Before Minigore there was RamMan

Before John Gore we had a physics based game concept called RamMan. It was a game about blocky treasure hunter running around a level evading a monster. The player had no guns, he only had a grappling hook & slippery shoes. The grappling hook and his slippery shoes allowed him to swing around obstacles and make RamMan hit the obstacles instead. The gameplay was based around accurate timing and use of momentum:



The ancient beast who is chasing him is the RamMan. If you combine ramming and man that's pretty much what you get, literally :D




3d models of the characters that were modeled in Zbrush:



RamMan & the treasure hunter posing in their final form:




The temple is many floors deep. As you complete each floor the earlier floor will break into pieces and you fall on the deeper floor. Only on the deepest floor you can finally reach the green jewels of the statue and defeat RamMan by putting the jewels into his eye sockets.




Very blocky test scene:




Mockup of how it would have looked like:



I might have some video buried deep in the archives, I'll update this post if I can find it.

-UPDATE - Here's the footage I talked about:


DISCLAIMER: This is old and buried game which never made it into full production.

Multiplayer is just around the corner!

Minigore now has around 1,5 million players worldwide! Amazing huh?! After we put Minigore free on App Store, the download amounts skyrocketed. We were expecting the downloads get bigger, but we certainly didn't expect this much!

New update finally came out, and the feedback has been very positive. I'm glad about this :)

We have started multiplayer beta testing! Hold your horses, everyone... I know how much you wait for Ep 4 to be ready. However, there is still going to be some fixing before we are ready to submit the update with multiplayer. Beta testers are currently working on the multiplayer aspect of Ep 4, but not yet the graveyard / zombies. Why? -You might ask. It's because we want the beta testing to be less chaotic. This way we can pretty much isolate the problems of the multiplayer without having to be concerned about the bugs in the zombies -part. Splitting Ep 4 into two releases isn't an impossible option either and in that case you would get your hands on multiplayer very soon.

New favicon for the Minigore forums:

Tons of Things

Greetings, destroyers of furries!

I have tons of stuff to tell today. First of all, as some of you already noticed, Minigore is free for a limited time on App Store. Be sure to tell all your friends who might enjoy this awesome game! After putting Minigore free, we have raised the ranks and are currently #2 in free games US App Store and #4 in free apps US App Store. This is huge! For those who did not know, US is the biggest market many iPhone/iPod touch games have, and that is the case for Minigore too.



Secondly, the contest has seen many great entries so far. I only have a small complaint. I WANT MORE ENTRIES!!! I'm quite sure you have friends who would like to win an iPod or a Wacom! The competition also created something nice in it's own: The Mountain Sheep Forums. So be sure to register and chat with other fans, check out fan art, competition entries or just talk about the weather... You can find the forums at www.mountainsheep.net/forums

There's more! We submitted the new update of Minigore for iPhone/iPod touch! So you'll get to play White Gangster Gore soon. This build also has Encyclopedia with 3 pages on it. Also fixed the new achievements not always registering and the muzzle flash bug with the bushes. We also submitted HD version update with multitasking!

Some people might have encountered the launching of Minigore to end up to a black screen. This means there is not enough memory available for the game to run. You may have too many apps open simultaneously or may have used an app that leaks memory. Either way, closing other apps or restarting the device should help. We are going to update Minigore later this year to inform you with a popup if it has indeed run out of memory at start.

And because I finally ran out of breath and have nothing more to say, I let you guys enjoy a picture of John Gore taking a bath :D

Minigore Monster Contest! Big Prizes!

We held a tagline contest last year where the winner ended up as a playable character in Minigore. Evan Hsu was the lucky one with his catchy tagline "Tiny creatures, Giant adventure!"


It's that time of the year again so let me introduce the next Minigore themed contest:

Click the poster for a hires version!


We would like you to design a monster that fits into the minigore universe. You can use whatever means necessary to make your fantastic creature. This includes digital painting tools like Photoshop or Gimp, traditional art tools, clay, super sculpey, matchsticks & glue, baking cakes, snow, ice sculpting, 3d software, Zbrush, pixel art, papercrafting, blood... maybe not the last one, but you get the point :)

If you plan to draw your monster with pen & paper just scan it or use your camera to take the picture. You must however add a text "minigore monster!" to one of the corners with the same type of pencil, pen or crayons you used to ensure us that the picture is indeed made by you.

Send the pictures to sheepcontests@gmail.com with a description of your monster, its name and its abilities. Also, add in your full name, your address and e-mail (if it's not the same you used to send the pictures). We need your contact information in case you win some of the prizes in the competition. Mountain Sheep will NOT use your contact information in any other way than to inform the winners.

We will pick 10 best monster designs and then we will create a poll out of them for everyone to vote your favourite. We will consider the following judging criteria when picking the 10 finalists for the poll:

1) Creativity
2) Technical skill
3) Effort (you get extra points for making the monster using extraordinary methods)


The deadline for submitting entries is 31st of December 2010 (12.00 (UTC +2 timezone). After we shortlist 10 entries the public voting will be held and the winner will be the design which gets the most votes!


We've got some awesome prizes for the winners:

1st prize : Wacom Intuos 4 M A5 Wide
Top of the line drawing tablet from Wacom. It's same model I used to create all Minigore art.




2nd prize : iPod touch 8GB (4th generation)
It's the latest iPod touch featuring retina display.



3nd prize : Minigore poster and a mug
Cool Minigore themed merchandise.


Everyone at Mountain Sheep is super excited about the competition and I personally can't wait to see what kind of crazy designs you guys & gals come up with!


UPDATE: I did a couple examples to answer few questions and to get you even more inspired to throw together some crazy designs!



Let your imagination fly! The monsters can be as tiny as an ant or as big as a mountain, it could be designed as playable character or it could be a boss, or just a regular monster. If you want to go the whole nine yards it can be put into elaborate setting with a moody background and other characters.

Discussion about entries Minigore Forums

Gangster in white

Hello!

As briefly explained in my last post, theres a new update underway shortly and it includes the new playable character White Gangster Gore, here's the splash screen:

..And a pic showing all the health states of the White Gangster Gore (the final version has dual shotguns).

Also included first 3 pages of the Encyclopedia. And various bug fixes. We had some problem with the achievements in the last release, they have been fixed now. It was a bit tricky since when Kimmo made a fix for the lost dlc achievements, a new achievement related bug was born in the progress. This is pretty much how game development often goes, you never know what's going to break next when you fix something. The code for a game as small as Minigore is quite a bit of text and complexity (I think it's around 30,000 lines). ANYWAY, the update has entered another test phase, and will be submitted shortly.

I have some good news for everyone out there who would like to (or has already) design a creature in the Minigore Universe. Yes, it is time for a contest! I will make a new blog post on Wednesday describing the rules for the competition. There has been some rumors about having the latest iPod as one of the prizes ;). Here's a picture Timo made that might give you some ideas. I suggest you start warming up your crayons!!

EDIT: Added the picture of the health states and the in-game appearance of the White Gangster Gore.

Graveyard news

Hey all!

We just started beta testing the next update of the game with Gangster Gore in a white suit, dual wielding shotguns. First version of Encyclopedia is included too.

This weeks blog post is about some polish on the future content: graveyard and the zombies. At the end of the post I will make a small Q/A -section from the questions I've picked from the comments and will try to shed some light on them. First here's some new screen shots from the zombie level. The chest you see on the pic is a "treasure chest" that will give you more kills. Also Timo changed the walls on the level shorter so that the enemies wouldn't get stuck behind them. Vlado used his magical programmer skills and shader technologies to make the blood look SUPER.

Questions and Answers:

Q1) What happened to the grenade ability that was going to be in ep 3?

A1) It didn't suite the gameplay fluently, so it became a grenade launcher instead.

Q2) What happened to Old Man Tackle?

A2) Timo says: Work in progress.

Q3) Why playing Sensei Evan leads to a message "Too skilled for leaderboards."?

A3) Currently we are going with a one leaderboard only and Sensei Evan is not balanced compared to other characters. Only a handful of people have managed to get Sensei and we think it would be a bit unfair for everyone if Sensei was the only character you could get to leaderboards with.

Q4) What's the point of the star system?

A4) At this point the stars are only showing the amount of time played with a character. There has been some ideas about how we could use the feature to make it more worthwhile to get full stars but for now we are not planning on implementing any of them. Personally I find this something that could be done after more important parts of the game are done.

Q5) What's the situation with the Ep 4?

A5) Getting there. Multiplayer needs more work. Next in line is a "revival mechanism" in Co-Op. No more exciting news, sorry. Kimmo is working on merging the iPhone/iPod version code of the game with the HD version code to make future implementing easier. Release date is NOT going to be November 2010. That's all there is to say about the release date for now.

Q6) Game Center support for older devices?

A6) Can't be done. Unfortunately it's not up to us (Mountain Sheep). Someone was hoping we could have OpenFeint working simultaneously with GC, but we are not going to go back to OF. This because it requires too much regular upkeeping from our part.