Check out this new fanart from a mysterious artist known only as “Someone Someone”. If the Veggienaut up top can get to those wits, he might be able to kill that vocalist.

Outwitters fan and illustrator Seth Rutledge has developed some pretty sweet concepts for his own Wah-Kapooian Outwitters dream team. Check out the full post on his blog.

We’ve been testing that special unit buff for a week now, and will be meeting sometime today or Monday to give it a thumbs up or down. Big thanks to our testers for providing your feedback on the beta boards. We don’t always have time to reply directly, but we do read through and consider everything. Keep an eye on your email, because we’ll be needing your help again very soon for something a bit more interesting.

King of the Unit Shuffle

Congratulations are in order for TheGreatErenan, who has conquered probably the craziest tournament idea you guys have come up with. In the Micro Strategic Starting Unit Tournament (TM), competitors dueled using starting units only. That’s right: perma-death for everyone involved. As you can see from watching a replay: this means LOTS of hopping around and fog of war manipulation.

TheGreatErenan mastered the art of the unit shuffle and came out on top, and for that we salute him.

Our New Year’s resolution is to stop 2012’ing. From now on, we’re only 2013’ing, or higher.

Our first order of business was to take a look at our analytics and see how the last gameplay changes have settled out. Surprisingly, the balance seems to have improved across the board. Where once there was a heavy first-turn advantage, it’s much closer to 50/50. The special units are even looking more evenly matched. There is one exception, and we’ll be sending a buff their way in the next update.

Really Cool Fan Stuff We Noticed

As a side note, if you haven’t checked out the fan-made Outwitters Sports Network recently, you might want to give it a fresh look. David Lambert the Code Penguin has been busy. You can now watch popular replays from high-level players, or break down replays of your own move by move. It’s honestly better than our in-game replay for people wanting a closer look at their matches.

And while we’re dropping fan links, there’s also the super-cool Map Creator Tool developed by forum vet Harti. You can’t use your maps in-game, but there’s nothing stopping you from printing that bad boy out and playing on a tabletop with pen and paper, like pappy used to do. Fair warning: it’s a beta, so it’s only been tested in Chrome 23, IE9, Chrome on iPad 3, and Safari on iPad 3 (sometimes laggy, cannot load maps).

Had some setbacks, so we’ve moved our Veggienauts submission date to next week. If things go smoothly, you’ll have all kinds of new stuff to play with around the 15th.

It’s not really fan art, but an interesting blog post was brought to our attention by an Australian teacher that’s been using Outwitters in his classroom. We’re a little jealous that his kids have already got Mobi-less teleport technology in their Outwitters maps, but we’re proud to help train the Australian Super-Titans of the future.

No news on the patch update this week, other than it isn’t submitted for Apple’s approval yet. Seeing how apps take about a week to get approved, I’d say early next month is the more likely release date. We’re as antsy as anyone to start testing new team pack ideas, but we also don’t want to rush this patch and break the game. Sorry for the delay.

While you wait, I’d recommend everyone check out this thread from our forums, if you haven’t already. NathanDetr0it, which I like to think is not a psuedonym, does an excellent job breaking down the strategic subtleties behind Outwitters’ simple rules. It might change the way you look at your turns. It might change the way you look at your life.

David “the Code Penguin” Lambert recently brought to our attention something he’s been working on for Outwitters: a browser-based replay viewer! Not only can you watch your replay without an iDevice, you also get to see a fog of war overlay for each player, a move by move summary of the action, AND it can generate a heatmap of your game (which I think shows you which spaces and paths were used; correct me if I’m wrong). I hate to say it, but this is cooler than our in-game replay if you’re wanting to analyze your game.

Check out this sample Super-Titan replay, or plug in a link of your own! You’re going to want to bookmark this. For anyone out of the loop, you can copy a replay link from any completed game in Outwitters by tapping and holding the entry in your games list. These URL’s can be viewed on any device with Outwitters installed, or by plugging them into David’s contraption.

Fan art by Pyyrhic

We come to the end of another week working on our patch update, which should alleviate Outwitters’ most annoying bugs and crashes. We’re aiming to have that out around the end of the month, after which we can start testing our new team pack ideas.

If you’ve been eyeing any Outwitters IAP, I’d suggest you take this plunge this weekend. Everything bumps up to non-sale prices on Monday!

I’ll be the first to admit we sit on fanart for a long time, but I swear we haven’t had this one since 2003. lolcoptr (who I expect to see at our first World Helicopter Championship) is apparently already itching for the return of Tilt to Live. We take it he’s hoping for more slow motion, some heavy-handed philosophical discussion, and maybe a sexy cake weapon (with an unspeakable effect on dots). Alex didn’t get that last joke, which makes it way funnier to me.

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, Mr. Out Loud Helicopter is getting the item of his choice from our Tilt to Live store. If you have some One Man Left fanart & are over the age of 13, 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.

The funny thing about Josh Trumper’s fan art submission is that I have an eerily similar page in my Outwitters sketchbook. I couldn’t have done a better job assigning roles for the Tilt to Live power ups myself. In fact, I didn’t… His are more clever.

In his own words: “The Red Dot Destroying Arrows are a team of silent types who enjoy nothing but setting off power ups and killing red dots… and they’re all out of dots.” I kid you not, Josh has 3 paragraphs of very specific ideas for his Vortex special character, an invulnerable sinkhole that consumes friends and foes alike. He even suggested a 3 turn countdown before the Vortex activates, just like Tilt to Live. Someone has a bright future in game design ahead of them.

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, Josh is getting the item of his choice from our Tilt to Live store. If you have some One Man Left fanart & are over the age of 13, 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.