That’s the official trailer for Blocks. I worked very closely with sir Eric Rothman on that elegant piece of art, and man did that guy do a fantastic job. Thank you so much Eric, you are a true professional.

If you still don’t know what Blocks is, it’s a game that several Juicers have been making at a company called Darkwind Media. We’ve spent a lot of time designing, polishing, testing, refining, testing again, so on and so forth. We’ve even had a beta testing pizza party, where we invited about 50 people to come in and give us feedback, complete with interviews and surveys. We’re riding the express train to legit-town my friends, and this is the first game of hopefully many more to come.

We’re planning on entering Blocks into 4 game development competitions this year, starting first with www.indiepubgames.com. Voting begins August 1st and lasts until August 31st. If you feel like you want to support our efforts, swing by that site and vote for us. You can also join our Facebook group from the website, where we are amassing an army of followers to help spread the word and vote for the various competitions.

I officially invite everyone to visit the brand new www.blocksthegame.com. Enjoy.

<3

There’s more to having a successful game release besides a completed game. Nobody is going to buy your game if they don’t know about it. Publicity is key, and I’ve been hard at work letting the world know all about the awesomeness of Blocks. I wanted to inform you guys that Blocks scored a brief write-up by Peter over at DIYgamer.com. It’s short and sweet, but it’s a great start. I anticipate more in-depth reviews once the game is released for sale. Hit the link below to check it out. By the way, those of you with an XBox 360, start getting excited.

Thanks Pete!

http://www.diygamer.com/2010/03/delivering-blocks/

For those of you who have been playing the game Blocks, we’ve released a newer version of the demo. We have incorporated a lot of the feedback received from everyone and included 3 new levels. For a full rundown, check out the Darkwind Media Blog.

Thank you for playing!

Here’s me being awesome on level 16, “All The Way Down”. The level was designed to be annoyingly narrow in the very beginning to show the player that you can still win by chucking the block to the island goal. I wanted to see if I could beat the level without touching anything. I did it!

Hey Juicers. I have an announcement to make.

Luster is now in public beta. Download it here. It is available for PC and Mac. I promise that it if you install it and want to uninstall it, you can uninstall it easily as you would any program.

Luster is our platform for creating interactive 3D applications. Like Flash, once the Luster runtime is installed on your computer, you can run Luster applications. Luster applications can be hosted on a website through major browsers or as applications on your desktop.

So what are you going to do now that you have installed Luster? Well easy! Download and play Blocks.

Blocks is a game we have been working on at the Darkwind Media offices to promote and test Luster. You can download Blocks for free and run it on, again, Mac or PC. Its small. It does not require installation. Just download and play, delete when you are done.

If you could give us feedback on any bugs you encounter in Blocks while playing it, that would be great. Email us at feedback@luster3d.com. Once Luster is downloaded, you can also check out some of our other demos. If you don’t want to download the demos, please at least check out our gallery.

Thanks Juicers. You are great. Huge thanks also to Brian, Choof, and Chris for putting in so much work and making this happen.

Hey guys, if you missed it our article was in Sunday’s Democrat and Chronicle newspaper. We are really excited and have already received several contacts over it. It was on the front page of the business section with a huge picture of us standing there (the one from the last blog post) and nice big text. Really eye-catching.

So anyways, if you are online and want to give it a read you can find the whole article here.

Edit: By the way, there is a Joe DeJoia cameo in the article that is worth reading. I dare you to read his quote in your head and not hear it in his voice.

We are going to be featured in the Democrat and Chronicle this Sunday. Here is a “teaser-trailer” for our article. Watch at your own risk. I will be sure to link the article when it comes out on Sunday.

Watch the video here

My brother’s started a blog at MoneyJog.com.  He’s offering investment advice for new investors and investors with small (<$5k) portfolios.

For those of you who don’t know him, Craig’s been making some pretty respectable income through the stock market, even with all the nonsense that’s been going on lately.  Last month, he was showing (roughly) 44% gains for the year. He’s blogging about his decision process and smart, legitimate ways to make money in the stock market.

So feel free to stop on by and make yourself at home.  Maybe even pick up a few investment tips.  MoneyJog is kind of a work in progress… let us know what you think of the site and any recommendations you have for improvement.  If anybody’d like to help out at all over there, drop me a line.

Thanks to Choof for helping with (i.e. doing) the setup, and Darkwind Media for hosting the domain(s).

Hey Juicers, how have you been? I haven’t been around much lately, I’ll be better I promise.

I wanted to let everyone know that you can finally get Luster installed on your Windows machine and start playing around with some demos. Head on over to the Luster Beta Sign-up page to get started. After you have signed up, we need to activate your account. Once that happens, you’ll receive an email with instructions and more details about the whole shabang.

There’s some basic tech demos available online right now, but we have some sweeter demos that will trickle out over the next week or two, including one of the music visualizers. You should definitely check out the Arthas Dance Animation, it’s pretty cool. It uses somewhat advanced lighting techniques, so if you have an older video card it may not look as great as it should. But that’s what this beta thing is all about, figuring out these little details, right?

I leave you with a video of the Arthas animation. Major props to Chris for making this happen.

A couple of weeks ago, I set up the Darkwind Media & Luster Twitter accounts so we could start gathering a following and have yet another outlet to push our news & luster examples. This sparked the idea that I should start using my own Twitter account that has remained dormant since I registered my username a while back.

This is my call for any juicers who have twitter to list their account here (if they wish) so. Feel free to edit the post to keep it tidy.

• Choofins
• BLin22
• kstizzle
• Colin_Doody
• bochocki
• teamasparagus
• <empty>

Darkwind Media just put up the company website & Luster websites for the public. Give us a few days to get some Luster applications up, we’re testing the web players extensively.

Please note if you do download the players, there will be new versions very frequently. Watch the Darkwind Media Blog, because we’ll be telling people when new versions are available.

The Mac version is just a newborn, it still has some soft spots on it’s head. Be kind.

Kyle let us use his Spitfire model he made for school earlier this year and put it into Luster. We took a small video with the camera rotating around the spitfire.

The video doesn’t do it much justice, it looks much better in Luster. If anyone is interested, feel free to ask and I can give you the Luster player installation and you can check out the file for yourself!

Hey, just thought I would show off some of the new videos Brian has posted to the Darkwind Media Blog. For more information, check out the site

www.darkwindmedia.com

Video I : Luster Physics Demo

Luster Physics Demo from Brian Johnstone on Vimeo

Video II: Human Visualization Project Preview

Human Visualization Project Redux from Brian Johnstone on Vimeo.