We’re still experimenting with some balance tweaks as more of the menus come online. This time we’re playing with unit pricing. Where everyone but the special guys used to cost the same, we’re going to try making the weaker, more mobile guys cheaper to build than the heavy hitters. Bases have been a bit too easy to defend vs. attack, so making slow, defensive guys more expensive should help even things out.

In other news, we finally have a sound engine in place! Alex took it upon himself to collect placeholder sound effects, including some of the most annoying filler I’ve ever heard. For example, when an Adorables heavy jumps to a new space, he now shouts “DERRRRR… WHERE’S DA PRINCESS?! A-HURRR HURRR.”

Every time he moves.

We’ve joined forces this month with eleven of our colleagues in a little charitable venture called 12 Indie Apps for Christmas. We’re donating 25% of our December earnings from the original Tilt to Live to Child’s Play, a game industry charity dedicated to improving the lives of children with toys and games in a network of over 70 hospitals worldwide. And if you already have Tilt to Live, which is pretty likely, check out the roster of 11 other apps you could buy to support the cause. Or just go to the Child’s Play website and give them some money directly. These are all good things to do for sick kids on Christmas.

Of course if you are a sick kid reading this from a hospital, this post is not for you.

Alex is slowly funneling more users into the Outwitters beta, including other devs like Michael Bean of Disc Drivin’. How can you get in on some of this Outwitters beta action? You could submit your udid and device info here with the topic “Beta Request”, and hope very picky Alex picks you. We don’t have many slots available, so no promises.

It’s looking like fog of war is getting a thumbs up (from me and Alex at least). The element of surprise adds some tension to the gameplay that wasn’t there before. Not to mention the thrill of setting little traps in the dark.

Next week we’ll still be slowly working to get more menus online and old ones revised. I only recently got an iPhone in front of me with my menus running, and man those buttons are tiny. So that’s all gotta be retouched. We’re also going to try adding a full game replay, so you could watch your match start to finish without fog afterward… which is yet another menu to put together. Outwitters is still slated for release early next year.

New Adorables and Scallywags base designs.

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.