I suppose it’s time to start talking about what Zombie Cow Studios going to be getting up to next.

I can’t tell you much. Not due to some big clever hush-hush drip-feed hype marketing, but mainly because there isn’t much to tell yet.

You’ll be pleased to hear I’ve enrolled some sort of ‘best of the best of the best’ team to help me out on this next game. Jon ‘Log’ Blyth and Steve Hogarty of PCZone fame are helping out with the writing and designing, as is Ben Ward, Ben There, Dan That!’s plucky cohort.

Lemmy, professional coder and The Forgotten Element’s chief compiling guru is currently beavering away at a swishy trendy engine which will not only be used for this next project, but also for The Gibbage Sequel waaaay down the line, somewhere.

Hopefully The Forgotten Element’s Captain Binky will be around to help out with art consulting,as well ,if he finds the time. Excitingly, Mike Watts of Encore Music is also on board to help out with the clever music bits- he did the music for Gibbage and Ben There, Dan That!, so you know he’s utterly brilliant at what he does. It’s an exciting team indeed.

The whole thing’s being done in XNA, with the ideal of distributing it through the likes of XBLA and Steam.

The game itself? It’ll be a 2D platformer affair with a heavy emphasis on comedy. Think a two-dimensional Psychonauts and a story revolving around a couple of dysfunctional robots, and you’re pretty much there. I’m really looking forward to getting my teeth into it, it’s going to be amazing. As I said, it’s early days yet, but with the likes of Log, Steve and Ben helping out you can be fairly sure it’s not only going to be awesomely good fun, it’ll be funny as fuck to boot.

So now you know. More when there’s more.

Until then, why not join in over at The Forums?

There’s a massive, beautiful, interesting article in the latest issue of PCZone all about the making of Ben There, Dan That! Worth sneakily opening the little plastic bag it comes in while you’re killing time in WHSmiths, certainly.

If you’ve found us via that massive beautiful interesting PCZone article, then welcome! If you haven’t installed Ben There, Dan That! off the coverdisk yet, you might like to download the version from the BTDT game page instead, which fixes a couple of issues. Also, do pop into the forums and say hello.

In other news: work is progressing nicely on The Next Project – key members of the team, which excitingly includes Log and Steve from PCZone, met in an overpriced London pub last week to knock out some plot and gameplay basics, and I’m really excited about where it’s all going. We’re still very much at the early stages, but I’m confident it’ll be amazing. More on that soon, I hope…

How are you getting on with Ben There, Dan That!, then? We think the game’s on the easy-to-medium side, but to be fair there’s some fairly tricky puzzles in there.

If you’re a little bit stuck, but too proud to go looking up solutions on The Internet because you’re scared it’ll make you feel like one of those dumbass twitch-gamers who has been brought up on a diet of games mainly about Space Marines, and as a result is unable to think for himself for more than two minutes because he’s so used to having everything spoon-feed to him, then you’re in luck: Ben There, Dan That!’s co-writer Ben has somehow found the time to knock out a nice little hint guide.

It’s funny and clever, and won’t necessarily spoil the fun for you, but should give you a leg up if you need a shove in the right direction.

Here’s your link. Even if you’ve finished the game, it’s worth a read because it’s amazing.

Well done, Ben! Thank you, Ben! I was wondering how to get past the church bit.

Someone’s done some Ben There, Dan That! fan art!

Zombie Cow Forum user and legend ‘vimes’ knocked out this classic while on a train. Obviously it’ll be on the front of a T-shirt as soon as possible:

If you enjoyed Ben There, Dan That!, don’t have any cash to donate per se, but would like to help out with your talented artistic fingers, why not design us a T-shirt to sell?

I do pay attention to what people say, you know. Although most of the criticisms levelled at Ben There, Dan That! are small pissy things that are really rather unpleasantly pernickety given that it’s a free game, that doesn’t mean that every negative point someone writes somewhere on The Internet doesn’t hurt.

So here we are, with a newer, more spangly version of Ben There, Dan That! uploaded and ready to play. If you’ve completed the game already, it’s not really worth a re-download, but you’ll at least be able to sleep better at night knowing that future generations are getting a better version.

Here’s a full list of the changes, SPOILERS if you haven’t played it yet, obv:

>> You can now use “Walk To” on open doors to go through them, no more of that perpetual ‘using’ nonsense. It’ll also work on buildings and the like.

>> You can now use keyboard shortcuts to change the cursor mode, because some people bless them were worried that cycling through half a dozen different potential interactions was wearing out their right mouse button, or something. Here’s what you’ve got:

W: Walk To
U: Use
L: Look At
T: Talk To
D: Use Dan
I: Use Inventory (if applicable)
TAB: View Contents of Inventory
F5: Save
F9: Load

>> Cursor Graphics now animate if they’re over something that’ll generate a response, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but considering that pretty much everything bar the walls and floors generates a response I’ll admit it seems a little futile. Still, it looks cool which is obviously the most important thing.

>> Signposted that Hidden Door, so you can’t possibly miss it, now.

>> Fixed some typos, squashed a bug in the Jungle, added some dialogue where some was strangely missing.

>> Added a Donate request to the Title Page, in case people download the game from somewhere other than zombie-cow.com, and pointed out that there are instructions here.

So there you have it. If you have any issues with this latest version, or if you’ve got any niggles you’d like to see addressed in a future update, please do let me know.

It was my birthday last month. Don’t worry, I didn’t expect you to get me anything, it’s fine. Downloading my games is more than enough of a present, honestly.

That doesn’t count for my brother though, obviously, who is obliged to buy my something trendy and whizzy.

This year, I forced him to buy me this sweet Psychonauts T-shirt from Double Fine, which he did, and he finally got around to handing it over this weekend. It is, without a doubt, the very best T-shirt I own, and I own some fucking awesome T-shirts believe you me.

Anyway, the exciting thing about this particular T-shirt is that it came bundled not only with a piece of paper with my brother’s credit card details on it, but also with the word ‘thanks’, in tasteful pink-flavoured highlighter pen…

AND there’s a smiley face.

Naturally, my initial reaction was that legend Tim Schafer had personally written me a little one-word letter, without knowing that I was about to rip him off pay homage to his works through the medium of Ben There, Dan That!

Looking at it in slightly closer detail, and through ridiculous over-analysis of the handwriting and signatures on various parts of the packaging, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that Tim Schafer doesn’t have overly-girly handwriting at all, but that this note was written by someone called ‘Laura’.

This is exciting for two reasons: firstly, Laura is in all probability an honest-to-goodness genuine FEMALE WOMAN and secondly, she has presumably stood in the same room as Tim Schafer at one point, and possibly even touched him on his hand or arms.

Unless Double Fine somehow outsources their T-shirt sales, which is quite probable… Still, the T-shirt definitely smells like Tim Schafer, so there’s a link there.

Next step is to get in touch with this ‘Laura’. She’s our ‘in’, she’s our link to Tim himself, and from there swishy 3D sequels.

Is this stalking? This isn’t technically, legally stalking, is it? I’m not a lawyer, but I think you’d be hard pushed to pin anything on me at this point.

Quite a lot of people have downloaded and played Ben There, Dan That! by now. Some of you even enjoyed it so much that you’ve parted with your hard-earned cash to show your support, and for that we’re eternally grateful.

We’ve had some great press, probably most-notably over at RockPaperShotgun, who said some very nice things about our little game indeed.

If you’ve played the game and loved it, but don’t have the disposable income to show your support financially, there are a couple of other things you can do to help out:

1. I’ve Dugg it. You can be my Digg friend, and Digg the game via my profile. That’d be awesome if you can.
2. You can be a fan of Ben There, Dan That! on Facebook, which is essentially a fairly-low way of us surreptitiously advertising it to all your friends, but it’s undoubtedly the coolest badge of honour your profile will ever see.
3. You can use StumbleUpon or del.icio.us, or any other bookmarking jobby you might use.
4. You can pop a thread in any forums you’re a member of, pointing them towards the game.

In other exciting news, we’re looking into the possibility of doing some Ben There, Dan That! T-shirts, so if you’re artistically-minded and want to submit something we can turn into honest-to-goodness fashion, have a read of that thread.

So it’s all go as ever. Sorry about the perpetual plugging, it’ll be over as soon as we hit a million downloads, then I’ll relax.

GO DIGG!

The launch of the site has gone rather well, really. Alright so lots of people couldn’t download Ben There, Dan That! without it shitting up something rotten and crashing, and as a result we had to move servers which broke the entire website for about a day, but considering all the things that could have gone wrong we didn’t screw up too much. Anyway, it’s all fixed now. Many thanks to the guys that provided mirrors during that time…!

We’ve had over 1200 downloads so far which is pretty impressive given that we’ve only been mentioned on a dozen-or-so forums across The Internet and all the main sites are waaaay too busy with E3 to even notice us…

Most people seem to really like the game, some people have had some valid criticisms, and one person has given it a particularly grumpy and unfair rating over at AGS, which is a bit of a pisser because it’s dragged our overall score down. Especially given that he hasn’t even finished the game yet.

Still, I think the overriding opinion from what I’ve read is that for a free game, it scores nice and highly in terms of being a genuinely funny and fun game to play. Well done us.

We’ve received a whopping EIGHT POUNDS of donations so far from two lovely people, which is more than we’d expected, to be honest. If you like Ben there, Dan That!, please do consider dropping us a quid or two by way of a thank you. There’s a big DONATE button on the Ben There, Dan That! page.

Failing that, please do mention the game anywhere you can on The Internet, and get others playing it. At least until I overshoot my bandwidth allowance and everything goes tits-up again.

Well, it’s been a frightfully long time coming, but here we are, at last.

To celebrate the launch of the almighty Zombie Cow Studios, we’ve dropped the price of Gibbage to a mere £3/ $6-ish, and released another couple of games on top:

First up is Cruxade, a block-dropping homage to the likes of Tetris and Lumines. It’s curiously addictive in a mind-bending puzzle sort of way.

Or maybe freeware comedy adventure Ben There, Dan That! is more your cup of tea? It’s an old-school point-and-click game filled with witty dialogue and brillo puzzles.

Or there’s classic stalwart Gibbage, the game that started it all. It’s a 2D cartoon deathmatch game, and is still properly amazing and now half price.

What an eclectic bunch of games, eh? You’ll be pleased to hear that work has started on the next project, which is still very much in pre-production but on the move. Now I’ve finally tidied up the final releases of Cruxade and Ben There, Dan That! and launched the website, I can devote some proper time to our next amazing game.

Because the website’s BRAND NEW, there are liable to be a couple of spelling mistakes and broken links kicking about the place – if you spot one, please send me a pm via the forums, or drop me an email.

Have a look around, sign up for The Forum, grab our rss feed and enjoy. It’s nice to have you here.

Dan