Ahhh, back at it again.  It’s been a while since there’s been time to hit the blog, but with us wrapping up our first WP7 game, finally we can start to talk about things!

We are still waiting for our final release of “The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit” to get through the xblig review process.  What a pain in the ass.  Plain and simple.  We’re hoping to release soon, and will have news forthcoming once we get through submissions.  One of these days, you will get to actually see all the great efforts that came forward to bring a former Indie Game of the Week, to a Game of the Year!  We extended this game far beyond  its development time, with results that show throughout the game.  Before revising the control scheme, we actually reached the final tier of entrants for the Indie Summer Uprising, but did not make the final cut.  There’s so much to speak of thats new to the game, we’ll have to hold off until we are ready to release.

Besides all that XBLIG nonsense, we moved forward–by leaps and bounds.  In the beginning of December, 2011, we decided it was time to get going, so we started development on our follow up game “Cradle to the Grave”, a sort of tower defense game.  Having worked together for 2 years, Simon and I became the machine, and today we stand prepared to release the beta version of the game, just 2.5 months later.  While THoM was a much larger game in some ways, our new agile method has turned us into a speeding bullet of development, cutting through all our shortcomings on our first game and allowing us to streamline production in unprecedented ways.  Besides making a 50 level game with over 100 craftable items, numerous enemies and even cutscenes, Simon implemented a full backend that will allow us to connect users through social medias like twitter and facebook, as well as our own server to keep up-to-the-minute scoring and interactions.  We’re doing it folks, and we’re doing it 100.  We don’t know anyway different than to get better, and we can’t wait to unleash our next game, “Cradle to the Grave”, onto the WP7 and other platforms this spring, 2012.  Very soon, we’ll be looking for beta testers and players alike, as well as releasing content.

We’ll be continuing to update and drop what content we can, and hope to hear from the community…we’re tired of sitting idly by and watching!  We players in this game, and we want the ball!!!  Thankfully, we are already seeing great results with “Cradle to the Grave”, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing quite a bit of feedback.  MS has sent us phones, there’s some buzz going on, and we’re feeling alright.  Being in that final phase of a game is truly painstaking, but shoot, pros execute in that last 5%–when they see the finish line, they start sprinting towards it.  That’s where we are, and it’s what we’re doing.  Now…where’s that pic I wanted to post…