In nine days I’m flying down to San Francisco for GDC, as Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is nominated for the Excellence in Visual Art Award at the Independent Games Festival. (Totally amazing–check out those other noms.) The last time I went to GDC was in 2008, when I was but a wee college student with a Gesundheit! prototype under my arm, and it was crazy and a bit overwhelming for a young animator who didn’t quite know what he wanted to do yet… but it still blew me away. I can’t wait to be back.

If you’re going to be there and want to try Lovers and meet up with me and the other Asteroid Base-ers, we’ll be in the IGF Pavilion. You can also drop a line at info@asteroidbase.com. Hope to see you there!

Busy times! We’ve had some exciting Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime-related news over the last month, so here’s a quick roundup:

- Lovers has been nominated for an IGF Award for Excellence in Visual Art! This is a crazy huge honour, and the three of us at Asteroid Base are super excited to be heading down to San Francisco in March for the IGF. This will be my first time at GDC since the Gesundheit! prototype was in the IGF back in 2008, and since then I’ve met so many folks in indie games–I can’t wait.

- I did an interview with IGN’s Colin Campbell about Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, where we talk indie games, co-op, and Captain Picard.

- Lovers is one of the Telegraph’s top 25 anticipated indie games.

- And finally, I blogged a behind-the-scenes look at our 2.5-D animation techniques in Unity, which ended up on Gamasutra. It has gifs!

Took a road trip over to DIG London the other day to do an encore presentation of our Press ‘A’ To Jump panel, originally from TAAFI, where we talked game animation with friends Cathy Feraday Miller, Jay Edry, Ryan Henson Creighton, and moderator Sagan Yee. I could spend a whole day chatting with those guys about animation, so I had a wonderful time, and hopefully the audience got something out of our fevered ramblings. Plus the slideshow didn’t break! I love it when that doesn’t happen.

That’s me camouflaged in the middle. Photo by Ben McEvoy / TAAFI.

I recently blogged over at Asteroid Base about our art inspirations for Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, from Battletech to Chris Ware to Russian matchbooks. Read the whole thing here.

Here’s a trailer for Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime we put together!

Guilded Youth is out! We’ve recently submitted it to the Interactive Fiction Competition, and you can play it online here. Also check out Jim Munroe’s blog post about making the game.

And by the way, mega congratulations to Jim Munroe for his and Molleindustria‘s Unmanned, which just won the frickin’ grand jury prize at Indiecade!

So I’m going to Switzerland next week to speak at Fantoche International Animation Fest about the art and animation behind Gesundheit!. This is totally crazy and I totally can’t wait. The lineup looks really great, lots I want to see. My talk’s on Friday, September 7, in the afternoon.

In other news, Unity is awesome. Been working lately on Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (among other things) and I’ve been porting the game from Game Maker to Unity, and cleaning and polishing it up along the way. As a 3D animation guy, Unity started feeling like home really quickly, and the game’s come a long way from when we showed it back at Global Game Jam. This is my first time programming in C#, so there’s lots to learn, but what can I say? It really shouldn’t feel so comfortable.

We’ll be showing the game at the Playtesting SkillSwap this Friday at George Brown College, so swing by if you’re curious.

Taking a quick break from prepping for our TAAFI panel tomorrow to point to Touch Arcade’s sneak preview of some stuff I’ve been working on lately! More to come…

Hey all you animators/artists/gamers/students/interested folks, I’m going to be part of a panel on game animation called PRESS A TO JUMP at TAAFI this summer and I’m very much looking forward to talking shop with some great animators and games people.

If you haven’t heard about TAAFI, it’s a new animation festival starting this year in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox, and the lineup of screenings and events looks awesome (and it’s only the first year!). Anyway, on our panel we’ll be talking about game animation–where it is now, where it’s going, techniques, how it relates to other forms of animation, and learn about the wacky career paths in this industry.

PANELISTS
Cathy Feraday Miller (LucasArts/EIDOS/Co-founder at Rocket 5)
Miguel Sternberg (Spooky Squid’s They Bleed Pixels)
Jay Edry (DrinkBox Studios’ Guacamelee!)
Ryan Henson Creighton (Untold Entertainment)
Matt Hammill (Gesundheit!)

Moderator: Sagan Yee

PRESS A TO JUMP: ANIMATION, ART AND INTERACTIVITY

Saturday, July 7 at 9:00 am | TIFF Bell Lightbox

Part of Toronto Animation Arts Festival International (TAAFI)

Tickets available here

From 8-bit pixels to hyper-polished polygons, animation and graphics play a huge role in the gaming experience. No longer bound by the technological limitations of the past, yet still sitting at the intersection of creative and commercial interests, there is much more to game art than meets the eye. With unprecedented accessibility allowing for a near limitless range of animation styles, the visual variety of interactive media now rivals film in terms of imaginative scope and artistic expression. With a focus on independent creation, this panel brings in several game-makers to explore the constantly expanding role of animation in games, the relationship between technology and personal vision, and the potential of the industry for new artists.

Was at TOJam on the weekend, and it was amazing as usual. I made a text adventure (with art) called Guilded Youth with my hero Jim Munroe. I handled the artwork in the game, which I made using AsciiPaint.

So we’ve FINALLY managed to post our TOJam 2011 game Shuriken Skies with a whole one day to spare before TOJam 2012 starts! Hoo boy.

Made in 3 days, Shuriken Skies is a 2-4 competitive, no-holds-barred, every-ninja-for-themselves, skydiving beat-em-up fight fest. When your ill-fated flight on Ninja Air goes awry, you and your fellow passengers must battle in mid-air for the last parachute, or plunge to your doom.

We whipped together a quick trailer below, or you can go right ahead and download it for free at shurikenskies.com (Windows only).

The game was a collaboration between myself (characters), Jamie Tucker (backgrounds) and Adam Winkels (programming).

It’s finally here! We’ve just released an update for Gesundheit! HD for iPad, featuring a brand new bonus map with 6 new levels, new cutscenes, crazy high-res retina graphics for iPad 3, and even a few minor bug fixes for good measure.

And worry not, iPhone and Mac users; new updates for the iPhone and Mac versions will be out very shortly too, featuring all the bonus content as well. Thanks for your patience!

Quick update–been super busy on some secret projects which should be out in the coming months. But in the meantime they’re secret, so sadly there’s not so much to say here. Just imagine them being amazingly mysterious.

I was on a panel at last week’ Illustrationism conference, a pre-show idea jam before Sheridan’s illustration grad show. I was sort of there to represent the growing overlap between illustration, animation and games, and it was wonderful to meet other heroes of mine on the panel and get a peek into their worlds (photos here and here). I’m sure I learned as much from it as the students it was intended for. Plus the grad show was great–some super talented kids there.

Igor Hardy from HardyDev interviewed me recently, and we talked about all things Gesundheit!, AGS and Primal Rage. You can read it here. Don’t mind that cheesy photo of me!

Went to the Toronto Zoo on Sunday to sketch some animals. Way too cold to draw outside, but in the pavilions it’s always nice and toasty–you just have to haul around all your winter gear. Most of the animals were super active though, maybe because the cold was keeping away annoying humans. The gibbons were amazing. Stumpy legs = great walk cycles.