ErikSvedang.com

Hi!

It’s a great pleasure to finally reveal the update for Kometen. Me and Nicke have worked hard on this for two months, adding lots of things and tweaking what was already there. Here’s the changes:

• iPad support through universal binary. You just have to see this in motion :)
• Different regions to explore with new and unique music, backgrounds and objects
• Improved controls (quicker and smoother maneuvering of your comet)
• More food, debris and other fantastic things to see on your journey (including five objects from the drawing competition, more info below)
• Killing your comet now requires confirmation (tap five times in the upper left corner on the comet stats screen)
• Various small bug fixes and improvements

So what are you waiting for, go get the update! And if you don’t own the game yet — buy it here.

Winners of the Debris Drawing Competition

A while back we had a drawing competition where we let anyone who wanted submit drawings with ideas for debris to be added in the game. We selected five winners and — drum roll — here they are:

By Ted Martens (click the image to see the awesome animation)

By Calegaster

By Inlagd Sill

By Rowan Tedge (things went out of control with this one!)

By Houille (this concept was too fun not to be done)

Congratulations to all the winners, very good job! And thanks to everyone who participated, there was a lot of great stuff :) Nicke has used these drawings as reference images for five new objects in the game (we also added some touches of our own). Get the update to see how they look!

Hi!

It’s summer here in Sweden now and when Niklas and I are not sitting at the top of mountains thinking about life, we are working hard on completing the update for Kometen. We are keeping the game very much true to the original experience while trying to make it a lot more varied and surprising… we are very excited to see what you all will think about it!

Oh and by the way; winners in the drawing competition has been decided but will not be revealed until the update goes live. Thanks again to everyone who participated! And of course to everyone who has bought the game!!!

Take care,
Erik

More backgrounds await those who make it to the end of the universe.

Thanks to everyone who has bought Kometen so far, it’s really awesome to see that so many people are playing and enjoying it!

We’re currently working on the first update of the game and to spice things up a little we are going to have a competition. To participate you have to draw (or scribble) an object that you think would be interesting for a comet to find while traveling through space. Send the image file (scan it in first if you drew on a paper) to niklas [at] grafikbyran.com

The five objects we like the most will be translated into watercolor space debris by Nicke and put into the next version of the game. The original drawings will also be put up here on the site for display (with the name of their creators of course). We might do something with the other submissions too, but first we have to see how many people want to participate.

Deadline for the competition is Wednesday, May 26th.

So don’t be shy, take the chance to get your idea into Kometen! Post any questions in the comments below.

Take care,
Erik & Nicke

PS. We do this just as a fun thing so please don’t try to sue us for stealing your idea or anything. Peace!

Get it on iTunes!

Official Page

Hope you like it!!!

Erik

A while ago my friend Niklas Åkerblad (“Nicke” for short) and I decided to do a little game project together, kinda just for fun (and to see how well we could work together). We decided to work with the iPhone and iPod Touch since it seemed neat and a good fit for our small idea. Of course it still took way longer than we thought to get it done — game development never fails to surprise you… Anyway, it’s been a really nice experience to work together and now we’re finally starting to wrap things up. Exactly when the game will be out is hard to say since Apple has to approve it for the App Store but it shouldn’t take too long. Until then, here’s a little trailer:

The art (which is all watercolor) and music is made by Niklas while I have been doing the programming and game design. The overall concept is something we’ve worked very much together on though. In short the game is about exploring space to find art, while at the same time learning how to fly around in a graceful way. There isn’t any scoring system or way to lose, instead it’s all about self improvement and judging your own performance. I hope you will find it as much fun as we do!

Finally I have finished writing my article about the making of Blueberry Garden. It’s not a classic post-mortem since it primarily discusses my thoughts on the design while leaving out production details. Hopefully it can give some insight to what I wanted to achieve with the game regarding interactive storytelling and where I think I succeeded respectively failed.

Read it now on Gamasutra

Thanks to Christian Nutt for the support and making me finish the text!