Dear reader, today we have a lot of things to announce!

First, you may have noticed the website. It has been completely redesigned by Matthieu. And — most importantly — we now have a blog (you are reading its first post!) where we can write about:

• the company — the creation process in France and our major announcements
• our work — new projects, releases and updates
• business — thoughts and facts about the video game industry and apps markets
• technologies and development

Now, let’s talk about the company. We have decided to wait January 2014 to officially create Pixelnest Studio. This is the best we can do to optimize some expenses and prepare our first release.

Finally, the most interesting part: projects! We have often heard the question “Hum, what are you doing guys?”, so here is an exhaustive summary of our activity.

The Koikoukesse

This project is a quizz about video game, developed for mobile devices.

Here is a capture of some (not finished) screens of the application:

At the present time, we are not working on this project anymore.

“Why?”

We tried Xamarin, a mobile cross platform technology to make applications in C#, but were finally not satisfied with the result.

The main issue was the deployment time, even on simulators. It was a real pain to tweak an animation or a particle effect, for example.

Moreover, we’d rather want to focus on riskier and funnier projects (like George) as long as we can. Thus, this goes with a major technology change: we now use Unity for our games.

Unity

The tool is great and convinced us to use it.

The first time you will open the software, your eyes are likely going to bleed in front of the rich interface. If you have also developed game with XNA or a standard game framework, you will loose all your marks.

You need to force yourself to learn how to do things the Unity way, but after some time, you will find the tool extremely valuable. Instant feedback, live editing and a ready-made game engine are huge time savers and will allow you to focus your attention on the gameplay and not the dirty details of implementation. Damien wrote more about it here.

Furthermore, with the incoming 2D toolset, we have decided to learn and master it.

So, what have we planned to do with Unity?

George: Le pirate

George was a game we created to work with the Leap Motion for the Stunfest 2013 (a french video game festival).

After the event, we gathered gameplay ideas to make a better and richer game. Then, we decided to drop it until now.

We are rebuilding the game from scratch — with Unity and without the Leap Motion[1]. For example, on the capture above, you can see that we added real time terraformation.

You can find more information here.

Bunny Splash

And in exclusivity on Pixelnest (well, almost), we present today a new prototype focused on local multiplayer party. For now it is somewhere between Jump’n’Bump and Smash Bros. Who know where it will lead us?

Well, we have plans. But that’s another story!

As you can see, we are pretty busy. Stay tuned!

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1. A cool and useless technology. Sorry!