Last week was crazy.

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So much has happened in so little time! As we arrived home from London and the BAFTAs with Daniel and Jonas two weeks ago, just days later we set sail for San Francisco and GDC. We had no less than 4 nominations for DEVICE 6 in the IGF awards (+2 honourable mentions, which makes us the first studio in the history of IGF to have a presence in every category), 2 nominations for in the Game Developer’s Choice Awards, 5 nominations in the Pocketgamer awards as well as the IMGA, for both DEVICE 6 and Year Walk (CRAZY!).

While our week was actually just meeting old and new wonderful friends, we also had a demo-kiosk at the IGF pavillion to setup and attend. But truth to be told, we didn’t attend it that much, instead we stood from a distance and spied and took photos. In the previous two years we had just demoed our games, but this time we wanted to make something a little more special, so we had decided to create an analog version of the game that we called the DEVICE 6 IGF TEST KIOSK. Basically, the visitors would have to find clues in printed text snippets, three-dimensional lenticular images, fake plastic iPhones (Yes, that’s a thing) with printed text insert, a mysterious box with an audio device that would play a sound when a button was pushed, and loads of (fake?) lenses and microphones bugging the booth.  Solving the puzzle by inspecting this and looking in unsuspected places would eventually lead visitors to a secret webpage.

One of the funniest things for us (in hindsight that is, we were quite upset when we found out), was that we got a Booth Violation Notice for covering up logos with our big print piece. Some of the more friendly arrangers helped us sort it out, and we ended up doing some modifications to our kiosk which actually made it a whole lot better. Check out the gallery below to see some pics of the thing in action!

 

Joystiq actually covered our odd installation, and posted this video:

One of the biggest events was of course to win an IGF award for DEVICE 6’s Audio. We decided that the award belonged to Daniel Olsén, and left it with him in San Francisco. BUT! We also won an IMGA for Excellence In Art Design for Year Walk, so we got to keep one award at least.

As if all of this and the huge feature in the App Store weren’t enough, when we came home we found out that DEVICE 6 HAD SOLD 200.000 (TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND!) COPIES ON THE APP STORE. Wow.
So, to round it off, we really just want to thank everyone that has played and helped making our strange little text-map-meta-game-adventure-thing into a huge success for us. We, honestly, could’ve never believed it would reach so many people.

So from the bottom of our tiny fragile hearts,

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App Store “Indie Game Show Case”

Back in the office! We’ve had a wonderful week at GDC (with an igf award being one of the many highlights), and we’ll try to do some kind of round-up post soon, but we quickly wanted to show you this:

appstore

App Store let us be the first to choose a couple of games we like in their new series Indie Game Showcase. An honour and no easy task; there are many more games we would’ve loved to be on that list. Anyway, do check it out, there might just be one or two games that you’ve missed!

Puzzle Cards instead of Business Cards

simogocards

With the new look for our site, we felt now was a good time to get some new business cards. But, you know, business cards is a silly thing, so we thought we’d make something fun with it (and honestly, we’re not very business-y at all), so we decided to make Puzzle Cards instead of Business Cards.

card

The main idea with these cards is that we both have a set of two cards, with different puzzles, most of them requiring that you’ll use the two cards together, like a key for a cipher. So each puzzle is a little cipher for phone numbers, e-mail, web adress and names. We’ve placed them in tiny envelopes, and ordered a Simogo stamp, so it feels like a cute mini top secret dossier. We think these turned out pretty nice, have a look at the gallery below for more photos!

Welcome to the new Simogo site!

Long overdue, but here it is: The New Simogo Site! As you can see, we are no more blue, and all the old friends, such as Borderworm and Headermonkey are gone. They are… in a better place now.
Jokes aside, we didn’t feel the old site portrayed what we are making (and frankly it was feeling rather old…), and we wanted something that felt more timeless. What do you think?

We are still ironing out the last bugs, so please bear with us. If you see something odd, please, do let us know!

Big thanks to Victor for helping us out with the new site!