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Author Archives: Dave Chenell
Internships + Job Opportunities
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.
The ‘Ole Accidental Launch
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.htmAt the time of writing this blog post, graFighters has over
13,000 Users
10,000+ Characters uploaded
60,000+ FightsThe 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 PlayerThat’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
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.
Posted in Company News, Development Progress, Startup Life Tagged can I haz games, CNN is legit, launching, tu pac hologram was crazy 1 CommentThe Mayhem that is GDC and SXSW
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.
Posted in Company News, Startup Life Tagged ballin outta control, fun time, GDC, lots of drawings, not sleeping, omgwtfbbq, road show, SXSW Leave a commentEpic Collaboration for Raise Cache
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.
Posted in Company News Leave a commentGetting our develop on
Hello from NYC!
So we know all of you are wondering what we are up to in NYC and we wanted to keep everyone posted on the current status of all that is graFighters. First of all, the team is split up for the summer for geographical advantages in our plot to conquer the world (you gotta start somewhere). This means 2 members of the graFighters team are reporting from NYC, while the other 4 members of the team are holding it down in Syracuse.
While we did open up graFighters this past spring for a brief moment, we quickly realized that it was in no shape for public use. After getting some feedback from users we decided to close things down again and get back to work. What happened in the spring was hardly a beta or even an alpha; we will call it the “yay it worked” phase, and we are happy to be much further ahead now.
We now spend our days scouring stackoverflow, coding, designing, and drawing, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
We have about 1300 users all signed up and ready and waiting to play. It ‘s a big motivation having that many people waiting for our game and we are getting more and more excited to show you all what we have been working on.
To hold you over, here’s a screenshot of the current graFighters homepage. Much more to come in the following months.
Posted in Development Progress Tagged aaanndd we're back, big apple, GA, NYC, screenshots Leave a commentPaper Trail
First and foremost, graFighters officially works. We will upload a screencast/tutorial later today of the system in use. While we have only launched this current version to about 25 people, the feedback has been amazing. We are working on fixing up the bugs and should have a completely launchable version by mid May for you guys. We are stoked for this and can’t wait to show the world what we have been working on.
In other news, last Friday we closed our first round of investment at 200k from X.Million Venture Capital in Germany and officially changed our company from graFighters LLC to graFighters Ink.
So what does that mean for graFighters? It means that graFighters is no longer a what-if-idea, but a working product that has really great people behind it who are putting money into the vision in order to turn it into the best product it can be. If you know Eric and I, you know we have never been about the money, but apparently in this world things cost money (who knew?), and if you want to build really cool things, they cost a lot of money. Way more than Eric and I have lying around. This investment does not change anything on the vision or goal of graFighters, but rather allows us to deliver a better experience for all our users and build the great game that we envisioned two years ago.
We are very excited to be working with Djois and his team at X.Million and can’t wait to bring your all of your drawings to life.
UNY startups coverage
http://unystartups.com/2011/04/27/grafighters-closes-200k-seed-round-from-x-million-capital-ventures/Posted in Company News, Development Progress Tagged cash money, eurotrip, shout out to germany, that just happened Leave a commentGraFighters Theme Music
Some retro inspired graFighters music for your ears. This is coming fresh out of the timeless musical archives of Pete Kistler. Enjoy.
Grafighters Theme v1 by grafightersThis is madness….
While we know many of you are patiently waiting for the alpha launch of graFighters on the web… (we promise its coming even sooner than the last time we said it was coming soon). We thought we would give you a little sneak peak of the future. So here it is. The future…
Also aren’t vertical videos on Vimeo awesome? Yeah they are.
Props to @SamSkelton for the tinkering and the excellent filming.
