The HG Blog

Ah, summer has just begun and I’m on grand adventures. Following my adventures in Los Angeles last summer, I’m living in San Francisco. The city is definitely cool so far. But not nearly as warm as I had hoped. Frown.

I’m in the Bay Area for an internship at Google, great fun! I’m working in its New Business Development Department, helping the company in getting its new projects targeted and developed…though I can’t actually talk about them for fear of breaking the NDA and incurring the wrath of the Google Gods (gGods). I think it’ll be great experience to be applied to my work at HeavenGames.

Should be an exciting summer!

Yeah! So I’ve been under the radar for a bit. I had finals and the fun that is moving out and into a new place for the summer, so my life has been uber hectic for the past month or so. Anyway, I’m more or less settled in and ready for get a lot done in the next couple months. The HeavenGames main revamp has been going along quite well, as has our Cloud 9 (though it has admittedly slowed during finals period, ole Zenny is in college as well). I’m also ready to get back on doing our t-shirt sales and working on some other super secret projects. I don’t mean to be so super secretive and whatnot with the super secret projects, but it mostly has to do with stuff that’s really quite tentative. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that we’re doing something and then eventually back out on it. There are various sundry things that you guys might love, and I’ll do what I can to make sure they work out.

Other fun news: I finally got an HG business card. Time to expense a drunken rampage through New York City!

I’ll keep you posted on everything (including my drunken rampages)

As I’m typing this, my body is filled with 3 cans of Chef Boyardee’s Overstuffed Beef Ravioli. Also a fourth of a box of crackers. Gluttony never felt so fake Italian.

So that’s how I’m taking care of myself…I’m going to die very soon. However, HeavenGames is a totally different story. I just saw Oliver’s latest iterations of the HG Main redesign, and he’s really refining it into something that I think you guys are going to love. Zen, Elpea, Oliver, and I are currently discussing the various nitpicky things that always get discussed, and hopefully it’ll be done in a timely fashion…though regardless of the time it takes to finish, I know it’ll look awesome because it already does in beta version.

So my roommates and I have been playing Smash Brawl a decent amount since it came out (inbetween taking midterms…yeah), and I’ve come to decide it is indeed a solid game. The game isn’t as huge a change from Smash to Smash Melee, but there are a rather large number of subtle changes that make it feel new. Attack strengths are changed, attacks themselves are changed, and a number of new characters (Ike and Sonic!) exist; all of these combine to make the game play much more differently. It’s a lot of fun, though it’ll be a while before I can say whether I’m as satisfied with it as its predecessors.

Also, the voiceover for Ike’s recovery move is the most awesome sound ever.

Single player campaign designer and mod maker Gordon Farrell has updated his column, SOLO, at the HG main portal. Picking up on the idea that games can be art, Gordon digs deeper into some definitions and descriptions of art that might point the way to designing better games, and getting the kind of recognition for games many of us think they deserve. This is an ongoing inquiry that Gordon says he’ll be updating every couple of weeks. Post your responses and read what other gamers have had to say to his first column, “Towards the Art of the Game.”

Things at HeavenGames are continuing to progress very well, so we’re looking for a new batch of positions to be filled so we can continue advancing our mission of serving the HG communities as well as possible. The positions that are open right now are:

• Site Designer
• Graphics artist
• Statistics Analyst

A position at HeavenGames comes with many benefits, including useful experience in the gaming industry, assistance in job/internship placement in the industry, possible credit for those in university, and possible access to game alphas/betas. You can go to our help wanted page for more information on the jobs or working at HG.

Please contact me at socvazius@heavengames.com if you are interested in joining the family at HeavenGames!

We’re currently working on the design of our HG 2.0 system as described in an earlier post on this blog. You guys are going to be the ones using this system, so we’d like feedback from you guys as far as what features you’d like to see on it. Drop by the Outside Discussions thread to let us know, anything would be very much appreciated!

Hey all, I just wanted to wish everyone happy holidays. Of course, the date of this posting is prompted by the holiday that I celebrate, Christmas…but HeavenGames has people from all over the world from many backgrounds that have holiday celebrations at this time, so happy holidays!

And now, my Holiday gift to everyone:

I am actually a trucker.

It’s been a while since things started rolling with changes at HG, so I thought it’d be good to let you all know of some of the things that have been going on.

First of all, we’ve filled all of the Department Head positions except Art, as follows:

• Business Development: Brad4321
• Marketing: Avidwriter (Temporary)
• Finance: Lazidane
• Tech: Zen
• Operations/HR: Jayhawk
• Seraph Liaison: Elpea

Congratulations to all of them! We’re still looking for an Art and a Marketing head (Avidwriter’s doing a great job but can only fill in the job temporarily), so if you’re interested, fire off an email to me at socvazius@heavengames.com.

What have those guys been up to? Well, all kinds of stuff! Brad4321 at Business Development is busy working with the Seraphs to figure out what kinds of things their respective sites need with respect to asset/event support from developers. He’s also working on our pitches to various companies concerning content bundling and beta testing. Elpea has been work giving our dedicated Seraphs feedback about their sites and is working on redesigning HG Main into a page that covers gaming in general rather than just serving as an HG news feed. More details on that will come when the plan has been hammered out. Avidwriter has set up our Myspace page, definitely add it on our friends list! He’s also setting up a list of contacts for various news outlets (such as PC Gamer, Wired, etc) we can send news about HeavenGames happenings to.

These happenings are just a slice of what’s been going on at HeavenGames, and hopefully things will pick up even more when all of our department head positions are filled and everyone’s totally settled in (and finals are over, woo!).

As far as the design for HeavenGames’ content automated system, we’re still busy hammering out the details. Expect a post in the forums soon about getting feedback from you guys, since you’ll be the ones using it! In the meantime, if you have any suggestion, definitely send them to me via email.

Is that it? Well…almost. I need to tell everyone one more thing:

freakin burito, man.