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With Jon on holiday and a busy week finishing off things for Beneath the Lighthouse I totally forgot it was my responcibility to make sure we had a Pixel Love game launched! Doh! Ohe well better late than never!

Today/Mondays pixel love is/was supposed to be 'Tap Heros'. TBH I have no idea what it is about as Jon picked it before he left for holiday. I'm sure it's very good though so do click the link and give it a play!

It is by a studio called Varagtp so props to them if you like it!

Enjoy!

by Mat

As part of Apples Gorgeous games promotion our game Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage is on SALE! It is 79p in the UK and whatever is the bottom price in other territorys too. If you havn't picked it up yet this is probably your best chance to get it cheap so go quick and get it now!

by Nitrome

Hi Nitromians,

as promised last week when we launched Green Ninja we have launched Vault! on the website too so were now up to date with the mobile releases. From here on out were going to try and make them happen a similar time.

As a word of warning the game will not work in Chrome sadly as a they switched off Unity support earlier in the year. We would recommend using Firefox to play our games at the moment.

WebGL should eventually fix this issue but it seems to be a future fix at the moment sadly.

Next week we'll have another pixel love for you and should be able to give you more info on upcoming games. Some of them are getting quite close to completion now!

you can play vault here

Have a great weekend everyone!

by Mat

Todays Pixel Love pick is Puppy Racing and there is an interesting Nitrome related link to this game. The game is more than a bit old and back when it was made Nitrome was still relatively new so we often did some bits of work on the side of the games we did at Nitrome. One of those bits of work was for this game. Mat and Jon worked on the rotations for some of the racers in the game. To be clear we did not design the game...that was someone else...just a little sprite work. Still it's an interesting fact that we thougth you might like to know :)

The game itself is a Mario Kart clone that uses the Mode 7 type effect that so many games addopted at one point in flash before full 3d became possible at realistic speeds. It's no Mario Kart but it has a certain charm and we felt the link to Nitrome made it a great candidate for Pixel Love.

Join us next week for another Pixel Love and do feel free as always to send in your suggestions. Please note we can't always feature them much as we would like because games can be URL locked and we respect that decission if the creator does not want the game spread.

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

we realise it has been a frustrating wait for this but Green Ninja: Year of the Frog is now live on the website. This is just the Unity build so if your using Chrome which turned off Unity a few months back your going to have to swap browser I'm afraid. We would suggest Firefox.

We are hoping to put Vault live next week and then launch Beneath the Lighthouse as close to the mobile release as we can manage...ideally the same day. We then hope to stick with this on releases going forward.

We hate to over promise as things usually go wrong but this is our intent at this moment in time.

For those interested we are still intending to persue WebGL versions of all the Unity games. We have been trying to do this for a while with mixed success. Ultimatly despite overcoming several hurdles there seems to be an issue with the WebGL builds requiring too much memory which causes the browser to not load the content on some computers. It is particularly an issue on Chrome which is annoying as Chrome is the browser we would most like to get it working on. 

We still have no web developer at the moment which means were not majorly looking at the WebGL issue at this point in time. We are interviewing for the possition so at some point we will have someone again to look into this. We do feel however that this issue is somthing that is more an issue of the Unity exporter. A lot of devs are reporting the same issue and Unity seem to accnowlege that there is work to be done in this area to improve so the hope is that a furture Unity update may fix this issue that were having.

Have a great weekend everyone!

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

we have a brand new game in the works called Rust Bucket...Yay! But first some bad news...

The game we were working on called Plod is no more…Booo! What happened? Some projects just don’t turn out as fun as you expect them to be and that was the case with plod. It was fun to move around but though we kept trying we could not make very many things that were fun as a challenge to move past.

The upside of this is that we started a new project which is a refresh of our old icon game Turnament! It’s a game that we really wanted to go back to and flesh out much as we did with Gunbrick. The Plod game even helped us in making this as it was at the same viewpoint with the same depth sorting  issues so a lot of that engine went into this one!

You may notice that the game is not called Turnament!? We did toy with Turnament SD but a big problem with the name is that it was terrible for search as it was hard to spell. So we decided to name the game after the main character and we have decided his name is Rust Bucket.

We are very excited about ‘Rust Bucket’ it is already at a fairly advanced state with much more graphics and elements than are shown in the gif above. Aaron that is programming the game has made many similar games before including the original Turnament, Turn Undead, Sleepless Pug and his own personal game Ending so he is very well versed in this sort of game and were hoping to make this the best one yet!

We will have more on the game as it develops.

by Mat

Hey nitromians, 

Today's Pixelove game is called A Stroll in Space! 

by Big Dino games.

http://www.pixellovegames.com/games/dthfdrh/

In it you play as a cute lil astro dude/dudette who is rudely awoken by a HUGE space squid... sounds like our type of game already!

You explore the space station avoiding its many hazards and space nasties until you unlock 'the monkey' (yes that's right, I said monkey!). After which you will have use of the awe defying red button which does some rather neat things to gravity. 

This game has lots of lovely touches (especially the mid-ground and foreground animations). It fits in with the types of browser games we love to look at and play. So much so infact that you might even be mistaken at first glance that its one of our very own.

What do you guys think of A Stroll in Space?

Happy gaming.

by Jon

Hi Nitromians,

we have been making and publishing it’s own titles on the App Stores now with increasing success and we have now decided to branch out and develop a publishing program!

The first title under Nitromes publishing wing will be 'Ultimate Briefcase'. It is being developed by a very talented developer named Stefan Åhlin and his new studio ‘Quite Fresh’. Stefan actually worked at Nitrome in the past on many of our hit web games before leaving to pursue other things. We remained in contact since then and were thrilled to see us be able to team up again!

In 'Ultimate Briefcase' your tasked with surviving an onslaught of bombs with nothing to protect you but your trusty briefcase. There are many bomb types and power ups for you to discover in the game. You collect currency along the way which can be used to unlock new characters and level up the briefcase and those characters special items. During the game you will also be able to unlock new areas each with its own distinctive gameplay quirks. Ultimate Briefcase will be coming to iOS and Android devices soon! 

The Nitrome publishing program is different from other Publishing programs in that we seek to focus around the developers themselves rather than individual titles. For us it’s about finding the right people than cherry picking each game and working with those people to bring multiple titles to the App stores. Our hope is to enable developers to spend more time creating great content and less time on worrying who they might find to publish their next game.

We will work with developers from early in the process to ensure that their future titles will be something we are happy to publish and that they will be profitable enough for the developer that they can continue to make more great games. Nitrome published games will remain to be pixel art based, focused around a core query idea and funded by monetization models that fit our moral compass.

Any talented indies interested in a potential partnership feel free to contact us at publishing@nitrome.com.

For those that are currious as to what this means for our in house developed content....not much. We intend to keep producing the same ammount of content in house as we were before and in fact are expanding the team to be able to produce more content in the future.

For those of you wondering if the published games will appear on the website: Were considering this on a game by game basis. Primarally we are offering publishing based on mobile however we are open to the game appearing on the website aswell if the game is made in a technology that is compatable and if the developer wishes to pursue that. Currently there are no plans for Unltimate Briefcase to come to the website as the focus is on getting the game onto iOS and Android. It is possible however and if the developer shows an interest this may change.

by Mat

Hey nitromians,

Todays pixelove is Birdy fruit by the talented pixelpushing team Fliptic.

http://www.pixellovegames.com/games/birdyfruit/

It's a relatively simple concept in which you must flap your avian friends wings to guide him to safety. The catch is that you only have control of the altitude but not the direction making the game a whole lot trickier. oh yeah and theres a whole buch of traps, enemies and fruit in there too!

If anybody's got a cool game recommendation for a future Pixelove feature then please shout it out in the comments below. (preferably a Flash based pixelart based game)

Happy gaming ;)


 

by Nitrome

Hey Nitromians,

Beneath the lighthouse has lots of cool features that work with the touch and rotate mechanic icluding the rather cool SPONGES!. As you can see the sponges react to the players touch making them inflate when your finger or mouse is pressed down.

We'll be filling you in with some of the other cool features soon so keep your eyes and ears peeled (not literally, that'd be gross!)

Check back for lots more gaming news next week. 

by Jon

Hey Nitromians,

It's Friday again after another busy week at Nitrome towers,

What nicer way to round off the week with another cool little teaser of our next game Beneath the Lighthouse!

As you can see it's a little reminiscent of our old classic Roly Poly and Ditto combined. This time though we have really went to town on the game and taken the game to brand new heights.

We really are super pleased with how this one is turning out, so expect lots of news on some of the cool new mechanics and traps soon.

Until then happy gaming and have a great weekend.

p.s Remember to check back soon as we have plenty of gaming news coming your way. =)

by Markus

Hey Nitromians,

Great news, Nitrome is part of Amazons new gaming service Amazon Underground - "what's that?" I hear you say!

Well in a nutshell it's a brand new gaming service that lets players download games (many of them pay for titles or Freemium with nasty pestering In App purchases) for FREE! with absolutely no catches whatsoever. 

We got on board with the launch of this service and at this very moment you can get Gunbrick and 8Bit Doves at zero cost. All you need is an Android phone and the Amazon Underground App! 

There is more info via the link provided where you can download the Underground App via your Android devices or FireHD and Fire HDX Tablets. 

Happy Gaming =)

by Jon

Hey Nitromians,

We have just released a brand new Pixelove called Through by Goshki (Originally made for the #gbjam4 competition). What may appear at first to be a simple platformer soon becomes something entirely different (after the first few tutorial levels that is!). Levels are literally flipped around on there heads as you discover you can 'push' through walls, thus allowing you to traverse unexplored platforms. 

The graphics on this one may be simple, but we are a sucker for a interesting mechanic making this a worthy addition to our Pixelove series. 

Apologies for missing the usual pixelove Mondays guys and gals. It was a Bank holiday (public holiday) here in the UK yesterday.

Some of you may be aware that we are still without a web developer at the moment, which increases everyone's workload a fair bit (*sob*). Well we are still looking and are hopeful that we will find the right candidate for the role given time.

Until then please bear with us on the lack of website updates. We are aware that some of you are a little bit fruistrated with the lack of web releases but we are really trying our very best.

We are however as busy as ever (currently working on 4 games and a game update!) and are dying to show you what we've been working on. Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming game Beneith the lighthouse aswell as a slight (well quite big) change of plan for one of our other releases.

Until then, happy gaming. =)

by Jon

Check out this second teaser for our next game to be released 'Beneath the Lighthouse' Coming soon to iOS, Android and the Web.

by Mat

Hey Nitromians,

This weeks pixellove game is Duke Dashington by the extremely talented Jussi Simpanen over at Adventure islands.

Join our eentrapped explorer Duke in his quest through trap filled Temples. You have 10 seconds to escape each room and only your reflexes and dashing ability to save you from impending doom.

We'll... What are you waiting for get to work old bean, Tally-Ho!!!

p.s I've still been trying to wrap my head around how the Pixelove backend works for uploading, apologies again for the slight delay.

p.p.s If you like this game then show your support to the dev and download the full title on your mobile! 

by Jon