Two new prototypes!

written May 22nd, 2013 by natewiesel

Today is a special day, because today we’ve put two new (old) prototypes up on the internet for you to feast on! The first is an unfinished Ludum Dare game from May 2011 called A Really Big Rock. You may have heard of it previously back when we were doing the Wrrundowns because we once had plans to finish it. But obviously that never happened! The other prototype is much lesser-known. It was called Hyper-Snap (or something like that) and it’s a weird photography simulator of some kind. We had plans for better art and more content, but I personally just wasn’t a big fan of the whole idea and scrapped it after only a few days of work. We hope you enjoy these little bite-sized prototypes, as bizarre as they are!

Ludum Dare, Gamejolt, and One game a month.

written May 2nd, 2013 by lbunclejoe

Hello all! It’s been some time again, hasn’t it? Let’s take care of a little bit of housekeeping.

Nate and I recently closed the book on a Ludum Dare jam project, I DIED, which you can go ahead and check out right here. (I’ll wait!) It was a fun ride, and the first Ludum Dare I’ve ever personally participated in. Not sure why it has taken me so long to get in on the fun, but oh well! The game will be going up here on the site at a later date, once we have time to refine it and add some additional content.

That said, I DIED also marks our 4th game completed for one game a month! (Here’s to 8 more!) If you don’t count our April fools joke from last month, I DIED is also the first wholly original game created for the year long event. Both ViViD and Cylor were older games that needed significant updating (or outright completing). With a 3rd of 2013 over, we’d like to try doing a little less updating and a little more with new ideas. But, that said, it’s also probably a safe bet that we’ll do something with at least one more old project sometime this year.

Gamejolt, really, seems like a much better excuse for us to go back and file the sharp edges off our older projects though. Getting our stuff in front of fresh new eyes has been very cathartic, with the response to ViViD being particularly crazy. While the numbers are nothing super remarkable, just seeing so many enthusiastic strangers give our game a try and produce let’s plays has made us quite giddy. You’ve made us happy old men, internet, and all it took was you talking in front of footage from our 2010 drug trip. Thank you.

More and more will be making their way to Gamejolt with updates, so stay tuned. For now though, I should probably get back to work on other things. Until next time, everyone!

Block Dude X v1.3.1 with Mac support!

written March 16th, 2013 by zachhinchy

We’ve just put up a new version of Block Dude X! While it contains a few minor changes and fixes and some performance improvements, the big deal about this is that it’s now available on Mac OS X!

This is the first step in a broader initiative to get most of our Game Maker back-catalog running on Mac - we’ll have more information in the future about more plans in that regard. But for now, enjoy your block-stacking puzzle goodness.

Hit up the game’s page to download the new version.

Update: a new version, v1.3.2, is out. This fixes the problem that some people were having with the minimap (namely, it not existing).

Block Dude X v1.3.1 Prerelease!

written March 15th, 2013 by zachhinchy

UPDATE: We’ve made the release official; go check it out!

Original post: Hey folks. We’re gonna start doing a new thing every now and then over here at The Layabouts where we “officially unofficially” release new updates before we “actually for real” release them, to check for bugs and whatnot. Today, here’s a new version of Block Dude X. It’s a rewrite of the game that brings it to the new Game Maker Studio platform, bringing with it performance improvements and Mac OS X compatibility! There’s also a fix for a level exploit and some minor cosmetic improvements/fixes.

Download it: Windows • Mac OS X

So go ahead and try it out! If you run into any problems, please contact us. If everything goes well, we’ll release it for real (including on Game Jolt) within the next couple of days.

Apologies for the downtime.

written February 26th, 2013 by zachhinchy

We’re doing some shuffling around with the system backend, so a brief bit of downtime was expected, but we apologize for the length of time it took. We’re back, though!

Power Tower - Music!

written February 23rd, 2013 by zachhinchy

Hi, it’s me, Zach Hinchy! While I’m too busy with other things to be directly involved in the Power Tower project, I’m making music for it. You may have heard one of the battle themes in the trailer (a midgame battle theme, specifically), but here’s an opportunity for you to listen to it in full quality with no distractions. We’ll be sharing more music with you soon - we have some great ideas.

Power Tower - The Player Character

written February 13th, 2013 by lbunclejoe

We’re making a huge number of assets for Power Tower, to ensure that we can allow for as much randomization as possible, right down to the player’s starting appearance and name. We’ll cover randomly generated player names at a later time, but for now, let’s take a look at the appearance of the fine weirdos you’ll be controlling in Power Tower.

We recently updated the look of our player assets to fit more in line with the enemy artwork. Before, they used to look like this:

They can be funny, yes, but I think you can see why we wanted to change them. Take a look at the new batch:

Much better! More detailed, more consistent, and a lot more silly. We’re still in the process of remaking a lot of the old player assets, so we don’t have the dozen or so septilion possible looks we did before, but there’s still a good variety at the moment. These new ones can also turn!

Amazing Stuff! Look at him go! Of course, this new system has also broken a few things, like this other poor cyclops here:

We’re still figuring out how to handle situations like this, but there’s plenty of time left to do so.

See you next week!

Power Tower - Saturday Monster Sketches

written February 9th, 2013 by lbunclejoe

Here’s some Power Tower monsters straight out of Nate’s Notebook, and a couple (mostly) completed fellows from in game.