Toxic Island

I just finished recording the fully fifteen minute mini story for our first podcast, The Birth of Specter.  Rich, the sound master is busy putting music tracks together.  While I am continuing to pound away at the keyboard.

So far I’ve written several mini stories that paint a picture of the Crime Punk world.  These include low level players like Rodney Sanders to high level government operatives.  As soon as our editor and chief returns from vacation I will be posting the written word here for anyone to enjoy.

Our main goal with writing stories is to build the world of the game and get some (hopefully) nice cross promotion.  Fingers crossed!

We’re taking the back story fiction and putting it into podcasts.  Starting on Friday we’ll be recording the first episode.  Should be fun!

Fans will be able to hear how the events unfolded to create the world of Crime Punk.

I’m so very glad you asked.  Now that alpha testing is emminent I feel it is ok to share the broad details of this game we have been working on and the dream I’ve had for almost 20 years.

A long time ago a friend of a friend told me about a game called Assassin.  Basically you had a large school (high school or college) and a group of like 50 people.  The people all put their names in a hat and drew some one else’s name.  They then all had suction cup dart guns and went around looking for the person whose name they had.  Once they popped Joey, they took Joey’s name he was looking for – Danny – and started to hunt Danny.  Eventually you got down to 2 people that were hunting each other.  How fucking cool is that.

The problem arises for a kid like me growing up in a small town, there simply wasn’t enough kids to play such a game in a small school.  The teachers would have immediately put a stop to it.

For years I was thinking of a way to do Assassin but on a much much larger scale.  Several years later, 2000, enter the world of cell phones.  Ten years ago if you were rocking the Motorola StarTac you were the shit.  I then started to think there would be a way to play assassin with cell phones.  Maybe you could use taking pictures or SMS messages, but those had their own problems.

Around 2008 it hit me, GPS enabled smart phones.  Through GPS you can tell if your friends or other players are in the area, through transmitting their location back to a mother ship server.  CrimePunk was born.  The only problem now is that my mind does not do “small.”

Another game I’ve wanted to do for ages is a crime version of one of the all time great games, Civilization.  The concept grew into a MMO, where players can create criminal empires and then interact with them via their cell phones.  Players can also interact with other players’ organizations via cell phones whenever they are in the correct area.

For example, your enemy Danny has an organization (in the game they are called hoods), you can then go to Danny’s hood, pull out your cell phone, and interact with Danny’s hood.  All of this happening in real time.

Ok, we finally have the Google Map and Facebook jiving.  This took forever to iron out, basically b/c no one was going it.  We had to figure this out all on our own.  Big props to Dan, the lead code ninja on figuring all this crap out.  In the mean time i’ve been writing like mad to keep my ming busy.  You can check out the initial process of creating your organization here: http://apps.facebook.com/crimepunk.

Note: you can only do this once, to choose wisely Indiana!  We’ll be happy to reset your account once we get going in a few weeks.

We’ve been writing a bunch while we wait to get all the Facebook goodness in place.  Programming is a frustrating world so to keep the creative juices flowing we’ve been writing mini stories that will be published to better explain how the world of Crime Punk began and the shadowy figures and organizations that occupy it.

Power outages and other acts of god have held up development to get Crime Punk to the alpha test stage.  We’re about two months away from being able to play the game in its simplest form.  In the mean time stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks.

We’re super excited that Crime Punk will be ready for alpha testing as a Facebook application in about 3 weeks.  Right now we’re adding in a ton of slick items, characters, and missions to the game’s database.  We’ll keep you posted as we get closer.

If anyone reading this would like to participate in a test please email us!

Welcome to the new home of Toxic Island Games. We are an independent game developer, working on our first title – Crime Punk. This is a geo-location based augmented reality game. Details and development blog will be posted in the coming days.