The funny thing about Josh Trumper’s fan art submission is that I have an eerily similar page in my Outwitters sketchbook. I couldn’t have done a better job assigning roles for the Tilt to Live power ups myself. In fact, I didn’t… His are more clever.

In his own words: “The Red Dot Destroying Arrows are a team of silent types who enjoy nothing but setting off power ups and killing red dots… and they’re all out of dots.” I kid you not, Josh has 3 paragraphs of very specific ideas for his Vortex special character, an invulnerable sinkhole that consumes friends and foes alike. He even suggested a 3 turn countdown before the Vortex activates, just like Tilt to Live. Someone has a bright future in game design ahead of them.

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, Josh 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.

We got hung up on the topic of predictability this past week. As in: is it a good thing to see your opponent coming a mile away? Alex had a pretty neat idea for including fog of war without having to add any character stats. So we diverted attention to a prototype, and are now in the process of running a “wonder-what-he’s-doing” build through the ringer. The response has been good so far; it feels like a completely different game. Time will tell if there are any dominant strategies or other unfairness, but having secrets is fun.

While that’s being tried and debated, we’re returning to menus and other odds and ends of a tedious nature (from my perspective, anyway). After a meeting yesterday, we do have a much clearer understanding of what’s left to do. Now we just tick our way down this list to the finish line. Outwitters is slated for release early 2012.

Recently we were invited to not just one, but TWO interviews. We were all like, you remember who we are?

I sat down with Rondal of Startfrag.com and did my damnedest to recollect things about developing Tilt to Live. Then I was asked to analyze trends and make predictions about the industry. Y’know, things I’m thoroughly unqualified to do. Watch as I squirm and answer a question about indies with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, for some reason.

Alex and I were also recently grilled by author Ryan Rigney for his upcoming book “Buttonless: Incredible iPhone and iPad Games and the Stories Behind Them” (available for pre-order on Amazon.com). We were incredible enough to make the cut, and now it’s in writing, and he can never take it back.

Is it November already? This week we hit a pretty important milestone; Outwitters is finally a universal app! Alex has already taken a few turns from his iPhone, and the transition seems to have gone as smoothly as we’d hoped. There are some nasty new bugs popping up in the universal build, but we’re that much closer to the game we intend to release.

In the graphics department, each race now has one fully-themed map up and running with its animated background, most of them with music. It’s nice to see how everything came together, and to be able to play a few maps that look how they will on release day.

There are still a bunch of menus and level backgrounds to assemble, a sound engine to implement, and some mo’ quality assurance testing to do. So we’re pretty much prepared to walk the release date back to early 2012. That takes our lofty goal of releasing two games this year and whittles it down to… no games. But hey, we’ll be kicking 2012 off with a pretty big one.

iPad Screenshot

Adam the Artist

I love Batman. My last 3 hours playing it haven’t even been on the main story, but the side missions all feel really important. As a result, I do constantly feel un-Batman, because I’m letting people down left and right. But it’s not my fault. I can’t fly three feet without someone screaming, “HELP ME BATMAN, MY PROBLEM IS TIME SENSITIVE.” I can only Batman one of you guys at a time.

On iOS, I really enjoyed Nyx Quest (<- lite version) recently. It’s a platformer with touch interactions; probably the most relaxing platformer I’ve ever played. The music is very zen, and the environments are these bright, beautiful desert ruins. Even the enemies are relaxing, especially after you get the “zap anything you touch” power. It’s not challenging at all, but it’s a pleasant way to spend a few hours. Made me want to make a platformer.

Alex the Codesmith

I recently picked up Frozen Synapse from the Humble Frozen Bundle. I’ve been halfheartedly following it since beta, but never took the time to play it. I’ve apparently been missing out. The game is awesome! Admittedly, I’m not fanatical about turn-based strategy games (and yet here I am making one, hah), but what Mode 7 did with Frozen Synapse is mix turn-based strategy with some interesting tactical action elements reminiscent of an over-head view of a Counter-Strike match. That’s about the best I can explain it on a high level. The multiplayer games are short, satisfying, and intense. I haven’t given single player a try yet, but you should know by now that’s not what draws me in. And the great thing about it is there’s very little time commitment. You start a few games, do a few turns, then leave and come back the next day. It’s got the feel of a well-designed asynchronous mobile game, but on the PC, yet it feels very right. The graphics are clean, but very spartan. The design of Frozen Synapse is the kind of thing that gets me excited about designing games. It’s a very raw “game”, with almost no fluff or padding. Strip away all audio and graphics and you lose almost nothing to the core ‘experience’ of playing this game. Just game rules, 2 players, and a fun game “system” to explore the nuances of.

Editor’s note: Adam has chosen to disregard Alex’s blatant disrespect for his vocation.

This was kind of an odd week, so we completely forgot to write a blog post. Please accept this Adorables Theme concept by Outwitters’ composer Whitaker Blackall in its stead. It’s his take on the Dance of the Sugar Plumb Fairies.

This is probably more than our second update, but I only just started numbering them… so here’s 2!

Adam hurt his wittle index finger working too much, then double & triple hurt it when he tried to treat the problem himself. The moral of that story is: go to a freaking doctor. Luckily, I made enough headway for Alex to not even notice I’m down. This week he’s been working on implementing the game’s very short interactive tutorial, so hopefully next week he can start adapting it to work on an iPhone.

In playtesting land, we’re very close to the point where everything feels properly balanced. The Adorables vs. the Scallywags seems to play out pretty fair, but the Feedback‘s special character still feels kinda useless by comparison. We’ve seen the regular units used in roughly equal measure, though, so I’m pretty confident we can call them ready. Hard to believe I’ve been playing Outwitters since last November (when the game only ran in Adobe Illustrator). I guess that’s one good thing about a long development cycle: by the time it reaches you guys, we’ve had a year to figure out what doesn’t work.

Still have a small backlog of fanarts, or farts as I like to call them for short. Little backed up with all these farts. Today’s submission is from Himanshu Modi, literally hand-painted on his iPad with an app called Procreate. I’ll let him explain it in his own words.

“Can you not make a sort of a platforming game out of Tilt to Live… you know like Gauntlet mode in the iPhone, where you have a sense of going from left to right like a platformer, but where instead of dying, you end a level, say after a minute, with a boss fight? It’s easy enough to picture right? You could have a cool story about how Tilt is out to save the world… or, well, his girlfriend.” (His name’s actually not Tilt, it’s You. That’s a little How to Play trivia.)

Hats off to Himanshu for imagination. We gave him an arrow with a circle under it, and he turned it into a blockbuster!

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, Him (can I call you Him?) 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.

Another productive week at OML Headquarters! The alpha version of the game now has Unranked Online matches mostly working, which is our last gametype after the League stuff & Pass n’ Play. Now that those big pieces are in place, the bug hunt begins.

I’d also like the world to know that I’m ranked Super-Titan #1 for probably the only time in my career. Just wanted to get that in writing. Feels good. If you’re curious, I won the honor when our friend Josh Macias accidentally hit “Give Up” instead of “Replay”. So “beating” an unbeatable player was worth enough points to catapult me to Super-Titan, where I am currently alone. Still counts, Josh. Suck it.

In other news, Mobi sucks. I hate him more than any idea I have ever been partly responsible for. He is a hellgate which floods the world with an endless supply of deadly snipers. We’ll be addressing that.

Adam the Artist

I recently retreated to a childhood favorite while I wait for Silent Hill Downpour & Batman. Anyone remember Psi-Ops for the X-Box? It was a really creative third-person shooter, with mind control powers and pyrokinesis, and the power to blow people’s heads up with your mind. Sure, the AI is dumb as bricks, and almost all the boss fights are completed by throwing boxes at people to death. But still, mind-jacking a sniper, making them shoot all their friends, then jumping them off a building was an experience worth reliving. You can download a free, ad-supported version somewhere (couldn’t find a good link), or buy it here.

On iOS I fell in love with Gesundheit! this month. It’s a stylish stealth game about monsters that eat boogers… Despite what that might sound like, it’s well worth your money.

Alex the Codesmith

My current playing habits on iOS, whenever I do have time to play, gravitates towards Touchgrind BMX lately. I’m a huge fan of the old Tony Hawk Pro Skater series back in the day, and illusion labs’ latest entry brings back that spark, and also executes it extremely well on a mobile platform.

It’s that genuine feeling of accomplishment that you actually got better at something rather than the game artificially boosting stats as you progress that I find appealing with these kind of games. Starting out in touchgrind BMX my scores were meager and it looked completely impossible to achieve the scores needed to advance to further levels. But after watching a tutorial or two, I immediately saw what I needed to work on, and through practice my scores starting rising and levels started unlocking! A pure game. Love it.