I got pretty enthusiastic about the Outwitters: Skirmish prototype and did some sketching on the subject.

The six hero characters each represented a different Outwitters race: Tronk for the Veggienauts, Overclock for the Feedback, etc. Festress was sort of her own thing from a race of muties I was calling the Abhorables (sort of an anti-Adorables). The bottom row of the top image are minions that went with each hero.

Only one of these characters still exists in the current version of our sixth game, which isn’t set in the Outwitters universe.

Click to enlarge.

I also played around with an art style for the game, which you might remember from a previous blog post.

Want to know more about our upcoming Outwitters follow-up? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

From our earlier CQC prototype (along with a few others that didn’t quite pan out), we arrived at something we were calling at the time Outwitters: Skirmish. It was “Outwitters” in name only; there were no races, no bases, and no fog of war.

In Skirmish you chose 3 heroes, and each hero had its own minion class (the little guys with the numbers). You’d win the match by owning all 4 flags, defeating all the enemy heroes, OR by earning enough Victory Points. VP was a way to keep matches from dragging on too long; you got them from taking over flags or defeating enemies.

A lot of these ideas are still present in Game 6 in one form or another, but a lot has changed.

The biggest cut feature from Skirmish was character customization. Each of these heroes had something like 5 special moves to choose from, but you could only equip 3 moves for a battle. So we might both pick the Scallywag Captain, but we could still be using him in different ways.

This was very cool for variety, but it took a lot of reading and comparing to choose from all those moves (choose 3 characters, now choose 3 moves each). It didn’t help that the moves were also fairly complicated and interacted in all sorts of weird ways. They involved things like status effects and passive attributes that basically went full RPG.

Overall it was a lot less approachable than Outwitters and a lot harder to teach, which is not what we’re going for. Our goal for Game 6 is something as elegant as Outwitters, but with more flexibility and surprises in the way characters can be used.

Here’s a look at a few of the game pieces we had for the myriad status effects and traps in Skirmish:

From this prototype we learned that customization was cool, but we had to keep complexity in check.

Want to know more? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones for our followup to Outwitters, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

The road to Game 6 started with some pretty simple questions. What do we like about Outwitters, and what could we have done a better job with? As game designers, we explored these questions with lots and lots of prototypes. Some of them never got passed the “idea” phase to a playable state, like this abandoned “gameboard” file I found while digging through our old stuff. I think I was in the middle of figuring out what size everything needed to be on a phone screen.

We explored all kinds of stuff. Should moving a piece really cost you a wit? What about square spaces instead of hexes? What if you could push people into pits? Does that kill them? How can we make teams more unique from each other without adding a ton of production time to new races?

This is one of our more “out there” prototypes; what we’re working on now is a lot closer to the classic Outwitters map setup. I throw these gameboards together in Adobe Illustrator (much faster than having Alex actually code them), create a quick and dirty PDF manual, and we copy/paste game pieces around the board to play.

I called this prototype “CQC” because we were experimenting with very small boards. Positioning your units was important, but it wasn’t as crucial as how you played your character’s abilities.

Only red team could move on the red spaces, and only blue team could move on blue. The three brown spaces in the middle could be used by anyone. Your general, the mustachioed guy, could only jump between the 3 dark spaces, and you lost if he was defeated. Each player had a deck of cards with troops you could spawn and crystals to trigger their special moves. As you can see we had lots of different minions, and you could choose which ones you wanted to add to your deck.

The card deck portion felt too random for an Outwitters follow-up, and the board size was pretty stifling. But the idea of having a general, like a living Outwitters base that could fight back, was one that we decided to explore further…

Want to know more? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones for our followup to Outwitters, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

So explaining this new game, you probably noticed we’ve been carefully dancing around the phrase “Outwitters 2″. Don’t freak out. Keep reading.

There was a temptation to call whatever PvP strategy game we ended up with an Outwitters sequel. The new game has hexes, it’s turn-based PvP combat, it’s got a carefully thought-out league system. It even has runners, soldiers, and snipers. I think anyone who enjoyed Outwitters is going to love this game, but so many of the rules have changed that it feels misleading for us to just slap “Outwitters” on it. I prefer to think of it as an evolution of Outwitters, like a spiritual successor.

What are these changes, you nervously ask? “Destroy the enemy base” is no longer your goal; you’ll have a more flexible path to victory. There are lots of differences between teams, not just one super-expensive unit. You can start exchanging blows on turn 3, and the action escalates as a match goes on, so you won’t be seeing 100 turn games. We were even able to remove fog of war without killing the element of surprise, because minions now have several abilities and are a lot less predictable.

Want to know more? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

Space Food Truck is complete. We have a lot of features, expansions and gametype ideas we could still add to it (maybe we’ll post some of that later), but there was another project being tossed around that we’ve really been itching to green light.

In 2012 we made our first strategy game called Outwitters, and ever since moving on from that game we’ve had a pet obsession. When I looked through our “Outwitters 2: Think Again” folder just now (that was a working title), I counted 9 hex-based, PvP strategy prototypes we’ve tinkered with. Some were a lot like Outwitters, and some were barely recognizable. Finally, after 4+ years on and off experimenting, we’ve got it. A worthy successor. And that’s what we’re working on full time, starting next week.

In about a year, we hope to have it ready for launch. There will be a Kickstarter, and we will need your help! If you haven’t signed up for the mailing list yet, definitely do to keep up with our progress. And you can also check back here weekly to peek over our shoulders while we work.

Space Food Truck is officially graduating from Early Access next week, so this weekend we’re shining a spotlight on our first multiplayer strategy game, Outwitters for iOS and Android! Today through Sunday, EVERYTHING in the Outwitters store is 75% off or more.

Outwitters is an easy-to-learn, tough-to-master player vs. player strategy game that supports 1 vs. 1 or 2 vs. 2 matches. It even has cross-platform play between iOS and Android. You can check out the trailer to see it in action, and be sure to stop by our forums if you’re searching for a few regular opponents.

Our newest game, Space Food Truck, will be officially released on Steam March 25th. You can sign up for our mailer to get an email reminder. 25 lucky subscribers are getting a free copy on launch day!

This Friday on a very special OML Twitches: the creators of Outwitters go head to head! Neither of us have played in a good long while, but still we will clash like a couple of newborn babies. Help Alex scout and overcome my army for a shot at a free copy of Space Food Truck, which will pour forth from my base for every point of HP damage I take.  Stream starts Friday at 2:30pm EST , and the rerun will be up on our Youtube shortly thereafter.

Humble Bundle 16 is here, and Outwitters: Humble Edition is among the great Android games you can pick up while supporting a great cause. Pay whatever you want for this special version of Outwitters, DRM-free with all the IAP unlocked. That’s about $36 worth of teams, maps, and skins; plus you get a bunch of other awesome mobile games!

This Bundle splits the proceeds between small developers like us, Direct Relief (providing medical relief for people all over the world), and Worldreader (helping kids learn to read across the globe). You even get to pick how much of your money should go to each! So whether you’re looking for a good deal on Android games, you’re in a giving mood, or both; check out what Humble 16 has to offer.

We even went as far as exploring art styles for an Outwitters sequel. Here’s a Mortal Kombat-esque miniature board mockup with a Feedback “hero” character. One of our Outwitters 2 designs involved these heroes that worked like really durable special units.

Outwitters 2 was a heavy contender for Game 5, but ultimately we decided to go with something completely fresh. On the left are a few soldier designs for a new dystopian Adorables team, and on the right are some updated looks for the Feedback soldier.

I think we’re still a few weeks out from our big Game 5 announcement, but keep checking back for more updates!