ONE LIFE LEFT

We’ll be joined by everyone’s favourite radio/podcast/karaoke superstars of videogame culture commentary – ONE LIFE LEFT – who’ll be recording their latest show LIVE. Ste, Simon and Ann are travelling up to entertain us with a delicious mix of discussion, music, “ridiculous” features and other great stuff. WE <3 OLL.

One Life Left co-host Ste Curran will also be talking about the making of Echo Peak‘s latest game, Way of the Dogg. In case you haven’t heard, Way of the Dogg is a rhythm action game coming out later this year starring our second favourite* canine related rapper, Snoop Dogg. So we’re expecting plenty of surreal anecdotes and advice for anyone thinking of working with rap game heavyweights in the future.

www.onelifeleft.com
www.echo-peak.com

GREENFLY STUDIOS

Greenfly Studios are bringing along a handful of their PS Move party games for us to try out. We love our regular bouts of J.S. Joust so we’re really looking forward to trying out something new, comparably competitive, equally physical, similarly experimental, and just as fun!

QuickDraw:

QuickDraw is a gun-slinging homage to traditional Western films and Victorian pistol duels. A no-screen, digitally-enabled game for two to seven players using PSMove controllers, the goal is to be fastest straight-shooter around.

Featuring three modes, the principal mode “Gentleman’s Walk” arranges all players back-to-back whilst holding a PSMove controller vertically up. On the count to a church bell, each player takes a step forward and on the sound of pistol fire, everyone turns and shoots. The winner is the fastest, and straightest, shooter.

“Mexican Standoff” arranges all players in a big circle facing each other, PSMove contollers held vertically down by the hip (holstered). As the tumbleweed rolls past and the music plays, everyone is shifting their eyes & watching each other. On the sound of gunfire, everyone draws and shoots.

“Outlaws vs Sheriffs”; a Mexican Showdown with players arranged into teams – the team with the best average score (judged on speed and straightness) wins.

“Tense”, “nerve-wracking”, “awesome” and “just pure fun” are some of the statements given for Quick Draw.

GlowTag:

GlowTag reinvents playground tag and turns it on its head. Best played with 6-7 players, it’s a no-screen digitally-enabled game using PSMove controllers. Placing each controller into their back pockets, a random player is designated “IT” and must avoid having their trigger hit for as long as possible! Once caught, a new random player is selected until all players have had a turn – the winner is the longest to avoid being tagged. The catch is, your never quite sure if your currently “it”!

With each controller placed behind the player, you can only see if other players are lit. Stay on your toes and guard your controller because it might be you!

Check out their Mexican Standoff and Tag games:

www.greenflystudios.com

BRING YOUR GAME !

Developers and creatives! Do you have a game or something else relating to videogame culture? Do you want to show it off to a bunch of nice people?  We’ve expanded our Open initiative to include the regular Nights gigs in Nottingham, hopefully making it easier for you folks to get involved and get your work seen. Head over to open.gamecity.org and send us some details.

PLUS !

Loads more games.
Drinks
Food
PRIZES!

GameCityNights Season 4 Episode 2
Thursday 25 April 2013
6pm – 11pm
Antenna, Beck Street, NG1 1EQ
£5 advance tickets coming soon.
£6 on the door/£5 NUS
NTU/Confetti Students free with valid Student I.D.
18+ ID required.

Facebook Event

*Parappa’s #1. Obviously.

We’re delighted to be able to tell you our next ‘From the Desk of…’ guest is none other than Talawa Games founder & CEO, Jesper Engström. Their debut title, Unmechanical, has just launched on the app store and has been meeting acclaim the World over – not least at the BIG festival in Sao Paulo where last December they won Best Sound AND Game of the Show.

Jesper will be joining us live from Stockholm to answer your questions about shipping an award winning first game and what you do afterwards. Needless to say, Unmechanical will also be there to play (and win a copy of!) on the night.

Unmissable, surely…

Now that the tour’s well and truly over, we’ll be in Antenna on the last Thursday of every month (for the next few months at least). We had a brilliant time on the road, but it sure is good to be home.

To start off the fourth season with a bang, we’ll be joined by Ollie Clarke, one of the creative team behind The Button Affair. The suave action heist game full of running, jumping, lasers and a lot of gruesome deaths was released recently to support the charity Special Effect. Ollie and the rest of his team showed The Button Affair at GameCity7 last year to an enraptured audience and we’ve been trying to get them back since. They also made the stunning The Cat that Got the Milk which, if you haven’t seen before, you should definitely seek out. It’s a beautiful little game with superb artwork and the best Kandinsky tribute ever seen in videogames. It’s like controlling a hallucinating cat lost in an art gallery.

Ollie should also have a nice little creative challenge for you to take part in, too. FOR PRIZES.

Bring Your Game !

Developers and creatives! Do you have a game or something else relating to videogame culture? Do you want to show it off to a bunch of nice people?  We’re expanding our Open initiative to include the regular Nights gigs in Nottingham, hopefully making it easier for you folks to get involved and get your work seen. Head over to open.gamecity.org and send us some details.

PLUS !

Loads of indie developers bringing along their games.
A ‘From The Desk Of…’ interview with a special guest.
Drinks
Games
Food
PRIZES!

GameCityNights
Season 4 Episode 1

With special guest speaker Ollie Clarke (The Button Affair & The Cat that Got the Milk)

A From The Desk Of… interview with Talawa Games‘ Jesper Engström.

Thursday 28 March 2013
6pm – 11pm
Antenna, Beck Street, NG1 1EQ
£5 advance tickets available here.
£6 on the door/£5 NUS
NTU/Confetti Students free with valid Student I.D.
18+ ID required.

Facebook Event
Lanyrd Event

Do you want to be in with a chance of winning some brilliant prizes?

Do you want to get into SimCityNights for free?

If your answers are “Why yes, I do want to be on one of those teams!  I do want to build the best city! I do want to win brilliant prizes! I do want to get in for free!”, then you’ve come to the right place!

How to apply:

Tweet at us @GameCity with the hashtag #SimCityNights

or

Write a post on the SimCityNights facebook event page.

and

Tell us why you should be on one of the teams!

An important caveat!

To take part in the team challenge at SimCityNights you must be available from 4pm on Thursday 28th February and able to get to Antenna, 9 Beck Street, Nottingham, NG1 1EQ.

We’ll form the teams by picking names randomly and contacting you before Thursday.

Good luck!

More SimCityNights details here.

SimCityNights
Thursday 28 February
6pm – 11pm
Antenna, Beck Street, NG1 1EQ
£5 advance tickets available here.
£6 on the door/£5 NUS
NTU/Confetti Students free with valid Student I.D.
18+ ID required.

The MAC in Birmingham is a great venue and welcomed us for a fantastic night for which we adapted the set pretty substantially. This was the first gig we’d done in an actual theatre, and the addition of focussed lighting and a bigger PA made all the difference. Who knew?

Some fantastic developer talks led us up to the interval, with special mention reserved for the young developer folk from Gamer Camp who pitched like pros.

Thanks to everyone who came along. Cheers to all the developers who brought their games/apps/things along for us to look at:

• Gamer Camp Studios

• Team Phoenix at Gamer Camp Studios – Totem Dash

• Team Stash at Gamer Camp Studios – Baggage Reclaim

• Dixidiasoft – Steampunk League

• Falchion Games – Go To Hell Dave

• Wewana:Play

• Flump Studios – Pester

• Nyamyam Games – Tengami 

• VAMflax – Chopper Mike

Fortunately, our friends at Maxis have stepped in to do something befitting the finale of such an excellent run of events.

We’re adding an extra special tour date on Thursday 28th February at Antenna, Nottingham where GameCityNights, for one night only – will become SimCityNights!

Excitingly, this will be the first opportunity in Europe for the public to get their hands on the brand new SimCity ahead of its release on March 8th and there’ll be prizes to be won as part of a city-building challenge.

We’ll have 6 teams battling against each other to build the most thriving region possible. Prizes will be given out at its climax, courtesy of Maxis, for Mayors who have built the richest city, the biggest city, the cleanest city – and other provocative categories. With 3 expert teams already in hand, the evening promises to deliver a new experience of urban design for all those getting involved.

To be in with a chance of being on one of those teams, keep an eye on our Twitter and Facebook  pages over the next couple of weeks.

SimCityNights
Thursday 28 February
6pm – 11pm
Antenna, Beck Street, NG1 1EQ
£5 advance tickets available here.
£6 on the door/£5 NUS
NTU/Confetti Students free with valid Student I.D.
18+ ID required.

Mostly fun, though.
We’ve just unloaded, handed the keys back to the van hire company (unsoiled! undamaged!) and wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who came out to say hello and support us on the first few GameCityNights of 2013.

EDGE have been covering the detail of some of the gigs, and we’re going to be getting into the production of the shows over at Cityhall in the next few days – but in lieu of that, here’s what happened….!
We kicked off in Bristol at the lovely Arnolfini. The top floor of the building had only just been opened up to events and was a really interesting, beautiful space with amazing views over the waterfront. Bristol was also characterised by the amazing set of devs who turned up with work to show…

• Alistair Aitcheson – Slamjet Stadium

• Dojo Arcade – Soulfinity

• Force of Habit – Toast Time

• Opposable Games – Clockwork Racers

• Rose Robbins & Pete Shadbolt – Hardware Island

• Skull Bang Games – The Battle for Hill 218

• Steve Cable – Lucha Lucha Loco Ball

• Xiotex Studios – Cyberstream Fugitive

Ending with a prolonged (and especially argumentative) Canon Fodder section, we struck the kit and set forth into the Bristol night to get drenched and lost trying to find the hotel.
Due to some kind of administrative oversight, we’d been booked into somewhere fantastic – the Brooks Guest House, which we can unreservedly endorse. They have “John Lewis Beds”, a “trust bar”, cook you whatever you like in the morning from their open kitchen. In addition, they don’t get irritated when you turn up at 12.15 am to try and check in.
One day off, and we sped (responsibly!) up to Cambridge for a night at the venue of the regular indie-meetup CB2. Once again, we were blessed with some fantastic devs turning up to show stuff – and even more in the audience as Mssrs Key and Cavanagh arrived to show their support.

• DanielCakeGames – Nunnageddon 

• Daniel Ratcliffe – ComputerCraft

• Freekstorm – Doctor Kvorak

• Inkle – Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!

• Jasper Byrne / Superflat Games – New Game+

• Ugly Robot – Pocket Moto Adventures

• Yeah Us! – Pumped: BMX

No Canon Fodder that night, but an especially robust quiz took us towards last-orders.

The MAC in Birmingham is a great venue and welcomed us for a fantastic night for which we adapted the set pretty substantially. This was the first gig we’d done in an actual theatre, and the addition of focussed lighting and a bigger PA made all the difference. Who knew?
Some fantastic developer talks led us up to the interval, with special mention reserved for the young developer folk from Gamer Camp who pitched like pros.

• Gamer Camp Studios

• Team Phoenix at Gamer Camp Studios – Totem Dash

• Team Stash at Gamer Camp Studios – Baggage Reclaim

• Dixidiasoft – Steampunk League

• Falchion Games – Go To Hell Dave

• Wewana:Play

• Flump Studios – Pester

• Nyamyam Games – Tengami 

• VAMflax – Chopper Mike

With the administrative blip of Bristol’s accommodation a distant memory, we checked into some rooms on the ring-road after midnight and dreamt of John Lewis beds and buttery scrambled eggs on granary bread. My room had a bunk-bed. I slept on the bottom bunk.

There’s just a few more dates left now in this first leg, and we’d LOVE to see you there – wether you’re a developer or just someone who enjoys the company of them. Register on open.gamecity.org if you’ve got something to show, and hopefully we’ll see you in a couple of weeks!

It was a cosy night with loads of interesting chat, some brilliant new games that we’re really excited about seeing more of, and some new friends made. Cambridge is nice!

Thanks to the wonderful developers who turned up with some great games:

• DanielCakeGames – Nunnageddon 

• Daniel Ratcliffe – ComputerCraft

• Freekstorm – Doctor Kvorak

• Inkle – Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!

• Jasper Byrne / Superflat Games – New Game+

• Ugly Robot – Pocket Moto Adventures

• Yeah Us! – Pumped: BMX

The developers who joined us to show off their games feature briefly. Here’s some links if you want to see more of their work:

• Falchion Games - Go to Hell Dave!

• Anthill Games - Archipelagos

• Lucky Red Fish - Tonga

• Fallen Tree Games - Quell Momento

• AlloydGD - ReversE

• Snappy Fingers - Body Monsters

Huge thanks to Mondo Comico for supplying the prizes!

Crytek UK designer Michael Barclay will be joining GameCityNights this Thursday to take you inside Cryengine! Michael will explain the pipeline that Crytek use to produce AAA level designs and will be answering your questions.

Wonderful news!

We’ve been doing a lot of good stuff with Crytek recently, having just launched the Off the Map competition with them and the British Library. It’s handy having them on our doorstep to jump in and be generally brilliant at everything.

So, see you on Thursday for Edge presents GameCityNights – Nottingham with Maxis’ SimCity!

Thursday 24th January, 2013
9 Beck Street, Nottingham, NG1 1EQ
6pm – 11pm
Advance tickets available via NTU online store.
NTU & Confetti Students free with valid Student I.D.
18+ ID required.

Facebook event