The Outwitters Veggienaut update has been finalized and submitted to Apple! Their review process usually takes a week or so. Thanks for your patience with the delays (we didn’t see them coming either). If you’d like an email as soon as the update goes live, sign up for our mailing list. We don’t send much, mostly just new release notifications.
The new & improved Adorables spawn menu.
Did I say we’d be submitting Outwitters 1.2 this week? No, I don’t think I ever said that. You’d be hard pressed to find a written record of me saying anything like that.
We’ll almost certainly be submitting next week. Got some last-minute fixes that need doin’.
Had some setbacks, so we’ve moved our Veggienauts submission date to next week. If things go smoothly, you’ll have all kinds of new stuff to play with around the 15th.
It’s not really fan art, but an interesting blog post was brought to our attention by an Australian teacher that’s been using Outwitters in his classroom. We’re a little jealous that his kids have already got Mobi-less teleport technology in their Outwitters maps, but we’re proud to help train the Australian Super-Titans of the future.
Taking some time to jazz up the spawn menus. Don’t worry, it’s not an in-app purchase. Just a nice touch, I think.
Thanks to a nifty tool Alex made, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at Outwitters replays recently. Who won? How many capture point wits did he get? How many units did he kill? How much did he spend moving; how much attacking? My face hurts, frankly. I remember balancing Tilt to Live. We basically just watched how long it took people to die. Ah, simplicity.
A little beta craziness on a new map called Thorn Gulley. It’s interesting to see the different uses testers have come up with for Bramble. You can block paths with him, or just creep up on a capture point. We’re still debating and tweaking, but all of the new maps and content are finally playable. Hope to be ready to submit by the end of the month.
Ryan Rigney (author of Buttonless, which featured our first game Tilt to Live) came to us a few weeks ago with praise for Outwitters’ bold Free to Play model. No gold or extra lives being sold, just good wholesome content like I used to buy when I was a boy. “So how’s that working out for you?” he asked.
We figured we’d share our numbers so other small studios might make a better decision than we did. With 2% of 500,000 users buying something in your app, you need them to spend an average of $30 dollars each to break even on a $300,000 game (salaries for 2 people for 1.75 years, plus company overhead, custom sound, and half a year’s server costs). We should have done that math, and not overestimated the number of downloads “free” would attract. Consumables also weren’t a good fit for a competitive multiplayer game, which should’ve been a red flag that free to play was not a great choice.
So free to play + prominent Apple feature does not equal an automatic slam dunk. Lesson learned. We’re still proud of the game.
Adam the Artist
I picked up Lili for the iPad recently, a game developed by a team of former Epic employees. I like to imagine them working on Gears of War, constantly pitching flower-based game mechanics. “What if instead of a chainsaw machine gun, you jump on their backs and pick flowers? Why won’t anyone listen to us? We quit.”
Aside from being very pretty for an iPad title, they’ve created a world that’s genuinely fun to explore. The combat mechanic’s pretty straightforward. It’s tactile and it fits the device well, but it’s not really the core of the game. I had just as much fun wandering around talking to people.
My biggest gameplay qualm was with the last area, Mill Hill, which had some ridiculously tough enemies. So much so that I ran out of buffer items, and just gave up and switched to easy mode. I wonder if that was intentionally to get people to buy IAP, or just a bad progression of difficulty. Or maybe I just suck, but those guys felt impossible to topple without LOTS of items.
Alex the Codesmith
is a busy man this month.
Sorry, New Team Name Guessing thread. It’s not the velocipedists. We’ll save that idea for a racing game.
In our original Outwitters announcement, we showed off some concept art featuring a weird little plant soldier. He was from a team called the Naturals, which was only ever playable in our paper prototype and never actually made it into the game. For our first big team pack addition, we’ve resurrected these characters as the Veggienauts.
We call their special unit Bramble, and he has the gift of the green thumb. When rooted down, he grows his own destructible thorn barriers (no spawn tile required). In our first beta build, each barrier he plants will extend his reach. This will allow him to slowly spread his way across the map like a weed, blocking weak spots, capping Bonus Spaces, or providing cover for allies moving up the field. His exact balance and mechanics will be tweaked as we test over the coming weeks, but we aim to put the new team (and its new maps) in your hands sometime late in October. It’ll be a freebie for any über pack owners out there.
Stay tuned for more updates, artwork, and hilarious delay announcements.
All the animations for the new team were finished up this week, ready for Alex to start plugging into a fresh beta build. Hopefully our testers can start breaking it in around the end of next week. We like what we’ve seen with pen and paper playtests, but time will tell if we find any major balance problems. If this particular special doesn’t work out, we’ve got backups.
If no one complains about anything in this post’s comments, I’ll show off some of the new team artwork next week. Hey, look, it’s an alternate Feedback base:
Now that we’ve patched some of the more critical problems with Outwitters 1.0, Alex is starting to funnel in some new stuff for the 1.2 beta. He needs artwork again! I am remembering what it feels like to be useful.
If you’re still running into the bugs we tried to fix in 1.1, don’t hesitate to submit a bug report. Alex answers as many of these as he can, but we can promise yours will at least be read.
So what kind of stuff are we thinking about adding for our next update? A new team pack with new maps, definitely. And this pack will be unlocked for anyone that already purchased the Über Pack (the game limit upgrade we added in 1.1 wasn’t included because it wasn’t a team pack). iPhone 5 support? Possibly, if we don’t hit any major snags. I’ve also been toying with a few alternate base designs for each race. Here’s one for the Adorables that I call Castle Cutenstein:
