The very first blog entry

Hi there,

Thanks for finding the time to read my first blog entry (or getting here by accident and not knowing how to get back to where you were).

My name is Jakub and together with Jan, we are the founding guys behind Grip Games. I would post some photos here, but Jan’s simply too shy, so I will give you a photo of our headquarters instead.

We both came from mobile games development companies, working on games for Java, Symbian, Android and iPhone as well, we wanted to move to the higher league and be finally able to create games where our own ideas are the only limiting factor, that’s why we moved into PSP minis games development. I have managed several game development companies in the past and Jan, among many other creative positions, was the lead art designer at Disney Studios in Prague.

I will post more on our team, which, of course, include also programmers, testers and many guys pretending to be working, but in this blog entry, I would like to introduce you to our first game, 5-in-1 Arcade Hits. The name is pretty self-explanatory, so the best thing you can do is simply to check out the screenshots and make your own opinion.

There are some really cool features in this game that are not very frequent for a PSP minis game – like head2head multiplayer and global leaderboards. I will be blogging about these later.

We are also cooking a few more games, so you can look forward to much more info, but let’s focus on Arcade Hits first. We are probably the very first game developer ever whose first game is a compilation of the greatest hits :-)

Our goal is to get everyone engaged in the game, as everyone can find something in there. We have five full-blown games in one pack: Pool, which is a never-dying classic; we have two logic and memory games for anyone feeling like stretching their brain cells. Another one is Solitare, a real heavy-weight in card games and finally, Tetroid, which is our own combination of Arkanoid and Tetris.

I believe this is a really loaded up mix of casual and arcade fun and we hope it will find a lot of people who are looking exactly for this package – a 5 to 10 minutes of instant fun, whenever it is needed.

We are currently finishing up the game, making final adjustments, polishing, eliminating bugs, … Check these two pictures we have taken, one of them is a look at Jan’s sci-fi tablet-thing in our studio and the other is one of the many concept drawings we have made for the game.

We are currently three weeks from going gold, which means we are still about two months from the release. Making games for PSP is both a great fun and a terrible headache. But as we are closing to the final submit of our game into the Sony’s internal QA for approval, I can say with confidence that we have conquered the little black fun-box. I will definitely let you know about the process of becoming a licensed PSP developer in one of the future blog entries, so stay tuned.

I will conclude the first blog entry here. If you have any questions or ideas, simply send us a message and face the consequences. We are planning a lot of great stuff, including competitions, giving away PlayStation Network redeem codes and a lot more, most of which will be announced via this blog first, so checking on us regularly is highly recommended ;-) And, oh yeah, there’s always the RSS thing.

Cheers.

Jakub