Tilt to Live 2 somehow landed a spot on Pocket Gamer’s list of the “36 most anticipated iOS and Android games for the rest of 2013“, even though we haven’t shown any screenshots or video. Thanks for believing in us!

Huge thank you to everyone that helped spread the word about our interactive designer portfolio search. We’ve got a lot of good candidates to sift through, and we’re excited to see what an extra pair of hands will get us. Since Outwitters, I’ve had this nagging itch to focus on improving my style, characters, environments, and animation (not to mention the whole game design thing). Menu design has always been sort of this other world. I go there for a little while every year or so, and I only remember enough of the language to ask where the bathroom is. It’ll be nice to have someone more fluent around.

The enemies and weapons are all pretty much in, so once we fill in some UI blanks TtL2 will be ready for alpha testing. We’re also really excited about Mike Reagan starting work next month. When sound effects and music start coming in, it really feels like a totally different game.

I’m going to take this week’s post to do something a little boring, which is remind everyone that you can sign up to get an email as soon as Tilt to Live 2 is released. We don’t really use the list for much else, so there’s no worrying about loads of dookie clogging your inbox. Just “Hey, our new game’s out”, or “Hey, a cool update’s out”. It’s good for when life’s fickle whirlwind scoops you up into its funnel of distractions, and you forget to keep checking this blog.

And since you sat through that, here’s what Tilt to Live looks like FROM SPACE.

Here’s some sketches for a new, bubble-shield-style defensive weapon I was calling Ironhide. Also one of them is a marshmallow. We decided to take this in a different direction.

So boss month got a little side tracked. Halfway through, it segued into a “finish all the animations so our sound effects people have something to work with” marathon, which we’re still working on. We’ve got 17 different boss encounters at the moment, but none of their difficulties are tweaked yet for Code Red. Was shooting for 20-30 encounters, so we’ll be sneaking in some more boss design if we can.

We’ve been talking with Mike Reagan’s company REdVOLT Audio, the team responsible for Outwitters’ excellent soundtrack and sound effects, to see what they can do with Tilt to Live 2. Still a lot of animations to wrap up so they can do their thing in a month or so. I should be working on animations right now, actually.

Release date is shooting for September at the moment, which feels realistic because it’s super far away. Look for us to be all “what were we thinking?” in August.

In Tilt to Live 1, you learned what it felt like to drive a spike shield. In Redonkulous, you’ll learn what it’s like to be on the other end.

As I write this, we’ve got ten weapons mocked up and generally playable. About half of them are pretty enough to ship, the rest are still drawn in crayon or made of construction paper. We may cut the arsenal down if we decide a weapon isn’t really adding anything interesting to the mix. Tilt to Live launched with 8 weapons, so this feels about right.

June has been designated “Boss Fight” month. By July, we’re aiming to have all of our boss encounters finalized, each with an easy Classic Mode version, and a much harder Code Red version. So far we’re still on track to hit our narrow release window of “2013”.