One important element was missing from our GDC gameplay videos: Baron Brimstone’s insightful commentary. Brimstone Pinball will be hitting Tilt to Live 2 in a few weeks with 15 new achievements and a fresh leaderboard to conquer.
If you’d like a reminder when the new DLC is released, be sure to sign up for our mailing list.
Getting back in our groove, we spent the week implementing and playtesting some tough new achievements for Brimstone Pinball. There’s also a neat pinball plunger intro animation we added. Big “thank you” is owed to the playtesters that have gotten back to us with feedback so far. We might not respond to everything, but we do read it all carefully.
Now I’m flailing around in Adobe Premiere trying to remember how trailers are made. We’ve settled on a release date, but I’m not going to commit us to it publicly this week. It’s in April, and we’re shooting for iOS and Android at the same time.
And we’re back from the Game Developer’s Conference. It’s always great to spend a week outside of our bubble and get some insight from our peers. We got to try a lot of cool stuff that other mobile developers were up to (Unpossible, Adventure Beaks, Monsters vs. Monacles) and got some great feedback on Tilt to Live 2’s new Brimstone Pinball gametype. This was actually the first time we’d put it into someone else’s hands, so it was great to see people hitting that retry button without us even asking.
You can watch our early build of Brimstone Pinball in action at the links below (I don’t think we ever quite get to the hardest waves of enemies). Huge thanks to the press people on this list for giving us the chance to show you our project!
With an early build of the new gametype in tow, we’re off to the Game Developers Conference for a week of learning and fellowship. If you stumble across us at the conference, be sure to ask for a demo of Brimstone Pinball. It’s still young and in need of feedback, especially in regard to difficulty.
This is Baron Brimstone, our sinister pinball mascot. He looks forward to incinerating you with his army of tricked-out, evil pinball bumpers. If you’d like an email reminder when Brimstone Pinball hits Tilt to Live 2, you can sign up here!
This was an idea we thought had some promise: bat the brimstone into goals that appear along the arena’s edge, while beating up some new and more durable enemy types. The little ice bricks would destroy your brimstone on impact, so you wanted to try to dribble around those. There was also a shot clock component, where you’d either lose your combo or die if it ran out before you could score your next goal.
The prototype felt decent, but it just wasn’t that fluid. It was while we were spit balling ideas for improvement that this mode took on a whole new life. Next week, we’ll finally show you what you can expect for the first Tilt to Live 2 expansion.
Today is Tilt to Live’s 4th birthday, and we’re celebrating with the long-awaited release of Tilt to Live 2 on Android! Now more people than ever can experience the magic of the laser mace, and the child-like wonder of the hungry shield. It plays on both Android mobile devices and tablets, and will run best on mid-to-high end devices made within the last few years. If you experience any technical issues, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Tilt to Live 2’s Android release is just around the corner, and we’re zeroing in on our favorite new gametype idea.
When Tilt to Live 2 was still in development, we considered doing a “Boss Gauntlet” mode for the first big update. You’d go through all of the Classic and Code Red bosses back-to-back, seeing how far you could make it with a single life. We were even going to create a new, bigger boss fight with the Dot King if you fought all the way to the end. The sketch above was one of my favorite background concepts.
Ultimately, we scrapped that idea in favor of creating a fresh experience, since you guys have been battling these bosses since November. We’ve started prototyping a different idea, and it’s showing a lot of promise so far.
Tilt to Live 2 will be available on Google Play February 24th, and will run best on more recent, mid-to-high-end devices. You can sign up for an email reminder here.
At the same time we’re putting that together, Alex and I are debating and prototyping a brand new gametype, coming to all platforms a little later. Our list of weapon and gametype ideas is the sum of almost four years of “hey, that’d be neat”, so now we just have to narrow it down and philosophize until we arrive at something we both get excited about. We’ve started by each bringing our top three gametype ideas to the table, and we’re narrowing that down to two.
I got engaged! And that means I don’t have to write a real blog post this week.
