OutOfTheBit Laboratory

What a day! We have released Super Arcade Football and the response seems to be pretty good!

Hello!

It’s been awhile since our last update, we’ve been super busy with Super Arcade Football and are working hard and fast toward our Early Access release.

We’ve got the game out to a couple of testers who are giving us extremely useful feedback, finding horrible bugs and mostly enjoying the game.

Alongside all this... we are immensely proud to announce that Planet Quest has been nominated for ‘Best Quickplay Game’ at the International Mobile Gaming awards!

We’re honored to be nominated amongst games like Downwell and Quick Shot, and there’s also something called Angry Birds in the nominations, not sure what that is but sounds like it could be a success.

It’s that time of year that makes us at OutOfTheBit make silly festive .gifs. It is indeed, Christmas time.

BUT before I crack out the mince pies and sherry, I want to let you know that actually, christmas has already come early. Introducing:

MINI CHESS!

This was Robi’s first game with us as Graphic designer, and he’s done good.

Mini Chess is a simplified version of the classic chess, no little horsies or bishops, so it’s a lot quicker to play and easier for young ones to understand.

You can download it for iOS here

For Google Play click here

And for Amazon...here!

As for @SuperArcadeFootball, we have been quite busy. You can follow it’s development on Steam here:

We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly at our Christmas Party; Starting off at Somerset House for ice-skating fun, we made a game called ‘who can fall over the most’, turns out Robi is really good at this game and is the current world champion.

We then gorged ourselves on the finest Byron burgers.

It was a well deserved day out to celebrate a good year; 1 new game Greenlit within a week on Steam, 1 new employee, 4 new Games released (and dozens of updates), 1 pair of pants stolen, 3 games festivals, 1 game ranked at #13 in best games of 2015, our own game jam, our own video game meetup, our own C engine and approximately 9,000 coffees(each). ‘Twas a good year, and next year is going to be even better.

Hooray!

Greenlit in under 10 days! This is super good stuff.

We started off really strong, gaining votes like nobodies business, and the momentum seemed to stabilise for about a week. We had consistent comments, discussions and votes throughout the first 5 days and saw our item stats climbing to sit at a top #25 spot. People started tweeting which further helped us and all seemed to be going swimmingly.

But the past 2-3 days we noticed a big decline in visits and votes, and saw our top spot number fall to 26/27. Although we kind of expected this, we couldn’t help feel a bit deflated; I furiously mashed the refresh key whilst @alimotisi sobbed quietly in the corner, and @arnaud buggered off to france. 

We gave it one last push to try and reclaim a top #25 position, doing the twitters, doing the forums, the reddits, and talking to some people to spread the word. We finished our campaign sitting pretty at #21. 

We’ve been so obsessed with the item stats (Great pie charts btw) that we are a bit lost now with nothing to refresh. But hey ho, we have a game accepted on Steam! YESS!

We had a great time at GameCity, met some great people, played some good games and had a blast showing Super Arcade Football.

If you didn’t see it last week, Super Arcade Football is now on Greenlight! And so far the response has been really good, lots of comments, suggestions and overall support. Looking at the item stats it says #27 out of 1,780 (whatever that means), with almost 2,000 votes, which is good (we think?), but if you’re reading this, have a steam account, haven’t already voted AND like the look of SAF….Please vote!

So GameCity was a blast, and we are sad to have not stayed the full week. But, as is the blog.outofthebit tradition, we’d like to mention a few games we played which we really liked and think you should check out!

Switch ‘n’ Shoot

Really addictive one button game, I sucked at it, got good at it, then sucked again. But had fun all the same.  It’s a simple mechanic game and when done well these are best.

There’s a demo available on itch.io AND it’s also on GreenLight!

The Old Gods are Dead

This was good. Kinda funny and has a great dark atmosphere. It’s a narrative-focused game where you’re put through a series of moral tests to see if you are eligible for placement in an underground nuke-proof bunker. Can’t wait until they develop it further.

I ate the heart, no regrets.

The Umbrella Game

This was a really peaceful, gentle and frankly adorable experience. You are a umbrella in a world of floating islands inhabited by people straight out of the board game Ludo. You fly around like all good umbrellas and take on little quests like rescuing cats from trees, unblocking windmills and collecting lost horses. I managed to break the game unfortunatley, and for that, I am sorry.

There's a demo available that you can play in-browser, we’re looking forward to see what this becomes.

*Bonus*:

International Karate Defence (don’t have a link so here’s a nice picture)

Although technically not on the GameCity list, we met Joe Dickens (from @GamerGamer) who showed us his game International Karate Defence. Everything is fun here, you just have to do some sick Karate blocks against these balls, but @ali managed to get on the highscore, not sure who the Joe guy is though….

Super Arcade Football is on Steam Greenlight!

Last night we had some amazing people come down and test Super Arcade Football. So to start of this blog post, thanks so much for coming!

Even though the game is at about 5% of what we want it to be, people still had fun, which is friggin’ awesome and very relieving.We witnessed some amazing goals, the spawn of some fierce rivalries, and the birth of legendary players who finished the night undefeated. 

We got some great feedback for the game too; what to focus on, what new features people want to have, and most importantly what problems they found with it. Interestingly, a majority of the improvements suggested were about the controls and player representation, which is super useful as opposed to everyone saying conflicting things. We know that these are the areas to focus on.

Overall, a bloody good night, and the pizza wasn’t half bad either. We came into the office this morning and were very happy to see this comment on one of the feedback forms:

Hello!

Today, we are immensely excited to announce the development of our new PC Game: Super Arcade Football!

As the name may suggest, it's a Super Arcade Football game! Although it’s only just been born, the game will be fast paced, lushly animated, juicily sounding and ultimately, a super fun-local multiplayer game!

We are at that wonderful but uncertain stage of development; pre-alpha. The game has so far got super basic animations, basic audio and most of the core gameplay mechanics, we’ve got a looong way to go, but (we think) it’s already really fun to play.  

What do we want the game to become?

Our goal is to make a game with the classic football charm of masterpieces like Sensible Soccer and Kick-Off, but with the intense multi-player fun of games like Towerfall and Nidhogg.  Not wanting to be ‘just another Sensi clone’, Super Arcade Football will be our own take on the Arcade Football genre, with a focus on intense arcade action and crazy gameplay mechanics, visually pleasing feedbacks and an overall fun and exciting game to play with friends either locally or online.

We plan to start our Steam greenlight campaign next month, with an aim to gain a community whose ideas and feedback will play a massive part in the development of Super Arcade Football (I will from now on refer to it as SAF to save my little fingers).  The first build of SAF available to download will have an in game forum for players to submit their thoughts, images and vids of their sweet goals, and will be available on itch.io in the following months.

So this is all very exciting and daunting at the same time, and to add to the fear of starting a new project, we are inviting the whole world to come to our Play Testing Event on the 1st October. We’ll have FREE Pizza, FREE Drinks and you can test SAF! 

Here are the links to click if you are London based and would like to attend:

Facebook

Event brite

Meetup

The Mill is out now on the App Store!

You can download it here for free!

Yesterday we applied for Game City X

We had such a great time last year with Planet Quest, and are hoping to debut our new PC game this year!

We won’t make the announcement just yet about the game itself, but in the following weeks we’ll have a lot to shout about.

Very happy to announce we are now making the final binary for The Mill! Today is all about testing, and assuming we find nothing broken in the game, we will send to the overlords Apple on Monday.

The development of the game has gone quite swimmingly, which is odd, but we are confident it’s the best 9 Men’s Morris game around.

The big boss (@Ali) has gone away on holiday to Italy, but he never actually stated who was in charge in his absence. After a few days of sheer Mad Max like pandemonium, we decided on appointing Bruce the dog as our interim overlord CEO. He’s being doing great so far, productivity is up 250% and there have been a few changes to the company policies:

1. No Squirrels. 2. Replace all fruit in office with gravy bones. 3. No Cats. 4. If you urinate on it, it belongs to you. 5. All lunches must be consumed as quick as possible.

And that’s just the beginning of our new 1,000 page company handbook.

We've also done a bit of game development. 9 Men’s Morris is coming along very nicely, and is so nearly completed. It’s looking flipping juicey, all it needs is a lick of audio and some rigorous testing.

Meanwhile, @arnaud has come up with an idea for a game that he looks forward to pitching once everyone's back from Spaghetti land, but until then:

Yesterday we released Nuclear BattleShip!

Very pleased to say it’s doing good, people are playing (and beating us) online and the great people at TouchArcade have picked up on it and given some really good comments.

Hi there. It’s Ali here. As promised last week, we are making the source code from our game jam available for everyone to download.

Alessia, Simon and I used our own Cereal Box engine to make the game.

A screenshot from my old school looking version of Combat

You can find the source code on the Cereal Box git repository (look for the games/OOJam directory).

Arnaud, Rosalia and Brooke coded the game on the amazing Pico-8 fantasy game console.

A screenshot from Rosalia and Brooke’s Pico-8 Combat

Here’s a link to Arnaud’s creation: http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2180&pid=12008&autoplay=1#p12008

You can also download Rosalia and Brooke’s first ever Pico-8 game here:

http://www.outofthebit.com/oojams/oojam1/ro/ro_combat.p8

I hope you enjoy tampering with our source code!

Well yesterday’s game jam (OOJam) was a success! In the morning, we chose to replicate, from scratch, the Atari Classic: “Combat”. We set ourselves only 8 hours of development time, and pleased to say that all of us managed to create our own little combat beauties. Here’s some screenies:

Ali went for Pixel perfect precision:

Me...Not so much:

Pistacchio juice helps us program! I think...we drank a lot so can’t really remember. Where am I again?

Although mine may look basic minimalist, behind the scenes there are some very lovely variables:

typedef struct {

...............

   oofloat timeOfDeath;

   oobool alive?;

..............

} ooplayer;

We are getting ready for the big OOJam next week, we have our tools all ready, like our in-house Cereal Box, and Arnaud will be using the immensely brilliant Pico-8.

The game to make will be decided on the day, each of us are going to write down a classic Atari-era game, put it into a hat, and dear old Bruce the dog is going to try and paw one out. If that slip of paper isn't completely soaked in drool, then that is the game we are all going to make!

So, put it in your diaries, Wednesday the 29th of July, the time of the jam is from 10am until 6pm.....THE SAME DAY! That’s 8 solid hours of pure game making, if you are joining in you can submit whenever you feel like it. At the end of it all, if our fingers are not broken and minds not melted, we will publish our masterpieces on GitHub, and if anyone else want’s to join in then we are here with open arms and look forward to seeing yours!

BattleShip is so nearly there! Looking good, sounding good, screen shaking good and playing good. Just the last few bugs to stamp on and we should be good to send to Apple early next week!

We spent all week iterating on sounds and have got a nice variety of missiles, explosions, radars, splashes and lots of others. It’s been really fun making the sounds for this game, but today was a sad realisation, like with Planet Quest, we need to reduce the quality for the sake of the app. You'd think I would have learnt by now. But no:

What a sad sight for any sound designer :(