We’re excited to announce that we got into the PAX10 and that we’ll be at PAX Prime 2010 in September!  We’ll join nine other independent games that were hand-picked by a panel of judges to be showcased at the event. We’ll be revealing more information about our game leading up to PAX. We hope to see you guys there, so you can get hands-on with the game.

Thank you to the judges and Penny Arcade for selecting us!

We’re super excited to welcome Jen Zee to Supergiant Games to be our artist! She joined us in June and came to us from Gaia Online. She’s does all the hand-painted 2D art work in our game and 100% of the cosplaying that happens outside of our house.

Her talents include creating beautiful, lovingly crafted art and fighting Akumas. We’re really lucky to have her!

I am trying to get her to play in my D&D campaign. I think she might also be a nerd, but I’m not sure yet. What do you guys think?

~ Amir

Our friend Greg Kasavin, who we worked with at EALA, has started an awesome blog about games and narrative featuring exactly the kind of  insight and wit that made him one of the sharpest developers we’ve ever designed with.  His most recent post covers video game villains,  the “bad guys who overcompensate for their flat desires with huge lifebars.”

He covers notable bad guys from Bowser to Mike Tyson and even the garden-variety undead in Plants vs. Zombies about whom he observers “the zombies are sincerely hungry for brains — you’d want to give them your brains if you didn’t need them.”

Is Mario the only game with an awesome jelly fish enemy?

This is all relevant because we’ve been thinking a lot about antagonism, antagonists and enemy design.  It’s true – our game has enemies – you heard it here first.  I have learned from enough Will Wright talks that a lot of the best game designers take their inspiration from places outside of games.  With that in mind, and probably thinking too literally, I went to the “Extreme Mammals” exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences to comb mother nature for our very own set of goombas, zombies and cliff racers. They wouldn’t let me take pictures inside so instead I ended up sketching pictures of improbable primates and prehistoric armadillos.

Speaking of inspired creature design, Max from Unknown Worlds – the guys working on Natural Selection 2 – played our game recently at Thirsty Bear in San Francisco.  Thanks again, Max!

Natural Selection features a fair amount of "extreme" flora and fauna

GDC 2010 was our company debut and it went really well. We showed up with nothing but our game in a backpack and some cookies and ended up hitting the front page of Gamasutra, and previewing to lots of really insightful people including business luminaries like David Edery and Kim Pallister. We also got to show some really experienced game developers like Jake Kazdal (Zombie Studios’s art director) and Bruce Straley (Uncharted II’s game director).

[Not an actual game screen...pictured: Justin Hall, Kim Pallister and Austin Grossman]

Lots of our friends were around to check it out too, like Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible) Bernie Yee (Cafe Mom), Amir Rahimi (Instant Action), Jim Vessella & Matt Ott (LucasArts), Darius Kazemi (Orbus Gameworks), John Graham (Wolfire Games), Ramiro Corbetta (Powerhead) and some people we hadn’t met until the show like Justin Hall (ngmoco) and Peter Jones from Retro Affect.

We got lots of good feedback on the game and can’t wait to show it to everyone!