Category Archives: New Projects

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

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 →

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 →

Hyena – Audiogame Player

Hyena, New Projects

It’s time for the release of another project: Hyena

Hyena is something I call an AudioGame player. It is probably more correctly called AudioGameBook which is a combination of the words AudioBook and GameBook, which Hyena is based on. AudioBooks have had a dramatic rise in popularity the last couple of years, probably due to the rise of mp3-players, but they do provide a unique function: Being able to “read” a book while your body is busy with other things. Continue reading Hyena – Audiogame Player →

Collecting Smiles

Art, New Projects

As you may know I’m currently on sabbatical from the games-industry and my company Starbreeze. After having the best job I can imagine for 8 years, I felt I needed a change of scenery and decided to take the money I had managed to put away and burn it on things that makes me feel wiser. You can see some of those things on this site, with small projects of different kinds; some art-projects, some game-projects and some other things that may or may not be good ideas.

The biggest of these projects is one that I haven’t really started on. It’s the project that I’ve been hoping to do for quite some time, and it’s the project that made me create this site in the first place. It’s the Collecting Smiles project.

Continue reading Collecting Smiles →

Cosmonaut

Game Design, New Projects

Having a great idea for a game is valuable. That goes without saying, but exactly how valuable is such an idea? I’ve become rather cynical on the subject after working a while in the games-industry. If 50 people work on one game for over two years, how many good ideas are thought up? And how many of those are needed for the next game? Even if you don’t have a team of 50 people or don’t plan to work on one project for that long, there is a good chance that you’ll come up with a bunch of ideas that could become great games; Ideas that never will be realized.

Cosmonaut is such an idea. Continue reading Cosmonaut →

Rorschach

Art, Game Design, Interactive stories, New Projects, Rorschach

The Swedish game-magazine Level had a nice article about the relationship between art and games in their July 2007 issue. This article contained an interview with me about the game Rorschach, where I collaborated with Ida Rödén to make a small art-game. This game has been shown in a number of more “traditional” art-forums, for example at Umeå Konsthögskola and the M.A.D.E. festival. Art and games has always had a slightly weird relasionship and as usual opinions drift apart. Personally I see interactivity as the key word, and Rorschach tries to explore the interactivity of conversations; something that games in general have been pretty unsuccessful in.

Rorschach is now available for download and can be found at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/rorschach.