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.

We’ve just submitted an update for Tilt to Live HD adding 64-bit compatibility for the upcoming iOS 11 release. This should keep the game working a few more years, until iOS inevitably decides to support quantum-bits. Next up for the 64-bit treatment: Tilt to Live 2!

In case you haven’t heard, you can sign up for an email reminder when the game hits the App Store!

I remember the crushing disappointment when I learned that Tilt to Live’s cooperative mode only worked with blue tooth connections. I have only ever had white teeth.

But lo! Through the magic of Game Center, Viva la Coop now features online matchmaking in new updates for both Tilt to Live iPhone and Tilt to Live HD! Just don’t try to play HD with your iPhone buddy; they’re different games. You can match to random strangers, or invite a Game Center buddy to help out. Bullet points!

• Viva la Coop can now be played online via Game Center!
• Big fat iPhone 5 display support! See parts of the background you have only dreamed about.
• No mic support, so your friends won’t hear you yelling at them.
• Replaced a few images that have been blurry for like 2 years.

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.

Seems like just yesterday Whitaker Blackall was composing our very first piece of custom game music, Tilt to Live‘s Code Red theme. But that was long ago, when he was still called Whitaker Blackall.

The now hitched and renamed Whitaker Trebella  joined the proud fraternity of iPhone developers today with his first App Store release, Polymer (99¢). It’s a slidey connecty puzzle piece game, best demonstrated by this trailer:

We’ve all been blown away by how far and how fast Whit’s development career has matured (though it helps that he has no shortage of enthusiasm). We wish him the best of luck with this game, and encourage you guys to throw him a buck and check it out!

You may have noticed that Tilt to Live HD‘s retina update hit the App Store last night. That’s the first thing we’ve sent for approval since, like last March. We vaguely remember this feeling. I think it’s called accomplishment.

Meanwhile, in Outwitters

Retina blowup is going smoother than TtL’s did, even though the game is 10 times bigger or something. We were quasi-prepared for this. Alex is still busy fixing bugs and adding stuff, so I have even more time to address bad art. I’m glad we’ve taken so long. The gameplay is better balanced for it, and my art skills have gotten lots of practice redoing things.

Also, we’re in the process of rolling this guy out, which should come in handy when you’re looking for a 2v2 partner:

I don’t know if you guys remember, but we made this game a while back called Tilt to Live HD. Then the iPhone 4’s retina display came along, and we wondered whether we had gotten our app names backward. So with the release of the iPad 3 and its retina display, we decided  it was time to finally justify the HD monicker. We’ve spent the last two weeks or so digging through the most poorly organized art files, the most amateur of code, and at last we’ve submitted the retina update. It’s on it’s way through Apple’s approval process to come live on your iPad 3 soon.

Just look at how much detail we were able to pack into the enemy designs!

We’ve been seeing some blog comments and emails lately describing a scoring bug in Tilt to Live. The story went that when you beat your highscore, it wouldn’t overwrite the old one on the Gametype Select screen. It’d show up correctly on Game Center, but not in-game. That’s odd, we thought, but Alex wasn’t able to duplicate the event on any of his devices… so we just went back to work on Outwitters.

One day last week, Alex and I had the idea of running a small Tilt to Live Tournament using Game Center. As we were experimenting with different ways to manage it, TA-DA, we encountered the mythical scoring bug! So now available on Tilt to Live Lite & coming very soon to the other versions is a patch for that scoring problem.

Coming soon to this blog (once those updates are live), will be details on our first ever Tilt to Live Tournament. So brush up on iPhone’s Code Red if you got something to prove.

Some of you may have heard the news that AGON is shutting down operations at the end of June. If you haven’t, well… AGON is shutting down operations at the end of June. Adam has selected this inspirational video to help ease the transition.

To make sure Tilt to Live doesn’t run into any problems, we’re disabling AGON online connectivity from our game and using Game Center exclusively for global leaderboards and achievements. What does this mean for those that are living under a rock and don’t have internet connectivity on their devices? It shouldn’t mean much since  they can’t update anyway, or read this post for that matter. Your offline highscores will still be stored locally and you’ll be able to see your highest scores on the gametype select screen. When you tap on ‘Awards’ you will also still be able to see which awards you’ve unlocked and which ones are left to pursue.

If you’re worried about losing highscores or achievements, I’d recommend setting up a Game Center account (if you haven’t already) and making sure that Game Center is enabled in Tilt to Live’s options menu. This allows the game to save awards and highscores to Apple’s Game Center servers, so you’ll be able to restore them easily even between re-installs, or across devices.

We’re working on pushing an update out for Tilt to Live first, followed by Tilt to Live HD, and then a Lite update. Should be submitted sometime next week.