Just another awardless day…

We at Xform find ourselves at the office again for another day of work. Lately it seems just a tad bit more meaningless than normal… Why? It’s because we didn’t win anything last Thursday at the Dutch Game Awards :(

I’m kidding ofcourse, we’re slightly disappointed, but we don’t need recognition from a… well from anyone really. The fact that a single Xform game gets played by more than a 100.000 people each day is recognition enough that what we do is liked by a lot of people. However, with all that said, we have won a little bit in spirit with Flipper. The game won an award for “Best Mobile/Handheld Game” and the jury credited its only developer Hugo Smits (Goodbyegalaxygames) for this huge achievement in designing and programming the game on his own. The term “Bedroom coder” was used to describe what he had achieved on his own… literally in his bedroom (in Dutch we normally tend to say: “attic coder” for that type of person, just to emphasize the loneliness of it all). He has had a lot of help from us in publishing Flipper, but as this prize is meant for the development, it’s only right that he should take the credit for this on his own. It was great to see Hugo shining with his red owl on stage, a great crown on all his efforts and hard work. It’s still unclear what will happen with Hugo’s upcoming Flipper 2 but I’ll try to keep you up to date as much as I can what will happen from our standpoint. Nothing has been decided on this new game yet, so it’s up to Hugo!

It wasn’t all bad… for me at least… I was able to claim two awards with my former colleagues for a game I’ve worked on in 2009 and 2010. It’s a testament to the open and kind character of the Xform people that I was able to join my ex-colleagues in celebration of the award for “Best Visual Design” and “Best Audio Design” for the game Fairytale Fights. It was my old employer Playlogic that developed and published this game and I helped (my ass off) to make it! The company has unfortunately filed for bankruptcy in the summer of this year. This was after the game proved unsuccessful, with a very small chance the company will start over under new management, but this chance remains minuscule at this point. I decided not to stay for all the pictures at the award ceremony, this is something that the PR person should do, he still represents the company, together with the composer of the game, responsible for the audio. I’m working at Xform now! Next year we should definitely win a prize, as someone that has joined the company very recently I think there’s so much worthy of appreciation in the Xform line up, it’s high time for us to get the recognition we deserve from the jury. In the meantime millions of gamers will play our games, for now that really is all we need to keep going…

-- Erik