Create a profile in the app (this is so we can email you if you win).
Play Tank vs. Alien Online!
Achieve a rank of 3 by midnight EST, June 1st 2012.
A winner will be selected at random and emailed regarding how to collect their prize!
A special thanks from the Brass Monkey team to the wonderful folks at Tech Superpowers, who are helping to sponsor this contest, as well as gearing up to be our first ever Brass Monkey in-store location at their Patriot Place store!
Confused? Watch our video that explains how to start playing games with Brass Monkey!
Have you ever been having a great time playing a game on your phone, but you were interrupted by a bothersome ad popup? Did it take away from your experience?
Well, us too.
Which is why the Brass Monkey application is now ad-free! In our latest release we’ve removed all ads, so you can enjoy a seamless controller experience!
So, check it out! If you’ve already installed Brass Monkey, just download the update. Get a friend to join you and try out some awesome two-player games like Tank vs Alien or Rival Racers.
The Brass Monkey team has been traveling all over the U.S., showing off our product and gaining momentum fast! Here’s some of what we’ve been up to.
GDC 2012
We were excited to be a part of the first ever GDC Play exhibition at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, California. CEO Chris Allen and Creative Director Andrew Kostuik gave presentations on the Unity main stage, and CTO Francois Laberge was part of a panel at the HTML5 Tutorial Day, now available on the GDC Vault. We gave live demos all throughout GDC Play on the showroom floor.
SXSW
This was Brass Monkey’s first year at SXSW in Austin, TX, and what a trip it was! We were one of just 33 featured companies at Tech Cocktail’s startup showcase, chosen out of hundreds of applicants. They wrote this great article about what we’re doing with Brass Monkey. At the event, we also ran into Brian Gorbett of Microsoft, who had this to say!
New England Games SIG Marketing Panel
On March 21st, I had the honor of speaking at the MIT Enterprise Forum’s New England Games Special Interest Group panel on Marketing on a Budget. It was a great time, and I did my best to give folks helpful information! Our panel was one of the most widely attended that NE GamesSIG has run, they were happy to tell us.
Still to come: MIT Business in Gaming, Made in MA, and PAX East
It’s about to be a busy week in Boston, MA! At the MIT Sloan Business in Gaming Conference on Thursday, April 5th, CEO Chris Allen will be speaking on a panel about startups. I’ll be making an appearance on the Callie Crossley show on WGBG on Wednesday April 4, talking about the MA Games Industry. The whole team is excited to part of the Made in MA initiative, from the mixer held at Microsoft NERD on Thursday evening to the state-run MA Games Scavenger Hunt during PAX East.
Come visit us at PAX East, booth #138! There we’ll be doing live demos, giving away cool swag, and making an announcement about an upcoming contest!
We are super excited to announce that we’ve launched the first version of the Brass Monkey controller for Android on the Marketplace. For those that have devices like the Kindle Fire, that don’t use the Marketplace, we’ve put up a copy of the APK on our developer site. We worked really hard to get this out as fast as possible due to the overwhelming number of requests that we support the platform.
The first version of the app is still missing a few things that the iOS build has, although we bet you won’t miss them for the moment. We’ve disabled coin purchases on the build, so that means that you will just get to play Gnop Gnop (the only current paid game) for free for now; don’t tell your iOS friends, they will be jealous. We’ve also didn’t implement ads on the Android app either. We decided it was much more important to get the app out as fast as possible,and refine it from there. Although we did put the app through rigorous QA there may be some bugs with the build, so please let us know if you run into any. Did I mention that our QA team rocks?
I would like to personally thank our lead engineer Zach Kamsler for putting in so much time into learning the ins-and-outs of the platform, and to putting in the overtime to make it happen. Paul Gregoire built the original Brass Monkey SDK for Android, so his help on this was also invaluable. Likewise, due to the variability of Android devices, their screen resolutions and aspect ratios getting the UI to look good was no easy feat. Andrew Kostuik, our Creative Director did a fantastic job on making it look amazing. Of course we couldn’t have done any of this without our investors, so a huge thanks to them for making our dream a reality.
So with that, join me in welcoming our Android brethren to the Brass Monkey platform. I look forward to hopefully playing you in a game of Rival Racers of Tank vs. Alien soon!
One last note, if you are going to be at GDC this week, be sure to stop by and see us at GDC Play Kiosk #42.
Hi I’m Andrew Kostuik Creative Director at Brass Monkey. I’d like to share with you a brief look into the development of Contamination and the integration with the Brass Monkey platform.
In late 2011, myself and Andy Zupko started development on Contamination. We sought out to create a rails-type first person shooter with higher quality visuals and gameplay in mind, while maintaining the casual gamer perspective. For those that remember the game “Time Crisis“, it was a huge source of inspiration when building our own game. Brass Monkey was an incredible fit when we first started building the game, allowing us to maintain sophisticated controls for the first person gameplay and simplifying by being on a rails system so there was no need to have a second analog. What we ended up with was the right side of the controller being your standard aim configuration and the left side devoted to shooting, reloading, and next/prev weapon. We also added in accelerometer support for moving the players field of view in all directions when tilting your device.
That explains the origins of the game, but since then we’ve kept developing. We have been polishing up the game in this past week, as well as working on the storyline, fleshing out gameplay, and making decisions about where we want to take this game in the future.
Currently, we have polished up the first level, which we’ll keep refining in terms of gameplay and spawn patterns.
You can watch my friend Greg try out Contamination with the HDMI laptop hookup below:
Hooking up the HDMI to the TV and going into fullscreen, we show how the quality of games you can play using Brass Monkey can in fact come close, if not match, the experience of playing on a console like Xbox360/PS3.While this isn’t our main focus, it is fun to see the possibilities.
New to this build we have:
Updated UI Including HUD and Score, new Dead Screen.
Revamped Main Menu System with new UI
Added Nav Meshes to the Zombie Paths
Compressed the game from 75mb to 20mb including Main menu streaming in Level1
A musical score is being added in slowly. You can see this in Main Menu and Level 1 now.
In closing, here is a quick video of the main menu in action. I really didn’t want to have yet another simple static main menu. We decided to load in the main menu at first, and stream in the first level’s content. In my opinion, this will help to keep the player entertained while the game loads.
We’re excited to announce that Brass Monkey release 1.2 is now available! Our latest update has some great new features, including:
Dynamic controllers – What you see on your phone can now change.
Universal App – Now includes iPad resolution graphics.
Gesture-based exit button- Designed to prevent accidental quits.
We put together this brief video, showing off how dynamic controllers work on our latest game, Tank vs. Alien! Check it out and let us know what you think.
For our developer friends, we want to let you know that the Unity and Flash SDK’s now have developer support, so you can build your own dynamic controllers! We’d love to put more games up on our site, so drop us a line.
If you have any feedback about our new design, or anything else related to our app, we’d love to hear it. Drop us a line at at feedback@playbrassmonkey.com.
Brass Monkey was proud to sponsor the 2012 Global Game Jam. We provided snacks and beverages for a number of sites worldwide as a way to show our support for hard-
working developers, designers, audiophiles, artists, writers, producers, and more!
This year’s Global Game Jam was the biggest and most successful jam yet. Over 240 sites around the world participated in the 4th annual jam, making games in just 48 hours. The Global Game Jam is put on by the Independent Game Developers Association, and you can check out the results of this incredible effort by heading over to the Global Game Jam site, and playing some of the amazing games.
Brass Monkey made our SDK’s available to game jammers, and we’ll hopefully be seeing some cool uses of our tech coming from developers in the future!
A few months ago we were in the running for Tech Cocktail’s SXSW Startup event, and now we’re in their poll about who is Boston’s hottest new statup!