As some of you may know, many in Mojang and the whole lot of them Oxeye went to GDC/IGF this year. For me (thewreck) it was mostly to visit enchanting San Francisco and meet (hug) other developers, while for others – like notch who had speaking obligations – things were a bit less casual. Even while engorging myself in all the casual fun I managed to fit a bunch of work on Cobalt, alas I managed to catch the flu and was knocked out for the better part of the weekend following gdc.

After the gdc, me, kinten and another friend moved our cobalt development operations to an apartment in San Francisco for two weeks. Armed with our laptops we went exploring the breakfast offerings during the morning

the office cafés during the day

the night life during the night

and the sights during the weekends.

We managed to snap a lot of reference photos and recorded a bunch of sounds for the future. In regards to direct Cobalt development, I worked mostly on improvements to the editor, which is why many of the changes we have made will not be appearing in the v103 change-log. For example, the tiles browser has been remade, now supporting selecting multiple tiles (randomly picking between them after each placement) as well as rather advanced free text filtering.

The last week in USA, we went on a road trip along highway 1, through Santa Cruz, San Diego, through the Mojave desert to Los Angeles and finally flew home from Las Vegas proudly sporting my minecraft t-shirt. Now, it is time to get v103 ready for upload. We have no current estimate, but our current goal is to simply wrap it up, test it, and upload it.

Development is sometimes painful and hard but most of the time it is pure fun! The past couple of days we’ve been hard at work with getting the demo up to date in time for our GDC appearance.

There’s been some major changes to the core concept of the game and for the first time in a while it feels like we’re making some great progress!

I’ll try to set aside some time for a write up of the current state of the game, but for now you’ll have to make do with a play testing video.

We’re speaking Swedish in the video, but hopefully our reactions are sufficient to understand what’s happening!

/Kinten

But then, from beautiful California, there shines a light at the end of the tunnel! Spelunky and Meat Boy are hanging out and seem to have a great time. Blueface just had to send a big…

Hello!!! Be seeing you at GDC ‘11!

During my trip to San Francisco and Game Developer’s Conference, I recorded a bunch of clips and put them on YouTube as a video blog. You can see them all here:

• Day 1 – Travelling to SF
• Day 2 – Visiting Mission and Castro with Erik, Kian, Nils and Bernhard
• Day 3 – First day of Independent Games Summit
• Day 4 – Second day of IGS
• Day 5 – Independent Games Festival pavilion and award ceremony
• Day 6+7 – More from IGF and various parties

/ jeb