As on special request (thanks for the hint Bart!) I decided to organize a small party for the last Apricoters (Chris & Pablo & Brecht). Just intimous, for those who were involved and dropping in regular anyway! But nevertheless, it was awesome and give the team the right incentive and drive to make the final presentation a perfect premiere!

In the vimeo clip you can see a complete 6 minute walk-through the main  game levels. This, plus more goodies is going to be finalized on the DVD. Hopefully in 2 weeks it’s ready for print. End of september we then can ship it to everyone!

by the way! you can start pimping your desktop with our quick-made wallpapers :), check them out!
This is PSP sized, needed to do it 🙂

Wallpaper: 800×600
Wallpaper: 1024×768
Wallpaper: 1280×800
Wallpaper: 1280×1024
Wallpaper: 1680×1050

Chris flies back tomorrow, Pablo the day after…. <sob>. Thanks Chris, thanks Pablo, you’ve been great to work with! Good luck!

-Ton-

As usual, we will thank the the early dvd-pre-sale sponsors with a prominent credit. There will be a special section on the DVD, but also in the game itself!

On the link below you can find the dvd pre-sale sponsors, who have ordered and paid before we started in February (but we’ve been flexible a bit!).

/?page_id=316

Please check for errors! If your name is missing, please email me (ton at blender org), preferably with order ID from blender shop. Thanks!

-Ton-

(Note: some names don’t start with capitals yet, or are capitalized entirely, will be fixed. There will be also no nicknames, nor corporate names added!)

Last weekend I’ve been out of the Blender Institute, spending it in what would be a presentation of Yo Frankie! on the Game Development Campus 2008, in the University of Aalborg, Denmark.

The goal of the Camp was to share ideas about games, get to know each other, make groups, and then each group (7 groups in total, with 6 people each) will have to develop a game for the end of the week, using Blender as the Game Engine where all the games will run.

It ended up being lot more than that!  met a lot of people and made very good friends over there.

But the good news are that they are releasing all the games under the Creative Commons license! quoted from the Press Release:

“Inspired by the open-source game project, Yo Frankie!, all the teams have decided to release their games under the Creative Commons license.
The teams decide on the specifics for the licenses individually. This means that the games created at the summer camp will be made available on the website, along with all the code, 3D models and textures. All the games will run on all operating systems (Mac, Linux and Windows).”

And is all thanks to you people for making this game as Open as it is, sharing characters, animations, textures, and helping with constant feedback.

Also, the Game Development Camp is going to be giving away each student in the camp a copy of Yo Frankie!, and the Essential Blender book. Isn’t that awesome?

Sadly I had to hop back to Amsterdam and couldn’t spend the entire week there, we have to finish a game here!, but I will love to attend next year 🙂

Here you can see the Official Press Release.

Games OnLine!:
Check them out here.

Each game have its own section there, where you can see:

• Group’s Blog (Danish)
• Download Source Code (.blend file)
• Download Game (.zip)
  It’s .exe, but they run perfectly under Wine, however you can always download the blend file and press P, or save your own runtime file. 🙂

Updated the Press section in this site as well.

Thanks to everyone there, I had a great experience and learned a lot, see you next year!
(charlieee!)

With a good Mexican dinner, and the Dutch premiere of WALL-E, we’ve said goodbye to four of the Blender Institute crew.

Margreet Riphagen, Blender Institute producer for a year, accepted a great job at the Institute of Network Cultures. It’s also in Amsterdam center, so we’ll see her around regularly!
Campbell Barton, Blender developer and TD , went back to his girls in Melbourne Australia. He’ll be working wrapping up Apricot remotely for a month, at least.
Dariusz Dawidowski, 3D game artist and level designer, goes back today to his hometown in Poland. He’ll help wrapping up the Crystal Space game level(s) during next month.
Frank Richter, Crystal Space 3D engine developer, already found another room to live in Amsterdam, he’ll keep coding on CS and is currently seeking for a game developer job in Amsterdam (know any? contact him!).

Thanks a lot Margreet & guys! we’ll miss you!

Currently still here: Chris + Pablo to wrap up the Apricot project, Brecht to do cool coding work, and myself… in a week I’ll leave for Siggraph, and when I’m back we should pick up the mythical 2.5 coding project… 🙂

Picture: see us walking to the restaurant in the cool new Apricot memorial Yofrankie shirts! People from left to right: Frank, Chris, Dariusz, Brecht, Campbell, Ton, Pablo (half), 2nd picture: Chris, Campbell, Pablo. More pictures in Gallery)

Yo!, we got a name:  Yo Frankie!: A Furry Vendetta

People voted for this names (ain’t open source beautiful? =), and we sorted them out like: Yo Frankie! the main name, and “A Furry Vendetta” as the name of this episode, now is your time to start thinking/making the next episodes 🙂  Yo Frankie: “Point Blank Frank”, or “The Rise Of Frank” are the most voted, pick which one is going to be the name of your own level (s)! 😀

You can download our new logo in all this flavours:
Big 3DLogo, with background – 1440x810px
Big 3D Logo, no background (alpha) – 887x670px

2D Yo Frankie! Logo – Small Size / Bully Size
2D Yo Frankie! Text – Small Size / Bully Size
2D Frankie Icon – Small Size / Bully Size

.zip file with all this (~2.2mb).

Peace.