Here are some pictures:

And some videos on ‘da tube’:

Ivar

Gullarp

Iceberg 

Village

For only the second time in the history of Gastronaut, we are hiring. It’s always hard to find good people, and when you are small like us it’s even worse. If you are sick of being a cog at a larger studio, or just want a leg up getting over the indie hump, come join us.

Hiring Console Developer

It looks like those guys over at the Behemoth are releasing Alien Hominid to Xbox Live Arcade this Wednesday. The Xbox 360 version looks great! High definition and clean anti-aliased line work are a great match. And it’s only 800 points. You should buy it.
We are apparently their contact info for the Alien Hominid leaderboard contest.
-jake

Don and I won our ticket to the open bar at the Game Developer Choice Awards/Independent Games Festival Awards in the form of a nomination for Best New Studio! I’ve been a couple times before: first when Fuzzee Fever was a finalist in the IGF and later when our friends at Chronic Logic won the Grand Prize with Gish (I got to hang out at their table).

Our competition is tough with studios like Ready At Dawn and Iron Lore also nominated. I’m just amazed and proud at how we’ve gotten to this point! Apparently Shigeru Miyamoto will be there receiving his lifetime achievement award! Exciting times!
We’ll be heading to San Francisco in a couple of weeks. Our slides for the talk are done and we’re working on the actual speaking part now. It should be a good talk and we’re aiming to make it very useful for companies in similar situations to ours and perhaps bigger companies that want to enter the downloadable space.

-jake

Don and I will be giving a talk at the Independent Games Summit of GDC. The talk will be a “Postmortem” of Small Arms, which we still have yet to write. It will likely encompass some helpful tips for developing big ideas with small teams, balancing graphics-technology and art, making games to fit in XBLA size requirements and more! With the “more” being us talking about what we messed up and how not to do it. I’ll also be on a panel discussion at the IGS. So make sure to come to the talks. Gastronaut + public speaking: could Cutty be far behind?
-jake

We’ve been moving very slowly here after launching Small Arms. Vacations & holidays have slowed our normal busybody schedules to a snail’s pace. Small Arms has been an amazing success and we were happy to take some time off to watch it go.

In the meantime, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has profiled Gastronaut and Small Arms. This includes a photo of Don and I, sitting in front of the Gastronaut family TV. The paper also had an image of Lord Peet (Small Arms’ resident knight wanna-be) on the front page mingling with Rachael Ray. Note to the Food Network: Lord Peet is available for the next “Throwdown with Bobby Flay.”

The paper came out on December 18th. The article can be found online at this link: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/videogames/296238_software18.html

We were also mentioned in a Hollywood Reporter article about Xbox 360 Achievements. Click here for that article.

-jake

After finishing the game, we set about working on the new Small Arms website. This is now complete and the results can be seen at:

www.smallarmsgame.com

It has lots of cool features that give you a good look at the characters and weapons of the game fully animated. The site was made for us by the dynamic Donnie Steele, whose name we will license for an upcoming action game.

-jake