Internships + Job Opportunities


Posted on May 2, 2012 by Dave Chenell

Woot woot! Its that time of year where graFighters is looking to expand its creative team for the summer.  Below are some of the positions we are looking to fill.

2D and 3D Environmental Artists

We are looking for Environmental artists who

  • - Love the 2.5D style and can make things look vast, endless,  and magical.
  • - Have the ability to model and texture low poly basic shapes from reference images, with a good eye for shape and design.

 

 

Community Manager

The ideal community manager:

  • - Is an internet power-user and knows how to multitask x 1000.
  • - Knows how to communicate effectively through all the social media channels.
  • - Is the most active member of the graFighters community that knows how to schedule and plan events/contests/tournaments that rock.
  • - Considers themselves a people person.

 

 

2D Animators

An awesome graFighters animator would:

  • - Be comfortable with rigs in Maya and working in an environment limited to 2D.
  • - Have no problem playing Streetfighter or Mortal Kombat, and watching old kung fu movies or WWF replays for inspiration.
  • - Pay very close attention to detail and enjoy the responsibility of bringing life to all graFighters.

 

 

Interface Designers

The ideal candidate would go something like this:

  • -Has a great sense of overall App and Web Design, including current trends and understand the user experience and flow.
  • - Has no fear of a bajilliion+ layers in Photoshop.
  • - Is always looking to improve a design.
  • - Feels that they can visually achieve and expand on the graFighters brand.
  • - Is familiar with working collaboratively on a  design with a team.

Drawers

If you like drawing, no matter the skill level, we would love to have you. GraFighters is all about self expression through art and sometimes drawing cool things makes everything all better. Bring your ideas and your creativity to our office at the Syracuse Tech Garden. Come try it.

We will be offering both paid and non-paid internships and part time positions. We are also really flexible with people who want to work remotely. Email work samples to dave@grafighters.com and include the title of the job your are applying for! Also be real, tell us how you think you can help make grafighters more awesome. You’re better than generic cover letters, don’t do that.

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The ‘Ole Accidental Launch


Posted on April 16, 2012 by Dave Chenell

Wallpaper Download Link

So you see, we used to have this plan. We were going to take some time using what we had learned to, ya know, revamp our core game mechanics, tweak our animation engine, finish our apps, and add layers upon layers of polish. In short, we were going to make graFighters ready to launch. The plan was to have this happen within 3 months.

Sometimes things don’t go according to plan.

On Tuesday morning CNN posted a video about graFighters they had filmed at SXSW. We remembered filming the video and had been in contact with them, but we were not sure when/if the video would air and to what extent. We really didn’t know what to expect from it.

That same Tuesday, I awoke and noticed our user number had risen significantly from the previous day. It wasn’t until about an hour later we found the video on CNN. The video was followed by an article which included a link and eventually ended up on the homepage of CNN.com.

Our server quickly hit a bottleneck due to the traffic, yet as we scrambled to fix the problem (hooray NewRelic!) the story got picked up by Kotaku. Over the next few days we watched as we signed up well over 100 users an hour as graFighters spread throughout the interwebs.

CNN
http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/11/grafighters-a-game-that-brings-your-drawings-to-life/

Kotaku
http://kotaku.com/grafighters/

PocketNext
http://www.pocketnext.com/news/grafighters-plucked-from-the-kickstarter-graveyard/

We even got a “review” of grafighters from the Portuguese blog Baixaki!
http://baixaki.com.br/download/grafighters.htm

At the time of writing this blog post, graFighters has over

13,000 Users
10,000+ Characters uploaded
60,000+ Fights

The response has been awesome, and we are truly amazed at the positivity of our user embrace from using a half done product. Even in its current beta state, you guys have managed to create some amazing things on graFighters over the past few days.

 

What’s to come?

A New Game
A whole new set of game mechanics. Each move your character will perform is up to you. Each move has a value and type associated with it along with a chance of an epic bonus.

 

The Marketplace

Finally a place to spend all your hard earned Ink. Upgrade your moves, add weapons, powers, and even buy/sell new characters.

Mobile App
Full featured iPhone app (with Android to follow) that lets you do everything you can currently do on the site, plus more.

An embedabble module for your character that can be posted anywhere, kinda like this, but it will allow them to do cool moves. (If it’s not loading for you click here and it should load, clearly it’s a work in progress )

Want to see this character move? Download Flash Player

That’s just the begining.

How you can help!

We have heard from a bunch of you that you want to help shape this game. How would you like to create your own moves and level backgrounds?

Download the Level Template PSD

PSD version here

JPEG version here

Download the Moves Template FLA (Maya file coming soon)

Move Maker Template File (Requires Flash CS5 or later)

Send all game contributions to dave(at)grafighters(dot)com.

Plain and simple, we want to make the game that gets you excited about playing. We want to be able to bring the crazy things in your imagination to life and collaboratively build them a vast and amazing world to live in.

We know graFighters is still very much in beta and not ready for mass adoption. There are tons of things you are probably wondering about the current game. If you have any ideas or bugs to report be sure to post them to our User Voice page here.

http://grafighters.uservoice.com/forums/108191-ideas

And now what we have is some friendly Q&A.

Why does my character get the stats he gets?
Our Cornelius Algorithm mainly looks at the shape of each part of your character. It is judged on Shape, Spikeyness, Curvature, Mass, Taper etc. Right now the Algorithm is low on strength and high on speed. Don’t worry too much about your score because this will all change. We will be doing a full blog post about it soon.

Why does my character lose? How can I make him better?
It’s not your character’s fault, we swear. Think of this as their training days. It will be over soon, and you will be one step closer to world domination.

What is ink for and why do I want it?
Ink is good. You will be able to spend it soon on things in the game to make everything better. Better start saving!

When can I control my fighter?
Soon, let us know what type of games you want to play with your fighter as well as where you prefer to play them on our user voice page. Side Scroller, FPS, RPG, RTS? Xbox? iOS? Android? OMG!!! All the above!?!?

Why does the Android app crash alot?
There are so many devices! We will be putting out an update shortly that fixes the crashes.

Thank you to everybody for your ridiculous amounts of support.

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graFighters on CNN


Posted on April 10, 2012 by Dave Chenell

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The Mayhem that is GDC and SXSW


Posted on March 16, 2012 by Dave Chenell

Its been way too long since a blog post.

First and foremost we want to say thank you, to all the people who came by our booth at both GDC and SXSW. It was a super exciting experience for us to hear so much genuine excitement around graFighters.

Hearing things like “you guys have the best game on the floor” and “But Mom! I wanna do it again!” made our day. It felt great when people would spend a majority of their day at our booth asking us questions and perfecting their character, even when alienware had an amazing million dollar booth right next to us. You guys rock.

Over the course of the conferences we recieved hundreds of characters, from 5 year olds to 50 year olds at all different ability levels. We will be sure to do a post that highlights some of our favorites with some honors and awards in a few days once we have time to digest them all.

We are aware that the current version of graFighters has its flaws and we have been listening to your feedback, so by March 31st (give or take a week), we will be launching a brand new version of graFighters. This means new game mechanics, and a game thats easier to get into and more just plain more fun. This also means a new fully functional iPhone app with Android following closely after. We will be doing more blog posts in the future with much more detail on our overall development, our migration to unity3D, game mechanics, and the mobile apps. But in the meantime we just wanted to say thank you to everyone who continues to inspire us everyday to make grafighters more and more awesome.

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App, FB Connect, and Cornelius V2


Posted on December 15, 2011 by Eric

The past few weeks we’ve been hard at work to bring you several significant bundles of joy. The first bundle is something we are very proud of, an app for iPhone and Android. That’s right, two of them! The graFighters crew uses both platforms, so instead of fighting to the death over which phone we would conquer first we did both at the same time (with some help from our friends at Appfury).

The app is very simple right now. In fact, it only does one thing, but it does it well! Imagine you had a super special, really really cool personal graFighters camera that was hidden inside your phone. Then, click iPhone or Android and make your dreams come true! The graFighters app is simply a camera utility that allows you to take pictures of your characters and send them directly to your online account, sidestepping the use of any ancient technologies like clunky digital cameras or scanners. Its the fastest possible way to bring your drawings to life!

Next on our to do list was good ole’ Facebook Connect. It just makes sense, plus who doesn’t want do sign up for games and services as easily as possible!? To go along with Facebook Connect we built an invite system so all of you special beta testers can send out invites to your friends. graFighters is “open” for a couple days to let some new people play with the app and see the new updates, but once it shuts back down into private mode the invites will be the only way to gain access until the next round of updates are ready.

Last but not least is the Cornelius makeover. We went all in for this one, messing with both beauty and brains. Instead of doing all his calculations behind the curtain, you can now see him go to work as he analyzes your characters silhouette, overall characteristics, and specific body parts as defined by you. Needless to say, he will always be a work in progress, but this update is definitely a step in the right direction. If you have already uploaded some cool characters but want to run them through the new version of Cornelius all you have to do is click the Edit button on that character’s page in your sketchbook. (Just a heads up, your stat bars will definitely change due to his new found wisdom.)

We would love to get your feedback on everything so feel free to leave a comment on this blog post or give us a rating and/or comment in the App Store or Android Marketplace. Thanks!

 

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Major Site Updates!! And Cool Stuff.


Posted on November 4, 2011 by Eric

If you’ve been keeping up with us for the past week or two, you know that we have been all over the place in terms of both development and our physical location. We’ve enjoyed the demos and joining forces with other startups (see earlier posts), but we have also been hard at work making magic happen to the site so that you have something to enjoy as well! Below is a list of all of the new features that have officially been implemented:

Big List of Updates

Health Bars

Finally, the update you have all been asking for! And it was a great suggestion. Now you will know exactly who is winning and how much damage each move does. The cool part is seeing comebacks happen from characters who are barely able to stand.

 

Big Hit Popups

When a character does a move that is especially powerful, you will see a cool popup with and old school Batman style sound written out. We did an earlier post that showcased all of the different ones. A good friend of ours @boochtunes08 is working on some sweet sound effects to go with these popups, so as soon as we get them done we can add them into the game.

 

New Fight Web

This is the piece that brings everything together. The new fight web is much more balanced and allows every type of character (damage, strength, toughness, intelligence, or speed) to reach their maximum potential. In the previous version, damage characters were able to perform more powerful moves than other types of characters, which is why you may have noticed that characters with high damage stats (the black bar) seemed to be dominating.

 

The way the fight web connects with your Cornelius stats is that the higher you character was scored in a particular area, the more powerful moves your character will be able to perform within that category. We are currently working on adding another level of complexity and awesomeness to the fights by allowing characters to go into different states within a fight. These states include offensive strategies like rage mode and combo time, as well as defensive strategies like blocking and counter attacks.

Because the fight web is now more balanced, you may see a shift in your character’s winning and losing habits. So if your character was completely worthless before, it’s probably time to give them a second chance!

 

It’s important to note though, that Cornelius has the most direct effect on how your character performs. He recently enrolled in some 800 level Image Recognition courses, so it won’t be long before he is ready to put this new knowledge to the test. His update should be happening pretty soon, so we will keep you all posted on that.

 

Personalized Challenges

Now when you send a challenge to another character you have the option of making it personal, and by that we me do some trash talking! When your opponent receives the challenge they will see whatever tastefully chosen fighting words you decided to send them. Lets keep it clean though! Well… cleanish.

 

General Bug Fixes and Speediness 

As usual, there are always bugs to clean up so we have been getting after them as much as possible. Please keep posting them in the user voice section when you come across one! You may have noticed how slow the loading of the characters had gotten in the “graFighters” section where you can browse and search for them, and we are happy to announce that it is now fast again! It might not sound like a big change, but it really does make a big difference.

 

Shareable Fights and Character Pages

We think this update is a pretty cool one that will play a big role when we make the leap from private to public beta. The reason we are excited about this is because making all of the cool experiences that users are having on the site shareable to other like-minded people with help graFighters extend its reach to thousands of new doodlers who can bring their talents to our battlefields.

And Some Cool Stuff Because It’s Friday

Funky Feet
“He’s gonna punch yo…or kick…hue…well he’s gonna hurt ya…badly… :( mad emotion.”
Crafted by: el-luco

It’s really hard to describe how funny this character is to fight against, so you are just going to have to challenge him yourself. It reminds me a lot of Eddie Gordo from Tekken, and the breakdance fighting scene from Zoolander.

 

 

Girrafenator
“Fear the almighty Girrafenator and his secret weapon… the Dirty Hobo!”
Crafted by: PimpIA

I’ve been laughing about this character for 2 days now. No, it’s not a drawing per se, but it’s still hilarious. The Girrafenator is also 31 and 6 right now so I’d say Cornelius likes him too.

 

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Doin It Big: Demo at #NYTM


Posted on November 3, 2011 by Eric

Last evening the graFighters team had the opportunity to demo to a sold out crowd of over 900 tech enthusiasts at the New York Tech Meetup. In short, it was AWESOME… the whole entire thing. It was our first time at a NYTM, but it definitely set the bar high for future meetups. The theme was college startups, and we did our best to make Syracuse U proud. Also in the house were some other notable SU alum including the founder of Foursquare, Dennis Crowley, and our good friends from Everything Butt Art,  Alexis Moniello and Brian Snyder (you may recognize all of these names from our previous post about @raisecache, lots of collaboration going on).

This might be a bold statement, but the lineup of students and ideas from the NYTM last night could rival, if not demolish, the demos from any incubator or conference as of late. A huge round of applause goes out to everyone that was involved, including special shout outs to Jessica Lawrence who helped us prepare, and LoCreep, Ad Runner, and Imaginary Marching Band for having such cool demos. Best of luck to you all (and pretty much everyone else who wasn’t mentioned, because it was really, really impressive).

The entire event was filmed so if you weren’t able to make it, you won’t be missing out. If you want to jump straight to the graFighters demo you can go to the 28:15ish mark.

NYTech Meetup November 2, 2011 from NY Tech Meetup on Vimeo.

If you were at the meetup and want to take us up on our special invite to the private beta, you can sign up for an account and mention #NYTM in the reason why you want to play graFighters. The invites should be going out within the next day or two, we just have to make a few minor tweeks to some of the cool new updates first! (More on those in the next post!)

Thanks again everyone from the NYTM crew. Job well done!

 

 

 

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Epic Collaboration for Raise Cache


Posted on November 3, 2011 by Dave Chenell

A few days ago we heard from our brethren in drawing Brian Snyder that @dens and @fredwilson were battling it out on twitter about their DJ skills for the upcoming event Raise Cache. Conveniently, Alexis Moneillo (also of butt art fame), had just mocked up some turntable.fm avatars for the event (as turntable will be used to DJ the party live). We instantly knew there was only one way to settle this.

Conveniently, taking real life twitter feuds and expressing them through 2D characters is one of our specialties.

So here it is, Fred Wilson Vs Dennis Crowley. http://www.grafighters.com/raisecache.php

You can read more about the event on  Fred Wilson’s Blog and Techcrunch. All proceeds go to HackNY.

Thanks to Rebecca, Brian, Alexis, and Kane. This event is going to seriously rock.

http://www.raisecache.com

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Research for Wham


Posted on October 27, 2011 by Jen

…not that really sweet 80s band, this is about the sweat, pain, and blood put into the sounds effects.

First thing I did was buy 8 different batman comics, ranging from old to slightly new. I wanted power to be a slightly stereotypical and out of a comic. Mostly thinking if someone got punched in the face super hard.

Toughness was probably my favorite to work on. Say any of these sounds out loud and I start to laugh. Inspired by Gertrude, an old big tough character, and pillow fights.

Speed was inspired by bullets and lightning. I feel speed is about that fast lead into you getting a beat down and not even knowing it til you wake up in the hospital.

Damage was interesting because it wasn’t about contact or the playing laying down the moves, it’s about the one who’s getting stabbed. It’s the noises one makes when he or she gets a bunch of puncture wounds.

Intelligence was the hardest one. I was distracted by the other sounds, that I originally came up with a zzzrt kind of sound, based of lazers and ‘technology.’ But these are much better and not surround by weird stars.

All colors are drawn from the badges. Sound effects are always a fun thing to work on, granted you seem crazy to everyone else when you’re whispering strange noises over and over again….

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Week Numero Tres


Posted on October 24, 2011 by Eric

A cool thing about this past week was seeing some new artists come out of the woodwork. We’re not sure what they’ve been up to the past two weeks (maybe getting all of their characters ready), but they came out guns blazing to start week 3. Probably the most important thing to note is the work that being done in preparation for the next big update to the game. You can learn more about that and some of the cool characters from this past week below.

Beast Mode

ROBO DESTROYER
“KIIIIIIIILLLL!!!”
Crafted by: BingoBango

Yup, that just happened… 54 times. ROBO DESTROYER, with 54 Wins and 0 Losses, may be a lot of things, but one thing he isn’t is a liar. By the looks of it, ROBO DESTROYER must have fought Cyclops from X-Men, destroyed him (obviously), then visited his local optometrist to have the one slightly cool thing about Cyclops surgically attached to his face. Boom roasted! Who’s next!?

Not So Beast Mode


Shaolin Cucumber
“Open your fridge and he’s all like HIYYAAAAA!”
Crafted by: PaperGagnsta

Missing from the description is the part about how after he yells “HIYYAAAAA!” he yells “BYEYAAAAA!” and scurries out of the kitchen and into the living room where he attempts to hide, but ususally gets stuck going under the couch, or picked up by the dog. 3 Wins and 23 Losses, c’mon man!

Fan Favorite

HipstarusMaximus
“So chill he didn’t even feel the ice age.”
Crafted by: Ink_machine

Always going against the crowd “doin his thang”, HipstarusMaximus decided he wasn’t too cool for school when he was just a youngster. In fact, HipstarusMaximus has learned just about everything there is to know about fashion and fighting as his both his fedora and solid record of 22 Wins and 11 Losses suggest. Having a reasonably successful street-fighting career never looked so good!

Artists Of The Week

mish
“Napoleon 2.0″
With an army of shorties ready to roll, you’re doing big things with some little dudes. Seriously the collective height of all your characters is probably waist high on an average graFighter. P.S. It’s awesome!

Waterwood
“The Iron Chef”
Between the character made completely of saw blades and the deliciously constructed, yet not exactly great at fighting Salamisamari, “The Iron Chef” seems like an extremely fitting nickname. Also, tell the Musclesam family we said hello.

 Staff Pics

Whale Lord
“Using the best of whale technology, Whale Lord has made a battlesuit to wage war on the surface land. He can’t move his face, but he knows your fear. He knows.”
Crafted by: aid001

Bond
“he means business”
Crafted by: mish

Salamisamurai
“Watashi wa sarami no ryshu ni watashi no chsei o chikau.”
Crafted by: Waterwood

Cool Things That Happened Multiple Times

Characters with really long yelling sounds for names:
Buuulllaahahahaa and HUSAWWWWWWWWWW

Sea Creatures

Week 3 Stats

Characters Uploaded: 537
Challenges Sent: 5125

Stuff In The Works

Some of you may have noticed the seemingly unstoppable forces propelling characters to crazy records (AOH Man, cough cough) along with a couple others. We have been asked a lot of questions like “How do I get better?” or “How can I learn more about the system?”. We are excited to start unveiling some of those other dimensions to the game, but before we do, there are some updates we are currently working on to several pieces of this puzzle.

We will keep up to date with the progress being made, but in the mean time here are some things you can look forward to:

A more balanced fight web which will give all 5 types of characters an equal chance of going on crazy winning streaks and doing a full range of awesome moves.

Greatly improved shape recognition so that even the smallest details you have put into your drawings get analyzed by Cornelius.

Health bars, more deadly moves, different status effects for you characters during a fight like rage mode and combo attacks.

Basically all of these things are related to one another and are part of an intricate system, so when it’s ready it will be a massively epic update!

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