Tumbleweed Interactive at The Gathering 2010!

Tumbleweed Interactive will be attending TG 2010 this year!

For those of you who don't know, The Gathering is one of the largest computer parties in the world, and it's right here in Hamar. Check out http://www.gathering.org for more info.

We'll have an Umami playtest session at 15:00 on saturday and Håvard will have a short talk around 22:00ish on saturday as well.

If you're going, make sure you also see at least one of Simon McCallum's talks! They're scheduled at 14:30 on thursday, as well as 14:30 and 15:30 on friday. He's a really talented lecturer and we're sure he's gonna blow your mind!

Hope a lot of you will be submitting work to the creative compos!

Like with a Gamejam, the learning experience of creating something new is at the heart of the TG compos, so don't be afraid to submit your stuff.

See you there!

Global Game Jam 2010

Tumbleweed Interactive is hosting one of the Global Game Jam venues in 2010!

The Global Game Jam is a global initiative to get game developers, students and hobbyist game creators to cooperate across the globe. In just 48 hours hundreds of games are created, all based on similar themes. It's a great way to prototype ideas quickly, and we had a blast last time, so we're already looking forward to it. If you're interested in participating registration is now open on www.globalgamejam.org!

Hope to see many of you there!

Quick company update this week:

Tomorrow Tumbleweed Interactive will be attending Spillnatt (translated Game Night) at the Hamar library. Spillnatt is a cool event a lot of norwegian libraries are participating in, opening up the library for one night and the participants all get to play games.

If you are interested in testing Umami, we recommend you show up! We'll be there from around 17:00 or so. See you there!

We've also updated our blog, check it out here!

The last two weeks have been pretty hectic here at the Tumbleweed office. We've been preparing a new Umami build and I'm happy to say there has been a lot of progress. Our programmers have been working on implementing a lot of new graphical features, our artist has done a wonderful job both creating new and improving old assets while I've been working on implementing these assets in our existing levels. The result is that our game looks better than ever, and we're finally at the point where we feel we have a pretty accurate vertical slice of the game.

The next step is finalizing the last levels of the game, and some more polish, mainly the menus, the HUD and specific gameplay issues on levels. Some issues might arise during playtesting, so we're not exactly resting on our laurels, but we're happy with our work at the moment.

The most important thing we did right the last two weeks is appropriate planning, and the fact that we undertook tasks that we we're able to complete within the time allotted. Some slip-ups did occur, and there are some features that didn't get implemented. Fortunately, these features were mostly minor, and not integral to the overall experience.

The biggest feature we had to lay off until later was presenting the story to the players, but we didn't want to do it half-assed so it had to wait. Our teams inexperience with storytelling in games is mainly to blame for this, and if anyone have any good insights on this issue leave a comment or e-mail us! We love getting input from outside sources, it's not easy to maintain an objective perspective towards a product when you work on it every day.

I'd like to round it off with a link to the newest Umami gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0wzKWfgtM8

Right now we're giving out some preview builds to members of the press. If you are a member of the press and is interested in checking it out, send us a mail at contact[at]tumbleweedinteractive[dot]com.

New Umami Homepage!

We just launched the new Umami homepage! Check it out at www.umamigame.com!

Tumbleweed Interactive wins award at Nordic Game Conference 2009!

Last week, we won the award for "Best New Nordic Talent" at Nordic Game Conference for our iPhone/iPod Touch game "Skybound".

In the picture: Kristoffer is behind the microphone delivering the thank-you speech, Christer is standing in the background.

Welcome to the new Tumbleweed Interactive web-site!

In celebration with our new and improved domain name, twinteract.com, we have launched a new web-site!
We realized our domain was way too long, especially when our e-mail addresses couldn't fit on our buisness cards, so it was a long due investment!

Both tumbleweedinteractive.com and twinteract.com now points to our homepage.

We have also started twittering, so if you're using twitter, be sure to follow us!
We can be found at https://twitter.com/twinteract.