The Symphony of Snow

…wut wut wut wzio bom bom bom…Oh sorry! Just been listening to the new Symphony of Snow remix of Crystal Smasher by Rich Kemp. It, like him, is dreamy and awesome. Written to complement the softer feel of Frost, our new snow track, it tones down the industrial sound and bass volume of the original track and layers some Air-esque plinky-plonky electronica over the top. Turn on, tune in and smash crystals to this.

Check out all the other versions on Rich’s SoundCloud here: RichKemp

Playing with Dolly

Just a minor media drop today – here’s some rough footage of our new Dolly Zoom effect, which we literally implemented on submission day in a classic piece of ninja development.  This kind of thing is what Agile is all about, as I keep telling Will the producer (who actually knows what Agile is about but lets me get away with it… usually).

For the uninitiated, a Dolly Zoom is a cinematic effect achieved by gradually changing the camera’s field of view while physically moving the camera forward or backward, so that the main object focus appears to stay in the same place while the rest of the world distorts and stretches in or out around it.  This staple of low-budget horror and art-house sci fi is quite simple and cheap to achieve, relying entirely on the skill of the Dolly Grip.  It’s a tricky move, which no doubt explains why the practitioners deserve such an awesome sounding title.  Not as good as the Best Boy though, obviously.

Anyway, in computer games of course we just do it with numbers.  But it still looks cool! Unfortunately this didn’t make it into our trailer footage (coming soon!) so here is it in its own little video – with a side order of motion blur and a dash of the old secret sauce.

Retina Cake

Cake… we love to have it, we love to eat it, but we can’t do both!

This irritating truism has frustrated many a game developer, and it once again reared its greasy head and leered at us two weeks ago, while we were polishing up the new content for our mahoosive update coming this weekend.

The Good: we optimised the bejeesus out of our environment shaders and got waaaay more performance out of the engine, meaning that we can now get full Retina resolution on 4th gen devices at a stable 25+ FPS!   Hellz Yeah!

The Bad: we still can’t turn on the full-screen special effects (bloom and motion blur) at retina res, they are too expensive.  Only the mighty iPad2 can currently handle our shmanciest graphics settings at high resolution.

The Cosmetically Challenged: the way our tech works at the moment, we can’t offer a run-time option to let choose your own graphics settings.  For you lucky 4th gen owners out there, it’s EITHER retina OR spangly effects, NOT BOTH, and we had to choose one or the other for all of you.  Bummer.

So… the fact of the matter is, Retina support is the #1 feature request we got from fans, so that’s what you’re getting.  Hope you like it! Seriously though, if you would rather have the full-screen effects instead, or if for you the magic is all in choosing your own settings, please tell us!  We have our own forum you know, on this very website!  It is a bleak and empty place, devoid of warmth and community participation.  We would love it if you, Dear Reader, could find it in your heart to help change this sad state of affairs… but go ahead and post in the Touch Arcade forum instead if that’s more your thing.

We won’t judge.

New track and new mode!

Today we have the first look at our new track, Frost, and on it our new game mode, Surge! We wanted to create a new game experience out of the key ingredients of the Classic mode. The original game evolved a lot from our original plan to create a hi-octane puzzler and the new mode was a chance to focus again on speed and intensity. Plus, we knew most players would have played a fair amount of Classic so we could throw them straight into the action.

In Surge, you are racing against a countdown timer so any time saved early on will allow you to travel farther. Every COMBO earns you an extra QuB, so you can get to 8 QuBs quickly and doing so increases your speed in the same way that advancing through the waves does in Classic. We also felt that boosting did not have many uses in Classic, where speed is effectively your enemy – not so in Surge!

Our new track, Frost, is a different planet which the QuBOTs have been sent to mine. A wintry wonderland complete with falling snow and majestic mountains in the distance. Of course, once you slalom down a pretty piste, the thumping, industrial techno starts to jar a little and Rich was keen to remix the music to match our new planet. His Symphony of Space edition is a much more relaxing beat to smash to, keep an eye on the blog for a preview of this later in the week.

Surge feels like another direction we could have taken the original game. It certainly throws up more hair-raising moments and tempts you to gamble with barely-manageable speeds more than Classic. We hope you find it a quick route into the intense crystal-smashing goodness of the later waves and an interesting new spin on the core mechanics. Just wait till you see the new special effects at 100+mph!

If you love somebody…

Hello! First of all, apologies for going quiet for a bit there, its been a busy summer but we are back with exciting news for you today and loads more coming up. Last week we submitted a new-look QuBIT complete with enough new content to keep you up long into the night. There was always more to come from our cubey friend but we wanted to be sure to add features that would introduce new experiences and add new layers to the gameplay.

The biggest change is that QuBIT will become free to play so all of your friends who have been considering remortgaging their homes so they can get in on the crystal-smashing action can save their hard-earned pence. It turns out that when you go free for a weekend, a LOT of people download your app! So we thought *lightbulb* we should make QuBIT free all the time. Of course, there is now a juicy little paid-content pack for those who choose to level-up their QuBIT experience but don’t worry there is only one and it only costs 69p. It does however give you a veritable embarrassment of QuBIT-flavoured riches:

• A whole new game mode: Surge
• A new track, set on the snowy pistes of Frost
• New music to accompany this wintry wonderland
• 2 new playable characters with unique stats: QuTI and QuBYT
• Challenges, unlockables, love, world peace and an unparalleled feeling of warmth and goodwill*

There are also a number of cool new bits and bobs which will appear as soon as you update: new special effects, cool info screens for loading, new animations, tips and suchlike so its definitely worth checking out the update even if your own lil QuBIT has been under dust sheets for the summer. It will hit the AppStore on Friday so please let us know what you think!

*subject to terms and conditions which are in a font so small even the person who wrote them wasn’t sure what they said.

When shaders go bad

We have been hard at work building an entire new content package for QuBIT (more info on that soon!) and we have found some very strange side effects of when our shaders and light/shadow maps don’t work according to plan.

As you can see in the gallery below we have mistakenly put QuBIT in some unexpected environments When Shaders Go Bad!

Fail – This was the first attempt at getting our new Frost track looking like an ice planet. It didn’t quite work …

Psychedelic – QuBIT was sent back to a 60’s psychedelic environment.

Desert – A strange desert oasis in the middle of the new ice track.

Slime – Qubit gets stuck in a slime filled swamp

Ice Cream – QuBIT caught inside a crazy Ice cream parlour

Disco – Qubit decides to go to a disco.

None of these effects were planned and are all the result of shaders doings things we didn’t quite expect.

Competition Winner

Congratulations to k.games (GC name k.games) for winning the game center high score challenge. Results were taken this morning at 11am GMT (4am PST) from the weekly leaderboard on Game Center and k.games was at number 1 with the score 892,770. The prize is a $10 or £10 iTunes Gift card.

We have contacted you through Game Center with a friend request and a message to get in touch with us.

Please send us an e-mail to the address we stated in the friend request message to let us know if you want the $10 or £10 iTunes Gift card and we will send you the code.

Congratulations again to k.games and welcome to the QuBIT hall of fame.

QuBIT free Weekend

For this weekend QuBIT is going free. No strings attached. You can download and enjoy the game for absolutely no money this weekend.

If you already have the game this is the perfect time to get your friends and family in on the action. We want to see those leaderboards on fire with new top scores. There is currently a high-score competition running so you could end up winning a $10 or £10 iTunes gift card if you turn out to be a QuBIT master.

We are making QuBIT free in conjunction with our friends atFree App a Day

QuBIT High-Score Competition

After the success of the previous high score competition we have decided to run another weekly Game Center challenge. We have seen some huge scores coming through recently so it’s time to reward your hard work and dedication. Make sure you are signed in to Game Center to participate.

The score will be taken from the weekly Game Center leaderboard next Wednesday (3rd August) at 11am GMT (4am PST) and the prize will be a £10 or $10 iTunes gift card

Syntheticvoid won last weeks competition with an epic score of 674,120 and is our first hall of fame member. As a previous winner he won’t be eligible to win this competition but each competition winner will be added to the hall of fame and given a very special in-game bonus (Details to be revealed at a later date).

To help you reach a crazy score Syntheticvoid was kind enough to update our Tips and Tricks forum thread with some words of wisdom.

Good luck everyone and happy crystal smashing!

QuBIT 1.1 Update

Version 1.1 has gone through certification, and is now up on the Store. GL 1 support (for the 2nd generation iPod Touch) is the main feature, but there are also some new animations and minor performance improvements.

Min OS version has been reduced to 4.2.1.

Enjoy!