Here’s the concept for our fourth gauntlet, Arropolis: home of the arrows. That population will be steadily ticking down, or course.

This last gauntlet is meant to be wrapped up by the end of the month, leaving us one more month to tweak difficulty, discuss the mechanics, and generally tidy things up. The game will have 3 gauntlets for you to attack out of the box, plus an unlockable final encounter at the Dot Bot Fortress once you’ve proven yourself to be awesome.

So we’re in our fourth month of development, with nearly three gauntlets to show for it. The unlockable final gauntlet we’re finishing up now (which we haven’t shown you) contains a 3-stage final boss fight that a LOT of love has gone into. The Dot King showdown is something we’d considered putting in Tilt to Live 2 as part of a boss gauntlet mode, but that mode was not meant to be. I am proud to say that he will be your final test in Gauntlet’s Revenge.

We moved the boss level up in production so we’d definitely have time to make it as cool as possible. There’s still one more gauntlet to design before the bulk of Gauntlet’s Revenge is done. Our September/October release goal still looks good.

Here’s a clip from the Pointonium Mines where we cross a checkpoint and dispatch a couple of bat dot bots. We don’t have their death SQUEE yet, so you’ll have to imagine your own for now. Each Gauntlet is broken up by two checkpoints and a finish line, where a bonus round rains death and pointonium upon you in equal measure.

Based on current projections, it looks like we’re shooting for a September/October release. If you’d like to try joining the beta we just started, click here.

A new enemy for the Pointonium Mines, the Bat Dot Bot is a fun experiment in micro-boss style enemies. They travel in packs, and you can choose to avoid them or try and get an angle on their target weakpoint. Breaking it will earn you some sweet bonus pointonium and make them go “SQUEEEE”.

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Our first gauntlet, Lockdown, has been polished up pretty nicely. So now we’re moving forward with our second, the Pointonium Mines. Pointonium is what we’re calling the blue jewels you collect whilst trying not to die, which you may remember from the short Vine we posted last week.

Obstacles in the Pointonium Mines are designed to feel very different from Lockdown. Lockdown has a lot of smashing, skewering, and bullet dodging, while in the mines you’ll be dealing with falling boulders, sweeping lasers, and bat dot bots.

We don’t have enough ready for a trailer (there’s not even any sound effects yet), but we did put together this peek at one of the game’s gauntlets.

Probably the most important decision we make when designing a Tilt to Live game is: What will the custom tilt position button look like?

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These are concepts for a new enemy type called a Switchblade. He was either going to end up like a robotic hammerhead shark, or a wider version of Tilt to Live 2‘s Skewer knives, (which will also make an appearance in this game).

In Gauntlet’s Revenge, we’re evolving the dots into a whole new race called the Dot Bots. They’ll still fire themselves at you as bullets, but so far we have no plans of loosing individual dots at you. Obviously, the story and airtight internal logic is what everyone plays Tilt to Live for. This should hopefully make our enemies about 1,000x more interesting to draw.

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These are sketches for our first gauntlet, Lockdown. The plan is to have a few different gauntlets to choose from, each with their own enemies and traps. You might recognize the “three circle” symbol on the gears as a callback to the original Gauntlet’s gametype select symbol, and the gear motif is something we also used for Tilt to Live 1’s Gauntlet background. Tilt to Live 2 saw the dots get some robotic technology in the form of bosses and enemies, so this game pushes that a bit further.

Gauntlet mode first appeared in the original Tilt to Live. Rather than hopping from weapon to weapon, it was about navigating a parade of deadly traps with precision and good timing. It was a fun mode, but there were a few things we wish we’d done better. The difficulty was fairly flat, and the enemy formations lacked variety. We retooled it for Tilt to Live HD as a single screen bullet hell mode, but we always wanted another crack at that “precision endless runner”, “tilt platformer” feel.

When it came time to think up a second DLC for Tilt to Live 2, getting a chance to finally do Gauntlet justice was high on our list. Once a few enemies and track pieces were in the prototype, all sorts of interesting ideas came up. What if you could reach some kind of bonus room if you survived long enough? I have a lot of leftover obstacle ideas; what if we did a few different Gauntlets?

Rather than cutting our ideas down to make DLC for Tilt to Live 2, we’re running with them in our first Tilt to Live spin-off: Gauntlet’s Revenge. Development is already underway for iOS and Android, and we expect to be ready for release later this year. You can keep up with our progress on this blog, or sign up for an email reminder when the game is released.