From October 19th to 28th, we will be at GamerZ Festival in order to present And The Rhino Says, Dive and a brand new game design specially for the theme of the event: the end of the world!

It will take place in Aix-en-Provence, in France and the event is free of charge. If you feel curious about it, just take a lookat the official program. We will be located at the Musée des Tapisseries.

Well, it seems we have forgotten to feed this blog since a few months. Does this mean we’ve slowed down our activities? Not really

The truth is we have been fully caught up in an amazing number of parallel projects. Back in April, we’ve exhibited And The Rhino Says during an event held in Paris called FabFest.

In the mean time, we’ve shown a first playable version of Générations, our game designed to last for 250 years. And to start the summer, we’ve attended Futur-en-Seine where we’ve performed a perfect play concert of TEC 3001 followed by a live performance of Dive.

We’ve been lucky enough to share those two performances with few indie friends from Babycastles who were among the spectators.

Last but not least, we’ve been invited to exhibit Dive on its big tactile device during the opening vernissage of Joue Le Jeu at La Gaîté Lyrique. That was quite a great summer.

Some weeks ago, the Théâtre de l’Agora asked us to make a small arcade thing with a selection of indie games of our choice and gave us a “Carte blanche” to do so. Among a first list of weird and great indie games, our glance stopped on this game by Sophie Houlden: Dinosaurs didn’t have keyboards… A real UFO, who gave us the idea of the exhibition : to build a serie of five cardboard arcade cabinets with sticks and buttons replaced by keyboards. To give them a very special look, we’ve decided to remove and destroy every useless keys for each game. This idea was not only for the visual aspect of the device, it was also a great solution to offer the users/players a good affordance of the controller: all the remaining keys have a purpose and are used to play the game.  So is born Arcade didn’t have keyboards. With such a name we had get a relevant selection of games which only require a keyboard and use it in a very specific way : Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf by Cactus Because this is the future of MTV video music clip.

Because each new steps in game use the keyboards differently with only 6 keys. Because the music is crazy and the visual novel makes no logical sense when you tried to link both. GIRP by Bennet Foddy Because this is what e-sport should look like. Because it makes you “girp” you keyboard just like if you were climbing it. Because the challenge is accessible to any kind of users. Dinosaurs didn’t have keyboards but it they would, they wouldn’t break it (just like you are about to) by Sophie Houlden Because it explains why the dinosaurs died and disappeared form earth.

Because the way it request you to use the keys makes you feel you are running like a dinosaurs. Because even if the game can be hard to beat, the concept pleased everybody. Chase Goose by Hideous Because we wanted a really hard challenging game in our selection for the tough people. Because it requires endurance from the player and we knew people will play it together (to beat the high score! Because the graphics are rad, the music is cool and the ton is quite funny. pOnd by PeanutGallery Because we wanted something quiet and relaxing after all those challenging games (yes we know this is a lie). Because it only use the space key and we wanted to have a one button game. Because we like turtles (and purple squids). If you are around Paris this month, come pick a look. The exhibition  held at the Théâtre de l’Agora in Evry is extended until 24^thMarch. The access is totally free and you can play as long as you want.

We didn’t post a lot of news on our blog since a couple of months, however this doesn’t mean we aren’t active. We are working on several projects and in january we had the opportunity to build a new version of Dive on a big multitouch table. This experiment was pretty nice and a lot of people enjoyed the display and the tactile interface. We will try to post some video and pics on our website as soon as possible, but this is another story.

Today we are working on the build of a coming exhibition which will take place at Evry (France), in the Théâtre de l’Agora, on Tuesday, February 7 at 18:30 for approximatively one month.

We have been asked to work on a special “expo” by selecting 5 indie games of our choice. The only requirement was to keep the model of the “arcade cabinet” made of cardboard as an exhibition device. Currently we are installing the controllers and preparing each computer to be plug-and-play, ready to be launched and shown.

We don’t want to spoil you any surprise effect about the games selection, but we’ve based our decision on a very special concept! Everything is in the title: “Arcades didn’t have …” It’s up to you to guess what arcades didn’t have! Or myabe you could wait until next tuesday and join us during the event to discover what we did.

Oh, by the way, the picture we’ve put on this blogpost is a clue to find out the mysterious artistic choice of the exhibition!

In a couple of days we will be present at Stereolux! The event takes place at Nantes (France) and is about mediums convergence and new kind of artistic expressions. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to make two performances next Friday evening. We are currently working hard to finish a new version of Dive, specially designed for a performance act. We have improved several things such as sound design of the environment and the graphics atmosphere. We still have some slight modifications to provide on the level design part because it will have an important impact on the show.

Along to the Dive show, we will attend to perform a super play of the excellent T.E.C. 3001 (by the serbian indie studio Phoenix Games). To watch a (very good) player perform a perfect play is always nice, but we’ve wanted to be a little bit more innovative and creative on this part. As a performance, we will have a on live musical mix performed during the play. This means that our sound designer will have to play according to our player performance. We’ve made some try at our headquater and the results was pretty convincing. There will be two game in once. While one of us will play a game by mastering each control and knowing each level of it, another one will try to follow and forecast what is happening in game and play (interpret) it using sounds and rythms.

Until friday, we keep working and. . . rehearsing!