Super busy week. Corralling music, sound, and forum contractors for one. The forum thing is totally happening by the way, and when Outwitters comes out we hope you’ll find it useful.

We’ve also been discussing alternative special units for the Feedback and the Adorables, making the cute guy more useful and the smart guy less powerful. Turns out giving a character a 1 hit kill (essentially), then having the victim join your side is kind of overdoing it. No one brain should have all that power.

More exciting (for me), the rest of my artwork is getting funneled in! Units are finally exploding instead of disappearing, and they leap up from an underground bunker instead of just appearing on the spawn space. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have a lot of work to do getting Outwitters ready for GDC.

Haven’t had one of these in a while! The beta’s still going strong, with Alex trickling in a few new users between each milestone. Our latest addition was the profile page, where you can check your total league wins and view all the leaderboards you’re climbing. Eventually we’re hoping to add a tab for your friends’ profiles, so you can easily watch each other and gloat accordingly.

From what I understand, Alex’s next targets are getting death explosions in (which I’ve been dying to see for months… no pun intended), and addressing problems of a crashitory nature. Whit‘s working on some game over musics, and we’re in the process of getting a professional sound designer to bring the characters to life. That’s FOUR people working on a One Man Left game. A new record.

Outwitters is still geared for a March release. Here’s the latest from Whitaker Blackall:

We’re still experimenting with some balance tweaks as more of the menus come online. This time we’re playing with unit pricing. Where everyone but the special guys used to cost the same, we’re going to try making the weaker, more mobile guys cheaper to build than the heavy hitters. Bases have been a bit too easy to defend vs. attack, so making slow, defensive guys more expensive should help even things out.

In other news, we finally have a sound engine in place! Alex took it upon himself to collect placeholder sound effects, including some of the most annoying filler I’ve ever heard. For example, when an Adorables heavy jumps to a new space, he now shouts “DERRRRR… WHERE’S DA PRINCESS?! A-HURRR HURRR.”

Every time he moves.

Alex is slowly funneling more users into the Outwitters beta, including other devs like Michael Bean of Disc Drivin’. How can you get in on some of this Outwitters beta action? You could submit your udid and device info here with the topic “Beta Request”, and hope very picky Alex picks you. We don’t have many slots available, so no promises.

It’s looking like fog of war is getting a thumbs up (from me and Alex at least). The element of surprise adds some tension to the gameplay that wasn’t there before. Not to mention the thrill of setting little traps in the dark.

Next week we’ll still be slowly working to get more menus online and old ones revised. I only recently got an iPhone in front of me with my menus running, and man those buttons are tiny. So that’s all gotta be retouched. We’re also going to try adding a full game replay, so you could watch your match start to finish without fog afterward… which is yet another menu to put together. Outwitters is still slated for release early next year.

New Adorables and Scallywags base designs.

We got hung up on the topic of predictability this past week. As in: is it a good thing to see your opponent coming a mile away? Alex had a pretty neat idea for including fog of war without having to add any character stats. So we diverted attention to a prototype, and are now in the process of running a “wonder-what-he’s-doing” build through the ringer. The response has been good so far; it feels like a completely different game. Time will tell if there are any dominant strategies or other unfairness, but having secrets is fun.

While that’s being tried and debated, we’re returning to menus and other odds and ends of a tedious nature (from my perspective, anyway). After a meeting yesterday, we do have a much clearer understanding of what’s left to do. Now we just tick our way down this list to the finish line. Outwitters is slated for release early 2012.

Is it November already? This week we hit a pretty important milestone; Outwitters is finally a universal app! Alex has already taken a few turns from his iPhone, and the transition seems to have gone as smoothly as we’d hoped. There are some nasty new bugs popping up in the universal build, but we’re that much closer to the game we intend to release.

In the graphics department, each race now has one fully-themed map up and running with its animated background, most of them with music. It’s nice to see how everything came together, and to be able to play a few maps that look how they will on release day.

There are still a bunch of menus and level backgrounds to assemble, a sound engine to implement, and some mo’ quality assurance testing to do. So we’re pretty much prepared to walk the release date back to early 2012. That takes our lofty goal of releasing two games this year and whittles it down to… no games. But hey, we’ll be kicking 2012 off with a pretty big one.

iPad Screenshot

This was kind of an odd week, so we completely forgot to write a blog post. Please accept this Adorables Theme concept by Outwitters’ composer Whitaker Blackall in its stead. It’s his take on the Dance of the Sugar Plumb Fairies.

This is probably more than our second update, but I only just started numbering them… so here’s 2!

Adam hurt his wittle index finger working too much, then double & triple hurt it when he tried to treat the problem himself. The moral of that story is: go to a freaking doctor. Luckily, I made enough headway for Alex to not even notice I’m down. This week he’s been working on implementing the game’s very short interactive tutorial, so hopefully next week he can start adapting it to work on an iPhone.

In playtesting land, we’re very close to the point where everything feels properly balanced. The Adorables vs. the Scallywags seems to play out pretty fair, but the Feedback‘s special character still feels kinda useless by comparison. We’ve seen the regular units used in roughly equal measure, though, so I’m pretty confident we can call them ready. Hard to believe I’ve been playing Outwitters since last November (when the game only ran in Adobe Illustrator). I guess that’s one good thing about a long development cycle: by the time it reaches you guys, we’ve had a year to figure out what doesn’t work.

Another productive week at OML Headquarters! The alpha version of the game now has Unranked Online matches mostly working, which is our last gametype after the League stuff & Pass n’ Play. Now that those big pieces are in place, the bug hunt begins.

I’d also like the world to know that I’m ranked Super-Titan #1 for probably the only time in my career. Just wanted to get that in writing. Feels good. If you’re curious, I won the honor when our friend Josh Macias accidentally hit “Give Up” instead of “Replay”. So “beating” an unbeatable player was worth enough points to catapult me to Super-Titan, where I am currently alone. Still counts, Josh. Suck it.

In other news, Mobi sucks. I hate him more than any idea I have ever been partly responsible for. He is a hellgate which floods the world with an endless supply of deadly snipers. We’ll be addressing that.

We heard some resistance early on regarding Outwitters‘ lack of a single player campaign, and our reply at the time was that matchmaking would be there to keep people engaged. It was vague because we hadn’t hammered out the details yet. Our goal for this game is to create something more like a competitive sport (for lazy people), and the way we hope to realize that goal is with a nifty League System.

Sure, Outwitters will support pass n’ play games, or unranked online matches between you and your friends, but the meat of the action is in the leagues, where a whole world of blood-thirsty strangers will be clawing their way to fortune and glory. Mostly just glory.

When you first start your league career, you’ll play a few games as an unranked wildcard, hopping between some “best guess” matches to determine which of the 5 tiers fits your skill level. Once your fate is decided, you’ll be placed in a division of (roughly) 100 similar players.

Winning your league matches nets you points, allowing you to climb the ranks toward a possible tier promotion. Losing matches subtracts points, pushing you toward the bottom of the stack (and possibly into the dark depths of the Fluffy League). You’ll hold a separate rank for your 1v1 league matches and each of your 2v2 partners. You can even tackle the 2v2 Leagues with random partners, if you’re looking to scout for free agents.

Progress Report

This week we’re working on implementing the League system into the alpha version of the game. It’s been a lot of work for two people, but we’ve always been a little more ambitious than we probably should be. The 2011 release date we were shooting for is looking a little shaky at the moment, so I hate to say it, but Outwitters will likely drop closer to the end of this year if we make it at all. Rest assured that if we have to delay, it’ll just mean more more features & better gameplay.