JohnnyTwoShoes News

Unlimited Detail in games

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:04:04 -0800

Came across this new computer graphics rendering technique yesterday called Unlimited Detail. Since then I have been thinking of various possible uses. I hope it takes off in some form, so much potential - fully destructive environments with unlimited graphics detail, real materials, carving 3d models like an evolved Zbrush etc

Looking forward to finding out more and seeing where this goes, just wonder why I have only just heard of it. Watch the video to see what im talking about.

GPU giants have been trying to block this technology advance because it's diffuses the aggressive research and funding behind traditional polygon developments rendering their research pointless.

If you're a game developer, industry giant or investors then please look at Unlimited detail at their website and get in contact with them.

Source Unlimited Detail Technology via Game Trailers

Addy Van Der Borgh & JTS

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:00:27 -0800

Addy Van Der Borgh played tonight at The Good Ship in Kilburn. We caught him before the show and he was a true gent and recommended you catch him at The Good Ship for his warm-up shows before Edinburgh fringe festival (July 26th) or see his full line-up across the globe on his website. In return he said he'd mention us at these shows and he wore the spaceman for his act too!

Bad ass. Check out a YouTube video of him performing below.

New Stuff Sunday 2

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:45:09 -0800

Maybe this will be a long running thing, here we are on Sunday again and I'm giving forum goers a new feature. I've removed the advert on the main forum page and replaced it with a list of the latest ratings from across the forum.

It's called Rating History and it's live right now!

Wild Beasts: Hooting and Howling

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:31:29 -0800

This is a great track by a great band called Wild Beasts, they're currently touring so check tickets for your local area. Personally I'll be at the 22nd March gig at Koko, let me know if you'll be there.

Notes, now with live notifications!

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:53:43 -0800

Notes were introduced around New Years, they have been subject to an overhaul recently and now all registered players have been included in this open beta testing the new features such as live notifications, hiding and basic sorting.

How do I send a note?

If you already have friends, it's bleeding easy. Just press your name in the navigation bar, mine looks like this:

Once your panel has loaded, just press notes

Who is the note for? Start typing one of your friends, we'll fill in the rest. Pressing enter adds them to the list, keep typing, you can send a note to as many friends as you want (if you're sending spam, you might find you suddenly have no friends, just a warning to those would-be spammers out there)

Fill in your message and press "Send." Notes are a great way to extend your friendships with players to xbox or instant messaging with information you don't want to share with everyone on the forums. It's advisable not to share passwords or stuff like that, because it's still the internet and not everyone is who they say they are.

When you receive a note you will see a notification in the navigation bar, it will look like this. Just press it and you will see a list of all your new notes!

Flash 10.1 Beta 3 Available!

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:42:49 -0800

If you're running a netbook, you should get this version of the new 10.1 flash player because it enables hardware acceleration on the piddly gpu's that ship with most netbooks.

It means, 1080p flash video and ... playing games at a higher frame-rate.

Get it from the Adobe Labs site

Bill Gates on Climate Change

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:14:18 -0800

Bill Gates talks about climate change and how we can use Terra Power to potentially solve the worlds energy needs and use nuclear waste as fuel for creating new energy.

Alan Wake X10 Trailer

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:09:15 -0800

Alan Wake is an incredible thriller game due for release soon on the XBOX 360. Developed by Remedy, the guys that originally brought us the Max Payne series it's looking like an incredible game.

A lot of people don't know exactly what the game is about or where the game is getting released because of the games long development cycle and buyout by Microsoft. I can tell you that it's a 360 exclusive and the PC version has been canned as far as we know.

What that means is Remedy have been able to focus on pushing the 360 to its absolute limits, the results are absolutely tremendous. 2010 is certainly a year for gamers and this is just one of the top titles you can expect to see released. Due to hit the shelves in May, Alan Wake is one thriller game we won't be missing out on.

Check out the latest trailer from Microsoft at the X10 event, kudos to Remedy for having the staying power on getting this game complete. I can understand that this must have been hard to accomplish since Alan Wake was announced around the time of the 360 launch, almost 5 years ago.

Windows Mobile 7 for gaming!

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:43:39 -0800

So here you can see that Microsoft has unveiled the new mobile phone OS that Windows Mobile users have been speculating on for years.

It's evident that Microsoft have taken a fresh approach to this iPhone copy-cat market and like Palm they seem to have come out with the support of the overwhelming public.

What does it mean? It means that Microsoft are in-line with Apple, Palm and Google with their mobile software at long last and with the inclusion of XBOX Live gaming ability it means you will get some beefed up games running on mobile hardware.

For us that's exciting we're big fans of mobile gaming and this shows that Microsoft is as serious about it as the rest of the industry — I'm glad they took the time to do it right and differentiate themselves.

New Stuff Sunday

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:27:43 -0800

Hey-o! You're probably enjoying some Sunday internet gaming, feeding your mum pancakes or spending some quality time with those people who you love-a-lot.

Sunday, lovely Sunday. We made some updates to Johnny Two Shoes to make your weekend a little bit more awesome.

First up, you'll see a slightly re-designed game page to fit the new design. It's easy to see, just check out any games and force your eyes towards the game title.

Next, we want you all to see when we post non-featured blog stuff, so we made an icon that shows the latest post next to the blog link on the homepage and in the forum! So now it's easier to leave a comment and know what's going on.

In addition to all that lovely new stuff, we have added hearts to hip-hap, now when a player hearts a game it will be added to the hip-hap queue! Hopefully it means more friends and another way to see what's going on.

God of War III New Trailer

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:46:19 -0800

We over at JTS have been looking forward to this game for a while now, but this trailer makes me think we wont be let down when the game is finally released. Recommend you watch it in HD

Hip-Hap knows what's going down

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:05:52 -0800

Hip-hap was in beta a while back, it absolutely kained our servers because it wasn't optimised for the amount of players that loved to sit and watch it roll around, so we had to disable it while we worked out the kinks.

I'm happy to say that this evening we got it running just how we wanted so now it's back! Only for registered players, another reason to get on-board the good ship Johnny Two Shoes.

Pop and Fresh

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:48:04 -0800

Check out the new design on the home and games pages. We realised we needed to get with the times and blow-up those tiny little sugar cube images into whopping great wide versions.

In the process we thought, how can we show more games in one place? Well, we threw in the popular sort, it sorts games by how many people have fav'd them.

It seems that by far the most extremely loved and adored game is Attak, if you haven't played Attak yet then grab a buddy, sit them down and proceed to smash them through a series of office blocks with Sibor, Blane or one of the other nutball fighters.

By default you get to see what's fresh right now, the order in which we make 'em, newest right at the top working down to a little gem called Thermostorm. If you haven't played some of our older games, you should check them out — it's where we came from man!

Of course, High Speed Chase 2 is our latest creation, it's like a mix of High Speed Chase, The Heist and a whole bunch of ideas we had floating around in our brains.

We hope you love smashing cars off the road as much as we do, go play High Speed Chase 2 now d00ds.

Also, a quick nod to supergrover who captured the wonderful new Comatose icon, high fives all round.

Learning Exclusivity

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:41:21 -0800

High Speed Chase 2 is fresh out of development and it's live for everyone to play, on this site and on a ton of other sites. But what's different about a player out there on the internet and a registered player at Johnny Two Shoes?

Before we launched High Speed Chase 2 we had a number of ideas for how we could reward players for being part of the community, it started a very long time ago when all of our games were released exclusively to Johnny Two Shoes, a lot of them remain that way today, most recently Banana Dash World 4 was released as an exclusive.

We realised to build a proper community we need to integrate feedback and player interaction but we also need to make the experience at Johnny Two Shoes unique. At first that was comments on games, but that was pretty basic (and not very unique) so we re-designed the entire site from scratch with the community at the core. Johnny Two Shoes 2.0 launched almost 2 years ago — we had medals, high-scores, player accounts, profile pages and a blog.

Things have changed since then, but it's been more of an evolution of that basic idea and an evolution of our design. We did have to start make games with other companies because we simply ran out of money — it was a hard decision to make and it lead to about 18 months of incredibly hard work, the worst part was that we were incredibly distant from the community during that time.

In October 2009 we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, we were coming to a period when we could re-think what the community meant and how we would release our new games. We gave you Banana Dash World 4 as an exclusive, something we were very proud to do! We even tried throwing in a bonus level to see if it changed the reaction to the release.

The positive feedback we got from that bonus level set off a chain reaction with us. We worked out so many different ways to engage with the community and ways to boost the size of the community — we had High Speed Chase 2 half finished collecting dust so we busted open the files and tried to apply some of those ideas to:

Promote High Speed Chase on the iPhone
Engage new players
Encourage player registration at Johnny Two Shoes
Reward the existing community

So this is where we are now, a new blend on an existing mentality — another way to reward the community and a new way to drive new player registrations. As I write this, we're having a soaring number of new registrations when High Speed Chase 2 has been in the wild for around 24 hours.

So, what does this mean for the future of Johnny Two Shoes? You can bet that it means more community features, new ways to interact with each other (stuff you won't have seen anywhere else before) and a ton of new experiments that you can all get involved with.

This is an exciting time to be part of Johnny Two Shoes. We want to say thanks for sticking around and we're really looking forward to the rest of 2010 with you all!

Want to be a SPY?

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:05:26 -0800

This has just come in from an ex-MI6 agent, we're not sure exactly what he's trying to get across in that get-up but he certainly likes a little game called High Speed Chase 2.

You know, it's on iPhone and will be on the web in a few hours, stay tuned on our twitter.

Apple's Latest Creation

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:32:42 -0800

Is this the event to unveil the oft-rumoured Apple tablet? We think it is, January 27th — that's this month people, Apple could be unveiling their tablet (rumoured to be called iSlate). We shall see!

The Power-Up Wall

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:57:01 -0800

This is a little sneak-peek into the JohnnyTwoShoes development environment for High Speed Chase 2, yes, one of our walls is covered in those power-ups! We live and breath power-ups right now, follow the link to see a higher resolution image.

The Power-Up Wall on flickr

High Speed Chase 2 Beta

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:36:42 -0800

My good friends of Johnny Two Shoes, the much anticipated release of High Speed Chase 2 is nearing. The heat of this release is pretty darn hot, so roll-up roll-up, leave a comment to be considered for a beta invite.

Please note, we don't invite everybody to the beta, but if you don't try, you'll never know. We will start the beta small and grow and grow until it's bursting onto the web.

Tell your friends and your friends friends. Good luck.

Gadgets Of The Future

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 05:07:19 -0800

When each year rolls around we see tech companies offering all kinds of mad devices, like hanspree who put a 40 inch television in a toy firetruck and this year put a tv in a stuffed polar bear. It seems their intentions are squarely aimed at children, but there are a ton of other companies who are pushing the envelope, little bits of their research and development gets outed at CES and this year is no different, except the gadgets are a lot thinner, faster, higher capicity and most of all, shinier.

What really grabbed me was the sci-fi related gadgetry, by this I mean things you think would have just jumped from a sci-fi movie like Minority Report or Bladerunner.

This identity card by Samsung actually moves! The square for the persons face is in fact a small OLED screen that shows the person from different angles. This is not only inredible but it's likely that the US and UK will have identity cards at some point (not that we want them) and I can imagine that they would have something like this on the card paired with RFID technology.

Samsung is pulling out all the stops, here they have a laptop screen, again using OLED but this time it's 40% transparent. That means, you can see through it. I'm not sure how productive it would be, but if they could make your desktop area whatever is behind your screen and then have applications solid over the top that would be incredible.

Phone technology is always moving on, but in the last year or so I've been unimpressed with what manufacturers have to offer, seemingly just lots of iPhone clones or traditional candy bar phones with bigger and bigger cameras. When I saw these phones from LG and Samsung, I was blown away. Despite the phones being fatter, there is a mini projector stuffed inside so you can playback video or photo slideshows anywhere.

via engadget

More about Joe Danger

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:24:03 -0800

There have been a few videos released of the Hello games team talking up Joe Danger, not that they need to. It speaks for itself and certainly looks a treat.

Have a little peek for yourselves.

Thanks to thedavidcarney for pointing this out.

Dead Man's Bones

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:22:03 -0800

Hugo suggested another awesome band, Dead Man's Bones and I just couldn't let them go without a mention on the blog. Here's a pretty cool video to watch where they seem to be having a pretty good time making a creepy music video.

If you live in any of the countries that Spotify exists, then you should check out the entire self-titled "Dead Man's Bones" album. My personal favourite track is Pa Pa Power.

Listen on Spotify or buy on iTunes.

Johnny Two Shoes in 2009

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 07:14:45 -0800

It's 2010 and we're still here! 2009 was our most insane year yet, with the release of some wicked awesome games and us straying into a lot of new territory (even if it has been mostly behind closed doors).

We wanted to highlight some of the great things in 2009 related to Johnny Two Shoes, first off here are some stats from Google Analytics (who doesn't love stats?).

Most played game at Johnny Two Shoes in 2009? — Attak, followed by The Heist 2
Players visiting Johnny Two Shoes in 2009? — Over 10.5 million!
Top Google search term? — "Attak"
Most Googled player? — "PrettyPyrate" followed by "Shoop da whoop! SteveTheBad"

Our personal highlights include

Interview with BBC (thanks to Illumina and their film crew)
The Heist's 100,000,000th play (AddictingGames estimate over 100 million plays all around the web!)
Introduction of our spaceman logo and the stickers printed by StickerRobot
Our updated visual design
Working with Warner Brothers (thanks to AKQA and Channel 4)

There's a ton more stuff we could have said, but the list would be massive. We want to say thanks to everyone who's played our games in 2009 and especially to those who join in with the community and give something back.

There's been so much planning in 2009 for this upcoming year, you will finally see the fruits of our labour. Have a great 2010, we'll be right there with you, high-fiving all the way into 2011.

OnLive at Columbia Tech

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 06:25:44 -0800

OnLive shows what it can really do and discusses some of the technology behind it.

If you're not sure what OnLive is, it's basically a way for anyone with a TV or PC/Mac to play the latest and hottest PC games at full detail without having to spend any money on an extremely powerful PC. It runs entirely over the internet (kind of like streaming a movie trailer, only way more awesome).

This video is both exciting and an inspiration.

Notes in Beta

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:27:06 -0800

Now available for everyone to try out now is the new notes feature, it's still finding its feet in terms of usefulness but it's on its way to becoming a new way to communicate privately among the community.

To use the notes feature, make sure you've validated your email address and you will then see a "Notes" icon in the user panel. Type a name of one of your beloved friends in the recipient box and it will fill the rest in for you. Ready to send? Hit Send Note and shazam, it's in your note stream.

Please bear in mind that it's a beta and submit any madness you come across to the appropriate forum page.

Consider this a little Christmas/New Year gift from us. Send a note now!

A Gaming Christmas!

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 12:56:06 -0800

What better way to bring people together at Christmas than games? We've been playing Gears of War 2, Eye Pet and Alive4Ever. What have you been playing with your family? Get any cool game related gifts?

The Mochis: Game of The Year Awards

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:53:09 -0800

Johnny Two Shoes will be at the 2010 Flash Gaming Summit in San-Francisco, part of the event is "The Mochis", awards for the best games of 2009.

We think that Johnny Two Shoes has had a mad year, but amongst the madness we released some pretty sweet games that we had a lot of fun building and people have had a lot of fun playing!

So, vote for Johnny Two Shoes games in "The Mochis" game of the year awards for 2009. There are 11 categories, we qualify for the following categories with the following games:

Best Indie Game - Banana Dash World 4
Best Game Art - Banana Dash World 4, The Great Sperm Race
Most Creative Game - Banana Dash World 4, The Great Sperm Race, The Heist 2
Best Shooter Game - The Heist 2
Most Creative Game - Banana Dash World 4, The Great Sperm Race, The Heist 2

You can vote through the official Flash Gaming Summit website.

Flashguns

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:57:03 -0800

A great London based band called Flashguns, check them out. This video is for "I don't not love you" recommended to us by Hugo.

Remember, if you like this music video, try and support them by buying their EP "Matching Hearts, Similar Parts" from iTunes or from your local independent record store.

Inside the mind of Philippe Starck

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:13:50 -0800

Philippe Starck is a hero to me, I saw this video that Engadget made a while ago on their blog and I've been meaning to post it because what Starck says is very to the point and is a great example of a creative mind making a difference in the world.

Watch the Engadget Show — Inside the mind of designer Philippe Starck

Spaceman Stickers

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:40:46 -0800

Finally, after much waiting the honourable spaceman (and all his pals) have arrived today! It's been a lot of fun making spaceman our iconic logo so far and now he has a physical place on laptops, street lamps, underground carriages, pool tables, bus stops and lockers.

Sorry for the fluff, the stickers have little teeny pieces of paper stuck to them where they were die-cut. I just threw them on the scanner and hit GO!

WIP Space Illustration

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 11:32:14 -0800

I thought maybe it was a little much showing this illustration so early in its development, but then I thought, why not. It's been so long since we've actually been able to share things with you we should make it up some how.

So, this is part one of some kind of space illustration I'm working on. Right now there's no ship and that car was just plain lame-sauce so I decided to draw over it.