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Coconut Dodge on GameTank TV

Here's a nice review of Coconut Dodge, which is going to be broadcast on Freeview and Sky TV!



Thanks GameTank!

10 x Coconut Dodge Factoids

If you follow @FuturLab on Twitter, you'll have seen these before. They went down well, so we thought it'd be nice to feature them here too. We'll post more once Coconut Dodge has launched in the US at the end of this month :)

1. 
   Joris de Man, composer of the Killzone series of soundtracks features in Coconut Dodge credits for translating store text into Dutch :)
   



2. 
   The coconut crack sound took two people a day and a half to get right, layering wood blocks, fabric scratches and water sloshes.
   



3. 
   By far the most time consuming aspect of production was getting the font to work properly. It took three months to get right.
   



4. 
   The silly story about pirates stashing treasure in the trees was made up in 5 mins when faced with writing store description text.
   



5. 
   All the artwork in Coconut Dodge was drawn in two days by freelance illustrator, Ben Hooley: http://www.benovision.co.uk
   



6. 
   There are no loading times because all the assets are loaded into RAM at the start. We wanted no barriers for having one more go.
   



7. 
   Coconut Dodge levels were designed using a map editor that was knocked up in Flash in one afternoon.
   



8. 
   Only the brow of Clawrence can be hit by coconuts. He can therefore run behind them as long as they are below his brow.
   



9. 
   The Coconut Dodge theme tune was pinched for use in the game from a series of incomplete tunes by Weatherbrow. There are lots more...
   



10. 
    Coconut Dodge levels were designed in two weeks after all features in the game were implemented.
    

Coconut Dodge @ Gamescom 2010

We were delighted to see Coconut Dodge featured in Sony's promotional video for PlayStation miniS on show at Gamescom 2010:



Coconut Dodge appears at 1:15 :)

Thanks Sony!

Coconut Dodge US Release Date

We've just received the release date for Coconut Dodge in the US, and it's this month!



Coconut Dodge will be in the US PlayStation Store on August 31st!

Get ready to Crab some Gold! ;)

Arctic Adventures: Polar's Puzzles

Whilst developing Coconut Dodge, I kept a close eye on the PlayStation Store to see where the bar was being set for minis games. It was exciting because I genuinely believed Coconut Dodge was a higher quality game in all respects than most games on there. Of course, Fieldrunners and Aero Racer were clearly awesome, but they were also ports of games already enjoying success on other platforms.

Coconut Dodge is an original IP exclusive to minis, and in that sense, I believed it was the best game I'd played on the platform.

That is until I played Arctic Adventures: Polar's Puzzles.



Three hours later I gave it a 5 star rating on PlayStation Store, and felt compelled to write this post.

It's the first minis game I've played (aside from Aero Racer, Fieldrunners and of course Coconut Dodge) that genuinely brings value and quality to the platform in my opinion.*

Hurray for Eiconic Games! The platform needs more developers like this to improve the reputation of minis.

Go and get it!

*If anyone reading this believes there are other minis games up to the standard of the ones mentioned here, please post your thoughts, and I'll check them out!

Golden Viking Helmet!

Hello, I'm Shaun. I've just finished a games design course at City College Brighton, and I have decided to take a year away from education and gain some experience in the games industry as a 3D artist. FuturLab have kindly let me work on their Coconut Dodge items for PlayStation Home. I am aiming to post my progress up each week :)

The first thing I worked on was the Golden Viking Helmet, which gives a player invincibility in Coconut Dodge. Over the past few days I have been learning the process for putting the models into Home. Each model needs three LODs (Levels of Detail), which you can see below.



As you can see, each LOD model needs to have less and less detail, which makes them look a bit blocky... The further away you are from the helmet the lower in detail it gets, so you should never have to see the blocky models. 

The tricky part of this project is trying to get the same cartoony style as in the game. I would also like to mention that these probably aren't final until you see them in Home :)