In celebration of the new Legions content, we are holding yet another Facebook photo contest. Since we all love explosions - I dare you to find one person who doesn't - we figured everyone would enjoy some destructive pics. Your mission is to take an in-game screenshot of the biggest and most creative explosion. Upload your picture to the Legions fan page and tag your character with your Facebook profile name. In addition, add a "comment" with your InstantAction username (so we know who you are).
The three best submissions will be awarded the COMPLETE set of Outrider skins and helmets. The deadline is 7/6 so keep your finger on the "print screen" button and blow stuff up!
With the launch of all the new goodies in Legions today we wanted to show some impressive footage brought to us by the great ZhouYu. I'll preface the video with his info from the youtube page. Click here for the high def version.
Seeing as there is a new build of Legions coming out soon, I
thought it might be time to capture some of my favourite caps from the
old build.
Therefore this video is not composed of caps chosen
for pragmatic value or efficiency, as after a year plus of playing
efficiency no longer interests me overmuch. Instead these caps have
been chosen because they both interest and challenge me. Some are
certainly more challenging than others, the nivosus route especially.
It's that time of the month when we shut down InstantAction so we can add some new updates to the site. This time the updates are heavily focused around Legions and these will include customizable armor and voices for your character. In addition to the different custom helmets, skins, and voices here are some of the other highlight you'll find in Legions.
General Gameplay -player collision damage added
-added several new loadouts for each class -added observer mode -added a fix for the hot-swap exploit
Missions -added new forgotten mission
Laser Rifle -laser rifle no longer needs to be charged, but instead drains all energy when firing -damage is now based on energy used to fire -players can now jet while using the laser rifle
Rocket Launcher -specialist no longer has remote detonation -specialist rockets can now be triggered to accelerate by holding the trigger
Chat -enabled flood protection -added new quick chat voices
Systems -added player customization options for skin and helmet
-Added a second "small-map" dedicated server to all regions
-Added a "middle-sized" map server to all regions which includes Mirage, Core, Zenith, and Forgotten.
For the full rundown of the Legions update please click the link. Finally, everyone has been wanting to know how much all the content was going to cost. Here's a breakdown of the Action Token price per item:
In addition to all the good stuff that's coming next week, you'll be receiving a new map titled "Forgotten". The Legions blog has just posted a new video with the map and something else that's not quite out yet. Head on over to the Legions blog now to check it out.
Next week we'll be introducing Dedicated Servers for Legions in Australia. Those folks down under have been asking for a while now that we get dedicated servers up, and can finally rejoice in the fact that they'll be able to play Legions smooth as butter. That means no more blaming lag on your mid-air misses. Prepare yourselves.
Hey everyone, we're very excited to announce that new content for Legions is coming next week. What will you find in Legions next week? Well let me run through some of the new stuff (more to come later this week).
New Voice Packs:
12 new voice packs - including Tribes voices (male and female)
Helmets (pirates, cyborg-style, and general bad-assery):
What you are seeing will soon be reality. I'm pretty sure everyone guessed that a Legions app is coming to Facebook, but this is something new. Leaderboards will also be included with this facebook version of Legions so prepare to battle it out for top times.
Marble Blast is a franchise that doesn't need introduction on this
site. Ever since its initial release in 2002, people have been
'marbling it up' on PC, Mac, Linux, XBLA, online and yes, even Net Jet.
Its simple gameplay (you are essentially a round sphere that can roll
and jump) combined with a variety of power-ups and maps make it
accessible to both the casual and hardcore gamer alike.
Naturally, GarageGames saw a fit with their classic IP and the iPhone, but with all the work we've got going on with Torque and InstantAction, we needed to find the right partner to help us make it happen. Enter Luma Arcade.
Luma has been working with us over the past year and a half on various
projects, not the least of which is the much anticipated car racer, Rev.
With over 40 years of game development experience on their team, not to
mention a great history in graphics and design, they were a perfect
fit. Their gameplay video alone should give you an idea of what I mean:
Luke Lamothe, Technical Director of Luma Arcade, talked to me about creating Marble Blast Mobile, and the iPhone opportunity (and challenges) for this beloved game. Enjoy!
How did you integrate Marble Blast gameplay with iPhone tech?
Well,
it was pretty easy to decide that Marble Blast Mobile needed to be
controlled with the accelerometer on the iPhone. Being able to roll the
marble by tilting the device comes to mind. Unfortunately, it wasn't as
easy as just saying "if the phone is tilted to the left, then roll the
marble to the left." It took a heck of a lot of tweaking to get the
marble feeling natural, while at the same time having to compensate for
the lack of tactile feedback that a device such as the iPhone suffers
from when compared to using a keyboard or a game pad.
In addition, since you are essentially moving your screen around as you
control the marble, it doesn't make sense for the player to worry about
lots of touch screen interactions at the same time...that is just going
to get clumsy! To lessen the need for necessary touches when
controlling the ball, we developed an auto-camera system that would
follow the marble as it rolled around the levels with the accelerometer
input. This ended up working out quite well and allows for you to play
the game with only the accelerometer and single taps for jumping when
necessary.
What tools did you use to create Marble Blast Mobile?
Marble Blast Mobile was built using the iTGE engine.
We chose iTGE because a) we are quite familiar with TGE from the work
done on some of our previous titles, and b) Marble Blast is a
GarageGames property. Also, as the existing games in the Marble Blast
franchise were all written in some variation of a Torque engine, we
wanted to keep to a technology that would allow us to reference the
source from those games when working on this title.
In addition to iTGE, we used Torque Constructor
for working on the levels. Each level started out as an existing Marble
Blast level. Then, using Constructor, we made appropriate changes to
optimize and pretty things up where possible.
We also used 3DSMAX
and the DTS exporter plug-in for all of our DTS objects. Every DTS in
Marble Blast Mobile was based on the corresponding one from Marble Blast Online, but each one had to be simplified for the iPhone hardware in terms of material, poly counts, special effects, and animations.
Adobe Photoshop
was used by our artists to tweak all of the game textures. They needed
to be resized to resolutions better suited for the iPhone. Alpha
channels needed to be created for our specular mapping. And each
texture needed to be manually tweaked (with some brand new textures
created as well) since Marble Blast Mobile doesn't have all of those
fancy shader effects like the online version does!
All of our sound effects (and the music) were ones that previous Marble Blast games used, but we used Audacity to convert them all to be 8kHz and mono in order to reduce the download size of the game as well as to save big time on the memory used by the application when running.
What was your development process like?
We decided to first get a version of the game running on PC, as iTGE compiles and runs fine there (due to its TGE roots), using Marble Blast Gold as a starting point. Once we got there, we needed to pull in the resources and functionality from Marble Blast Online, which was built using a version of TGEA,
so it wasn't too hard to get the required information back into iTGE,
but it wasn't 100% straightforward either. By the time that we had a
"working" version on the PC, we had obtained our developer status from
Apple and were able to get the game running on iPhones for testing.
Once on the actual hardware, we had to overcome the hurdles of
performance and controls. The most important task was to get the
controls working properly so that we could finalize the necessary
changes to the level design for the iPhone. Concurrently, we had to
find ways of increasing the performance so that the game was actually
playable on the device, as we were averaging less than 10 fps on 2nd
generation iPod Touches (which are the "fastest" iPhone-type devices on
the market), with some of the more complex levels from Marble Blast
Online running under 5 fps!
Altogether we had about 10 people contribute to the project, not
including the QA people, with 4 of those being on the project pretty
much full time for its duration (2 programmers and 2 artists for
approximately 6 months). Generally, the work between the programmers
was split between non-iPhone coding (i.e. menus, gameplay, sound, etc.)
and iPhone-specific coding (input controls, graphics, performance,
etc.), and the artists were split between 3D art (world and object
meshes) and 2D art (menus, HUD, and textures). The additional people
associated on the project worked on smaller programming, art, and
design contributions. All in all, it took us about 5 months of work to
reach what I would have called beta status for Marble Blast Mobile.
We are always testing our own work as we go along and try to not let
any bugs or issues fester around to be dealt with later on in projects.
Having said that, there were quite a few issues picked up by the
excellent external QA team at VMC Game Labs
that handled the majority of QA testing for us. They enabled us to
concentrate on making Marble Blast Mobile better by fixing issues
instead of having to look for them.
If you had to do it all again, what would you do differently?
I'm
not sure what we really could have changed. I think that we tackled the
project about as best we could seeing as it was our first iPhone game,
we were working with iTGE (which was in beta), and we had to spend
nearly the first 2 months of development time without being able to
test on an iPhone while we waited for our iPhone developer application
to be processed and approved by Apple.
If anything, I guess I would have liked to have had the time to include
more levels in the game, as well as swap out some of the levels that
perhaps were not as well suited to the iPhone (both in terms of
gameplay and hardware capabilities) for some others from the Marble
Blast series that perhaps were. This ultimately was a side effect of
having to start working on getting the levels into the game before we
could properly test on the iPhone itself.
What can we expect to see next from Luma Arcade?
Well, next will probably be us finally finishing off REV
for InstantAction. It was in closed beta towards the end of last year
on the site, but we decided to spend some time porting it to TGEA 1.8
from TGE 1.5. We're looking to have that back in beta shortly, and we
are also working on 2 other iPhone games that are due to be released in
the next few months as well (one using iTGE, and the other iTGB), so keep your eyes open :)
Recent Comments