From the Desk of Alex Okafor

Hi OML fans!

Just wanted to start off this post with a huge thanks to our entire community of fans, players, and supporters! We wouldn’t have made it this far without you guys. It’s been a minute since our last update, and I wish this was more of an uplifting “bringing in the new year” post. Unfortunately, the last few years haven’t been the kindest to our studio, and to the indie game development scene at large. The combination of difficult market realities, and having burned the midnight oil for years on end is finally catching up with me (oh, to be young).

Going forward, OML is no longer a full-time endeavor for me. I’m currently happily in a new full-time position at another company.  When I think back on the years of development, the thing that sticks with me is the encouragement and excitement from our fans on what we were working on. You guys made it worth all the effort. I’m still in awe at the fan art, tools, community led tournaments, and support our fan base had shown over the years.

• So what does this mean for our online games? Our current game servers will continue to operate. If the situation changes with any of them, we’ll notify players on appropriate channels (this blog included).
• What does this mean for the Hex Gambit Switch port? It’s still in development, but at a much slower pace after hours. As such, I can’t really give an estimate on when it’ll be ready.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough how great these last 9+ years have been, and can’t thank you all you enough for that awesome opportunity.

What About Adam?

First of all, I’m grateful to Alex for taking me on this adventure in the first place, and I wish him the best.

We’d both like to offer a sincere apology to our Switch backers for all of the delays you guys have endured. After a rougher-than-expected Steam launch, we just found ourselves without any options to continue HG development full time. We over-promised, and we’re doing everything we can to make it right. Thank you all for your support and your patience.

While (as an artist) I can’t help Alex finish Hex Gambit any faster, I’m exploring my options for working on another game (don’t worry, there won’t be another Kickstarter) while taking on some contract work. If you’d like to see whatever might come next from me, make sure you subscribe to our mailing list and follow me on Twitter @oneadamleft. I have literally no idea what will happen!

If you’d like to contract me to help out with your project, I do all kinds of art with a specialty in UE4, and you can check out my portfolio right here.

Phew! Took quite a bit of effort to get Tilt to Live 2: Redonkulous up to snuff, but it’s done! It’s an oldie but a goodie. A nice side effect of having to update the underlying Unity engine was some decent performance gains during gameplay.

The latest Humble Mobile Bundle is out, and who’s that handsome devil in the lineup? Tilt to Live 2 joins The Last Express, Spaceteam, Monument Valley, Blek, and Joe Danger in this great, big bundle of joy for Android. Grab some awesome games at a great price and support charity in the process!

We sat down for a long discussion about Tilt to Live 2‘s 2nd DLC recently. The prototype is fun, and there’s so much more we could do with it if it wasn’t just a gametype within Tilt to Live 2. So why not flesh it out a bit? DLC 2 has enough going for it that it could be our fourth game: a spin-off that’s unlike any Tilt to Live game we’ve made. We’ve got to nail down a few details before we’re ready to formally announce the project, but good stuff is coming.

Our more astute fans may have noticed that Tilt to Live 2: Freedonkulous is no longer available on any stores. It must be true, because I didn’t even make the name a link to anything just now. We had some issues with the app, and made the decision to pull it from the store until we could figure out how to fix them.

But dry your teary eyes now. Because to make it up to anyone that missed out on Freedonkulous, the REAL non-lite versions of Tilt to Live 2 AND the original Tilt to Live have both been set to free on the App Store for a limited time! This is not a thing that happens, so act fast before you miss out. One caveat for our Android fans: we don’t actually have a way to set a game from paid to free and back on Android, so we’ve reduced the price as low as it can go for you.

Our second TtL2 DLC has taken a very interesting turn, so check back for news on that next week.

Just released in an update to the paid version of Tilt to Live 2, Brimstone Pinball now has a hard mode, with its own leaderboard for crazy people. How long will you last? One second? THREE?!

Pro tip: you’ll definitely want to make use of the star beam (dribble against a green star wall 3 times) and the superball to keep your enemies at bay. You won’t last long in hard mode without them.

Here’s an enemy type that we sadly had to cut from Brimstone Pinball in order to meet our deadline: Giant Bumper Baddies. They moved much slower, but took like 10 brimstone hits to take down. We had them working up to a point, but they did some very odd things with the physics, exploded if another bumper spawned on top of them, and died in one hit from the superball and star beam like everything else, which was pretty anti-climactic. It would have taken a lot of retooling to do them justice, so we had to give them the axe.

We’re still working hard on Tilt to Live 2 DLC 2, which we’re going to have to come up with a better name for. Once it gets a bit prettier and more fleshed out, we’ll be ready to “reveal” it and “market” it at you.

Dot King sketch from the old Boss Gauntlet concept

Lots of cool ideas are being tossed around like so much pizza dough. We had a few long discussions on how different weapons could take center stage like we did for brimstone, spitballed some new weapons, and even came up with some weird modes without any weapons at all. Two rough-but-playable demos have been assembled for our strongest candidates (One by ME, and I can’t even code! Thanks Unity!), and we’re just about ready to commit to one of them. We’ll probably be ready to announce what it is in a few weeks.

Another good idea sprung up from our conversations: we may be adding a “hard mode” toggle to Brimstone Pinball & the 2nd DLC, similar to the “Old School” toggle for Classic and Code Red. Alex would like to die faster. Not sure why we haven’t thought of this sooner.

And now, the moment people who don’t like paying for things have been waiting for! Freedonkulous is something we put together so anyone can grab the basic Tilt to Live 2 experience, free of charge. Plus, not coincidentally, the paid version of Tilt to Live 2 is only 99¢ for a very limited time! I cannot express how excited I was to discover that our tagline could double as a “free” pun. Actually, I just looked it up, and it’s not a pun. It’s called a portmanteau, and now we’re all smarter.

What are we giving away in Freedonkulous, you probably ask? It’s got Classic Mode with all of its boss fights, an Old School option to streamline the gameplay, two unlockable weapons, and over 30 achievements to conquer.

If you free users like what you’re playing, now’s a great time to upgrade to the paid version (whose price is temporarily inhibited) for:

• Code Red (hard mode): with harder bosses, more achievements, & two more unlockable weapons!
• Access to the Brimstone Pinball DLC
• No ads
• Support the devs: your purchases keep us in the business of making games

We’d like to thank everyone that took the plunge and bought the new Brimstone Pinball DLC. We worked really hard to make that worth your 99¢, so reading things like “Brimstone Pinball is the best thing that happened to Tilt to Live since Code Red” made our day. Thanks for keeping our little game-making outfit afloat. And thanks to the App Store editorial team for including Tilt to Live 2 in their featured games this week.

New updates recharge our App Store promo codes, so iOS users who don’t have TtL2 already should give one of these a shot:

As we mentioned last week, there’s a small side project being wrapped up for release (we think) by the 30th of this month. I can’t tell you much about it for good reason, other than the whole thing took about a week to make, so don’t get your hopes up too high (Outwitters fans).