Taking some time to jazz up the spawn menus. Don’t worry, it’s not an in-app purchase. Just a nice touch, I think.
Thanks to a nifty tool Alex made, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at Outwitters replays recently. Who won? How many capture point wits did he get? How many units did he kill? How much did he spend moving; how much attacking? My face hurts, frankly. I remember balancing Tilt to Live. We basically just watched how long it took people to die. Ah, simplicity.
A little beta craziness on a new map called Thorn Gulley. It’s interesting to see the different uses testers have come up with for Bramble. You can block paths with him, or just creep up on a capture point. We’re still debating and tweaking, but all of the new maps and content are finally playable. Hope to be ready to submit by the end of the month.
Ryan Rigney (author of Buttonless, which featured our first game Tilt to Live) came to us a few weeks ago with praise for Outwitters’ bold Free to Play model. No gold or extra lives being sold, just good wholesome content like I used to buy when I was a boy. “So how’s that working out for you?” he asked.
We figured we’d share our numbers so other small studios might make a better decision than we did. With 2% of 500,000 users buying something in your app, you need them to spend an average of $30 dollars each to break even on a $300,000 game (salaries for 2 people for 1.75 years, plus company overhead, custom sound, and half a year’s server costs). We should have done that math, and not overestimated the number of downloads “free” would attract. Consumables also weren’t a good fit for a competitive multiplayer game, which should’ve been a red flag that free to play was not a great choice.
So free to play + prominent Apple feature does not equal an automatic slam dunk. Lesson learned. We’re still proud of the game.
Sorry, New Team Name Guessing thread. It’s not the velocipedists. We’ll save that idea for a racing game.
In our original Outwitters announcement, we showed off some concept art featuring a weird little plant soldier. He was from a team called the Naturals, which was only ever playable in our paper prototype and never actually made it into the game. For our first big team pack addition, we’ve resurrected these characters as the Veggienauts.
We call their special unit Bramble, and he has the gift of the green thumb. When rooted down, he grows his own destructible thorn barriers (no spawn tile required). In our first beta build, each barrier he plants will extend his reach. This will allow him to slowly spread his way across the map like a weed, blocking weak spots, capping Bonus Spaces, or providing cover for allies moving up the field. His exact balance and mechanics will be tweaked as we test over the coming weeks, but we aim to put the new team (and its new maps) in your hands sometime late in October. It’ll be a freebie for any über pack owners out there.
Stay tuned for more updates, artwork, and hilarious delay announcements.
All the animations for the new team were finished up this week, ready for Alex to start plugging into a fresh beta build. Hopefully our testers can start breaking it in around the end of next week. We like what we’ve seen with pen and paper playtests, but time will tell if we find any major balance problems. If this particular special doesn’t work out, we’ve got backups.
If no one complains about anything in this post’s comments, I’ll show off some of the new team artwork next week. Hey, look, it’s an alternate Feedback base:
Now that we’ve patched some of the more critical problems with Outwitters 1.0, Alex is starting to funnel in some new stuff for the 1.2 beta. He needs artwork again! I am remembering what it feels like to be useful.
If you’re still running into the bugs we tried to fix in 1.1, don’t hesitate to submit a bug report. Alex answers as many of these as he can, but we can promise yours will at least be read.
So what kind of stuff are we thinking about adding for our next update? A new team pack with new maps, definitely. And this pack will be unlocked for anyone that already purchased the Über Pack (the game limit upgrade we added in 1.1 wasn’t included because it wasn’t a team pack). iPhone 5 support? Possibly, if we don’t hit any major snags. I’ve also been toying with a few alternate base designs for each race. Here’s one for the Adorables that I call Castle Cutenstein:
If you haven’t updated to Outwitters 1.1, you are missing out! Literally. The game won’t let you play again until you update. Here’s a breakdown of new things that aren’t old anymore.
The Ups and Downs of Your Game Limit
If you bought anything at all from the Outwitters store, your game limit is still good old 20! We’ve added an item to the store that increases it to 35 if you wanna. We really do appreciate anyone that’s dropped us a few dollars in your time with our game. Profits help us fund updates like new maps and teams. As long as Outwitters is paying the bills, we can keep working on it! (We’ll have news on our first team addition soon.)
If you’re a free user with no intention of ever buying anything, that’s totally cool by us! But we’ve reduced your game limit to 5, because there are A LOT of you and your turns are pretty expensive for us. If that makes you mad, we’re very sorry, but it only costs $3 for you to not be mad anymore.
New:
- New item in the store. Increase your max game limit to 35!
Fixes:
- fixed a crash on new league game
- fixes for games not timing out after 4 days
- fixes for large turn count games not loading
- fixed crash on viewing profile and exiting quickly
- fixed crash when joining a game due to a desynced server/client game state
- no active games list bug fixed
- fixed crashing when servers are down for maintenance
Map Change:
- Starting soldier has been moved back on Foundry, helping to neuter one rush strategy
I’ll start this off by plugging our Labor Day sale for Tilt to Live. Now through Labor Day you can get Tilt to Live iPhone for just 99¢, or Tilt to Live HD‘s Full Version for $1.99! That’s what we in the business call a bargain. Tell your friends, please?
Meanwhile, in Outwitters…
The patch update has, at long last, been submitted to Apple. Shouldn’t bee more than a week before it reaches your device. More importantly, Alex will finally be moved in to his new house around the middle of next week. That means I’ll have a partner again, and we can accomplish tasks. As those of you that follow this blog may know, a completed patch update means we get to shift attention to a new team and new maps. We’ll be telling you more about that as it comes together.
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.