We’re aiming to submit Outwitters to Apple this month, so… we’re busy.

Alex is squashing bugs likes it’s Men in Black 1 up in this. I realize I never have anything interesting to say about what Alex is doing anymore, and that’s because he’s on the “little fixes” phase of production. The accomplishments are still important, and it’s hard work, just not that sexy. Like this latest build he made blurry sprites look sharp.

And me? With the game artwork done I’m shifting over to some trailer stuff, and trying to get together a commemorative poster for the release like I did for Tilt to Live. My plan is that for every game we make, I want a piece of artwork to hang on my office wall. Nothing with logos or marketing poop all over it, just a cool little scene. Something I can look at when I’m feeling insecure and say, “oh yeah, I have made some games before.” Here’s the work in progress:

As we’ve mentioned before, we’re sitting on a feature-complete-but-buggy Outwitters, which has all of the artwork it needs to be complete. I’ve heard whispers of a June release being “fa sho”, but when exactly, and whether that will truly come to pass, I cannot say with certainty. So while Alex does codes to squash crashing bugs and improve performance, I’ve been looking critically at the visual odds and ends.

And nitpicking.

The original character sprites were done in November/December of 2010, and I’ve hated many of them for nearly as long. So after overhauling map backgrounds and tilesets for the third time, I decided I’d bite the bullet and take another pass on characters. I had the time, and it doesn’t delay Alex’s work. So what ensued was the minor, but in my opinion worthwhile, process of redrawing and reanimating seven characters from facing forward, to facing slightly left. I realize how that sounds.

The difference is subtle, but it makes for slightly more dynamic screenshots, plus I finally got to fix the Feedback medic. You see, all of the one-eyed characters in Outwitters were snipers, except the Feedback medic. And all of the medics in Outwitters had crosses incorporated into their design, except the Feedback medic. It was maddening.

Having turned everyone sideways, I finally feel like the game’s artwork is the best I can do without completely starting over. That’s been my goal since I first “finished” the graphics for Outwitters last June.

Adam the Artist

I recently finished an XBLA title I’d been itching to play since GDC, Bastion. Their creative lead gave a talk on atmosphere in games that I really enjoyed. At the end of the game you’re presented with two pretty heavy choices which determine your ending. That’s not unusual, but what I really loved about the way they approached this was that none of the endings is “right”. The game just asks you to consider what you would do, without “gotcha” consequences for choosing wrong. It’s also a fun hack n’ slash with a lot of imagination, so you should pick it up if you haven’t already.

On iOS lately I’m mostly playing the Outwitters beta. And I tried a few bad games that I can’t recommend.

Alex the Codesmith

I actually turned on my Xbox 360! I did it to play Awesomenauts for a couple hours. It’s a 3 vs. 3 side-scrolling DOTA/Team Fortress mash up. Hilarious fun and love the style. Definitely worth checking it out if you’re looking to play a fun multiplayer game with some buddies.

On the iOS front I highly recommend checking out SpellTower if you haven’t already. Do it.

Yesterday, we sat down with Owen Faraday of PocketTactics.com to talk about this game we’re almost done with. He threw us some Q’s, and we provided some effin’ A’s. You can read it all right now on the internet!

Now that the Outwitters beta testers have broken it in, the OML Forums are open for biness (big thanks to Mike Berg of WeHeartGames for helping us make that happen). We figure a community-centered multiplayer game like Outwitters is going to require some sort of… community center. So when the game comes out and you’re in need of a serious 2v2 partner, we hope you’ll drop in. Feel free to register and post amongst yourselves in the mean time.

Seems like just yesterday Whitaker Blackall was composing our very first piece of custom game music, Tilt to Live‘s Code Red theme. But that was long ago, when he was still called Whitaker Blackall.

The now hitched and renamed Whitaker Trebella  joined the proud fraternity of iPhone developers today with his first App Store release, Polymer (99¢). It’s a slidey connecty puzzle piece game, best demonstrated by this trailer:

We’ve all been blown away by how far and how fast Whit’s development career has matured (though it helps that he has no shortage of enthusiasm). We wish him the best of luck with this game, and encourage you guys to throw him a buck and check it out!

We recently approved this theme song by Mike Reagan, composer for games like God of War and Darksiders. He described his vision for the music as “cute, but maniacal”, and apparently spent a lot of time staring at the evil little imp in our logo.

The X is just a roman numeral for ten. I’m not trying to make this update seem more extreme than other updates; it just happens to look amazing with an X at the end.

Alex is working on adding the store to Outwitters, after which he says we are “feature complete”. My ears perked up a little when I heard that. Don’t let the word “store” throw you, we won’t be selling hats or gold or nuclear arms (you can’t hug the world with nuclear arms). Just teams and maps. We don’t even have plans for bugging you with ads. This is the ideal we’d like to make work. We’ll see how that goes.

In Artland (population: me), the game tiles are getting a makeover. One thing that stood out for me from GDC was art directors talking about focal points, contrast and color. These were important lessons from art school that I’d left to die by the side of the road. I was drawing tiles the same way I drew characters, and everyone kept asking what they did! They are walls. They do nothing. IGNORE THEM.

You may have noticed that Tilt to Live HD‘s retina update hit the App Store last night. That’s the first thing we’ve sent for approval since, like last March. We vaguely remember this feeling. I think it’s called accomplishment.

Meanwhile, in Outwitters

Retina blowup is going smoother than TtL’s did, even though the game is 10 times bigger or something. We were quasi-prepared for this. Alex is still busy fixing bugs and adding stuff, so I have even more time to address bad art. I’m glad we’ve taken so long. The gameplay is better balanced for it, and my art skills have gotten lots of practice redoing things.

Also, we’re in the process of rolling this guy out, which should come in handy when you’re looking for a 2v2 partner:

I don’t know if you guys remember, but we made this game a while back called Tilt to Live HD. Then the iPhone 4’s retina display came along, and we wondered whether we had gotten our app names backward. So with the release of the iPad 3 and its retina display, we decided  it was time to finally justify the HD monicker. We’ve spent the last two weeks or so digging through the most poorly organized art files, the most amateur of code, and at last we’ve submitted the retina update. It’s on it’s way through Apple’s approval process to come live on your iPad 3 soon.

Just look at how much detail we were able to pack into the enemy designs!