Over the past few months our turn-based strategy game Outwitters has been painstakingly rebuilt, more or less from the ground up. We’re proud to announce that it’s finally available for Android devices, and can even be played cross-platform with our iOS community! You can grab it right now for free, or read on to learn more.

What’s New in 2.0?

• Rebuilt from the ground up to support Android & iOS cross play
• Faster push notifications allow for ‘blitz’ play. Your game will refresh as soon as your opponent sends his turn, instead of having to flip back to the main menu.
• Minor touch-ups and add-ons to UI, such as viewing your friends’ rank before inviting them to a game.
• Faster load times and transitions, with higher frame rates smoothing out some animations

What’s Outwitters?

For the uninitiated, Outwitters is a quirky turn-based strategy game that asks players to navigate the fog of war, vying for a good angle on their opponent’s base. The first player to deal 5 damage to the enemy base wins. Spawning troops, moving around the board, and attacking are all powered by a resource called wits, which you can grab more of by taking control of bonus spaces around the map. It’s easy to learn, but there are plenty of complex tactics to master.

What really sets Outwitters apart from other mobile games are the robust league, season, and matchmaking systems. After a few placement matches you’ll be assigned a league and placed into a division, where you’ll square off against 100 or so worthy opponents for glory. These league rankings are recorded and reshuffled every so often when a new season arrives. It’s basically the perfect game for competitive people who like pink teddy bears.

Things have been a little hectic at the office this week, but we are finally able to announce that Outwitters 2.0 will be hitting Android and iOS devices this week. Thursday March 12th to be exact! That means you Apple folk still have a few more days to warm up before the Androids arrive.

We just couldn’t launch a major update for Outwitters without giving the trailer a face lift. Those jaw-dropping scrambler maneuvers are actually real replays from forum regulars Apple 9763 and Alvendor.

Coming in March: Outwitters 2.0 with faster load times, better frame rates, and cross platform play between iOS and Android! For an email reminder on launch day you can sign up for our mailer, or follow us on facebook, twitter, or this very blog.

This week our Outwitters 2.0 beta testers may have noticed Alex uploading what we like to call release candidate builds. Barring any emergency fixes, this thing is on its way! We’ve set a loose release date window for the first half of March (trying to time the iOS update with the Android launch), and I’m working on cutting together a new trailer today.

While we were capturing footage, we remembered a few pretty awesome replays from our forum regulars. You guys might recognize a couple of your own power plays in the new trailer.

Little improvements and patches are trickling in to Outwitters 2.0, including a little extra love to the old base death animation.

Alex is working his butt off getting things straightened out between all these Droid and iOS devices, but he’s set a personal goal to have everything working by the end of next week. Definitely a tougher port than we expected when we set off on this adventure, but it’ll be worth it when iOS and Android buddies can finally duke it out.

If you’d like an email reminder the day that Outwitters 2.0 drops, you could sign up for our mailing list or follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Or, you know, we post that kind of stuff here too.

I think I’ve used this post title before, but I like it too much not to use it more often. Just got a beta build out yesterday that finishes implementing all the menus (so… many… menus) for the tablet version of what we’re calling Outwitters 2.0. Still bug squashing and working in the death animations and sound effects, but we’re almost there!

Alex would like me to remind you to follow us on twitter, where he posts new developments more frequently than we do here, often using significantly less words! Just yesterday he dug up these old logo designs from the embryonic days of Outwitters, when we were thinking about maybe just calling it Outwits.

Still creeping forward on the Outwitters port this week, inching ever closer to our big cross-platform release. Alex is wrapping up the iPad/tablet versions of everything while I recreate the old tutorial animations in the new engine. It’s all taking about twice as long as we expected, but the upshot is we’ll have a great framework in place if we decide to make another turn-based strategy game.

We’re just about to start the spit and polish portion of development, and both of us are super-excited to get this thing out into the world next month.

We’ve been working pretty hard on wrapping up our Outwitters port to Android. Not to leave our iOS users in the dust, this update does a lot to bring Outwitters up to speed on iOS as well. Some of the new features coming to both platforms:

• Higher frame rates for smoother animations
• Faster push notifications, allowing for ‘blitz’ play, where one can sit in-game and simply wait for a turn to refresh their game board live!
• Minor touch-ups and add-ons to UI, such as viewing your friends’ rank before inviting them to a game.
• Faster transitions/loading between game and main menu

As well as iPhone 6/6+ support for iOS. Anyone that wishes to take our beta for a spin and give feedback/report bugs on Google Play or iOS please sign up via your respective platform in our beta thread.

The Gauntlet’s Revenge switch to free to play on Android was a bit of a distraction, but we’re back on track with the Outwitters port. This past week the map backgrounds were all rebuilt to resemble the originals as closely as possible (though I did improve the twitchy egg animation for Reaper & War Garden – you’re welcome). According to Alex, we’re still set to have it all wrapped up by the end of the month. That may mean a February release rather than January like we intended.

As for January being prototype month for Game 5, that ship seems to have sailed. My work stack for the port is a lot smaller than Alex’s, so for me it feels like waiting for Christmas. I’ve got like eight turn-based strategy games prototyped, so I’ve shifted focus to something I’ve always wanted to experiment with: an adventure game with a story. It won’t be game 5, but it’s fun to play around with.

So, real talk, Gauntlet’s Revenge has been under-performing on Android as a paid app. By a whole lot. In light of this, in the spirit of making lemonade from our lemons, Gauntlet’s Revenge just went free with ads on Android! Now there’s nothing standing between you and your shot at the Dot King.

A “remove ads” IAP is included so you can play the game as it was originally intended. We are unbelievably sorry to the few players who did purchase the app. There’s just no way for us to exclude you from a change like this, and we totally understand if you’d like a refund on your purchase. Send your request through this form along with your Google Play order number and we’ll get it issued as soon as possible. We wouldn’t consider a drastic move like this unless it absolutely had to be done.

There are no plans to make changes to the iOS version of the game at this time.