Nikki and the Robots is now on Steam Greenlight™ and we sure hope that it will get enough Thumbs Up to join the comfortable cross-platform player community soon!

It might end up being the first piece of software on Steam that is open source code and written in Haskell.

Nikki and the Robots Greenlight Trailer

By the way, if you happen to speak German: we have been interviewed by Pixelmacher and will appear for four minutes on German TV (ZDF.Kultur on Monday 26th Nov 2012, 22:30 - 23:00 GMT+1) and more material will be available on pixelmacher.tv for two weeks after that.

In preparation for the soon-to-be release we printed some stickers to hand out. The business cards we've had for quite a while but I believe we haven't shared them yet. If you have a game-making-related business card yourself, share it!

Meanwhile, we're solving problems that prevent Nikki and the Robots from running on various computers. If you would like to help us make sure that Nikki 0.5 will run on the operating system of your choice, feel free to drop us an email.

We want to allow to preorder the storymode very soon but before talking about business plans, let's take a look at the levels in the story mode first!

We used some of the level contest entries as a basis to create story levels. Lootninja by sauer2 for example:

Original Lootninja Level, as included with the latest release

"Upgraded" Lootninja Level

Some of the steps when "upgrading" a level are the addition of...

background, skyline and info/data terminals...

shadows and characters...

hidden areas...

... and new content in general. Most "upgrade levels" are larger and require more time to do a 100% run than the originals.

Here is a big screen of a different, jetpack robot-heavy level, which is not based on a contest entry:

Codename "Jetpack Intro" (1920x1200)

We're nearly done with all the levels for episode 1 but some bugs, the preorder website and paypal integration will probably not allow us to release before January...

Indie Connect Prelude. One step of an effort to nurture and build the Indie Games Scene in Berlin, Germany. We will be there.

What? Developers talk (English language) and everybody plays games.

When? This Friday, starting 18:30ish (aka "like 6:30 PM") GMT+1.

Game developers will talk about developing games. For example team GameStrom will introduce their game design brainstorm events, Anjin Anhut will tell us how to "Just do it!" and Christiaan Janssen and I will talk about Game Development Jams in general.

You will be able to play the latest Nikki release and other indie games as part of an exhibition.

So if you're in Berlin or close and haven't played Nikki and the Robots yet or would like to meet one or two of the game's developers, do come!

PS: It's free of charge and no registration required.

Two of us were at BIGJam this weekend. It was fun! We produced a Haskell- and an Inform-based game prototype. Both are silly.

Video: Acrobots on YouTube

For "Acrobots" we modified our open source Nikki and the Robots Freeplay version to have no gravity and added a new floating robot. The robot is supposed to collect engines and trash that floats around the level which would add thrust and mass respectively.

The Inform-based text adventure can be played here online. It begins with:

You are in a room that looks fancy-dancy. You can see backyard door, a glass box (closed) (in which is a cat) and a unicorn here.

The Inform text adventure language is very natural-language-like and is a good learning tool for some beginner programmers.

We're looking forward to more Game Jams and the BIGJam 2012!

You can check out many BIGJam 2011 games in this thread.

Context: Our level design contest (rules are here) will be over in about three days (a timer is here).

Something caught my attention when I last went shopping: butter. The packaging and name inspired me to design a level.

• ROOMBOTER ("butter" in Dutch) sounds like the kick-kraftwerk word ROBOTER ("robot" in Germany). Robots are important in our game Nikki and the Robots..
• The packaging design aesthetics remind of pixels and tetris; blocks in a grid. Many of the existing levels in Nikki and the Robots are similar.

You can download this level [mirror 1|mirror 2].

Copying existing designs is not how I would usually create levels. The instant inspiration I got compelled me to do it in this case though.

When did you last have spontaneous inspiration for game locations/levels lately? Do you rather get ideas from nature or man-made things?

We're starting our first level design competition! Fire up the editor and create something amazing!

We will pick 10 winning level designs (possibly even more), whose creators will each receive a free copy of Nikki and the Robots (the full game), and they will be included in the game's credits.

One Three of the level builders will also win a fancy Nikki and the Robots t-shirt!

Our level editor is easy to use and we have made a short tutorial [links: GDocs | Readability | IndieDB] and an instructional video [links: Vimeo | YouTube | IndieDB].

You can send us your levels via email, upload them to a hosting site and send us the links, or you can post them to the forum. For hosting files we recommend box.net, dropbox.com or mediafire.com.

• Name (for attribution/credits)
• Email address (for contact)
• The phrase "These levels are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Unported 3.0" (CC BY)

The winning levels will be included in updates of Nikki and the Robots. We will also create retouched versions with additional graphics and content and then include these levels in the story mode of the full Nikki game.

Authors will be given notable attribution both in the game and on our website.

No Clones Allowed!

Everybody is welcome to submit as many original levels as they like. Allow other games to inspire you - we all do - but no clones, please. :)

This competiton ends on July 7th 2011.

We flexed our brain muscles for some new ideas to ensure that Nikki and the Robots will be as complete and charming as we are anticipating, without pushing the release date into 2012+. The plan to create four episodes and then sell them has been dropped in favor of a new release concept, which emphasizes an open development philosophy and community involvement:

This development strategy of Nikki and the Robots is based on the following:

1. Community Levels Everywhere: Nikki will feature a level server to exchange community levels created with the editor. We will pick the best and upgrade them to be included in the story mode.
2. Step-by-Step Story: The story mode will have episodic releases and each episode will be a combination of upgraded community levels and new content made by us.
3. Partial Protectionism: The story mode will be available for pay. The sweet-looking graphics of the story mode won't be available for editing and sharing right away. However, we are likely to make more assets free-as-in-freedom as the game's development progresses.

Our following steps will be a new Nikki release, writing extensive tutorials for the editor and our first level design contest. Expect all of these things to happen very soon!

We are pretty excited about this new idea! Have you spotted a weak pillar in our plan? Or perhaps you can tell us of a project that tried something similar? Your thoughts and comments are more than welcome!