Great news! Cogs has been selected by IndieCade to be be part of the "indie games showcase" at E3. Rob and Brendan are both flying down to Los Angeles for the event, which runs from Tuesday through Thursday, June 2-4, 2009.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo is the world's premiere trade show for computer and video games. We'll be showing off Cogs at booth #652 in the South Hall, so swing by and say hi.

(Continued from yesterday.)

In April, 2008, I had been living in the city for a couple months and was becoming a regular attendee of the monthly San Francisco Postmortem where one night I had the good fortune of meeting one Rob Jagnow. I'd been looking for a project to give me something creative to do (at the time I was parking cars for a local Valet company) and Rob pointed me to his website where he had a few screenshots of a small personal project he'd been working on called "Cogs."

Since I always like it when other people do this, I thought I might write up a few posts about how Cogs got to look like it does today. We start our epic journey with a brief look at the pre-Brendanian era, or as Rob likes to call it "engineer art."

To the right you can see UI elements from some of the earliest cogs builds, circa 2004-05. To his credit, Rob is not such a bad artist and is fairly proficient when it comes to Photoshop. In fact all of the backgrounds you see in the game including the iris texture were done by the man himself, though I took over for the 3D portion which is pretty much everything else.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the Cogs Wrap Party last weekend. Of course, no Cogs party is complete without cog cupcakes.

We all had a good laugh when Brendan walked into the room sporting an enormous silver gear, hung around his neck with a heavy chain. Oh yes, this was a classy affair. Unfortunately, I have not photographic evidence of the bling gone awry.

Cogs is now live in the wild and can be purchased for ten bucks at the Steam store. You'll find the full press release after the jump.

Being totally hip and with the times, we now have a twitter feed.

http://twitter.com/lazy8studios

Cogs will launch on Tuesday, April 14, 2009! Players can download Cogs for the PC via Steam, the online game distribution service from Valve, Inc. A demo version will be available for free with the full version priced at $9.99.

Steam was our first choice for online distribution. With an audience of more than 15 million worldwide, a high threshold for game quality and a strong reputation for customer satisfaction, we're happy to be partnering with Steam.

Our changelist submissions are getting more concise and to-do lists are getting way too short. If you've checked the forums you've probably noticed we've been beta testing for a little over 3 weeks (If you're a tester we're pushing out a big, dare I say near-final patch today. If you're a soon-to-be tester you'll be getting your key shortly after). There is excitement in the air here at Lazy8 (a.k.a. Rob's house) and not a little anxiety and nervousness as we get dangerously close to releasing our first game.

We've added a message board to the site. Come over and sign up if you have questions or want to talk about the game!

http://forum.lazy8studios.com