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Woo it has been quiet here. This is Aiysha (the artist person) here to give you a heads up on what we’ve been up to.

Minermite Chapter 3 will be released as soon as we iron out some bugs in the levels. In this new level, Freckles and gang discover a bunch of ruins in the mines (fancy that? How convenient!) and encounter a series of challenges that they need to overcome. They also discover a sinister new face behind the stolen gems! FINALLY!

We’re also developing chapter 4 right now, which will feature new obstacles (doncha guys love those boulders?) and a new villain too! He will be absolutely FABULOUS. Of sorts. With metallic shiny bits, just like the new mysterious villain above. For the villains, I really liked the idea of having some sort of armor on their characters, which is a big difference from the more cartoonish miners and their colorful jumpsuits. I could not have the villains decked out in full armor suits so I made do with pieces of body armor, like metal corsets or metal masks. Designing the villains was a lot more fun for me than the main characters (maybe I lean more towards the dark side) and I cannot wait to post up designs for the next villains.

Oh and did I mention? Minermite will also be released for Android tablets and the iPad very soon!

Apart fro Minermite, we have also been developing a new game which we revealed (or rather finally posted up art on) at StartUp Asia last week!

Say hello to “Spellwords”! Spellwords is a word finding game that aims to let its players learn new words, discover meanings of the words that they have already found and to have fun while doing so. We incorporated more fantasy and some RPG elements in addition to more exciting word game mechanics. The game would be out for release in about 3 months time so keep a lookout for it!

Winect have gone through a small update to plug a memory leak and also fixed a missing file problem that has been causing it to crash for some users.

Additionally, a new Winect for Ppt has been added specifically for powerpoint presentation usage. This version works as follows:

• Left swipe for next slide
• Right swipe for previous slide
• Point at location to move mouse cursor to targetted location.

If you have any queries or problems, email me at daniel@ixorastudios.com

It’s been a busy week after Licence to Play (Hello guys and girls who were there!). As we head towards a full launch, we put together a bunch of old sketches used during the game production for archiving and feeling good about ourselves. So here’s the first bunch of character sketches for Minermite (with some hopefully witty commentary by our artist).

(He’s turned somewhat cool in the end. He was supposed to be a dorky, noobie who just kept quiet. I don’t know where his hair came from, my brain farted it out and it happened.)

(Because every game needs a girl character somewhere. It was difficult drawing her cute. Also I like her red dress. I think I was listening to a lot of Mylene Farmer while drawing her.)

(The butt of all our jokes. Has awesome sideburns. Turned out to be a pretty good looking bugger by the end. Best angry faces too. Also I didn’t have enough scans of his sketches so have a picture of my cat. He’s young and angry, like Lambchop.)

(OH MY GOD BABYFACE ILU SO MUCH. OOOOUUUU YEAH.)

(You see, Lumber was supposed to have dreadlocks if I had my way. Unfortunately I did not get my way Sadness.)

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Ixora studios would like to wish Singapore a Happy National Day!

Singapore Skyline photos by: Goh Hak Liang (http://www.flickr.com/photos/hak87/)

Hi Everyone!

Hope you’re all as psyched as the 3 of us are about the upcoming Diablo III release! (It’s in 4 days! w00t!)

Anyway, we came across this video interview on Gamespot of Jay Wilson (the Game Director of D3), and he talks about aspects of game development we thoroughly agree with!

Innovation in games doesn’t come in the form of “a big upper-cut punch super feature”, but is driven slowly through games that are well executed.  So many times we’ve received feedback like “that’s HGH not really innovative…” and “I don’t see your killer feature…”.  But at the end of the day, customers are looking for something familiar, yet refreshing.  Something easy to pick up, yet new!  Most importantly, something fun and beautiful to play.  Like Jay, we believe the way to accomplish that is through excellent execution, not dropping big feature bombs on people’s heads.  Execute perfectly and innovation is sure to follow, conversely, good games don’t necessarily follow forced innovation.

Looking forward to seeing everyone on Battle.net!!

I apologise for the downtime for the past few days. The server should be mor stable and running better now!

On a side note, I am working modifying the finger gesture recognition framework currently and packing it into a dll for everyone to use it! It will release sometime next week, so do check it out!

Hi,

We are undergoing a server migration. Contents will be back up as soon as possible!