Gamzee Blog

Again, we’ve been woefully remiss in updating the blog (too much work, but in a good way).

At any rate, we did Game Night, as usual, last night, and were joined by our friends Holden and Duffy from PageWoo. Howard Marks (Gamzee CEO and co-founder) co-founded an incubator/startup accelerator called StartEngine, that we happen to share office space with. StartEngine’s a 90-day program that gives startups a seed investment, office space, expertise, and mentoring; and besides Howard and Paul Kessler from Bristol (one of Gamzee’s investors) has a really great group of mentors onboard from different entrepreneurial backgrounds.

The takeaway is that there are 10 other startups in our space, including PageWoo, who are doing quick, single-page websites for brands. It provides a really nice energy and a lot of cool people to run things by. And apparently new folks for Game Night.

Last night, we eased them into Game Night (they were new to it) with the single longest game of Munchkin (Munchkin Booty, to be precise) I’ve ever played. It took about 2 hours (it’s normally a 30-45 minute game), and Abe finally won it. That was followed up by a couple of rounds of BANG! Duffy was a little slow to pick it up and died almost immediately as the Sheriff. The second round, I would’ve won as outlaw, taking out the renegade (Duffy again) and the Sheriff (Max, playing the worst game of BANG! known to man, which started with him killing his Deputy, Sean), except Sean decided to simultaneously “help” (read “play”) Duffy and Max’s hands. So Max won.

In more work-related news, we’re in open beta testing of our newest game, DownWords. DownWords is a casual action word game that combines Tetris and Scrabble. Letter tiles fall from the top of the screen, and you have to click them and form words. The tiles gradually drop faster and faster, and eventually they’ll scroll off the screen, ending the game.

So far, feedback has been very positive (which is nice, we’re really fond of the game). It’s currently playable on desktop Web and on iOS devices. Android coming soon. And we’ll be launching it in earnest shortly.

We moved offices last night to fancy new digs down Wilshire (literally just down the street from where we were before — the cross-street is where our old office was!)

The new space is much fancier and larger. And we get to share it with two cool companies, including an incubator. Soon, our space will be filled with tons of smart people. We should have lots of interesting folks to converse and go for lunch with.

Here’s some pics (the first one’s scaled smaller so it doesn’t overrun our sidebar).

A view on the main seating area.

Our awesome view.

Our conference room.

Howard and me.

The short answer is no.

We had a celebratory Bowling Night for Gamzee on Tuesday at Hollywood’s Lucky Strike Lanes (which is pretty nice).

It was a good time, with everybody drinking beer and chowing down on some good sliders and burgers and fries and steak skewers.

Our bowling scores would have been great if we were 10. But sadly, we’re much older than that. High score of the night went to Sean with a whopping 120. Nobody else bowled over 100. The only person who should be proud is Howard, who skipped bowling due to recovering from a shoulder injury.

I wish I’d done the same.

The early scores from frame one. Sadly, that was as good as it got the whole night.

President, CEO, and non-bowler, Howard Marks.

Engineer Caleb throwing stones.

On a non-bowling-related note, it looks like hardware acceleration for Canvas is turned on, at least in the dev build of iOS 5.