Conventiony Goodness! news - Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox Game

We were invited to the IGDA's Game ON event this weekend just gone and WOW, what a day! This will have been the second time ONLY that we've ever had Malevolence on open play mode for the public. The first time was at the end of last year at Game ON's Sydney event, and we were stunned at the time to get a literally unanimous positive response from the attendees. We thought it must have been a fluke that time, but we did it again here in Brisbane and got it again (and the game has come a long way since then!) We had more people than I could count come and play the game and talk about it and hear about it... It was incredible.

There's me, lost in a crowd of people, wielding a sword to keep them at bay! I would literally finish talking to one person and then turn and come face to face with another. It was amazing.

The day opened quite calmly, actually, and I had no reason to suspect what was to come. We had an open mic session with myself, two of the Halfbrick team (Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, etc) and the two founding members of Screwtape Studios (The Bank Job) with an avid audience listening in as we answered questions for them.

One of the questions was for us to tell the story of how we came into making games, and what drives us to do it. My story is a bit long-winded so I tried to keep it short (and failed horribly) but a few of the audience teared up at it, which was a bit moving:

It was quite humbling getting to sit right next to developers of that level and be classed as one of them. Especially since Jetpack Joyride and The Bank Job are two of my favourite mobile games!Then we went into the public showing area where I set up all the gear and got to have Malevolence ready to play, desperately hoping that no major bugs would be present. Turns out only one was, and it only showed up every 9 or 10 playthroughs (and I ended up fixing it after the show anyway :P) but it was INCREDIBLE to get to watch people play the game who had never played it before!

Everyone loved it! They carved their way through orcs and goblins, got destroyed by minotaurs, and most of them fell victim to the dreaded pit trap and died horrible deaths. Many of the players were quite young and had never played a game like it, and so they went into it playing it as if it were Skyrim, barging forward and swinging wildly, but Malevolence won every time ;-) I thought this would dissuade them, but some people would sit there for a good 20 minutes, re-playing it until they could survive for a decent length of time, and afterwards told me how much they're looking forward to getting it so that they can play even longer :D.

The artwork from Rachel and Carrie was highly praised, and the sounds and music from Roland and Nicolas were loved by everyone! We knew we had done the sounds right when people were physically twitching and convulsing when the spike traps would suddenly snap closed with a creaky slam. Hehe very fun to watch!

Next came my turn to introduce the game to the crowd at large:

With my trusty Templar sword over my shoulder, I addressed the crowd and told them about the game. Many people were interested in the fact that the world was infinite, which was great to see. A lot of the attendees were game developers themselves, so hopefully I was able to inspire some of them to start thinking a bit differently about their games:

All in all it was a fantastic day, and I have to take a moment here to thank my amazing wife Nyssa who was with me the entire time giving me support and helping to make sure everyone was talked to and their questions answered :) She's an amazing woman!

So other than that, we've been busy coding away, and Ethan has been busy modelling. He's made some more progress on the abandoned mine pack, as you can see:

So that's looking super awesome. Plus, our writing team have been MACHINES and are pumping out some incredible literature for the game, and our art team has been hard at work recreating some of the photos that were sent in by the KickStarter pledgers to get their Malevolence character counterparts! We're keeping it mostly a secret until we can do a big reveal, but we discussed it and thought we'd sneak out one of them in it's early sketch form, just for you to be able to have an early preview. We won't tell you who it is, but let's see if he recognises himself as a fighters guildmaster:

Now this individual just needs to get a dragon tattoo on his head in real life! It looks pretty cool!

But more on that as work progresses :) In the meantime, be sure to keep up with everything Malevolence at the following sites: