Cletus, Dyson Nominated for IGF Award

Firstly I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I have a few articles planned out which have been delayed slightly for reasons I’ll go into in the near future, but they will be forthcoming.

Secondly, I’m immensely proud to say that Cletus Clay has been nominated for the IGF Excellence in Visual Arts award. It feels amazing to have one of our games nominated, but I feel it important to point out that the nomination is particularly down to Anthony Flack, not just as designer, but who’s work formed the bulk of the submission (a lot of our effort is still very much work in progress).

There’s some interesting games in the IGF Nominations this year, and I really can’t predict who is going to win out.

One of the Grand Prize nominees is the intriguing Dyson; TunaSnax have just posted up an interview we did with them before Christmas. It’s the story about how they got this far and you can read it here.

Best of luck to all the nominees. See you in San Francisco!

Today I can reveal that Cletus Clay is going to appear on both PC and Xbox LIVE Arcade platforms!

We’ve also got a new blog post revealing why Anthony chose to work with clay, as well as a little more about the game itself, complete with one of our early images.

Please read for the blog post and Digg members can Digg us up!

To those who were wondering, I am still alive – just! I’m hard at work hammering out our indie title, which you can now find blogged on TunaSnax.

I’m very pleased to say that we’re working with Anthony Flack to create his long awaited follow-up to Platypus (download it here), Cletus Clay. To say the least, it’s bloody hard work for all of us but also highly satisfying.

For those who don’t know, we make everything in clay then animate it using traditional stop-frame techniques – just like Wallace and Grommit (Aardman Animations). What you see on the screen, give or take some clean-up and effects work, actually exists on a desk somewhere and it’s the photo which is on-screen.

I hear some people have just seen the blog this weekend and think we’re not really doing this, but honestly – we really are, and it’s more difficult than you can imagine. We’ll talk more about the process over the next few months and I’ll doubtless also mention it here.

Right, back to the hard grind!