Good work setting up the site Joel (not to mention composing and producing the music!). Check it out here: http://www.myspace.com/joelmtaylor
It should soon be available on iTunes too.
Game Rain #1 – win 1 of 21 cool games thanks to indienerds.com!
One of those codes available to win is for Square Off. The other games look great too!. For instructions on entering, see this post on indinerds.com.
Square Off press kit analysis
Gerald from indienerds.com liked our press kit so much he wrote up a detailed analysis. Read it on the creators club forums: the perfect press kit.
Square Off video review from indienerds.com
Many thanks to Gerald Terveen for doing this excellent video review. Watch it here or below. I recommend you take a look at some of his other video reviews – they’re always interesting and he picks good games too 😉
http://indienerds.com/wordpress/?p=404
Square Off Development Post Mortem
We wrote up a post mortem of our development experience with Square Off. It details what we thought went right during development, and what could be improved for future projects. We hope you find it interesting!
You can view the Post Mortem here.
Square Off 1.1 Update Released!
You can view the whole press release, or if you just want the low down, the update includes:
- One new coop / single player level. The game can now be completed (ie, this level does not continue on in a survival mode style like the rest of the levels)
- Two new death match levels
- Level statistics and cumulative profile statistics. These can be seen per weapon.
- Added local only and friends only modes to the global scoreboards
- A multitude of gameplay tweaks and bug fixes
- Autofire option for those twinstick die hards who don’t like the trigger
- Ship and boss AI improvements to make coop more interesting.
- New and improved SFX and backing tracks
Thanks to all the fans and I hope you enjoy these new features. I know many people will be disappointed that there’s no online play or achievements – well, we had to save something big for the sequel 😉
Stay tuned to @GnomicStudios on twitter as we’ll be holding a couple of code competitions in the coming days.
[EDIT] As Josh says in the comments, you can now view the update trailer on GameTrailers.
Square Off Update in Peer Review
The free update to Square Off is now up for Peer Review and should only be a few days away from release. We have finally finished all of the bug fixing and testing required to get the game released with the level of quality that you expect from Gnomic games. Here is what some xbox peer reviewers have been saying so far…
“Nice Job!!! No evil checklist issues, fun and addictive gameplay!!!” – Jennifer (Beta Cell 3D)
“You put alot of effort into this for a free update…” – QuimbyRBG
“Pass, Great Job!” – DigitalDNA
“… that’s a lot of effort put in for the fans (since it probably won’t result in as much of a sales spike as effort put in). Not that there’s anything wrong with that – it’s admirable, but surprising.” – Arrogancy Games
“Oh yeah this game rocks! PASS PASS PASS” – Jeremy (JForce Games)
Square Off on sale for $1 (and other matters)
Sale Price? Sold!
Since we managed to shift 5000 copies at $3, we’ve decided to drop the price to just $1, which is ridiculous value (in our opinions). There are many reasons for doing this, the main one being that on the Xbox Live Indie Games services, $1 seems to be the sweet spot for getting sales and snowballing the popularity of your game. We’re calling it a “sale” for now, as if it doesn’t work out we may put the price back up in 3 months.
The Free Update
We’re still working on this. It contains loads of improvements and fixes, particularly for the deathmatch mode. Here’s a little teaser screenshot of the new final level:
Good work Adam, it looks really pretty.
New Team Members
We’ve had some extremely valuable new people join our team. Josh Stewart has blessedly offered to take on the role of Lead Tester (aka QA and admin guru). He’s set us up hosted SVN for source control and an online bug tracking system which has been incredibly useful. He’s also proved quite proficient at finding bugs. I seriously never imagined there could be so many bugs, but at least they’re all logged with detailed descriptions and even screen shots and videos. Nice work Josh
Ben Schroeder has also offered to help on the testing and coding side. For now he’s mainly helping with testing and bug reporting, but he has an Xbox which is extremely helpful as it means someone other than myself can test the Xbox specific features. When we start work on the next project, he’ll bring his substantial skills to bear on the code.
Hacked!
You may have noticed this. There were a few days when our site was down because a wordpress exploit had allowed some script kiddie to infiltrate and overwrite our homepage with some Jihadi nonsense! That was a bit of a fright… thanks Josh for helping get it all back to normal.
Square Off Update Progress…
Hey all, don’t let the quietness on the blog front fool you, behind the scenes we have been hard at work planning our next move and an update to Square Off! There will be some bug fixes and some cool new additions to the game for free!
We will reveal all when we release it soon so stay tuned…
Review @ NegativeGamer
negativegamer.com by Jon “Pendelton” (-1/-10)
” It’s got a somewhat quirky story, hand-drawn graphics, a touch of dual-stick shooter and a multiplayer component. More than any other game I’ve seen on the service, it does these things well.”
Many thanks to Jon for taking the time to review our game!