Foil – “Handsome Pixels” to be released this Thursday, October 18th

Tell a friend to tell a friend to tell five friends to tell five hundred friends.

Statoss Beta now officially live

Kenzora is proud to announce that the Statoss beta is now officially live. Statoss is an online tool dedicated to simplifying the process of sending out social media status updates. Simply link your account to as many Twitter and Facebook accounts as you like, type in your 140 character message and toss it. Gone is the cutting and pasting across services, and gone is the social media time-suck of timelines and news feeds. Share your status, get back to work. Simple. Efficient. Smart. Sign up for the beta today at http://www.statoss.com

We look forward to your feedback.

Kenzora artists appear on free compilation

Kenzora artists Séverine Baron and Foil have lent a few tracks each to the free compilation “Off-Planet Soundtrack vol. 1″. Go forth and download it here: http://foil.bandcamp.com/album/off-planet-soundtrack-vol-1
Then go and tell all your friends about it. That’s what we would do.

Foil music to appear in upcoming action game

We’re proud to announce that Kenzora artist Foil will not only be providing music to an upcoming, yet to be announced console game title, but there will in fact be the option to purchase Foil t-shirts in-game for the characters to wear! Coolest. Thing. Ever. More info coming soon.

Foil live @ Escogriffe 2.28.2012

Come one come all! Foil is back with their patented brand of live strangeness at Escogriffe (you know, that pub next door to Quai des Brumes…). Feb 28, 2012. 4467 Rue St. Denis, Montreal. Doors are at 9pm. Bring your fancy pants.

Foil live at Casa Del Popolo – Thurs. Jan 5th, 2012

Come join Kenzora artist Foil for an evening of sloppy, sexy electronic music, and help welcome us all into 2012 in the most psychotic possible way.

Foil live @ Casa del Popolo
with Megan Rose + Stab Ability
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
4873 Boulevard Saint-Laurent Montréal, QC H2T 1R5, Canada
Billets / Tickets: 514.284.0122. | info@casadelpopolo.com

Update: Thanks for everyone who came down and got their freak on with Foil. A great time was had by all.

Foil working on music for an upcoming XBLA title

While we can’t say which one it is, we can say that Foil is working on some music to be used in an upcoming holiday release that promises to be pretty high profile. Stay tuned for more details (such as, for instance, which game it is), but suffice to say we’re super proud of our rising Kenzora stars!

Update: As it turns out, it seems that Foil will be providing music for not one, but THREE upcoming games, including one XBLA/PSN title, one for full console, and one for iOS. More details to follow, but how exciting is that!?!?

New Foil video ready for consumption

Here’s the latest and greatest from Foil. The track, “Breakthrough”, features a dreamy fractal morph that can best be described as, well…dreamy. Enjoy, and check back here often to find out when Foil’s debut LP, “The Sound of Silicone” can be yours!

Séverine Baron – “Générations” available now!

Kenzora Music is proud to announce the amazing new release, “Générations”, from internationally acclaimed electro-acoustic composer Séverine Baron. Her third full-length release, “Générations” combines the dreamy ambient soundscapes of Baron’s earlier work, with a decidedly new, and more ambitious palette of beats and textures. Go pick up your copy on iTunes here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/generations/id452444075, or check for Séverine in your digital store of choice. Enjoy!

Statoss beta signup is live

Speaking of progress, it would seem that the Statoss.com beta signup page is alive and kicking. Please go have a look-see at http://www.statoss.com. If you want to be notified when the site launches in three weeks (give or take), drop us your email address and we’ll make sure to keep you in the loop. Exciting times indeed!

Spinning our web

Ok…this is starting to get exciting. Kenzora has officially spawned a new division. With the introduction of our forthcoming product, Statoss, we now make apps. We are happy for this new direction, and look forward to the coming eons of working on and releasing tools and entertainment that we can be proud of. Check back often for more updates and news; we simply can’t wait to share our latest and greatest with the world!

Main menu is up and running

While it seems like a pretty minor achievement, having the main menu up and running on our first game is pretty exciting stuff. What was once a dream and/or crazy idea has become something tangible; as if all of our nights and weekends that we’ve dedicated to bringing this project to life have not been in vain, and that there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Kenzora games has officially been in existence since 2009, and the team has been assembled and working more or less weekly for a year and a half now. Why then do we only have a main menu working, you might ask? The answer is simple yet not so much. As team of touchscreen developers, designers and musicians, we are a highly competent and creative force. However, not having any previous game development experience has not exactly helped our time-frame and big picture projections. Add to that the fact that we’ve officially started and dropped three game ideas before finally settling on our current project, and you start getting the idea. But that is the past. What is happening now is that our dream, our baby, our first game, “Memory Mine” is finally getting made. And for that we are proud and excited. Stay tuned for more development updates and news!

A blank storyboard

Is there anything more brimming with possibilities than a blank storyboard? Well, perhaps the blank piece of paper playing host to the boxes, but that’s another story (or story to be).

Humble beginnings

The team hard at work (or at least it looks like they are). From left to right: Brian Li, Stefan Spec, Paul Williams, Olivier Courtemanche & Duc Tran.

Working on a scoring matrix

The question has come up for us: what is more satisying for players…lower score numbers that are harder to come by, such as 5,000, or higher numbers, like 900,000 or 25,000,000? I think in the name of saving space we are opting to limit the score per level to 6 figures or less, but is there any reason to go higher? Or lower? It’s a fun challenge, and one that really doesn’t matter much in the end, but I think we’re happy to get feedback from users to confirm or disprove our current approach.

Time-stretching sprites

While it’s entirely likely that most of you have no idea what this means or why we’re blogging about it, stretching sprites by 300% has been a lesson learned for us all. Apparently, as we eventually figured out, 6 frames of sprite animation left our protagonist looking like he was having a caffeine induced seizure. It turns out that stretching it out by 300% was the sweet spot for making it look remotely realistic. Now that our sprites are looking less tragically debilitated, it’s only a matter of moving them through space-time. Wish us luck!

The path forward is clear

We had a very productive staff meeting last night, during which homemade pizzas were devoured, Innis & Gunn beer was suckled upon, and grandiose ideas were launched into orbit. After some careful consideration and heated debate, we now have a clear path forward for our next batch of entertainment offerings. Most notably, we now know for certain that organic tomato and basic sauce, garlic, Emmental swiss and thinly sliced white ham pizzas are better than the frozen variety. If this were a foodie site and if we wouldn’t rather keep our magic recipe a closely guarded secret, we would likely have posted it here, food porn money shots and all. I guess our drool inducing teaser description will just have to suffice for now. Oh, and expect great things in the months to come as well.

Upcoming field trip

One of our upcoming field trips that we’re all excited about involves going deep into the heart of downtown Montreal to a greasy, grimy burger joint (that we love). Once there, it will be out task to capture said burger joint in as many photos as possible, with the goal of taking them back to the studio and creating a seriously awesome 3D rendering of it. But that’s just the beginning…we also intend to recreate the entire city block where our beloved burgers live. We’ll keep you posted on our progress, but it’s safe to assume that burgers will be eaten in the process. Oh yes, they will be eaten.

Top secret project in the works

Work has officially begun on our next super-ultra-top secret project, the likes of which humanity has never seen before. Insiders are referring to it as “the game that will change everything”. Details are being carefully guarded at this point, and those who do know have been deeply and thoroughly threatened to keep it hush hush. Check back here often as we begin to slowly leak images and gameplay videos, but most of them will likely be zoomed in to 400%, making it rather difficult to tell what’s really going on. Wish us, and all of humanity luck! We hope you can handle it.

We have a new website!

Thanks to the wonders of hacking WordPress themes and a little bit of brute force, we have a new website! And not a moment too soon. It turns out that the spike in traffic that we experienced in our previous site caused out former web hosting service to crash for nearly 48 hours. Not just our site, but the entire service. As a result we were permanently banned from that server (serves us right for being awesome), and have now found a new home on a server better equipped to handle said awesomeness. So a big thanks to all our friends who weathered the storm with us, and here’s to a major and awe inspiring 2010!