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.

Thanks to Mike Berg of We Heart Games for helping us get this new site design online! It’s the same great taste, just with a nifty new wrapper. If you notice anything’s broken, let us know and we’ll patch it up.

December is over, and so is 12 Indie Apps for Christmas. We kind of pigeon holed ourselves by dragging Christmas into it. Can’t really keep that kind of thing going past December. Anyway, we’re thrilled to report that over $10,000 was raised for Child’s Play and Doctors Without Borders! (Our portion is headed to Child’s Play.) Big thanks to anyone that supported the effort, or who felt bad for not participating and donated a dollar here.

This Year at OML

The doctors say 2011 likely won’t make it past the new year, so with a heavy heart we bid it farewell. We may not have anything to show for it yet, but 2011 was hard work. Outwitters has required a lot of learning. New tech, new work flow, new genre, universal device support… It’s no wonder our release estimate was so far off. But we’re both really proud of the work in progress, and we can’t wait to see the rest of the bells and whistles fall into place.

Our New Years Resolution

The App Store hasn’t heard from us in a while, and we aim to change that in 2012. Outwitters should hit the store sometime before the end of March, after which we have a few content updates planned.  Hopefully by year’s end we’ll be neck-deep in some kind of Game III, maybe even releasing it.

Thanks for keeping tabs on us this year. Don’t drink and drive, and we’ll see you guys in 2012 WITH ACTUAL GAME CONTENT FOR YOU TO PLAY.

The following is an actual excerpt from a textbook called Game Development Essentials: Mobile Game Development. I was asked about my vision for the future of mobile gaming, a topic I think about pretty much every day.