascinating how the two teams take turns not only drafting from the list of heroes, but also get to ban others so the other team can’t pick them. I think that mechanic is interesting on many levels, and after a brief period of talking about it I suddenly came up with a design for a card-game using some of the same concepts. Here are the rules: Continue reading Draft/Ban poker game →

Sci-Fi card-game concept

Game Design, New Projects

sci_fiIt always feels good when you spend a few hours getting that idea in your head down on “paper”. This is a concept of card-base adventure game with semi-realtime combat that I mocked up a few weeks ago.

Trading-card games as a mechanics for video-games seem to getting more popular every year. I’ve spent a bunch of time in the excellent Hearthstone recently and they nail so many things in that game. Blizzard being awesome as always.

Continue reading Sci-Fi card-game concept →

Colors! video export now available on Android

Colors!

Watching painting playbacks are cool, but it has always been bugging us that there haven’t been any good tools to export those playbacks as videos. If you ran the original version of Colors! for Nintendo DS, you could use the ColorsDraw tool, but we stopped supporting that quite a while ago and it doesn’t work on newer versions of Colors! (like Colors! 3D). So we are very happy to announce the video export feature for Colors! for Android.

If you are running the full version of Colors! on an Android device running at least 4.1 (Jelly Bean), you can now export any painting playback as a video-file. In the future, we hope to bring this functionality to Colors! for iOS and perhaps more importantly, to allow this directly from colorslive.com, but for now this is an Android 4.1 exclusive feature.

This update also brings Colors! for Android up to par in terms of gallery features, where all the good things that Colors! 3D user have been using for a while, like followers, search and tags, are now available.

Colors! for iOS has also received a nice update which includes the reference photo features that I know many of you have been missing.

Enjoy!