With last week’s tournament out of the way, all of One Man Left Studios (both of us) are shifting focus back to Outwitters. Alex is making steady progress on the asynchronous stuff, so now throughout the work day we’ll get little push notifications that it’s time to take our turn. Still having some weird bugs now and then, like spawn points mysteriously disappearing or, my personal favorite: “Bombshell is overpowered, because the game crashes if I kill it”. Right now these buggy alpha games are only working on iPad, rotating between Alex, myself, and a local friend. Release date is still the annoyingly-vague “2011”, until we get past all the hard stuff.

In the sound department, Whitacker Blackall (our Tilt to Live composer) has been chipping away at some of Outwitters’ music and sound effects. Check out this take on the Feedback‘s anthem:

Click to enlarge.

Ever wonder where pirate fish come from? Well, it’s obvious really. A network of reef-filled fish tanks dotting the coastline, interconnected by a highway of pipes. Do they breathe air or water? I don’t pretend to know. Pirates breathe air, fish breathe water… I’m inclined to say they got the best of both worlds.

With the Scallywags’ look nailed down, we’re turning our attention to bringing things to life and tying them all together. Did I mention we’re hard at work on menus? So. Many. Menus.

It’s been quite a week for us. Our fake Pinocchio placeholder menus are slooowly being replaced by their “real boy” versions, and we’re starting to wrap our heads around what life will be like in the menus outside the game. There’s a lot more going on in Menu Town than we had in Tilt to Live. Alex hopes to have online matchmaking working in some form soon, so we can start playing asynchronously with friends and family (that feature had been lost while we focused on other stuff). 2v2 is working, and Whitaker Blackall is polishing up a pretty sweet Feedback theme. Lots done and lots still to do!

Here’s a screenshot of the Arrow doing what he does best: pointing at things.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Click to enlarge.

So for each race in Outwitters, I’m designing a “home turf” map theme to compliment the character designs. What you see here is a wide view of the Feedback’s homeworld, as it stands now. This is also kind of our first screenshot! Neat.

The colorful spaces with the team logos are spawn points, which are the spaces you tap to create new units. The space with the flag on it is a capture space, which I can explain for you guys another day. Suffice it to say, those help you gain the upper hand. And the number floating beside each unit displays its health.

The Feedback’s world uses a lot of dull grays and browns to give it a doom-and-gloom, industrial vibe. They are our robot overlords, after all. The other maps I’m working on will be more vibrant, colorful places like a beach scene and a forest village. Still not really sure if this is the design we’ll stick with. There are some other ideas in my sketchbook I’d like to try out, if we have time.

That’s all for this week. It’s starting to look like a real game now! Check back soon for more Outwitters team reveals and artwork.

Alex got asynchronous play working in the prototype last night! We had our first online test of Outwitters, and I’m happy to report that I won. Alex will tell you that he wasn’t trying to win, just testing to ensure that everyone’s turns were getting “pushed to the server” or whatever. My turns were pushing alright. Pushing to his base and beating it to death.

So Outwitters is a multiplayer, multi-race strategy game. How many races will we include? However many we can finish. Here’s the first race we ever mocked up, wayyy back in October. They’re the team Alex and I are testing with in our first, bare bones prototype.

When you pick a race in Outwitters, you’re choosing two things: what do I want to look like, and what’s my special unit? Every race has 5 standard units plus one exclusive, special unit.

• Soldier: Balance of speed & strength
• Runner: Fast mover, weak fighter
• Heavy: Packs a punch, but gets around a little slower
• Medic: Lover, not a fighter
• Sniper: Long-range, low mobility
• Special Unit: Unique for each race

The sixth unit isn’t a “super unit” at the time of this writing. You can create one for the same price as anything else, and use it whenever you want. They may not march effortlessly across the battlefield leaving only devastation in their wake, but they do have unique abilities to keep your opponents on their toes.

For the Feedback in our prototype, the special unit is called a Scrambler. It’s an incredibly persuasive, cybernetic floating brain. It’s special power: possession! If you manage to corner an enemy with a Scrambler, you can instantly brainwash him to join your team. It’ll even hijack another race’s special unit, so you can use their own abilities against them.

Stay tuned for more sneak peeks at artwork, levels, and races as we expand our prototype into the full-fledged game, arriving free-to-try on iPads and iPhones later this year.