Elecorn: The Animated Coder

Hey all!

We had about 50 orders for Caster t-shirts.  Since each shirt ships with an original hand drawn pencil sketch by yours truly, that means I did 50 of those as well.

Today I just finished the last of those and went ahead and scanned them all in and uploaded them for your viewing pleasure here:

http://www.casterthegame.com/caster_sketches/

I’ve submitted the t-shirt order and things are looking good.

It will still be a little while until the shirts are done, but I will let you all know once I’ve mailed them out.   Oh, and the shirts have a little something extra to make them true “Caster” shirts…. Any guesses what that might be?

Thanks!

Sadly, many times game studios work on projects that are confidential and never see the light of day.

Thankfully this one is out!

Hidden Path Entertainment worked with Valve on this update.  I didn’t help much on this one, but am excited for it’s release nonetheless.

Check it out here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/260/

Thanks!

Caster has been updated on the iPhone!  Enjoy!

http://www.itunes.com/apps/caster

The Mac version of Episode 2 is now up!

www.casterthegame.com

Also, check out this fantastic trailer that Marco Herold made:

Just finishing up the iPhone version.  Should be submitting it tonight!

Here’s an interview I did with iWorth It.  Too bad they didn’t spell the name of Elecorn properly.  Well, they’re not the first…. Elecron…. hmm.

“Elecron… the little known autobot that transforms form an elephant into a unicorn.”

http://www.iworthitappreviews.com/2010/01/23/elecron-developer-of-caster-iphone-app/

When I first designed Caster, I wanted to have the option to play as a male or female character.  You can see that from these designs made in 2004.

Here’s a little run sequence I just finished for the new character in Caster.

I plan to include the new character in the next update on iPhone.

The character will of course also be available when I update the Desktop versions as well.

Thanks!

I’m heading off to Austin tomorrow morning to attend GDC Austin.

I will be giving a lecture on some stuff my friend and I learned while doing the iPhone port of Caster.

We hope that it will help other people considering porting their existing C++ games to the iPhone.

If you’re going to be at GDC Austin, look me up!

I’ll be posting the slides and notes after the conference.

Thanks!

To celebrate the upcoming release of Caster Episode 2, I have asked famed video game rapper Random (aka Mega Ran) (www.megaran.com) to record a new theme:

Caster – Random (right click to Save As to your desktop).

I am looking to you awesome player/game videographers to put a sweet Caster vid to this score. So I am holding a competition to create a dynamite music video to accompany the theme song. The competition starts today and lasts through the end of July.  I will choose several finalists and let Caster enthusiasts vote on a winner!

Winner Receives:

• Custom made Caster t-shirt
• Piece of original Caster artwork
• Credit in the game
• Notoriety of having their music video used as promotional material and the intro for the iPhone version of the game.

Qualified Entrants Receive:

• Caster iPhone or desktop wallpaper

Rules:

• You must only use Caster art or other art that you have a license to use.
• You may add additional sound effects, but they should not obscure the base music track.
• Keep it clean / family friendly.
• Use the entire song.
• Use the Caster title in the first part of the video.

Suggestions:

• Fast action.
• Showing off the different attacks and abilities in the game.
• Something that fits with the song.
• Please use a high quality video compression scheme that is a fairly standard format.

When you have something ready that you’d like to submit, just e-mail me a link to where I can download the video (like a file share website) or write me to obtain access to my FTP server.

And that’s it!  Have fun!  I’m excited to see what you come up with!

Let me know if you have any questions:

Inspiration (some existing YouTube videos to check out):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSQSkINkT0s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVXWa7ll5_M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVcxKKwtthQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EwlICILWIc

Last year at Casual Connect in Seattle, I met Omaha from iGame Radio.

Here’s a recent interview we did on Caster.

Enjoy!

http://www.igameradio.com/2009/07/09/podcast-ep-75-plants-vs-zombies-9-innings-and-elecorn/

If you use Firefox for your web browser, you can check out the Caster persona here.

This will decorate the border of your browser window.

Also, if anyone is interested in making a Caster themed persona, let me know!  I can provide source art etc and can approve the persona that you want to submit.

Thanks!