We have chosen a great Pixel Love for you all this week. It's called Exposure and was made by Zillix. This is something quite special.
We love its 3d pixel landscape and the relaxed explorative nature of this game. Your aim is to explore the desert and interact with the other people there. Maybe they can expose the secrets of the orbs? Besides these mystical orbs, you will also find items around the desert which will hold different properties after exposure to the sunlight for 10 seconds.
There are also multiple endings to this game, can you find them all?
Have fun everyone. We will bring you more Pixel Love next week!
Following on from the news of Cheese Dreams: New Moon yesterday we thought we would update you all on the progress made with Test Subject Arena 2. The game is currently working very nicely in multiplayer mode where with Touchy you can now play with up to 4 people! We have been making various arenas and have been testing and balancing the abilities of the various characters.
Each character is a little different from each other this time round so the Rex suit can hang on ceilings and to compensate other characters have different advantages. Some characters are faster than others or shoot faster but there are also some other one off properties too that we will let you guess at for now!
The game in multiplayer is getting fairly far along now so we wanted to look again at single player, which is something we didn't have in the original.
We spent some time in the original trying to make a convincing AI opponent and failed dismally! Though we could make a character move around the arena... getting it to do this intelligently and to choose when to stand and shoot or when to run just proved too big of a challenge for the time we had.
It would have taken far longer than the whole of the rest of the game and it was decided not to be worth it in what was realistically a multiplayer game.
The same is still the case now but this time out we have some different ideas for what we could do for single player. We are only just looking at this now so it may yet not pan out but hey at least you know we're looking at it right!? Plus at this stage if you want to speculate on what the single player entails you may even suggest something we hadn't considered and make it even better!
You can look forward to Test Subject Arena 2 soon...ish!
A long time ago we announced and gave you a demo of a remake of one of our older games Cheese Dreams and then nothing!
The game was fairly far into development but various other projects meant we had to put it on hold and then (even more) various other projects stopped us coming back to it. We're thrilled to finally let you all know that we are now back working on it!
The game now has a proper title 'Cheese Dreams: New Moon' which we think covers well what the project is. For those who maybe don't know what this is about here is a recap.
Cheese Dreams: New Moon is a remake of our 2007 game 'Cheese Dreams'. It has the same basic bouncing mechanic but remade in a new engine that now supports full physics for all game elements rather than a few hard coded ones. It has the same mouse ship setting and basic story and shares some elements but beyond that is a brand new game that could be considered a sequel if it weren't for having the same storyline. If your still not clear then trying out both the demo and the original game should give you a good idea of the difference.
So why did we decide to remake it and not make a sequel? ...for fans of the original there is an obvious direction for a sequel given at the end of the game. We love the concept of the Moon being abducted by mice and although we would love to explore what happens next the general feeling was that so much time had passed that people in general would not remember what happened in the original particularly as it was a pretty hard game to beat.
The project is still a little while off so don't expect it in a week or two!
Although we did a lot of work on this before it was put on hold the fact is that the game had became bloated with content and elements, so much so that making the levels and finishing off the art and code for what is already there is still quite a big task! Jon went through everything that has been built for the new project and said there was already enough for two projects worth of content!...in fact we may put the project out in two parts both to get this out quicker and so as to not waste any elements!
At the time of writing this it is intended to be the next browser game after Test Subject Arena 2 so that should give you a rough idea of the timescale we're looking at.
To wrap up we wanted to share one tip bit of info in this post. In Cheese Dreams: New Moon your going to not only see the moon but also some other planets too....hmmm how mysterious!
With us having a game that has now been Greenlit for Steam distribution we are taking a special interest in the three Steam announcements that are taking place this week. The first of these announcements has now passed and Valve have announced 'Steam OS' a free operating system that people can put onto their PC. It is an extension of their Big Picture Mode that they introduced last year which basically makes it so you can play PC games on your TV in a more friendly and intuitive way, all controlled with a gamepad.
Steam OS means that you don't need Windows on that PC as Steam OS will automatically take the user into Big Picture mode! The OS is built upon Linux which does mean that not a lot of the catalogue will run on the platform straight away but Valve also talk about the ability to stream any other Steam content from your Mac or PC that you have elsewhere in the house, plus it seems that now there is a real reason to support it, Linux support is likely to go through the roof. You can find the full announcement here: http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/
Everyone fully expects one of the further two announcements to be Valves Steam Box which would be a standalone piece of hardware that runs the new OS. This could have a pretty interesting knock on affect for Nitrome as we would suddenly be in a position where our Flightless game on completion would be available on what is essentially a console. Pretty exciting stuff!
So what do you think? Is this a big deal for the gaming industry or do you think it is hype that will quickly die away? What else do you think Valve are going to announce in their other two announcements? What do you think the knock on effects are for Nitrome? Now that we have comments we finally have a place to chat about such things! :)
Hi Nitromians!
We have fixed our game Rustyard! The correct version of the game should show "ver2.2" in the top left corner of the screen rather than "ver2.1" which is the old number. Please clear your cache if you see the old number.
This should now fix the expandable blocks problem that was crashing the game. Thanks for pointing this out to us, happy gaming! :)
Hi Nitromians!
Today's Pixel Love treat is Wild West The Sheriff developed by Dead Pixel Team.
We thought we would highlight this one as we are rather taken by its GameBoy styled artwork. The art and design makes great use of the limited colour palette to create a wonderful western look and feel.
Your main aim in this game is to capture all of the bandits throughout the levels by jumping on their heads. Once captured, you have to bring them back to the sheriffs office. Some of the bandits will be hiding out in barrels and some will try and shoot at you, so you will certainly have your work cut out!
Play Wild West The Sheriff: Click Here!
Have fun, we will bring you more Pixel Love next week!
Hey Nitromians,
We have noticed that some of you are still experiencing problems with our fixes for both Rustyard and Fault Line Avatars. We are looking into the issues you are having and should have another update for Monday.
NOTE: Please check that you are playing these versions (displayed on the title screen of both games)
Rustyard ver2.1 and Faultline ver2.2
If there are any bug related issues (in either the avatar or game itself) can you please help us by posting them below.
Thanks :)
Hey nitromians,
Some of you may have already noticed that we have a snazzy new messaging system for the accounts that has just gone live. (Yipeeee)
We have taken user feedback into account and made a brand new system so that messaging is more of a joy than a pain to use. This includes clearer symbols and improved usability throughout.
There still may be a few nasty new bugs in this new build, so we would really appreciate your help in finding them and making it run as smoothly as possible.
Could you please post any bugs you find relating to this update into the comments below. Or why just not send us a mail using... well this update ;)
Our fans are really important to us so we strive to improve and expand the accounts on a regular basis. Hopefully it being Friday the 13th won't curse us with too much bad luck and things won't break into the weekend. =)
Hey, Nitromians.
We were both surprised and pleased today to see that our game Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage has been featured in two category's on the App store.
It is listed in both the "what we're playing" and "Huggable Heroes" sections. (Who wouldn't want to hug a smelly hairy Viking?)
If you haven't had the chance to check out our first iPhone game then you can check it out here:
http://www.icebreaker-game.com/get-app/choose-version/
For those of you patiently waiting in the wings for an Android version. Don't worry... it is still going full speed ahead. We really don't want it to be a buggy sloppy port. And with literally dozens of devices to work with its a LOT of work and this takes time.
We will set a release date for this as soon as we feel that its finished. Hopefully you will all find that is is well worth the wait.
Hi Nitromians!
We have just released a fresh batch of avatars for you to find!
There are some really awesome avatars in this update, but we don't want to spoil anything for you.
Have fun collecting them all! :D
