Dino Run is Officially Released!

Hooray!! Our latest game Dino Run is ready to go. Both single player and MULTIPLAYER modes. And it's FREE for all to enjoy! To get started running, go to pixeljam.com/dinorun and play to your hearts content!

In the next couple of days we'll be resolving any issues that arise from high volume play on the multiplayer side, but otherwise the game is good to go. please feel free to share it with your friends, brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, strangers, colleagues, major and minor publications and web sites, everyone!

Dino Run Multiplayer Edition will only appear on pixeljam.com on xgenstudios.com, who's great MMocha multiplayer server allowed us to make this a multiplayer game. (They've also got some other great games on their site that are worth playing, such as Stick Arena!)

The single player version of the game is plentiful, offering quite an array of things to do and achieve, levels of difficulty, special themed "speed runs" to unlock, super eggs to find, abilities to be increased, passwords to be entered and trophies to be earned. In the game, all the bones you collect become your currency to buy things such as Speed runs, features, icons, desktops, mp3's and other secret good stuff. There's even a "night mode" you can unlock, which I think is particularly cool.

There is also an in-depth high score system that you can submit your top scores to and of course gain the notoriety and praise that you so rightfully deserve.

And to top it all off, as you can see in the image above, there's a set of unique hats, helmets & masks that can be worn by your heroic velociraptor, in both single and multiplayer modes! Many more than are seen here. These hats are so much fun! Definitely one of my favorite features of this game. I truly enjoyed creating them and enjoy running with them even more.

How can you have this exciting set of dino hats you ask? Well, anyone who DONATES money to Pixeljam will receive a special Patronage Gift Pack with 40+ hats (there are a few you can only unlock in the game), the ability to change your dino colors + some other goodies too. You choose the amount that you'd like to contribute & in turn,you get digital treats & we can possibly stay afloat and make another game! Yes, we want to make more games, such as Gamma Bros 2, which is one of the next we want to work on, but income is required. This is a way for you to help make that actually happen.

Thanks a lot to all of our fantastic beta testers who helped make this game so much better than we could have imagined. Thanks to the amazing people who have helped support us in various generous ways. Thanks to Mark DeNardo for providing more excellent music and sfx for our games, and thanks to Miles Tilmann for working way too much to make this game actually come to life. We're gonna take a little break and possibly in a month or so will begin working on our next game. :)

That's all for now. Enjoy Dino Run! We'll see you out there in the multiplayer races. May you escape extinction and live to run another day.

-Rich

Dino Run (beta)

Hi!

News: We've got a new game in the works called "Dino Run". A Giant asteroid has crash landed & extinction may just be inevitable. You are a Velociraptor & you should probably start running for your life! Run, jump, catch a ride with a Pterodactyl, eat power-up plants & other things, save all the dino eggs you can!

This game will feature both single player AND Online Multiplayer versions!

We've been working on it since September, are about to begin beta testing. We hope to finish and release it in the beginning of February. We've got plenty more to add to it in the meantime. Thanks to all of our beta testers in advance. And as in our previous games, music and sfx by Mark DeNardo.

Here are some screens of ACTUAL game play: (Click images for larger views)




















That's the big news. We're excited. We hope to have a new game for you in Early February, & then we'll get to work on Gamma Bros 2. :)

Happy Holidays!

Ratmaze 2 !!

Hi everyone, Ratmaze 2 is here!

Go to http://pixeljam.com/ratmaze2

If you enjoyed the original Ratmaze at all, we think you'll really enjoy this one! For one thing, it's a lot more fun! There's a colorful new maze to explore, some new moves (you can run diagonally), there are a lot more tasty cheeses to eat, apples for speed boosts, secrets, plus some of the biggest cheeses you've ever seen in the bonus areas! There are other new activities involving bouncing balls, holes, and an attractive new female Rat as well. Oh, and you can submit your high scores and compete with your friends and complete strangers!

Here are a few screenshots:

Go play! it's free. Have fun, & Thanks for helping our beloved Rats eat all possible cheeses.

Oh yeah! thanks a lot to Crazy Monkey Games for sponsoring Ratmaze 2, and to all of our beta testers, without whom the game would be buggy and not as much fun!

Ratmaze 2

Programming/visual fx/sound fx production: Miles Tilmannn

Art & Animation: Rich Grillotti

Music, sound fx: Mark Denardo

Speacial thanks to John at Crazy Monkey games for sponsoring Ratmaze 2

Beta testers:

Mike Lee, Bobby K, Matt Jeanes, .tiff, Andy Watson, John West, Nathan Siruta, Kasey Akira, Jason Reinsvold, Karen Cate, Luposian, Emily Lewis, Steve Finkel, John Magnotta, Jenny Pearsall

Squeek!

Gamedev.net/Pixeljam Interview

Hi again! Here's a quick update.. Miles and Rich of Pixeljam Games were recently interviewed by Gamedev.net, and it went live this week. Since Gamma Bros received a nomination as a contender for the 2007 IGF Best Web Browser game category, and we will be attending the GDC and IGF this March, gamedev.net wanted to chat with us. It went rather well, and may be informative for some. Here's a link to it:

http://www.gamedev.net/columns/interviews/pixeljam.asp

Well, we hope it's entertaining! That's all for now. Stay tuned for more exciting developments...

-Rich

New Pixeljam Website!

Hello fellow pixel enthusiasts. We've got some good news. This month we finally managed to complete and launch a new web site for Pixeljam.com!

There are a bunch of sections, including Games, Downloads, Shop, Art, Info, Press, and more! We've also set it up so that we can swap out the main "theme" of the site with new themes. In this launch version, we've got our little moonjumper which you can make jump around for fun, plus you can unlock a download if you figure out the mystery...

We'll eventually add some new themes to the site with other characters, environments and challenges, which will hopefully add a fun dimension to the site itself. There is a little bit we reveal about some upcoming games that we've been working on, but of course not too much. In Downloads you can find some good music, in the shop you can buy some Gamma Bros shirts for the time being, and we'll be adding to all of the sections as we go.

You may notice that we've gone ahead and embraced google adsense ads on our site and with our games. We were reluctant for very long time, trying to maintain extreme dignity and all, but we couldn't really afford to have the no-ads philosophy any longer. We could very well be out of business before we get started here if we don't do some things to make money. The good thing about google adsense is that it's all unobtrusive enough, the ads are actually relative to what we're doing, & might actually be a way for us to make a little. The more ways we have to earn small money here and there could eventually lead to us being able to do this all full time. We're still only able to work on our games here and there part time, but we're still accepting donations if anyone wants to try to hurry us up! Also, the shop is selling Gamma Bros shirts until they sell out.

In other news.. Mr. Rat from Ratmaze is a celebrity! Ratmaze was featured recently in Games For Windows magazine. It's for a feature "101 Free Games", in the "10 minute time wasters" sub-section, which is Also featured on http://www.1up.com.

Well, that's all I've got time to write about today. The IGF awards festival and Game Developers Conference is just around the corner & we're getting really excited about it. We'll definitely have a blog for you in March, for sure. But probably sooner tha that as well.

Don't forget to visit and enjoy our new site!
_Rich

 

Gamma Bros = 2007 IGF Finalist!!

Hi! It's time again for another deeply sporadic blog from Pixeljam Games! Why do we wait so long between blogs these days? Well, we need to be spending most of our time actually making and conceiving of games, not just talking about them or wasting anyones time with non-information. Plus, we don't have any new releases ready to go yet, and don't want to spoil too much of our exisiting works in progress, so, there you go. On the other hand, there really is a lot to write about!

The main thing I'd like to write about today is the exciting news about Gamma Bros! First and foremost, Gamma Bros has been selected as a finalist in the 2007 IGF (Independent Games Festival) Web Browser Game category in San Francisco in March. This is really, really great news and quite an honor, considering only 3 games are selected in that category, out of all the tens of thousands of web browser games in the world released in 2006. :)

So, all honors aside, the greatest part is that we get 2 free passes to attend the IGF and the option to upgrade our passes inexpensively to attend the Independent Games Summit conference lectures and classes. Miles and I will be going and are really looking forward to it. We've already got our plane tickets & have a bunch of people we're looking forward to meeting while we're out there. Individuals & companies we'd like to do some game developing with, and make some online multiplayer games with in the future. It's too bad they didn't give us 3 passes so our 8-bit music genius Mark DeNardo could go with us, but at least he's been to some cool events we haven't been to, like playing the Blip Festival in NY recently.

Now, we needed to be able to afford to get ourselves out there, which wasn't looking very good to begin with, and then an amazing stroke of miracle happened! We received word that Gamma Bros won the first big game contest held by the very cool new gaming site Kongregate.com! Gamma Bros had already won $250 in their weekly contest a couple months ago, and then we won an unexpected $1500 more on their Game Contest 0!! Holy crap! That meant we could now comfortable afford to fly out to San Francisco for a week and feed ourselves too! We have some very good friends out there we can stay with, so it's all really falling into place. We'll probably also make a few things to give away as well, and with any luck we'll have a few new micro games completed that we can give out on a promo CD to all interested individuals. Awesome. Thanks Kongregate and IGF judges.

We won a couple other contests too w/ Gamma Bros, but nothing as big as the Kongregate one. If you are a Flash game developer, you should definitely enter your games into the Kongregate contests. They offer great cash prizes, even for Runner-up games.

Okay, I don't want this blog to go on too long, so that's all I'll write for now. I've been wanting to put a blog up with a collection of press links, Gamma Bros reviews, and interviews we've done, but it's a lot to pull together. I'll do my best as soon as I can, but of course making games is priority #1, and there's a massive amount of work to be done there. We've got some really cool ones in the works. If you want to see games from us sooner than later, you can help us out by buying a Gamma Bros t-shirt or donating or something. the less actual paying job work we have to seek out and take on to survive & pay our bills, the more time we can devote and the sooner & more effectively we can make things happen with our games which, of course, will ultimately benefit all of humankind. :)

-Rich

help wanted

Hello again.

It's been a while. Ever since we finished Gamma Bros, we've been very, very busy. Miles and I had been working hard on our next game (currently top secret) and trying to do as much actual paying client work as we can so we can pay our bills! In fact, the client work has been all consuming for a long time now, and we haven't had much opportunity to work on games at all. It's unfortunate, but there is a way you can help! If even a small percentage of the people who have enjoyed Gamma Bros helped us out with a donation of $5 or more, we could actually make a full time job out of making our games. Once we got outselves going we would find other ways to make out money (like making and selling pixel art t-shirts and merchandise) and wouldn't need any donation support.

Well, anyway, we've got one partially finished & hope to get back to it this fall and release it by the end of the year perhaps. All I'll say is that it's got pixel robots & the plan is to have a mutiplayer option if we can work that out. Then we've got many other games we're working out on paper & in our heads for now, and Gamma Bros 2 is hopefully going to happen sometime.

Well, back to work. I'll write more about the new game soon.
-Rich