Picking up on what Malouff suggested, I thought it would be fun to tell you a bit about our experiences with the age rating bodies. Apparently the Germans and Australians are a lot tougher than us “normal” Europeans. At least that’s what PEGI must think.

Similar copies of the game were submitted to the Australian, German, and PEGI age rating. But while the Germans rated it 0 (suitable for everyone), and the Australians gave us a G (3+), PEGI rated it 12+! We were very surprised, but luckily they were very nice and helped us find a solution that we were all happy about.
It turned out that what they found too violent was a number of spinning chainsaws, which Max must use/avoid in order to move on, and a number of pounding pistons with spikes on.

Finding an alternative proved to be quite difficlut. We had to come up with something that would look dangerous enough to communicate to the player: “you better not touch this”, while at the same time not being so dangerous that only teenagers could handle the sight of it

And then a quick update

Yesterday we had the pleasure of showing a “final” version of Max & the Magic Marker off at an event at the Danish Film Institute – A scary but nice experience.

People liked it – at least that’s what they said.

It’s been a while since the last post so… the update:
1. I need a bath
2. We all could use a drink
3. The plan is to be finished by the end of today

…wish us luck

As we mentioned on facebook yesterday, we had the pleasure of going to Frankfurt for the European Independent Game Awards and win the category of best game design last Friday.
Mikkel, Rune and I (Ole) had packed our suitcases, and left to spend the night at Flemings Hotel in Frankfurt. Honestly we didn’t expect to win, as the game is not out yet, and all the jury had played was a quite buggy build. Anyway, that didn’t matter at all once they announced the winners. We had a great night in the surprisingly fun town of Frankfurt.
Also we had the pleasure of meeting a lot of cool people from the industry and our friends from Ronimo Games.

And now for the more serious part
It’s Monday and we are all back at the office. When we started out on this blog we had the ambition of trying to be as open as we could and tell as honestly about the development as possible. This is easy when things are going good and you are happy to tell what a fantastic place the world is and how much fun it is to be in the games business. However, it turned out to be a lot harder than expected once the development didn’t go as planned, and that is what has happened the last month or so.
Originally we had an internal development deadline planned in September, but as time went it became clear that this was not going to happen, and it was postponed a few weeks. Since then we have had the feeling of being “Almost there…” without being able to actually close it. I guess this is largely due our lack of experience, and there is not much we can do about that other than work our asses off. What we can do is to stay true to our initial ambition of openness, so here is the status:

In terms of development we have stopped. This means we are now only fixing bugs and polishing. If everything goes well, this should be over in the end of this week, and we’ll be able to move on. So if you cross your fingers and send us good thoughts the game will be out soon (we promise…).
Age rating just got back from USK (the German foundation), AGCB (the Australian classification) and PEGI. The funny thing here is that while the germans rated the game  0 (for everyone) and Australia rated the game G (3+), PEGI decided that this should be rated 12+! After some negotiation and adjustments from our side, we are now at a 7+ PEGI rating, and we are fine with that. It is just weird that the spread is so big. I guess the Australians and Germans are just a lot tougher than us.

And then a positive discovery – appearently we hugely underestimated the hours of gameplay. When we test the game, it has taken closer to 5 hours (and often more) to complete, than the 3 hours we originally thought it would take. As gamers we are really happy about that, since we in no way feel the extra playing time is due to excessive repetition or poor judgement from our side. We really believe we have at least 5 hours of compact fun. On the other hand – as “business people” we can’t help but thinking that this is one of the reasons why we couldn’t meet our initial deadline.