So we went with both. Meet the Scallywags, the third team chosen for Outwitters’ release, and scourge of the seven seas. My favorite touch, personally, is that their Runner apparently lost his butt in some kind of horrible accident. Or maybe that’s considered his legs? I’ll have to look up where seahorses’ poop comes out and get back to you.

Aquatic Team, Splash Damage… Get it?

The special character for this race is called a Bombshell. In our first pass for balancing, he’ll function as an alternative to your Sniper. Where Snipers deal massive damage to a single tile in range, Bombshell’s mortar will deal less damage to your target, but extra splash damage to the surrounding tiles. That makes him the only character in the game capable of damaging multiple enemies with a single strike.

Being a crabby character, we’re also going to try giving Bombshell a unique way of getting around. Out of the shell, he’s slightly faster than a Sniper but super-vulnerable to attack. In order to fire his mortar, he’ll have to take a turn to fortify. In his shell he benefits from an armor boost, but becomes completely immobile. He’ll have to re-emerge in order to relocate.

Quality Over Quantity

In order to release this game on time (and have more time for quality assurance), Alex and I have decided to pull our remaining, incomplete teams from the release version, to be worked on as updates down the line. That plant team you’ve been staring at on our banner the last few months: shelved for now. C’est la game design. The Adorables, Feedback, and Scallywags will be at your disposal on launch day, and then more teams and map themes and schemes and dreams will be added further downstream.

Adam the Artist

I recently completed yet another playthrough of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, one of my very favorite games of all time (available now on Steam, currently being revamped for PS3). It’s a first-person shooter with a sci-fi western theme, where the main character acts as his own horse. Plus it’s not set in the Middle East, which is incredibly novel by today’s standards.

On the iOS all I’ve been playing recently is Velocispider (Universal, 99¢), a nifty arcade game by our friends at Retro Dreamer. It’s kinda like Space Invaders or Galaga, if that’s your cup of tea. You can tap and hold to charge your shots in this game. I was ready to quit at like stage three until someone told me that, so now I pass the knowledge on to you.

Alex the Codesmith

Not much has changed on the non-iOS front for me. I’m still neck-deep into Starcraft 2. With a game this deep and with such a high skill cap, I don’t see myself getting ‘tired of it’ for an extremely long time. I have *intentions* on finishing up Uncharted 2 after seeing the E3 footage and I still want to check out L.A. Noire.

On the iOS front, the game I’m playing at the moment is Match Panic by Chaotic Box. I tend to have a soft spot for extremely simple game concepts executed well on the iOS, and this one’s no exception. The difficulty ramps up nicely for my tastes as well, but given what I know about *my* tastes it’s probably a bit on the hard side for the average player. The concept of the game is to tap the left or right side of the screen that has the matching symbol of the one that is in the middle of the screen. The faster you go, the more points you get, and there’s an actual time limit for getting through a ‘stack’ of symbols. Getting a match wrong penalizes you by slowing you down. The game’s responsiveness is definitely appreciated, as I don’t ever feel like I missed a symbol because the UI was lagging or delayed.

There’s a hot new game sweeping the iOS world, and it goes by the name of Tilt to Fly (99¢). Some people seem to think that sounds similar to a game we made, but that’s more than a little presumptuous. See in our game, the goal of the tilting is to live. In their game, it’s to fly. TtF also features a robust and satisfying weapon arsenal, including the Frost Circle, the Squiggly Push, and the Not-a-Burnicade. Buy it right now. We certainly can’t put it down!

Click to engorgio.

I present the current incarnation of the Adorables’ Map Theme. Their metropolis is made of candy, and their cliffs of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Like it was with the Feedback, that game board in the center is not an actual map.

The Adorables is a pretty goofy team, but you’d be surprised how much effort and research went into crafting the look. I seriously took time to google pastries, watch My Little Pony, and listen to Danny Elfman, all to engage the little girl that dwells inside me. Because apparently one does.

This is actually my second pass on the Adorables’ map design, which used to look like this:

Tilt to Live‘s one year anniversary may have come and gone, but today marks the end of Alex’s first year as a full time indie developer. I don’t remember when I went full time, so I don’t get a post. I’m okay with that.

You can read about Alex’s experience on his secret developer blog.

Anybody that’s ever done creative work will tell you, revisions can be painful. Especially when you’ve got a LOT of other work to get to, and the thing in question is “good enough”. But let’s face it, the old design was overly repetitive, and I just wasn’t crazy about it thematically. I’m fairly new to level design, so the work was bound to need redoing.

Here’s my second pass, one that I think is getting much more attractive. If the Adorables level is going to be the cutest thing I can think of, the Feedback should hit the other extreme.

Click to enlarge.

Our jaws dropped when we were linked to this Youtube video last week. A fan by the name of MRcheese911 (and that’s not an alias; it’s his real, given name) had both the skill and the patience to recreate Tilt to Live with the level editor in Little Big Planet 2. If you happen to have a copy of LBP2, you can play it for yourself by searching either “Tilt to Live” or ” MRcheese911″. We don’t know whether to hug him or sue him. Just kidding. We’re hugging him. Suing people is really expensive.

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, MRcheese911 is getting the item of his choice from our Tilt to Live store. If you have some Tilt to Live fanart, send it over to contests[at]onemanleft.com. If we like your stuff, we’ll post it and send you a free item from our shop.

We actually received two fanart submissions from codename: diggitfireball. One’s a video montage, with some editing magic performed on practically every piece of Tilt to Live footage on the internet.

His second piece is hand drawn and entitled: Tilt-amous. It’s apparently a fantasy crossover of Tilt to Live and the PS3 game Infamous. That’s the strangest idea that has ever been had by anyone, so of course I’m posting it.

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, diggitfireball is getting the item of his choice from our Tilt to Live store. If you have some Tilt to Live fanart, send it over to contests[at]onemanleft.com. If we like your stuff, we’ll post it and send you a free item from our shop.

Some of you may be curious about the mouse creature we’ve been showcasing in our Outwitters banner. He’s the soldier for the Adorables, and these are his brothers in war.

The Adorables is a team we designed for two kinds of people. The first are people who enjoy rainbows, birthday cakes, and narwhals. It’s the team I plan to use to get my sister to play. The second kind of person is slightly more sinister. They’ll be the most brilliant opponents you’ve ever encountered, but they’ll lack the common decency to simply walk all over you. No. They will skip all over you, with stuffed elephants and what looks like a Care Bear… but is legally distinct from a Care Bear.

Om Nom Nom

The Adorables’ special unit is called a “Mobi”, as in Moby Dick and as in Mobi-lity. Here’s how he works at the moment: Surround Mobi with up to six comrades, and tell him to inhale. All six will hop into his gullet, and all will move for the price of one character. If Mobi dies, everyone in his belly dies with him. So the Adorables’ advantage is the ability to quickly taxi your slower characters up the field. But it’s a risky maneuver, since Mobi himself is not very durable. The more units he carries, the more costly his loss.

The Adorables’ homeworld map is still under construction, but I can tell you that I watched Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, and the Care Bears this morning while brainstorming.

Now through Sunday. I had a nice post written about this with some very clever jokes, but it was mysteriously erased. I swear to god, this sale is cursed.

New Outwitters team post will be ready Wednesday.