We are proud to announce, that the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet - The Webby Awards - selected our Spaced Away game as the Official Honoree in Games for Tablets category!

The Mobile Web has finally outgrown its infancy to become one of the most exciting avenues for content, services and commerce. The Webby Mobile Winners, Nominees, and Honorees have shown the foresight and ingenuity to excel within a quickly changing and increasingly fragmented Mobile Web universe.

As a result of the superior quantity and quality of sites entered, the 16th Annual Webby Awards recognized sites and teams that demonstrated a standard of excellence.

Spaced Away was recognized among side great tablet games such as Dead Space and SPY Mouse from EA, AC/DC Pinball Rocks from Sony, or Elmo Loves ABCs from Sesame Workshop (see all Honorees here).

The 16th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 US states and over 60 countries worldwide.

Thanks!

Right now, we are working on a couple of projects. We're converting Spaced Away for various devices, designing levels for our yet unnamed platformer, doing tech-demos of our unnannounced game, but this post is about something different. For the first time, we will talk about Friendly Creatures - our brand new game, which is right now almost complete.

You probably want to know what type of game is it. Well, it's designed primarily for children. You simply try to connect the right Creatures together. There are always plenty of them on the screen and by dragging them to groups you try to make new friends. Just keep in mind, that some Creatures don't get on well with others, so be careful, or else they will get really angry.

We are aiming at pick-up-and-play types of games audience. Aside from the simple, but fun gameplay, our key features for Friendly Creatures is graphical and sound design. To record the sounds, we gathered a group of children and then captured the smiles and giggles as they were playing the game. Then we mixed them up a little and the result can be heard in-game. Needless to say, that the kids had a real blast playing Friendly Creatures. And you will have too. Soon. Check out some cool fresh images of our menu screens and some background bits.

You know how it is with programmers. They speak in ancient codes, their mind looks like Matrix and 99% of the time you have no idea what they are talking about. But when one of our prog-guys came to us, that he's built some productivity tools for Unity, we were like "Ooooh!" There are various plug-in's for Unity, which help you achieve certain things even the original creators of the programme didn't even thought about. But none of them is like our Productivity Tools utility.

Basically, its main features are custom hot keys and fast and easy to use search functionality. Apart from hotkeys functionality, PT also offers a great way to search both scene and project for every project asset, gameobject or command available in project and Unity. PT also includes custom functions to add even more productivity to your production process. Functions like gameObject grouping, parent object selection and gameObject swapping will save your time. A lot of time!

Plain & simple, it goes like this:

• Custom Hotkeys settings window – set your own hotkeys to Unity functions bindings

• Navigators – a quick, easy and mouseless way to search through your Unity project, scene and functions

• GameObject grouping

• Parent object selection

• gameObject Swapping

Once you download our Productivity Tools, you will never want to switch back, guaranteed! Give it a go, it's worth just $30, which is virtually nothing, compared to time and money you can save with it.

You may be thinking, that after we finished our last game, Spaced Away, there may be some time for a little relax. Well, we did relax...a little. Couple of minutes, maybe. Then we started another project, which was finished last week. It's called Spaced Away Slim and, obviously, it's the same game as Spaced Away. But this time, you can download it not only on iPad 2, but also on iPhones, iPods and the original iPads. Yay! There are no differences to the actual gameplay, but the graphics needed to be downgraded a bit. Yes, we did it so well on the first time, that our super-extra-cool textures and sprites showed to be too much for the less powerful technology.

We worked really hard on this. It was like creating an entirely new game. In fact, we had to use some of our special super powers to achieve this. Mobile Stage 3D, to be honest. It's a new way to get the best out of the new version of Adobe AIR. It was an interesting experience and we even made it to the Adobe showcase. Right next to Angry Birds :)

Give it a go, if you own any of the supported Apple devices!

This is the first part of the long-running series of articles about us, about making games. It is published (in Czech language) in the Level magazine.

Gaming journalist usually don't have proper understanding of the term "game development." When you are reviewing games, you can only guess a lot of things, some even absolutely wrong. It was one of the main reasons why I decided to take one step forward and give it a try on the other side. Get to know the processes better, learn how the game makers think, before they actually ship their product. In this series of articles, I will try to give you a small insight about the development of our indie game and what we actually mean by "making games."

Let's start with something you probably don't want to hear. If you think, that when you play games a lot and that automatically gives you some type of qualification (just like me a couple of months ago), you will be proven wrong quite quickly. Even the process of choosing a theme of your next project is a bit more complex, than it may seem. Some may think, that we, level & game designers, just sit around, chill out for a couple of hours and in the end there will be a dozen of fresh new ideas. That's not the way it works, at least for us. You may think, that when you try to create something, your mind should be absolutely without bounds. Wrong! Creative process is a job too and you should follow some rules, when you are creating some early concepts for a game. I named them "blank paper principle." It's pretty easy. You just put a big piece of paper in front of you (the bigger the better) and write every single tick of your brain down. Looks simple, but it really helps your mindflow and sorting out ideas. A lot of thoughts are just straight-to-bin, those groundbreaking ideas do not just come around, you've gotta put a lot of effort to it. Also, your super-dee-duper concept better be simple. Two words to describe it should be enough.

But hey, you gotta have other members of your team in mind. Unexperienced designers in general want to enhance their game as much as possible. But somebody has to do the graphics, the code, the sounds, well...basically everything. And that costs money. To plan some project and in the middle of the process say "well, that was stupid, let's start again!" is like paving your highway to hell. You have to make your games from the beginning with a sense of "ok, I can change these things, but it has to stand on a solid design foundation." It has to be at least perfect. Ideally with a basic timetable setup. We managed to sort all of these things out and started developing our explorative platformer. Stay tuned for more!

In the past few days we've been so looking forward to this. We are more than pleased to announce, that we have received the FWA Mobile Of The Day Award for the 4th of February! In case you've got no clue what FWA is (strange!) - it is only the most visited website award program in the history of the internet. Their mission is to showcase cutting edge creativity, regardless of the medium or technology used.

In the past, Mobile Of The Day Award rewarded bestselling iOS and Android games like: Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Cut the rope, Plants vs. Zombies, or Tiny Wings. Now FWA rewarded our physics puzzler Spaced Away. For more informations about Mobile Of The Day award visit this link or even download our game to see what all the "fuss" is about ;)

As we said last week, the work on our new project is currently underway and we had some really nice brainstorming sessions. But that's not all. Our artists already have some concepts in motion. Check out the first "making-of" video, which will tell you a bit more about the game itself. As you can see, we are using Unity engine with full 3D animations for our main character. But remember - it's still like 10% of the final product!

What we've all been waiting for in the past month has finally become reality just minutes ago. Spaced Away was approved for AppStore on iTunes, so you can download it right to your iPads 2.

It's priced $1.99 / €1.59 and, well, it's out there for you to try! In case you forgot what is Spaced Away, you can check out two official trailers at our website SpacedAway.com, browse through the blog or even buy the game and see what's worth :)

Well, it's year 2012 (yaay!) and we in Falanxia are wasting absolutely no time making games. In fact, right now, we are working on one of the projects, which was pitched a few months ago, but didn't make it past our cut. And no, that does not mean it's just a '11 leftover.

In fact, our designer team worked on it really hard and made some significant improvements, so it'll be a game worth playing. It's...well, we can't say right now what type of game it'll be, but we've got some good reasons.

Look for some more information coming this week. For now, all we've got for you is "just" a screenshot from one of the first prototypes. Enjoy! :)

Yup, it's us again, doing some self-promoting through our series of videoblogs. This time with Michal Hotovec, our art director. Have fun!