Junk: Battles wins CNMA Award

Last night was a big night. Junk: Battles had been nominated as a finalist in the Canadian New Media Awards, for Best Innovative Web-based Game, and the founders of Antic went to Toronto for the event.

Junk was up against Frima's Build-A-Bearville and Social Game Universe's Avastar Social -- and Junk won!

We'd like to thank all of our families, friends, and most especially, our players, for giving us the support and feedback we need to make Junk: Battles the most innovative web-based game out there -- and to continually make it better from week to week.

Grab your junk, and get ready

The time has come for everyone to go play with their junk.

Junk: Battles is now in Open Beta.

Sign up to play, and as a bonus for being savvy enough to find the illustrious Antic blog, I'll drop a bit of a secret. Just for you. Enter the code "FANTIC" for an extra shiny special prize. Only share this with your bestest of bestest friends. And your enemies. The ones you want to destroy in game. With guns and lasers and catapults and stuff. Even better, tell them to use your username as a referral code, and you'll get a bonus whenever they buy some Oil.

Sign up for the forum, too, and let us know how we're doing. We listen to everything there -- we've got it hooked up to a speech synthesizer, and set it to a pounding techno beat -- well, unless we've gotten noise complaints. Then we just read them. Quietly, by candlelight, with a nice merlot.

We Got the Cover!

A few weeks ago, we had a writer and a photographer come into the office to write an article for the August '09 issue of Business London magazine about Antic Entertainment and our history. To top it all off, we also got the cover of the issue, featuring art from Junk: Battles.

Check it out (on pages 22-26) to get an insight into our founders, our history, and our future.

Home Stretch

Almost time to turn the lights on for Junk: Battles.

We are feature complete (for open beta) - and smashing bugs, and load testing. And bug testing. And usability testing. Pretty much every type of testing you can think of! Our friends at QABoss have been helping out greatly giving us detailed, clear bug reports helping us catch the most obvious (and most importantly the not so obvious!) of errors.

We expect to have the doors open wide for everyone to play by the end of next week.

Check out the Junk Battles blog for further development details, bug fixes, and completed features!

Birdwatching in the Office

I have finally managed to capture a photo of the elusive coder bird, displaying his full plumage. A rare treat.

From the back of the helmet, you can't see it, but written in a childlike scrawl on duct tape is "I Broke Build." We have a tradition here at Antic, that anyone who checks broken code into the server has to wear the Build Helmet until the bug is fixed.

Making Magic Happen

As some of you may know, Magic the Gathering, the world's most popular and versatile customizable card game, released it's 15th anniversary core set on July 10th. Of course, we here at Antic Entertainment had to get one shipped to our office door the day of!

Tonight, surrounded by delicious pizza, all of us are here after hours drafting the entire box and having our first three way tournament. Sadly (happily?) it's actually our fifth Magic tournament we've done this year, but this one is especially fun given that's it's a four-game threesome, with everyone involved. It's alot nerdier than it sounds, really. Keep your minds out of the gutter.

For anyone who's been out of the Magic scene, if you're thinking of getting back in, this is the set to get. It's 125 of the best cards from the last fifteen years, and 125 cards inspired by the best cards in the last 15 years! The set is well balanced, powerful, and there's very little common fodder. Everyone is having a great time with their decks, and at this point in time - it's hard to tell who's going to come out on top.

Tomorrow the real fun begins though, as we count down 2 weeks until open beta!

Tenenbaum's Eulogy

We are all gathered here this day to mourn the passing of a London landmark. At the corner of Richmond and Whatever lay a quaint burger joint named Tenenbaum's. Or T-bomb to his friends. We at Antic made it a regular expedition to see our good friend Tenenbaum (is that like Good King Wenceslas? --ed) on Friday lunches. We got to be such regulars there that we had our own special burger concoction, named The Antic. For the curious, it was a bacon cheeseburger, grilled with tex mex seasoning, and liberally doused with more seasoning after cooking. Truly tasty.

We would brave wind and weather, snow and storm, to experience the tasty hamburger goodness that was the product of Tenenbaum's lifelong dream to fill the bellies of the downtown hungry.

However, such perfection was not to last. We missed a week, due to a holiday falling on our Friday, and upon our return, Tenenbaum's had changed. It had closed and re-opened, with different people, as Blimpy's. This offended us greatly, so we refused to eat there on principle.

This all changed on Friday.

It was a mistake. A dark day, though the sun was shining. It was truly not yet time to move on. Like a widow's suitor, Blimpy's was incapable of living up to the perfection of our beloved Tenenbaum's.

RIP old friend.

(PS. Thanks Ted!)