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:

If you haven’t updated to Outwitters 1.1, you are missing out! Literally. The game won’t let you play again until you update. Here’s a breakdown of new things that aren’t old anymore.

The Ups and Downs of Your Game Limit

If you bought anything at all from the Outwitters store, your game limit is still good old 20! We’ve added an item to the store that increases it to 35 if you wanna. We really do appreciate anyone that’s dropped us a few dollars in your time with our game. Profits help us fund updates like new maps and teams. As long as Outwitters is paying the bills, we can keep working on it! (We’ll have news on our first team addition soon.)

If you’re a free user with no intention of ever buying anything, that’s totally cool by us! But we’ve reduced your game limit to 5, because there are A LOT of you and your turns are pretty expensive for us. If that makes you mad, we’re very sorry, but it only costs $3 for you to not be mad anymore.

New:

• New item in the store. Increase your max game limit to 35!

Fixes:

• fixed a crash on new league game
• fixes for games not timing out after 4 days
• fixes for large turn count games not loading
• fixed crash on viewing profile and exiting quickly
• fixed crash when joining a game due to a desynced server/client game state
• no active games list bug fixed
• fixed crashing when servers are down for maintenance

Map Change:

• Starting soldier has been moved back on Foundry, helping to neuter one rush strategy

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.

No news on the patch update this week, other than it isn’t submitted for Apple’s approval yet. Seeing how apps take about a week to get approved, I’d say early next month is the more likely release date. We’re as antsy as anyone to start testing new team pack ideas, but we also don’t want to rush this patch and break the game. Sorry for the delay.

While you wait, I’d recommend everyone check out this thread from our forums, if you haven’t already. NathanDetr0it, which I like to think is not a psuedonym, does an excellent job breaking down the strategic subtleties behind Outwitters’ simple rules. It might change the way you look at your turns. It might change the way you look at your life.

Adam the Artist

I actually found an app all on my own for iOS, which is, like, unheard of. It was in the App Store’s “What’s Hot” section while Outwitters was being featured. The icon intrigued me, I tapped for details, & the screen shots closed the deal. So that’s what that feels like, I thought.

Shellrazer is a war-turtle-riding simulator from the guys that made N+, which Alex and I used to play together. I’m not sure how well this one will work on an iPhone, but on iPad it was perfect for me. You stack some guns on top of your turtle, throw some perks on those guns, and mow down goblins and gun towers and sheep-mounted knights. The difficulty gets pretty nuts towards the end, so paying attention to which guns work best on who and what perks you need becomes really important. I had a blast.

Alex the Codesmith

I’ve been on a PC gaming kick as of late, meaning more than Starcraft 2. Every now and then, especially after a major release or between projects, I tend to go through a lot of games. I usually don’t even come close to beating them. I’ve kind of gotten over the nagging “completionist” in me. If a game offers a decent amount of entertainment for a reasonable amount of time, I’m happy. Maybe it’s a sign of getting older…

In any case, one game I picked up during the Steam Summer Sale was Anno 2070. Very cool city building game with insane amount of depth. The selling point for me was the ability to play in the same ‘world’ with friends, either as separate cities or sharing a city. Provided for some good times.

Another game I’ve sunk a decent amount of hours into was the Arma 2 mod Day Z. It’s in alpha so ‘buggy’ doesn’t really begin to describe the quirkiness of that game. But it’s definitely playable and extremely difficult. The concept of being put on a vast landmass to survive on your own, avoiding zombies, and other players was really compelling. Death in this game is permanent. You start from square one when you die. You could be a month into the game, miles north into the territory and have a bad run in with some zombies, starve to death, or get killed by some bandits (other players) that don’t like the way you looked at them. From a design perspective, the game is fascinating. It’s a multiplayer game where paranoia between players is truly real, and even though there are weapons not everyone is rushing to point X to up their kill/death ratio. Killing another player in this game has a unnerving effect (at least on me). If you manage to kill someone (either by accident, defensively, or just by being a griefer) the consequences are huge. You could have potentially wiped out weeks if not months of another player’s playtime with a single shot (click of the mouse).

And finally, I’m currently pretty into Tower Wars by Supervillain Studios. It recently came out for PC on Steam. I’ve never been a big Tower Defense fan (mostly from fatigue of the game type), but this game was refreshing enough for me to be genuinely interested in the nuances of the tower interactions with the creeps. Having 2v2 and 3v3 co-op head-to-head is kind of what clinched it for me (again). Good times had by all.

David “the Code Penguin” Lambert recently brought to our attention something he’s been working on for Outwitters: a browser-based replay viewer! Not only can you watch your replay without an iDevice, you also get to see a fog of war overlay for each player, a move by move summary of the action, AND it can generate a heatmap of your game (which I think shows you which spaces and paths were used; correct me if I’m wrong). I hate to say it, but this is cooler than our in-game replay if you’re wanting to analyze your game.

Check out this sample Super-Titan replay, or plug in a link of your own! You’re going to want to bookmark this. For anyone out of the loop, you can copy a replay link from any completed game in Outwitters by tapping and holding the entry in your games list. These URL’s can be viewed on any device with Outwitters installed, or by plugging them into David’s contraption.

Fan art by Pyyrhic

We come to the end of another week working on our patch update, which should alleviate Outwitters’ most annoying bugs and crashes. We’re aiming to have that out around the end of the month, after which we can start testing our new team pack ideas.

If you’ve been eyeing any Outwitters IAP, I’d suggest you take this plunge this weekend. Everything bumps up to non-sale prices on Monday!