Fireworks, Monkeys, Racers and Podcasts!?

Hi all, just a post to let you know whats going on in the Urban Games world.

chainWorks Reaches Internal Beta!
Our first title, chainWorks, has reached internal beta status, and what-a-relief! It's a fantastic feeling to push my first ever indie title out for people to play. Plenty of feedback coming back which is great, mostly people are enjoying the concept, commenting on it's uniqueness, but offering plenty of suggestions for improvements which is a win-win scenario for me. I posted up some screenshots of the game over at our gallery. So after I get through the bug fixes and suggestions, i've got to sit down and decide what to do with this game...

Monkey Challenge - A New Challenge
I've started work on a new 2d project to take my mind off of the laborious and boring famous "last 10% (90% dev time)" phase of chainWorks. This little game is called monkey challenge, and how much fun is it to just "make games"! I haven't had so much fun programming since I first got T2D, but after 6 - 10 hours coding I have 50% of the final features running in game and bug free. This is the first chance I've had to use the level editor, and it makes creating levels for this game absolutely awesome fun. What's more the code im producing now is levels and levels better than the chainWorks stuff, all nicely commented, tabbed, logical callbacks and effective use of name spaces and classes.... it's that "feel good buzz" that indie game development is all about. I'll be posting more about Monkey Challenge later on, but its inspired by chu-chu rocket (the dreamcast title), but involves monkeys vs tigers, with more exciting puzzle pieces such as rope bridges, tree houses, banana collection and family rescue missions...full write up soon!

Synergy Racing
Our main project of the day is called Synergy. No website or public details yet, just wanted to share a few concept images of ours....


Full Pic

Garage Games Community Podcast
Finally I have the garage games community podcast. A LOT of interest was expressed for this, and since getting a mac (and moving my LIFE to it) Ive wanted to try my hand at this. So I went out and bought a condensor mic & a behringer preamp, and am ready to get this show on the road. What I would love however is a co-host. Someone who is in touch with the GG community, and has time to put aside a few hours once in a while to help present a show to the community. This is all indie stuff, so no technical experience required, but a quiet location and decent quality mic would probably be best... We also have a radio technician onboard who will be "producing" the show, so it's really just a case of reading through what we're planning on talking about and shouting out your opinion.

I'm also on the look out for some cool content for the show. We're after people for interviews, people for roundtables, people for anything! If you want to help co-host, feature in a debate, have shout out for your game, have a cool idea or anything, i've set up a forum just for you :), so come on, drop me a line!

That about wraps up news and gossip for me! I'll check in later with more news on Monkey Challenge, and hopefully chainWorks Beta2 :)