16GAMES – The Punk Retro Game That Was Not Meant To Be

Do you remember the blog post we did about one of our abandoned projects, called Tree?
Guess what? We have some more projects that never went in to full production, and they serve no use in just lying about. So, without further ado – may we present:

16GAMES was a pretty neat little 2 button punk thing that we sent in to the Nordic Game funding programme to try and score some fat cash. But, as you might guess we didn’t get any funding and we sort of fell out of love with it so we ended up making Beat Sneak Bandit instead (which seems like a pretty good thing, looking back).

To get the basic idea, here’s the short description from one of our 16GAMES documents:

A lot of games have offered a range of minigames and some even choose to throw them at the player at a high pace, such as Wario Ware. 16 games in unique in that it offers all it’s minigames at the same time, and takes the concept of multitasking to a new level. With a set of extremely simple minigames that are all played like old LCD games, everyone should be able to pick up and play 16 Games. With a presentation that mixes retro visuals with a punky soundtrack, we believe a unique atmosphere is communicated as well.

And here’s the 2 page pitch document (click to view in full size!)

Screenshot mockup:

We actually started producing art assets, check out this sprite sheet:

Finally, we did a lot of music tests for this one. Some tests are very classic chiptune things, will others are a bit more trashy. The plan was to put raw fuzzy guitars on these, to emphasize the punky attitude of the game. Download and take a listen:

Simogo – 16games – test 1
Simogo – 16games – test 2
Simogo – 16games – test 3
Simogo – 16games – test 4
Simogo – 16games – test 5
Simogo – 16games – test 6

And that’s about it.

Simogo San Francisco Awards 2012

Best Hosts And Coolest Persons All Around:
Daniel & Emily!

Friendliest Persons:
Jonathan & Sean of Lucky Frame (Do check out their lovely little toy Pugs Luv Beats for iOS)

Funniest Person:
Rhodri from Dakko Dakko (we got a sneak peek of his upcoming game Floating Cloud God Saves The Pilgrims – Very promising!)

Most Crowded Place:
The IGF Booth

Best Smoothies:
Jamba Juice
(Honorable Mention: Cold Stone)

Best Food:
Umami Burgers

Weirdest Place:
The China Resturant on the 6th floor that seemed to be stuck in the 70’s.

Most Frequently Showing Up Out Of Nowhere And Spontaneously Joining Up For Beer:
Fredrik from Southend.

Coolest Prototype:
The weird basketball thing by Matt (creator of Trainyard!)

Best Dinner Arrangement:
Phill (designer of our favourite to do app Clear)

Game That We Would Be Totally Okay With Winning The Best Mobile Award Instead Of Beat Sneak Bandit:
Async Corp Download it now!
(Honorable Mention: Faraway)

And last, (but definitely) greatest:

The Grand Simogo Happening Award:
Winning Best Mobile Game in The IGF!

Bandit = IGF BEST MOBILE GAME!

We had the most amazing week in San Francisco. We’ll do a round up of pics and stuff that happened over there, but just in case you missed it: Beat Sneak Bandit won the award for Best Mobile game in the Independent Games Festival! This was super overwhelming and … Yeah. Our minds are blown and we’re not sure it actually happened or if it was some weird fever dream caused by the flu (aka the gdc plague) that a lot of people (including Simon) caught over there.

Check out these cute dudes giving their much unprepared speech:

Skip to 25 minutes in if you only want to see us:

Behind the scenes!


Do not miss this! A behind the scenes of Simogo article over at Touch Arcade – Learn all of Simogo’s dirty little secrets, read how Beat Sneak Bandit was made and look at neat making of pictures like this one!

Click click basically anywhere to head over to the article!

And with that, we’d like to say bye bye for a week! We’ll be going to San Francisco for Game Developers Conference and the Independent Games Festival (in which Beat Sneak Bandit is nominated for best mobile game!), so it will probably be a bit quiet around here for those days. If you’re there – Sneak by the IGF booth and say hello, we’ll be there Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, showing off Beat Sneak Bandit!

See you!