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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”.
Some more less-circular ideas for Tilt to Live 2 enemies. Again, no idea what (if any) of this will make it into the final game. We’re kind of hovering around the concept of giving the dots some war machines. The battering ram dots are an adaptation of the old big red throwing knives from Tilt to Live 1’s Gauntlet mode. The tank is probably a bit much for a Tilt to Live game, but I like his little general hat.
This was one of the first concept pieces I played with for Tilt to Live 2. None of this stuff is guaranteed to make it into the game, but you can see I’m messing with some alternate enemy types. As much as I enjoy the idea of a big freaky mega dot, it has to fit well with the flow of the game to make it into the final product.
Most of my concept work is just quick sketching thrown around on a big canvas, with some color or grayscale values thrown in occasionally to flesh things out. Nothing super-polished, just enough to make the idea tangible. I’m pretty determined to do more than just draw circles for this game, so we’ll see where that ambition takes us.
