We’ve also been selected to showcase the game at the Nordic Game Indie Night, an awesome indie game developer party which kickstarts the Nordic Game Conference. So if you’re in Scandinavia on Wednesday May 22nd, you should drop by Slagthuset in Malmö and drink a beer with us or to try out some of the other cool games being showcased.

Showcasing at the Indie Night automatically makes us nominated in the category Nordic Indie Sensation Award 2013 as well. The voting for this prize will be take place on the Indie Night, so please vote for us if you’re there.

Comments and feedback.

Since the release of Episode One, there has been a constant flow of advice, criticism and praise coming from you great people out there. You guys do a great job of letting us know exactly what you like and dislike about The Silent Age. We like that. And we listen.

There’s one word we hear a lot: “Android!”. You guys have been shouting that word ever since the game was released on iOS. Guess what – after having spent several nights smithing at the Android anvil, we can finally announce that the game is up and running! On Android devices!

NO! Wait… Don’t open the champagne just yet… And stop waving your arms please… We haven’t actually like – tested that it works – on that many Android devices. Just one actually. And we’d actually like the game to be more or less bug free on most devices before launching the game on Google Play.

This is where YOU enter the picture! Yeah, you the Android device owner! We need beta-testers to make sure that Episode One is as flawless as the Pink Panther jewel on all Android devices!

If you would like to participate in the beta and provide us feedback about issues you may encounter, please write an email to info@houseonfire.dk with the text “tsa beta” in the subject (VERY IMPORTANT, otherwise the email gets lost in our filter). Write what device you have in the message, and we’ll send you a link where you can download and install the game. As a minimum the game requires Android 2.3 and an ARM7 CPU.

Comments and feedback.

Since the release of The Silent Age Episode One, we’ve been receiving an enormous amount of feedback from you wonderful fans out there. Among the feedback there is however one question that stands out. A question that craves to be answered:

“When can I play Episode Two”?

You guys want more. And you want it now! We truly appreciate that, and we can’t wait to get started.

Thing is, we still haven’t secured the funding that we need in order to complete Episode Two. The original plan was to secure the funding through donations on our home page and then release Episode Two for free. Sadly, we’re still far from reaching our funding goal although a lot of you wonderful people have donated.

So, time for plan B. We have decided to make Episode Two a paid app. Episode One will still be free, and those of you who have donated will still get Episode Two for free. Putting a price tag on Episode Two has been suggested numerous times by you fans out there and one of the recurring comments we get is that you guys don’t mind paying for playing The Silent Age.

So, back to the question: “When can I play episode Two”?

Episode Two will be the final chapter of The Silent Age. It has to be artistic, well written, beautiful and simply awesome. And that takes time. If we announce a deadline at this point, we risk sacrificing the top layer of awesomeness just because we need to make a specific deadline. You can play Episode Two when it’s done. And it’s done when it’s absolutely fantastic.

Comments and feedback on facebook.

The rumors are true. The first part of Joe’s epic misadventures is out there! The Silent Age Episode One has landed on the App Store. Go play it fanboys and fangirls!

Episode One is 100% free. If you like it, please consider donating a small sum of money to the production of Episode Two. Read more about donations here.

But first – go play Episode One!

Comments and feedback on facebook.

While we’ve been busy behind the scenes working on our “go-to-market” strategy, just to sound all serious, The Silent Age won the Casual Connect 2013 Indie Prize along with four other games.

Casual Connect has a nice list of the games which were presented at the showcase. There are some real gems in there, so I encourage you to look them up and give them a try.

Comments and feedback on Facebook.

But yeah, the music is playing and the pixels are ready to go. In short – Episode One is definitely DONE! …or uhm.. DONE-ISH! We’ll submit the game to the App Store once the bugfixing is done. First stop on our release tour is the iPad!

Anyways, while you’re waiting, why don’t you check out this home made trailer? It’s not the final trailer for the game, but it sort of gives you an idea of the look and feel of the game.

As always, we’re very interested in your feedback. Let us know your thoughts and suggestions on facebook.

From left: Gregor, Uni, Linda, office baby Giana, Manuel and Moritz

Everyone participated, including Linda, even though she was watching the office baby at the same time. We managed to make some nice prototypes games.

Get Me Out of Here

The winner of the game was without a doubt Linda, who managed to have a game up and running in GameMaker early on Saturday. Get Me Out of Here is a game where you have to clear a circle from smaller circles by connecting two at a time. When you connect two circles, they attract. It is a very simple mechanic, but it turned out to be a very challenging game. The beautiful graphics come from Thomas, of course

Fall Cat

André came second with Fall Cat. A game about a poor cat falling down an endless pit. An hilarious game with André squeaking like a cat at every collision.

Ken-
neth

Thomas made a stealth-game where you play a protagonist with only a dagger as his weapon. You throw the dagger to kill the guards, but  have to go pick it up before another guard sees it. Thomas also made sound and music effects for some of the other games.

Space Miner

Uni made a game about mining in space. You launch your space craft and it has to crash into the sun in order to disperse some minerals. You then launch another space craft to collect the minerals before your opponent reaps the benefits of your lost ship.

Colour Bubbles

Moritz, one of the interns made a game about popping bubbles. Pick a colour and pop all the bubbles of that colour. If you hit the wrong bubble, it changes colour making the game more difficult.

Edge

Lasse continued working on his arcade-style spline-racer, which looks awesome btw. He even convinced Moritz to make music tracks for it, and we all discovered Moritz’ hidden talent.

Gregor was working on a gravity based game, where the playing field was full of particles attracting each other, and Manuel worked on a game where two spaceships fly around a sun, shooting each other.

Comments and feedback.

Square Joe

Joe came to life in 2011. At this point he was a nameless ambassador of a faint game idea, visually presented as a placeholder rectangle. At this point we knew that the game would be about time travel and that the main character would be human. We didn’t know if the game would be side view or isometric view or whether Joe would be male or female.

Stickman Joe

Once we knew that the main character would be a man, and that the view in the game would be 2-D side view, I added a little more detail to the character. Stickman Joe was used mostly for size comparison.

Stalker Joe

For a while we considered making the game very art-oriented, almost completely without any text. I was highly influenced by the desolate science fiction universe presented in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker at the time, and the main character was a mix of male characters from Tarkovsky movies.

Yellow Joe

Once I started working on the backgrounds for the post apocalyptic future, I realized that the general tone of the visuals tended to be dark and desaturated. It was hard to visually distinguish Joe from the background imagery, and something drastic had to be done to make him stand out. I started out by replacing his dark clothes with a highly saturated yellow suit just to see what happened.

Red Joe

The yellow colour was a tad too dramatic, but I liked the idea of a using a single coloured boiler suit. I changed the colour to orangey red, partly inspired by The Dig, one of my favorite adventure games. The red boiler suit makes Joe a highly recognizable character, and for a while I considered making him an escaped convict, just to justify the suit.

Detailed Joe

Having decided on the red boiler suit, I tried to make Joe more realistic by adding more fringes to the fabric. At this point we had decided that Joe would have some kind of maintenance job, which I tried to emphasize by giving him safety shoes and by adding a slightly visible white t-shirt.

Minimal Joe

The extra fringes made Joe look great on screenshots, and we actually thought that we had nailed the look. Once we started animating Joe however, the fringes didn’t animate along with the character. It looked odd, and we realized that we’d have to either animate all the fringes or skip them entirely. And, yes, I actually did try to manually animate all the fringes along with the animation. After having spent 4 hours animating 6 frames, I decided to go for plan B. So, we ended up removing all the fringes.

Seventies Joe

During production we made the decision to change the game setting from 2012 to 1972. The first thing I did was giving Joe a Seventies makeover, including a shave, long hair, a tight polyester suit and some extra heel on the shoes. At this point we also decided to give Joe a slightly passive and naive personality, which I tried to reflect by making his posture less erect.

Final Joe

The moustache was actually meant as a joke. In a November blog post, I wrote that Joe supported the Movember Movement by sporting a well trimmed hipster moustache. Our marketing guy posted a poll on our Facebook page, asking whether Joe should wear a moustache in the game. The majority of the voters voted yes, and thus Joe now has a moustache. I personally think the moustache makes him look a lot like Richard Benjamin in Westworld or a male Seventies porn star.

Share your thoughts on facebook.

The first playthrough was nerve-wracking! What if the game just felt odd to play on an iPad? What if the game was too dark? What if the performance sucked?

Luckily, the playthrough went pretty well. The game looks and feels great on an iPad. The coder tells me we have a few memory problems and sometimes the raindrops mutate into giant pixelated jellyfish. But the overall performance is pretty good and the bugs are fixable.

By the way, the red background is my newly installed kitchen floor. I chose the colour after having looked at Joe’s red boiler suit for ages. It´s a great colour for a kitchen floor!

Comments and feedback.

It’s spring time! In Denmark this means the weather changes from constant grey to slightly less grey. We Scandinavians can now actually go outside without worrying about frost bites and even the Sun occasionally stops by on its way to a happier place. But let’s not talk about the weather. It just makes me wanna go outside and look at female humans instead of working. We don’t have time for pleasures like that. We have a game to deliver to all of you lovely people out there.

The Silent Age Episode One has actually reached a state where it’s playable. Yeah, that’s right, it’s alive, it’s ALIVE!! We ought to open that bottle of champagne that has been collecting dust next to the silly party hats. But we’re Scandinavians. We’ll party when the game is done. Instead, we’re spending our time testing, polishing and adding more puzzles to the game. We even have an animator on board now! The game finally comes together, and it could actually turn out to be a great game!

Comments and feedback.

We’ve been crunching! We’ve been at work all through the weekend from 8.30 in the morning, which is really early for an indie games company. The story guy, the programmer guy, the game designer guy and the sound designer girl all gave up an entire weekend of partying and couch potatoing. Even the company baby was there.

The plan was to finish up most half of The Silent Age Episode One by Monday – a plan which went very well until a horde of bugs and unforseen challenges showed up. We did suspect that something like that might happen, and we did manage to get a lot of stuff done. The Silent Age Ep. 1 is in good shape.

We also managed to add an extra feature: We’re now able to add an overall colour tint to Joe’s sprite. This means that we can make Joe all green, all yellow or all black! As you can see in the above example, we can now place Joe in a semi-dark room without having him look like a flourescent sticker!

The team, busy planning.

Anders, the story guy.

Nevin, the sound girl. Only people with a high IQ are able to work on two laptops simultaneously.

Uni, the producer, looks at the ever growing task list.

Share your comments and feedback on facebook.

They did it to the latest Twilight Saga and Harry Potter movies. They did it in Berlin and Korea. Now we’re doing it:

We’re slicing up the game!

We have been working on The Silent Age for… well… ages! Let’s call it a year on and off. We could easily go on for another six months of solitary confinement development, but we feel a strong need to stop brewing for a moment and start letting you have a taste of what we’re brewing instead.

So we have decided to release The Silent Age in two episodes. Rather than keeping you waiting any longer, we would like to get your response to the game as we move along. The critique we get from the first episode will help us improve the experience as we work on the second episode.

The plan is to include the first 5 chapters in Episode One, which is very close to being considered beta. Episode Two will contain the last 5 chapters, which is scheduled to be released… When it’s Done.

As always, we would love to hear your comments and feedback.

The House on Fire Team split into two fractions: Here’s one part of the team, proudly advertising a secret upcoming project. From left it’s: Lasse, some random guy not from House on Fire, André, Uni and Linda.

The team worked hard, fueled by a mix of adrenaline and beers, and with the helping hand from the random guy not from House on Fire, they managed to make a rather weird game.

I partnered up with fellow font geek Alexandra Mariner from Funrigger to open a Logo Shop during the event. The Logo Shop was a 100% free enterprise, providing custom made logos for game jammers! By the way, this picture kinda reminds me of a certain Kraftwerk sleeve.

Nordic Game Jam was great fun, and a great place to network with fellow videogame-geeks.

Giana uttered her first word shortly after the jam ended. Uni claims it was “Babba!” but others say it might have been “Data!”…

How fast do people read? Asked another way, how quickly should text disappear from the screen?

Being a point-and-click adventure game, ehm, a tap-and-click adventure game, there is a lot of story to be told. The narrative and dialog is done by the very talented Anders Pedersen, and I think you guys will love it.

We would love nothing more than being able to afford voice actors to do the dialog and narrative. But on our tight budget, we’ll have to go the classic way. And it does suite the style of the game very well.

We are currently working on the whole dialog and text system. Whenever the player click, eh, taps on an object, Joe will walk over to it and describe it. Often with a comment which might tell more about Joe’s personality and situation, then the object itself. This is how much of the back-story is told, and is our primary way of informing the player.

The comments are displayed at the top of the screen. Unobtrusive, it won’t take away the flow of the game, and the player can continue on without tapping pages and pages of text, if she doesn’t want to read it.

But every now and then, Joe needs to talks to people. This is usually important for knowing your actual goal in the game. So we have made a dialog system which pops up in the middle of the screen. It displays a profile picture next to the text so you can tell, who is saying what.

As it turns out, there is a whole science behind reading, reading speed, and type of reading. Looking at the Wikipedia page, our player will read for comprehension, which is for an adult between 200 and 400 words per minute, at a average word-length of 6.

I am pretty bad at reading myself. So we have set the text to display at 200 wpm with an added one second fixed reaction time. In dialog between the protagonist and other NPCs, we have decided to require the player to tap to the next page, so she won’t miss important plot-points (unless she want to).

How fast do you read? Please leave your comments and opinions in the comments below or on Facebook.

2011 ends! Tonight! According to the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar and the great German movie director Roland Emmerich, 2012 marks the End of the World As We Know It. Fortunately the cataclysmic events will not occur until December 21, so it seems we’ll have time enough to release The Silent Age before Armageddon.

Things were a bit less dramatic in 1972. Joe spends New Years Eve on the coast of Honolulu, Hawaii, getting drunk and playing songs on his ukulele. He has bought a pack of cigarettes, hoping to build up a smoking habit. But Alas, the cheap rum makes his ukulele sound like Stockhausen on a bad day and the cigarettes just make him dizzy. Poor Joe. Let’s hope some dramatic event will turn his life upside down in the near future.

Hello World! I’m Daan and I’m currently handling marketing, communication and community here at House on Fire. The team asked me if I could write something about me coming to Denmark to work for them and so I did! Being in marketing I tried to make it a “tongue-in-cheek” reference to the usage of buzzwords in marketing hence it might seem a tad quaint to some. Hope you’ll enjoy it!

In early 2011 I started preparing for my quest to leave my homeland in search of better grounds. My study gave me the possibility to follow a placement abroad so I decided that could be a perfect stepping board for my quest. I soon came to the conclusion I had to move up north as far as I could to get away from the unbearable temperatures in north-western Europe. I started my search on the World Wide Web hoping to find a company that might take me under their wings. After a long search time started to run out but right in that moment of adversity I got approached by two individuals from Denmark representing two different companies. Both opportunities sounded awesome and after a quick question I found out the companies belonged to the same union. This made it possible for them to share my talents and gave me the opportunity to experience life in another country.

In the end of August the time to leave had finally arrived and I could feel me at the start of the cone of uncertainty (which isn’t at all unusual when you’re at the start of a possibly life changing endeavour) almost like I’m standing on the crossroads of my life… Though I was very sure which way I wanted to go and so, filled with inspiration, I set out to occupy the position of marketing expert at House on Fire and community manager for Big Bite Games.

I had no clue what I could expect from working in the indie scene, for all I knew I would end up with a bunch of Hacktivists or something. I was happily surprised to find myself in good company though. These guys clearly had a good sense of innovation and the game Neon Zone has even been compared to Portal at one point which is one of the most successful indie games around. All of this attention and praise does should theoretically point to a real winner but we soon found out it’s not enough for a game to sell. In order to do that, we needed to induce some form of remembrance in the consumers, preferably on par with the Brazilian floods or the Japan earthquake and Tsunami earlier this year (though obviously not in such a dramatic fashion). It goes without saying that this task of ginormous proportions rested near solely on my shoulders.

In order to make a winning strategy I was forced to focus all my time and energy on my work which had the fortunate side effect that I had no time to embarrass myself by planking on one of the national monuments around here in Copenhagen. One problem I did encounter by working for an indie developer is that I had to start the revolution without a budget (wouldn’t it be better if indie developers had a similar virtually unlimited financial power as a Super PAC?.., though that obviously would completely take away the charm of all that’s indie). I started my marketing immersion by tagging up every mentioning of our game out there and by writing fabulous press releases.

The remaining question of course is if this all has worked, was it a great success or merely a waste of web-space? Well I certainly hope that it was, though as long as Neon Zone is not next to Angry Birds (or preferably above it) there is still work to be done. Of course practise makes perfect and everything takes time so I will conclude this episode as of great educational value and hope that both Neon Zone, The Silent Age and House on Fire will go down in history as great names and hopefully one day be able to claim a legendary status like the first Carmageddon or Tetris (to pick two completely different examples).

Our recent exposure on the IndieGames Weblog has spawned a lot of comments on the main character Joe. Joe is literally an Average Joe, living an average life and taking care of an average job. Let me explain why we created such a rather dull character for our game:

We decided early on to give Joe a very weak personality to make more room for the surrounding scenery. The story takes place in both the early Seventies and in a future where mankind has become extinct, and both settings are visually rich and offers great possibilities for exploration. We felt that having a main character with a strong personality would steal away too much attention from the surroundings.

When working with Joe, we soon realized that the most interesting situations occurs when Joe’s personality is directly in contrast to the surrounding world. For example, in the above scene Joe finds himself in a room surrounded by stylish Seventies art and design. Joe has no appreciation or understanding of neither, and this enables us to have him comment on the room in funny or unexpected ways.

Joe starts out his adventure as a slightly naive working class nobody. His life is quite tragic, but he’s totally unaware of his own miserable situation. As the story progresses, he becomes gradually more aware of his own situation and is forced to evolve accordingly.

Sadly, this means that The Silent Age has been neglected. But don’t worry, as of December 1st we’re back on track with fresh eyes and full of post apocalyptic energy.

Joe himself has been busy supporting the charity event Movember by growing a nice hipster moustache. We haven’t really decided yet whether he should be allowed to keep it or not.

Go get it on your Android or your iPhone

Join us on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates!

If you have the connection and machine for it, make sure you enjoy it in HD quality and full-screen.

We hope you like it.

A few months ago we created a prototype to see how the game would work, to find problems in the game-play as soon as possible, and to see what kind of interactions we could expect in the game. The story and puzzles were not complete at the time, so we had to extrapolate what kind of situations the player could get into.

It was, and still is running on the Android powered Galaxy Tab, and everyone we show it to is very excited about the game. The first typical comment is “Oh, i loved Monkey Island” and as soon as we mention time travel, we hear references to Day of the Tentacle.

Anyway, we’ve shown the prototype to a lot of people, and used the feedback to tweak the prototype until we were happy. Of course, this also turned the code into a mess. Every object had its own specialized code, which quickly became unmanageable. So we ditched the prototype and started from scratch. Right now I’m working on making the interaction between objects and the player, and of course it is all scriptable and general.

I have created a matrix of interactions. Whenever an object is used with another object, I put in some commands into the corresponding cell for the engine to interpret, and the magic happens. Clicking on the green_access_card now does this:

remove=green_access_card|create=inv_green_access_card

Creating a green access card in my inventory. And when I use my inv_green_access_card with green_card_reader this happens:

remove=inv_green_access_card|create=elevator_to_secretary

Which is how you open the elevator doors. Pretty straight forward, really. The objects themselves can run an animation, if they are set up to do this. In this case, the elevator doors could open. It’s awesome when it works

But alas, having the perfect name is like sunbathing on the perfect spot on the beach: You quickly realize that you’re not alone… A Google search on the name will return 1.500.000.000 results, and YouTube offers half a million results. Since nobody cares to look any further than the first 10 results on a search engine, we became totally invisible. Even if you entered advanced search combinations like “Future” + “House on Fire” or “Future” + “Point and click adventure”, we were still invisible…

When a movie came out this year entitled ‘The Future‘, we finally decided to find a new name for the game. We had 3 simple requirements:

• Everyone on the team has to love the name

• It should sound like a Seventies Sci-Fi movie

• The name should stay true to the atmosphere of the game

After a weekend of research and thinking, we came up with the name The Silent Age. It has that Seventies Sci-Fi feel to it and also hints at the mood of the game. Its also a nod at the song Sons of the Silent Age by David Bowie.

A lot of my inspiration and motivation for making this game has been the Sci-Fi movies of the early Seventies, like The Andromeda Strain,  Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Capricorn One.

Retrofitting

One of the core features in the game is time travelling between fixed moments in the present and in the future. At some point an idea started growing in my mind – what if I moved the present from 2011 to 1971? The future time could then be set to now – fourty years later – in 2011. I decided to give it a go, and the more I worked with the idea, the more advantages spawned. Here’s a few:

• The Seventies are fun to look at! People had weird tapestry and bubbly chairs. People were much more experimenting in their choice of colors and materials. The freedom in color in particular allows us to use colors much more actively.

• Removing modern technology means that our hero doesn’t have a cell phone or computer access. This saves us a lot of “why doesn’t he just call for help?”, or “why doesn’t he just get the info on the internet?”-explanations.

• The World has changed a great deal since the Seventies, which allow us to make references which has a different meaning today than in 1971. Nixon was percieved to be a good president, OJ Simpson was extremely popular and you could actually smoke – in a plane!

• A lot of stuff was going on in the Seventies which we can use for the story – The Cold War, The Vietnam War, The Space Program and in particular the conspiracy theories which were popular at the time.

It’s proven to be a great decision, which not only gives a lot of options but also adds a lot of personality to the game.

We’ve tried having interactible objects sparkling occasionally, which most user testers find to be a great help. Still, some testers are annoyed by this solution as they’d rather discover the interactable objects themselves.

Using Colours

We’re currently working on using colours to solve the problem. The idea is to have a general palette for the background and then highlight objects with colours outside that palette.  The idea comes from EA’s Mirrors Edge which uses a similar colour system to guide the player.

Above is a sketch of a game scene taking place next to a lake at nightfall. To the left is an ambulance parked by the roadside and in the middle there’s a mailbox, a sign and a bridge leading to the small boat on the right. The colour scheme should make it pretty clear which objects are interactable: the ambulance, the mailbox, the sign and the boat.

Will it work? Only loads of user testing will tell…

This teaser does not show actual gameplay. We made it early in the process to define the look and feel of the game. It was important for us to create a world which would be interesting for players to be in before diving into game design.