David Hellman

This Thursday, October 22, I’ll be at Columbia College in Chicago, giving a lecture about my work on Braid. They say it’s open to the public!

The info is this: 916 S. Wabash Ave, Room 150. 6:00 pm.

Here is Columbia College’s page about it.

TIG Jam has run its course and I’m back in San Francisco. (The weather is blessedly gray and cool.) The jam was terrific, such a great creative shot in the arm. The indie community is truly talented and supportive.

On the last night, some of us gave 5-minute talks about whatever happened to be on our minds, indie-wise. Matthew Wegner, CEO of Flashbang (who hosts the jam) encouraged us to eschew the angry ranting format and talk about constructive things. A video of the talks has just been posted, presumably by Matthew. Keep in mind these are highly informal and somewhat off-the-cuff, coming at the end of 3 days of 30 people hanging out together in a medium-sized room.

I come in at 21:00. Other speakers include Danny Baranowsky, Derek Yu, Chris DeLeon, Adam Saltzman, Alec Holowka, and Tommy Refenes.

Update: Here’s the video of everyone showing their projects, later in the evening. Unfortunately, for much of the running time there’s no view of the screen where the work is actually displayed…

I’m at TIG Jam at the Flashbang Office in Tempe, Arizona, with about 29 other indie developers. Everyone is working on various cool-looking projects. The TIG Jam website is updating live with graphics from the event, including a web cam. I’ll be posting concept art there over the next few days.

Alice in Bomberland is an upcoming game for iPhone and iPod Touch, developed by Chris DeLeon. Chris designed and programmed Topple, and worked prominently on Boom Blox. He’s also a teacher of game design and all-around profond penseur. One time, he made a game a day for 219 days!

We met at a bar and before you know it I was drawing the main character sprite for his new game. We turned her into a simplified, Mario-like game hero, designed to read well at a small scale. Other prominent art is by Mark Meyers. The game itself is an old school survival challenge where you jump around frantically avoiding deadly explosives. In keeping with the source material, it diverges frequently into the surreal, here taking the form of fantastic, disorienting special effects.

Now that Alice is done, Chris and I are in preproduction on another game on which I’m the design lead. At this point, it could take virtually any form, although we’re targeting the iPhone/iPod Touch platforms. I’m excited about sharing more information about that at the right time!

Oh, I forgot to mention that I did a painting for the Darkstalkers Tribute book that came out recently. We weren’t supposed to talk about it, and then we were, and I wasn’t sure when it was okay, and I just forgot about it.

But here it is:

For those who don’t know, this is a character from a popular series of fighting games. Pretty sure he’s a vampire. The book has a lot of vampires, as well as mummies. There are also a lot of sexy girls, because undead things are sexy.

Also! When the poster shop opens in the near future, a limited run of these will be available for purchase!

To make this blog post slightly more interesting, I thought I’d share some of the rough drafts. In the original sketch, the guy was more weird looking:

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Look what the internet made:

We’ve discussed WayForward’s A Boy and His Blob already, but I feel that this adds something valuable to the discourse.