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!

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.