Switch!

Our first project has been out for nearly a week now. It hasn’t really competed much on the XBLIG marketplace with only about 100 sales but I can’t say I was expecting much more than that… our trial mode isn’t very good and puzzle games don’t do especially well on the dashboard in the first place.

Switch! reviewed on ArmlessOctopus (4 out of 5 stars)
http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2010/12/16/xbox-indie-review-switch/

Switch! mentioned on the ArmlessOctopus podcast
http://www.armlessoctopus.com/category/podcast/

Switch! reviewed on Xbox 360 Digest (3 out of 5 stars)
http://www.xbox360digest.com/2011/03/31/indie-review-switch/

Switch! in the Gamergeddon IG roundup
http://www.gamergeddon.com/2010/12/12/xbox-indie-games-round-up-december-12th/

The video of our trial mode being played in the above roundup video… is… just awful. I don’t know if anyone could have tried harder to make our game look terrible. I should probably blame the fact that our trial mode only allows people to play on EASY and our controls/help screens could have been a bit more in your face.

Winter Uprising

http://kotaku.com/5714036/seems-the-xbox-360s-indie-uprising-was-more-of-a-mild-foot+stamp

Seems like there have been some setbacks at the rate WU developers have been able to release. The only big success so far has been Epic Dungeon with the rest of the “big” games selling very few copies. Fortunately, with games like Crossfire 2 and ZP2KX just hitting the New Releases list and Cthulu Saves The World on the way soon, things may pick up. Here’s to hoping.

We received an email this morning indicating that Switch! had passed peer review and was now available on the marketplace! After doing a joyous happy dance, we downloaded and played it ourselves. Here is the link on Xbox.com:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Switch/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550721

It has been a pretty long road, even just to release a simple puzzle game. I will likely write up a postmortem sometime in the near future.

SWITCH! Is Now In Peer Review

Our first XBLIG game has been submitted to peer review and should be available sometime in the next week or two (if it passes). If you have a XNA Creators Club account and are interested in peer reviewing it, you can click here. Displayed below is the final box art that went with that submission:

Indie Games Winter Uprising Trailer

The Indie Games Winter Uprising page now has box art for all the games and this shiny new trailer. Some of the games have passed peer review and will be showing up on the New Releases list shortly:

Indie Games Winter Uprising from Nakatomi HMC on Vimeo.

The fellas over at Zeboyd have gone to the trouble of organizing an event to take place on the XBLIG dashboard this December. In an effort to fight the perception that the XBL Indie Games store publishes nothing more than a bunch of crappy avatar and fart games, they have organized the Indie Games Winter Uprising. In it’s own words:

If you thought that the XBox Live Indie Games service was just filled with massage apps, clones, and garbage, think again! We are fighting back against mediocrity and lameness in the best way we know how – by releasing amazing games! Mark your calendars, because the first week in December is going to be the best week of gaming the service has ever seen. With new games from veteran developers like Ska Studios and Radiangames alongside promising newcomers, there’s something for everyone here. Check out the lineup!

Read the whole writeup here.

Kristian and Myself are pushing hard to finish up SWITCH! so that we can release it alongside all the rest of the games that will come out during this event. Should we succeed, SWITCH! will be available for 80 MS points and will contain no zombies, ninjas, towers, dual-stick controls, farting, scantily clad women or XBL avatars. It does have lasers though. Every game needs lasers.

One last preview/update here for November… SWITCH! is nearing completion as we have implemented all screens, most major components are finished, sound is pretty much finalized and many of the art assets are in. We will be spending the next few weeks completing what is left and polishing things as best we can. Our hope is to be ready to submit SWITCH! for playtesting by the end of the month and release by the beginning of December.

Here is one last video for your viewing pleasure… much has changed since the last video I posted so I won’t even try to detail all that has been updated. Look for yourself!

Another video demonstrating the latest build. Since our last post one week ago, we have implemented several new items including updates to the menu system, a new futuristic sprite for the flipper, a new power bar, a placeholder animation for the nuke (my MS Paint skills are amazing), idle animations for tiles and the flipper (if you watch you can notice tiles occasionally blinking and looking around), sound effects, music for both the menus and game screen, and more! Still so much to do…

The latest Switch! development video has been uploaded. Most of the development still lies ahead of us but the core of the gameplay has been implemented as demonstrated here:

Our July update for SWITCH!