It’s been quite a week for us. Our fake Pinocchio placeholder menus are slooowly being replaced by their “real boy” versions, and we’re starting to wrap our heads around what life will be like in the menus outside the game. There’s a lot more going on in Menu Town than we had in Tilt to Live. Alex hopes to have online matchmaking working in some form soon, so we can start playing asynchronously with friends and family (that feature had been lost while we focused on other stuff). 2v2 is working, and Whitaker Blackall is polishing up a pretty sweet Feedback theme. Lots done and lots still to do!

Here’s a screenshot of the Arrow doing what he does best: pointing at things.

Submitted by Danny Trewin.

I like to imagine that the Arrow sawed that ‘stache off with a spike shield, using a custom tilt calibration. Then attached it to his face with a tiiiiny vortex.

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, THOUGH HE DID NOT PUT FORTH THE EFFORT TO COLOR IT, DANNY… Danny is getting the item of his choice from our Tilt to Live store. If you have some One Man Left fanart, 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.

So we went with both. Meet the Scallywags, the third team chosen for Outwitters’ release, and scourge of the seven seas. My favorite touch, personally, is that their Runner apparently lost his butt in some kind of horrible accident. Or maybe that’s considered his legs? I’ll have to look up where seahorses’ poop comes out and get back to you.

Aquatic Team, Splash Damage… Get it?

The special character for this race is called a Bombshell. In our first pass for balancing, he’ll function as an alternative to your Sniper. Where Snipers deal massive damage to a single tile in range, Bombshell’s mortar will deal less damage to your target, but extra splash damage to the surrounding tiles. That makes him the only character in the game capable of damaging multiple enemies with a single strike.

Being a crabby character, we’re also going to try giving Bombshell a unique way of getting around. Out of the shell, he’s slightly faster than a Sniper but super-vulnerable to attack. In order to fire his mortar, he’ll have to take a turn to fortify. In his shell he benefits from an armor boost, but becomes completely immobile. He’ll have to re-emerge in order to relocate.

Quality Over Quantity

In order to release this game on time (and have more time for quality assurance), Alex and I have decided to pull our remaining, incomplete teams from the release version, to be worked on as updates down the line. That plant team you’ve been staring at on our banner the last few months: shelved for now. C’est la game design. The Adorables, Feedback, and Scallywags will be at your disposal on launch day, and then more teams and map themes and schemes and dreams will be added further downstream.

Adam the Artist

I recently completed yet another playthrough of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, one of my very favorite games of all time (available now on Steam, currently being revamped for PS3). It’s a first-person shooter with a sci-fi western theme, where the main character acts as his own horse. Plus it’s not set in the Middle East, which is incredibly novel by today’s standards.

On the iOS all I’ve been playing recently is Velocispider (Universal, 99¢), a nifty arcade game by our friends at Retro Dreamer. It’s kinda like Space Invaders or Galaga, if that’s your cup of tea. You can tap and hold to charge your shots in this game. I was ready to quit at like stage three until someone told me that, so now I pass the knowledge on to you.

Alex the Codesmith

Not much has changed on the non-iOS front for me. I’m still neck-deep into Starcraft 2. With a game this deep and with such a high skill cap, I don’t see myself getting ‘tired of it’ for an extremely long time. I have *intentions* on finishing up Uncharted 2 after seeing the E3 footage and I still want to check out L.A. Noire.

On the iOS front, the game I’m playing at the moment is Match Panic by Chaotic Box. I tend to have a soft spot for extremely simple game concepts executed well on the iOS, and this one’s no exception. The difficulty ramps up nicely for my tastes as well, but given what I know about *my* tastes it’s probably a bit on the hard side for the average player. The concept of the game is to tap the left or right side of the screen that has the matching symbol of the one that is in the middle of the screen. The faster you go, the more points you get, and there’s an actual time limit for getting through a ‘stack’ of symbols. Getting a match wrong penalizes you by slowing you down. The game’s responsiveness is definitely appreciated, as I don’t ever feel like I missed a symbol because the UI was lagging or delayed.

There’s a hot new game sweeping the iOS world, and it goes by the name of Tilt to Fly (99¢). Some people seem to think that sounds similar to a game we made, but that’s more than a little presumptuous. See in our game, the goal of the tilting is to live. In their game, it’s to fly. TtF also features a robust and satisfying weapon arsenal, including the Frost Circle, the Squiggly Push, and the Not-a-Burnicade. Buy it right now. We certainly can’t put it down!

Click to engorgio.

I present the current incarnation of the Adorables’ Map Theme. Their metropolis is made of candy, and their cliffs of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Like it was with the Feedback, that game board in the center is not an actual map.

The Adorables is a pretty goofy team, but you’d be surprised how much effort and research went into crafting the look. I seriously took time to google pastries, watch My Little Pony, and listen to Danny Elfman, all to engage the little girl that dwells inside me. Because apparently one does.

This is actually my second pass on the Adorables’ map design, which used to look like this:

Tilt to Live‘s one year anniversary may have come and gone, but today marks the end of Alex’s first year as a full time indie developer. I don’t remember when I went full time, so I don’t get a post. I’m okay with that.

You can read about Alex’s experience on his secret developer blog.

Some of you may have heard the news that AGON is shutting down operations at the end of June. If you haven’t, well… AGON is shutting down operations at the end of June. Adam has selected this inspirational video to help ease the transition.

To make sure Tilt to Live doesn’t run into any problems, we’re disabling AGON online connectivity from our game and using Game Center exclusively for global leaderboards and achievements. What does this mean for those that are living under a rock and don’t have internet connectivity on their devices? It shouldn’t mean much since  they can’t update anyway, or read this post for that matter. Your offline highscores will still be stored locally and you’ll be able to see your highest scores on the gametype select screen. When you tap on ‘Awards’ you will also still be able to see which awards you’ve unlocked and which ones are left to pursue.

If you’re worried about losing highscores or achievements, I’d recommend setting up a Game Center account (if you haven’t already) and making sure that Game Center is enabled in Tilt to Live’s options menu. This allows the game to save awards and highscores to Apple’s Game Center servers, so you’ll be able to restore them easily even between re-installs, or across devices.

We’re working on pushing an update out for Tilt to Live first, followed by Tilt to Live HD, and then a Lite update. Should be submitted sometime next week.

Anybody that’s ever done creative work will tell you, revisions can be painful. Especially when you’ve got a LOT of other work to get to, and the thing in question is “good enough”. But let’s face it, the old design was overly repetitive, and I just wasn’t crazy about it thematically. I’m fairly new to level design, so the work was bound to need redoing.

Here’s my second pass, one that I think is getting much more attractive. If the Adorables level is going to be the cutest thing I can think of, the Feedback should hit the other extreme.

Click to enlarge.

Our jaws dropped when we were linked to this Youtube video last week. A fan by the name of MRcheese911 (and that’s not an alias; it’s his real, given name) had both the skill and the patience to recreate Tilt to Live with the level editor in Little Big Planet 2. If you happen to have a copy of LBP2, you can play it for yourself by searching either “Tilt to Live” or ” MRcheese911″. We don’t know whether to hug him or sue him. Just kidding. We’re hugging him. Suing people is really expensive.

Your Artwork Here

For his time and effort, MRcheese911 is getting the item of his choice from our Tilt to Live store. If you have some Tilt to Live fanart, 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.