We’ve just returned from our first ever Game Developer’s Conference! For whatever reason, these are the only two pictures I took. We attended some pretty sweet lectures, and I got to shake hands with the Art Lead from Donkey Kong Country Returns and the writer from Dead Space 2. I’m keeping their business cards on my desk for inspiration. I tried to get a lock of hair, but there was no really smooth way of doing it.

Alex’s souvenir was a truly terrible-sounding illness that had me washing my hands religiously. Poor guy spent the last two or three days of the conference in silent agony. Silent aside from the snorting and coughing fits. Hopefully he feels better soon.

We also got to meet at least six British people (one was from New Zealand, but he counts)! I’ve never met a British person before, and I’d like to apologize for asking you all to say things from Lord of the Rings, and snickering when you went for tea on our coffee break.

So now it’s back to work! Alex is polishing up HD’s Coop, and I’m continuing artwork & animation for something new. More on that after coop is out the door.

¡Viva la Coop! has arrived for the iPhone and iTouch! Those of you with a healthy pool of potential partners should be pretty stoked. For the rest of you, I have some recommended reading.

We aren’t able to give promo codes away for our IAP anymore, since our in-app promo code system didn’t sit well with a certain fruit company. So instead, 30 mailing list subscribers are getting a free copy of the Tilt to Live Soundtrack! Tomorrow morning. When my Thursday night shows aren’t on.

Next week, Alex and I journey to our first ever GDC conference. I know it’s supposed to be GD Conference, but this is sort of a family blog. From what I gather, we’ll be spending the week attending lectures and drinking heavily. So basically college.

When we return, we’ll be putting the finishing touches on ¡Viva la Coop Gigante! That’s the two-iPads-required version, one of the more expensive multiplayer situations we can imagine. But it’s not too hard to port over, so why not? And after that… something new.

Happy birthday Tilt to Live! We got you cooperative play… whenever it’s approved. And happy birthday Steve Jobs! We got you 30% of our revenue. Don’t spend it all in one place.

We got the following email recently from a serviceman in the Israeli army:

“hey there, first of all, i want to thank you for making, hands down, the best iPhone game i have ever played.  Tilt To Live is the only game i was ever able to justify spending money for, and it was worth every penny. I serve in the Israeli army, and i work with a team of people who are all obsessed (thanks to me) with tilt to live. i catch my commander playing on my iPhone all the time, and its a known running joke that our whole office is addicted. Tilt To Live is probably responsible for countless wasted work hours, and its only tolerated because the game is so awesome.  the reason i am writing is because i am (finally) finishing my army service next week, and i really wanted to give my team a going away present that was somehow related to Tilt To Live.  is there any way that i can acquire a poster or something related to the game?  i think that that would be the most appropriate present to get them, and believe it or not, that probably how ill be most remembered anyway (i hold the current record).  any help would be greatly appreciated. keep up the good work!  JON”

We decided to indulge his request for two reasons: (1) I happened to have ideas for Jew-themed weapons, and (2) you do not say no to people with guns. Below, the poster for a fantasy spin-off.

Viva la Turret HD is now gracing iPads everywhere, since about 7pm Central Time on January 31. TOLD YA it’d be out in January. You can now experience a bullet storm in the wide open spaces of TtL HD. For an overview of what’s changed in the gametype from the iPhone version, click here.

If you have the HD Full Version already, it’s just 99¢ to get the Viva la Turret Expansion IAP. If you don’t, the app’s new Full Version includes everything in HD for $4.99, Viva and all.

Other stuff new to 1.4:

• When you unpause the game, your cursor’s location will now be highlighted for you before gameplay resumes, to help you regain your bearings.
• Pickups are no longer obscured by the burnicade’s flame trail.

We were so busy with Viva la Turret last month that we didn’t get a lot of playing done. This month, we’re starting to binge again.

Adam’s Picks (Art/Writing)

The last two console games I’ve played were both platformers with hidden collectible stuff, which I can never seem to ignore. Even when the collectibles are things like fruit lamps and sewing machines for my imaginary room, I must have them. Playing Kirby’s Epic Yarn was like taking valium (I imagine). It’s a relaxing platformer for people who enjoy quilts. Donkey Kong Country Returns was a challenging platformer for people who enjoy the movie Groundhog Day. Specifically the part where he keeps killing himself and starting over. Both good games; I liked Donkey Kong better. As for the more relevant platforms:

Neuroshima Hex (Universal App, Lite):
It’s a multiplayer strategy game with kind of a steep learning curve, but it’s been our go-to road trip title for a couple of months now. You place pieces on a hexagonal board, aiming their attacks in the direction of your opponent’s pieces. Once your turn is over, your pieces are stuck where you pointed them. So then the jerk you’re fighting does his best to ruin everything you just set up. It’s One-upmanship: the Game, for up to four players.

Alex’s Picks (Codesmith)

When I find a game I truly like, I tend not to move on. These days I’m still coming back to Quake Live for quick 5-15 minute frag fests, and if I’m truly in the mood for getting my ass kicked I still go to Starcraft 2. With the amount of stuff we’re working on in January, I haven’t had much time to explore the deep caverns of the App Store.  So this recommendation comes from a friend, and after playing it for a short while I was hooked. I’m still not too far into it, but it’s been an utter joy playing this on my iPhone whenever I have a small amount of downtime:

Battleships (iPhone):
While not to be confused with EA’s Battleship, this is a really clever take on the latter. It’s actually a puzzle game, where you are trying to discover the location of several different sized ships on a grid. Each row and column have a number indicating how many “Ship Tiles” are in that row or column. Each level can be solved completely with logic alone, and that’s the really appealing part. I’ve sat and stared at the grid for minutes at a time convinced there’s no way to figure this out other than trial and error, but knowing that fact I’ve stuck with it and solved each puzzle so far without guessing. A really satisfying puzzle game worth checking out.

Next week: We’ll show you what’s coming your way after Viva HD (which is in review and on its way).

I was just notified by a friend of a rather cool video that I just had to share. Someone built a tilt motion controller for the iPhone and plans on mounting it to a camera to allow a robot to play accelerometer based games. This has been done before with  Guitar Hero, but the cool thing is that they were using Tilt to Live to test the controller! Check out the video below and the short article here.

This looks to be shaping up to be a really cool project. You can read more about it on Shane Wighton’s blog along with some other neat stuff.

2010 was an amazing year and a great start for us! Tilt to Live being our debut game on the app store took us further than we would have imagined. Going from a part-time hobby to a full time career has been nothing short of amazing over this past year. We released Tilt to Live back in late February and the support has been phenomenal! We’d like to thank our fans for their support and just being awesome! Below I wanted to share with you some of the places Tilt to Live came up in conversation during all the ‘end of the year/best games of 2010’ ruckus.

End of Year Accolades

We were selected as the iPhone Game of The Year for 2010 by AppAdvice. We’re flattered! Thanks again so much to the guys and gals over at AppAdvice!

Being selected as one of the top 5 best casual iphone games of the year on Touch Arcade was a great achievement!

We were nominated as Best Quick Fix mobile game of 2010 by IGN. It was an honor to be nominated among such games as Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja, Pix’n Love Rush, and Plants vs Zombies

We got an honorable mention over at midlife gamer for Game of the Year. Heavy Rain beating us out…hah. Having screenshots of the two games side-by-side is rather mind blowing. OUR ARROW IS THE MOST REALISTIC ARROW EVER RENDERED ON A TWO DIMENSIONAL SCREEN.

We got runner-up in the ‘Biggest Surprise’ category over at touchgen.net.

Back in November we were inducted into the App Hall of Fame.

That was one helluva year :). Here’s to keeping it up for 2011!

With the new update, Tilt to Live finally has enough music to make a short soundtrack! You can stream it all you want below. The only track we couldn’t secure the rights to was Gauntlet’s theme, so our apologies to fans of the mambo.

You could also support our composer by buying a copy on our Bandcamp site ($1.99), or on iTunes ($3.99 – we can’t tell iTunes what to charge). Or if you’re quick, you could click here and enter one of these five codes to get it for free:

3fgq-63ee
wau7-g4f3
p65v-3q54
rnr8-hz2a
ddm2-5tx7

Ten more free copies are heading out to our mailing list today, all of whom are getting a coupon code that reduces the soundtrack to 90¢. Now we’re friends with benefits!