New Media

It’s been a while since we last updated!  We spent the last week polishing and ironing out bugs, getting ready to submit, and we’ve been neglecting the old blog a bit, but there should be some more updates now things are calming down.

First up, we have new screenshots in the gallery.  These are iPad2 shots, showing off the GUI and the nice shaders.  New video coming soon!

Close to the edit

We are pushing hard for a submission candidate this week, and a lot of stuff is flying in quickly.  We have a whole new UI, we finalised the tutorial, we (almost) locked down the scoring and difficulty ramp, the achievements are in final balancing, all the assets are getting final polish… this is that special time when everything comes together and the whole experience jumps up several notches on the quality meter, and the taste of red bull and pizza mingle together and merge with the dizziness from a month of late nights to form a sort of higher state of consciousness, and then time seems to slow down and world becomes sharp and clear and you realise that everything is nothing and the universe contracts to a point of pure infinity… and you wake up and realise you fell asleep at your desk.

In other words, it’s high time for a few pictures of the team looking their best!
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UI revamp looking nice on iPad

A fearsome score from Mr Anderson

Concept image of the day

Action shot.  Go, QuBIT, Go!

Another tasty visual treat from the mouse of Mr Elliott.

Pleasing everyone, all the time.

We’ve been balancing QuBIT last week, tweaking the various stats in the game to try and get the difficulty ramp just so. Our aim is to ramp the difficulty in such a way that everyone finds their level and enjoys slowly pushing the bar up from there. We’ve also tried to iron out any difficulty spikes so that each wave becomes a small but discernable amount harder and you never get stuck at the same spot time and again.
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Tragedy Strikes!

Significant risk of delay to RC, after the Secret Sauce robo-development unit is terrorised and partly devoured by a pack of rampaging plastic dinosaurs.   Clever girl!

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Power Cut

Everything seems back to normal now. We had a pretty epic power outage last week, starting on Wednesday afternoon and not back on until about noon on Thursday. From beginning to end:

1) About 6pm, 2/3 of the machines in Studio suddenly blank out. It’s like the scene from Jurassic Park where they shut off the mainframe. Pheeoouummmmm.

2) Various people say they can smell burning coming from the fuse box

3) An electrician chap fiddles with a couple of things, and then the remaining machines go out. And the lights. He insists the two are unrelated.
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The masochism of a player

I’ve always found the way Mario dies in the original Super Mario Bros to be quite poetic. The way time stops, music is suddenly cut off and enemies and obstacles unexpectedly freeze in place. Mario turns to face you with a betrayed expression and raises his hands in hopelessness, as if to ask ‘what happened? I thought you had it in control’.

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New QuBIT concept mockup

Hard vs Soft

Elliott’s been experimenting with hard and soft edges on the track:

Historically, we’ve been aiming for quite a faceted look – all hard edges and clean, gleaming sides – but I’m starting to lean towards the smoother look he’s done here. What do you guys think? Remember – everyone’s an Art Director!