Adam the Artist

Silent Hill Downpour is finally out, and the reviews I’ve seen are split pretty evenly between love and loathing. I’m about 5 hours in, and though it definitely has its share of blemishes (read: haunted police cars), I’d say Vatra gets it. It’s an interesting character-driven journey in the tradition of SH2 (though it feels less mature so far), and it does some clever things to evolve the series gameplay-wise. Opening the town up into more of a sandbox experience was inspired (but all the choke points and dead ends are pretty discouraging for me).  I think I’ll always have a soft spot for this series, because these are horror games that at least try to approach things seriously.

On iOS I keep coming back to Beat Sneak Bandit, a stealth/rhythm/puzzle game from Simogo. It’s beautiful, clever, and it won Best Mobile Game at the 2012 Independent Games Festival. I don’t have the best sense of rhythm, but this kind of one-more-try gameplay does a pretty good job of sucking me in.

Alex the Codesmith

I managed to find time to play and ‘finish’ (although I don’t think that’s the right word as I think it encourages multiple replays) Journey. The newest game from thatgamecompany (makers of flOw and Flower). The game is an amazing piece of work. And my experience with it was quite fascinating.  They definitely took lessons learned from their previous games and have applied them masterfully here in regards to flow, control, and feel of the game. I recall starting the game out and going through the first few segments by myself. Other than the gorgeous graphics, there wasn’t much else that was keeping me interested and my patience was wearing thin. Then another journeymen’s head popped up over a hillside and then within a few short minutes I understood what TGC was aiming for with this game. They’ve done something really special in terms of making a single player game feel relevant outside the bounds of the game. It’s hard to explain, but once I experienced the feelings and emotions that Journey had me go through with fellow travelers it made me giddy for the future of this platform and the single player ‘experience’. Although, Journey felt much more closely to a work of art than a game to me. In terms of mechanics and story the game is pretty shallow, but what they accomplished with their laser focused premise of Journey I think will stick with me for a while, and I think will serve as an excellent reference for designers who wish to raise the bar in the ‘experience/interaction’ category of game design.

I, sadly, haven’t been doing much exploring on iOS. I’ve been coming back to the usual staple of Disc Drivin’ and Scramble with Friends. I flirted with Draw Something for a bit before letting it go. I appreciate what it’s done and was able to prove. In a marketplace where conventional wisdom tells you that you have to have traditional game mechanics and victory conditions to be successful, Draw Something turned that convention on it’s head and showed us how many people there really are outside our insular ‘gamer circle’ waiting to be entertained.

We’re back from GDC, and only I have escaped the clutches of the conference plague. The one where fluids burst forth uncontrollably from every orifice. That’s what I’m told, anyway. Alex and our sound designer Mike were less fortunate, so they’re both out of commission until the spewing ceases. Then I imagine they have mopping to do. I am the one man left ™.

Our GDC meetings went well, Outwitters got some hot news love, and I got to see a ton of really interesting lectures from people who make games better than me. Oh and the iPad 3 is a jerk, cause now I gotta make lots of stuff THAT I ALREADY MADE AND AM SO TOTALLY OVER bigger. We’re going to try updating TtL HD to retina first, and if these dusty old, unorganized, what-the-hell-was-I-thinking art files play nice, maybe we’ll release it.

You may notice in our news clips that we keep saying we’re about two months away from Outwitters’ release. We’re gonna try really hard to not be liars again. We have in fact read The Boy Who Cried Wolf and taken its lessons to heart. Trailer’s coming sometime soon.

We’re on a plane to San Francisco this morning, ready to show Outwitters to some press folk after a few hard weeks of polish. You might wanna keep an eye on TouchArcade.com next week to see if they post about their hands on experience with the game. Also, I drew you a picture.

Another marathon painting week for me while Alex squashes bugs. GDC… uncomfortably… close. Not much time to get this message to the outside world. Tell our moms we’re okay.

All week, I’ve been hard at work painting level backgrounds while Alex rounds out the game’s feature list. The annual Game Developers Conference is about 2 weeks away, and we need to have something presentable, nay, impressive to show for our year of development time. Here’s a taste of a new Scallywags background, and then I’m back to work.

Adam the Artist

I’ve been dusting off some old games in my library while I wait for Mass Effect 3 and Silent Hill: Downpour (both next month!). Lots of people will watch a movie more than once; I like to play really good games more than once. So I’ve been messing with Bioshock and Devil May Cry 3 & 4, which are old and I don’t think anyone wants to hear about them.

Saw these guys do their Mega Man 2 show recently, and I am in love. Their Castlebandia album is incredible. Stream it. Buy it. Love it.

Alex the Non-Artist

I’ve actually played some games other than Starcraft 2 (hurray!). On a sad note, I tried playing Starcraft 2 a couple days ago after a couple week hiatus and it wasn’t pretty. That game is brutal. I played Spiral Knights with a friend over the past weekend and had a really fun time with it. It has some fun MMO aspects with the auctioning, and persistent overworld, but drops most MMO tropes when you enter a ‘dungeon’ and it becomes a 4-player co-op action hack-n-slash game. It has a fair share of clever puzzles and really challenging boss battles. Coming off my disappoint from Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was really pleased to see a game that didn’t sacrifice playability for the sake of being able to call itself a “true MMO”. I don’t know if it’s sad or awesome that the combat in Spiral Knights was way more fun and engaging than in SWTOR, given that one has the stigma of being called a ‘free-2-play’ game (from an iOS app store perspective) and another a ‘premium high-budget MMO’.

I actually got to play the Diablo 3 beta for a little bit as well. But without any buddies that are also in the beta I have little to no desire to go back. I think I’ve played more Outwitters than any other game over the past several weeks really. With each iteration I’m enjoying it more and more. Some of our testers are getting hundreds of games under their belts, and I’m starting to see play-styles evolve between different players, and with a lot of them being viable I’m extremely excited to see that happen. It’s like the game is coming into it’s own! Still more work to be done on balance though…

Super busy week. Corralling music, sound, and forum contractors for one. The forum thing is totally happening by the way, and when Outwitters comes out we hope you’ll find it useful.

We’ve also been discussing alternative special units for the Feedback and the Adorables, making the cute guy more useful and the smart guy less powerful. Turns out giving a character a 1 hit kill (essentially), then having the victim join your side is kind of overdoing it. No one brain should have all that power.

More exciting (for me), the rest of my artwork is getting funneled in! Units are finally exploding instead of disappearing, and they leap up from an underground bunker instead of just appearing on the spawn space. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have a lot of work to do getting Outwitters ready for GDC.

I’ll be the first to admit we sit on fanart for a long time, but I swear we haven’t had this one since 2003. lolcoptr (who I expect to see at our first World Helicopter Championship) is apparently already itching for the return of Tilt to Live. We take it he’s hoping for more slow motion, some heavy-handed philosophical discussion, and maybe a sexy cake weapon (with an unspeakable effect on dots). Alex didn’t get that last joke, which makes it way funnier to me.

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, Mr. Out Loud Helicopter is getting the item of his choice from our Tilt to Live store. If you have some One Man Left fanart & are over the age of 13, send it over to contests[at]onemanleft.com. If we like your stuff, we’ll post it and send you a free item from our shop.

Haven’t had one of these in a while! The beta’s still going strong, with Alex trickling in a few new users between each milestone. Our latest addition was the profile page, where you can check your total league wins and view all the leaderboards you’re climbing. Eventually we’re hoping to add a tab for your friends’ profiles, so you can easily watch each other and gloat accordingly.

From what I understand, Alex’s next targets are getting death explosions in (which I’ve been dying to see for months… no pun intended), and addressing problems of a crashitory nature. Whit‘s working on some game over musics, and we’re in the process of getting a professional sound designer to bring the characters to life. That’s FOUR people working on a One Man Left game. A new record.

Outwitters is still geared for a March release. Here’s the latest from Whitaker Blackall:

Adam the Artist

I just finished Mass Effect 2, and was scratching my head over what I played before that. Then it hit me: Skyward Sword. It’s not often I forget a 20 hour game, but this one never really grabbed me. It had a lot of clever ideas, but I thought it was just okay for a Zelda game. I never knew flying could get so boring.

Mass Effect 2, which I’m incredibly late getting around to, has the best final battle I can ever remember playing in a game. You have all these choices, and if you choose wrong your friends die. It builds a real tension as you make your way through the mission, one that isn’t usually there. No one’s afraid of dying in a game; you just restart at a checkpoint and try again. But I was afraid of choosing wrong and screwing up the story. Story consequences. I like that. I’ll be picking up the third one in March fa sho.

All I’m playing on iOS is the Outwitters beta. I’ve been playing this thing forever, and I still get excited to check my turns. I’m proud we made this.

Alex the Codesmith

It’s around the holidays I tend to get involved in more games than my usual starcraft 2 and battlefield 3 affairs. I think a large portion of my childhood was dedicated to Tribes. So when I heard Tribes:Ascend was coming out I was all over it. There’s currently a beta going on that I’m playing with a few friends.

The game is shaping up to be a really solid tribes game. Despite their design choices for more diverse classes and loadouts the game still feels like a more robust version of Tribes: LT. LT was a mod of previous tribes where loadouts were restricted to light classes only, and as a result the CTF game had a very team-deathmatchy feel to it with a flag thrown in. It had the positive effect of allowing a shrinking community to still have intense close matches, but the game felt more shallow because the pool of players that specialized in certain niche roles were harder to find. I haven’t played in any high level scrims or anything in Tribes Ascend, but from the pubs I have played in, the game does seem to share a certain feel with LT. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but I do kind of miss the whole ‘heavy offense’ aspect of the game. It was a secondary objective to keep the enemy base down, and it ultimately led to more flag captures. It was crippling when you lost your generators, and probably a bit too harsh in this mainstream game design climate. But now looking at their design choices, they really are advocating fun pub play on both sides (destroying the enemy base is less crippling, turret placements are easy to destroy with tactical strikes, etc). Although the result is your actions have less of a lasting impact on the game at hand. There were certainly games in the Tribes of old where you spent 15 minutes screaming and crying because the enemy has your base so thoroughly owned you could literally not do anything constructive, so maybe it was for the better. It certainly made competitive play extremely enjoyable though.

Another game on my radar is Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. I’ve only played a few hours in, but I’m liking it so far. Although, having played every Assassin’s Creed game before it, I’m starting to sense my interest is waning. And it’s certainly not waning because the game isn’t as good as the previous ones. It’s again, simply a matter of having more engaging games to play in the time I do have to play them. Maybe after Outwitters is done I’ll marathon this one through.

The last ‘new’ game I’m checking out is the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. This thing is massive in every sense of the word. It excels in giving the sense of atmosphere one expects in an epic Star Wars game. But the finer points are lost. Each class has an extensive single player campaign you play through, fully-voice acted Mass Effect 2 style, but the fidelity of it is pretty low compared to a focused, dedicated single player game. It’s not often I play a game to ‘escape’ or immerse myself in a world, but SWTOR can certainly fit the bill when I do have those cravings, despite it’s lackluster gameplay mechanics.