So we’re close to wrapping up our next big update for Tilt to Live, but we’re in need of a little help from you guys. Some of the big new features in this update:

• Game Center Leaderboards and Achievements
• Gyroscope support
• Retina Display Graphics

We’re wanting to run this game through it’s paces on a nice range of devices. Anyone with a 3G, 3GS, or iPhone/iPod 4 are welcome to request an invite. What issues we’re potentially looking for:

1. Game Center integration working (or not working) on older gen devices and being correctly disabled on 3.x iOS devices. In areas with less than ideal interenet connectivity/speed are of particular interest.
2. Gyroscope support: (iPhone 4/iPod 4G only) Does it make sense?
3. General feedback of any bugs or crashes discovered.

If you think you have the time and would like to give TTL 1.5 a test run on your device, just head over to our contact form and choose ‘Beta Request’ and fill in the info. We can’t accomodate everyone due to very limited ad-hoc space, so please only apply if you’re willing to give it an honest effort.

We somehow managed to squeak by with an update in what feels like the very last minute in July. Frostbite mode is finally out and the leaderboards are already filling up with some insane scores!  So what does this update entail? See for yourself:

New

• The all new Frostbite Game Mode!
• A new devastating weapon, the Burnicade!
• 7 new awards to earn!

Improved

• AGON updated to 1.5.1 – better leaderboard functionality
• player visibility improved

Fixed

• minor iOS4 issues
• sound effect issues

Thanks to all who’ve supported us! Next Up? Tilt to Live on the iPad!

The Frostbite update was, at last, submitted to Apple for approval today. Did we take our sweet time with this gametype? Yep. Did we break our first promise, and then push the boundaries of our second promise? Absolutely. If something sucked, we unsucked it. And the result? A unique, fourth Tilt to Live gametype that we’re confident will rock your socks off. We’ll post all the details as soon as the update hits the App Store, but you’ll probably be too busy playing it to care.

For now, you can check out the fabulous Frostbite theme, composed by the very talented Whitaker Blackall. You may recall Whitaker’s previous Tilt to Live track for the Code Red gametype. His creativity and attention to detail continue to impress us. As far as we’re concerned, he is the sound of Tilt to Live.

After a month of teasing and delaying, it’s finally time to share the details of Tilt to Live’s upcoming Frostbite update. This is all still in development, so the specifics are being tweaked and balanced as I write this post, but here’s the big picture:

Frostbite Mode

This new gametype will transport you to a winter wonderland. One where all the dots rain pre-frozen from the heavens, gift-wrapped and ready to die. Because in Frostbite land every day is Christmas, or Hanukkah, or Muslim Christmas. But here’s the catch: Those frozen dots are falling towards that steamy hot spring at your feet. If my high school education serves me: frozen dot + steamy hot spring = thawed dot! And in an arena marred by an unfortunate weapon shortage, thawed dots spell big trouble. Looks like you’ve got some thorough shattering to do.

Luckily, a weapon shortage is not a weapon drought. And the pickup we’re tossing you every-so-often just happens to be the perfect safety net for a dot blizzard.

Meet the Burnicade

Intuitively enough, the new burnicade pickup will engulf your cursor in a burst of hellish flames, launching you across the arena in a blaze of glory. But the real payoff is the barricade of burning justice you’ll leave in your wake. This fire is deadly to dots, but not to you, because we think there are already quite enough things trying to kill you.

As you can imagine, the burnicade will be a rare sigh of relief in Frostbite mode. And because it’s built into the rules of that gametype, this weapon will be available in Frostbite from the moment you update/install the game. If you want to play with fire in Classic or Code Red, though, we suggest you work on your AGON PocketScore. The burnicade will be the next unlockable weapon beyond the Lightning shield.

And that’s the news, boys and girls. Frostbite and the burnicade will be giving your iDevice hot flashes in July.

I’d like to preface this post by pointing out that our banner did promise to shatter your expectations. So it’s totally inaccurate to call us liars.

The Frostbite update will be taking a backseat to some company reshuffling that’s going down this month, so its release has been pushed back to July. One Man Left (that’s us!) is experiencing some welcome growth, so we need a little me-time to reorganize. What this means in the long term is that we will be able to do our thing considerably more efficiently. In the short term it means that we are disappointing.

As a consolation prize, I will now reveal the name of our new weapon so as to engage your eager imaginations! Included with the Frostbite update in July, prepare to scorch the earth with a mighty BURNICADE. We’ll be posting screenshots and gameplay details for Frostbite and the burnicade later this month.

Ahoy! We’ve sacrificed May’s update early this morning to the AppStore Gods so it should be live in a few days. So what’s new in this update? For starters, Gauntlet Mode and Code Red have new songs! We were able to work with the talented Whitaker Blackall on getting a custom track done for Code Red and it sounds intense, especially when trying to ward off the hordes of red dots! So hats off to him on creating a catchy piece of music! Here’s a quick preview of the track opening:

[audio:http://www.onemanleft.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Code-Red-Preview.mp3|titles=Code Red Preview]

… you’ll have to wait for the update to hear the rest ;).

So what else is new in the update? Lots of minor stuff, but the high notes are:

New Stuff

• New Music
• 6 new awards to earn
• Tilt sensitivity now available under options or the custom position screen
• You can now play tilt to live on your toaster. (finally!)

Improved Stuff

• Added some more graphical elements to Gauntlet mode
• Increased the invincibility time after getting hit in Gauntlet mode
• You can cross your eyes and play tilt to live in 3D mode. (James Cameron eat your heart out)

Fixed Stuff

• AGON pocket score display now shows correct number
• Music no longer cuts out
• No longer spawns hell demons devouring your family and dog after dying in first 5 seconds of Code Red (sorry about that one!)

The much requested tilt sensitivity is finally in, and boy does it help! I tend to crank it up because I’m lazy and the less tilting I have to do the better. It’s also great for those that wish to play at a steeper angle and were having problems with the horizontal movement.

So what’s next? Our June update will have even more new content with a new weapon and all new game mode.

Having survived the update deadline crunch, Alex and I are now happily sweeping up bits of awards and polish that weren’t quite ready in time for Gauntlet’s release. A minor update will hit your device this month. A major update will explode your device next month. So start saving up for a new device.

My gift to you:

My personal iTouch wallpaper. If you put this on your iTouch and set it next to mine, I’ll probably be baffled! If you don’t understand why this wallpaper is great, then you didn’t get a 700 combo. If you can’t get a 700 combo, feel free to use a more accessible wallpaper.

So we’ve finished the massive game mode update we had planned for April release. Sadly, we finished it a bit behind schedule :[. Having submitted the final binary to Apple very early this morning we suspect it’ll be a few days past our intended launch date before the game goes live on the app store. My frustration for shipping late was only outweighed by our vicious desire to not release something we felt was unfit for release. Those extra few of days of gameplay tweaking and balancing we feel paid off in spades in the end, so we’re hoping you guys will get a kick out of the new modes :). In case you already forgot about what’s going to be in this update:

• 2 new game modes: Gauntlet and Code Red. Each with their own AGON leaderboards!
• 6 new awards to earn and brag to your friends about
• New how to play screen that gives a slightly better explanation of WTF is going on
• Fixed a nasty bug causing devices with some international region formats to crash

As always with game development, we didn’t get everything we wanted in this single update, but we certainly got the fun stuff :]. We’ve got a decently sized list of user-requested improvements and features that we didn’t have much time to work through in this update, but will be hopefully addressing in a little while. We’ve got a few more goodies in the coming months for Tilt to Live so watch this space.

Oh, and mucho thanks to TA for the honor of being one of the Games of the Month for March.

“lol i wonder if the app store will allow the [Code Red] description to be “classic mode on crack” cuz doesnt that violate some drug reference rule or something”

That’s a difficult question, and I’m glad you asked. Technically, it’s justifiable for Apple to reject our update if we don’t disclose that as a drug reference and change our rating accordingly. There’s no double meaning to it; crack is crack. On the other hand, it may be permissible because it doesn’t imply that any people are using the crack, just that a game mode is experiencing the effects of crack metaphorically. It’s not actually illegal for an abstract noun to use metaphor crack, which I believe eliminates the controversy altogether. In the interest of delivering the update on time, though, we may want to tread softly on this explosive topic. Tempers run high in the war on crack.

We’ve got an interim update for Tilt to Live coming in the next week or so. It’ll be addressing some issues we’ve come across from the mountain of feedback we’ve received. We weren’t able to get to everything, so if you don’t see an improvement you were hoping for in this update, keep in mind we’ve got a huge update coming in April and it may be in that one. Hopefully it won’t take to long, but I imagine Apple is having it’s hands full with reviews of the slew of games and apps for the launch of the iPad in the next week or so.

So what’s in this update?

Fixes/Improvements

• The “Quit Blowing Bubbles” achievement exploit is now fixed.
• Cluster Missiles and Blackhole pick ups are now correctly muted when you mute the SFX in the options menu.
• Pausing the game is now no longer triggered on the very edges of the screen, avoiding accidental pausing.
• Simplified in-game HUD. No more HUD elements that obstruct the playfield.
• Some new loading screen material.
• Other minor bug fixes

Calibration

I think our biggest complaint (and strangely enough also our biggest praise) was the calibration for movement. Looking through all the e-mails, tweets, forum posts, and facebook wall post, we have a contingent of users who, as far as I’m concerned, play the game literally like the custom icon implies. I’ll spare you the technical details of trying to get an accelerometer game to work in as many positions as possible.

Out of all the presets, Sleepy and Custom were having the most problems. Namely, when someone tried to play the game in a ‘vertical’ orientation (ie, 90 degrees from the Top-Down setting) they would lose horizontal control. So to remedy this we had to add a steering control scheme for those specific types of calibrations. It’s not the most elegant way of going about it because it introduces a bit more complexity to the player, but hey, you can now play in “Sleepy” without your arms getting  tired :).

Pocket Scores and YOU

We also did some UI tweaks to help better convey how the awards work with the the weapon unlock system. There seemed to be a lot of confusion as to how pocket score related to weapons, which wasn’t very clear in the UI. So hopefully this’ll make that a little easier to understand.

Tilt to Live is off to an amazing start, and it’s only going to get better! So help support Tilt to Live by letting your friends know about us!