This isn’t a full cinematic style trailer, just a quick mash up of some interesting bits now that all the coder art has gone. We will be doing one of those in the near future though, and I promise that it won’t have a Barry White overdub! 

For the actual game, we had a big meeting here this morning and found ourselves in agreement that the game is now 90% complete and in true programmer traditions, all we have to do now is finish up the other 90% that remains.

Multiplayer is working – FFA for 2, 3 & 4 players, plus a team 2v2 option. There are selectable time intervals for asynchronous play and a real-time option for those that want to sit their all day schooling their buddies over and over.

Just now we’ve started a fairly simple questing system for the single player fans, whilst at the same time levering in a tutorial which we promise is being kept short.

Tons of small jobs need finalising now, and when that’s all been done we’ll have a big announcement about early access for PC players.

We’ve hinted at public Beta before, but what we’re going to try is more like what worked so well for Notch – put the game out “almost complete” and get as much feedback from as many people as possible early on. In that way we can bring you the best game possible and give the impatient some early doors action.

That’s it for now, can’t stay too long as another 50 quickie jobs just showed up…

https://itunes.apple.com/app/id623273862

Another game slips quietly out of the Rubicon stable…  Our ‘one thumb’ bowling game called “Spinmaster Bowling”

If you enjoy a bit of ten pin action, I hope you’ll give ours a try? It’s free with ads or you can remove those and get access to a bunch of different balls for the princely sum of $0.99

This is not an over-engineered epic like some of its competitors – just pick up and play, which has been our design goal since day one. So much so, that you can play the entire game with just one thumb. No aimers, no sliders, no tilting, just swipe to take a shot and see how much spin you can cram on!

As well as the standard 300 game, there’s also an arcade mode that adds some pzazz and you can share scores (and action replays) over facebook which also houses a leaderboard.

iOS only for now, Android and others will be following very shortly…

Check it out!

Each of the 10 different races has a uniqe special passive ability that’s on all the time. For example all the orcs, no matter what type, get +2 power each time somebody attacks them but doesn’t finish them off. The humans get a health boost for each other friendly monster they’re stood next to it. etc. Works really nice. More details to come later.

All of the 40+ specialist abilities are now complete too, barring tweaking and balancing. I think we’re finally at the point where every single one of the 120 different monsters has a good reason to exist and will provide deck builders with a wealth of possibility. No “filler” here.

The player account server is practically complete and we’ve just started on the multiplayer stuff. Michalis just picked up my “most pestered man” baton! Games will be asynchronous, but offer a range of timeout periods for the opponent to take a turn, ranging from 1 day down to 5 minutes. And yes, by popular demand there will be many play options – 1v1, 1v1v1 and 2v2. We might even add some 2x players vs 1x or 2x AI’s as well if anyone wants it.

That’s it for now. I’ll post again once I’ve finished my first multiplayer game, by which time we’ll start thinking about how to roll out an alpha version for public testing and tweaking…

There is only one major job left on the todo list at the moment, and that’s an entirely new AI for the single player game. Oh, and the asyncronous stuff for the multplayer game. And a trillion other jobs for that matter. But mainly the AI.

Having changed the core rules of the game recently, we’re having to control both teams manually again, which sucks a bit. However once the new AI goes in, the gameplay should be fantastic. I really can’t wait to play this game “properly” now so hopefully that won’t be too long.

And then it’s time for an open “Alpha”…

There’s been a lot of idea reworking lately and we’re finally happy with how our gameplay is working. In fact we’re over the moon about it – we have something pretty new here and I do hope that means that translates into being a big hit.

There will be a substantial single player campaign, but Combat Monsters is in the main a multiplayer game, and will use similar technology to that found in other turn based online games such as “words with friends” or our own Great Big War Game.

Think Magic:The Gathering, simplified down to being playable without a degree in maths, but with actual 3D monsters hurling fireballs at each other, not some lame bits of paper.

You make a deck of around 40 “cards”, where each card represents either a monster, some equipment to drop on a monster, or an immediate effect like “draw two more cards”. On your turn you play the cards in your hand directly on to the battlefield which spawns monsters, equips them and etc.

You have a hero character to pick before combat and this guy also lives on the battlefield. The object of one battle being to kill the other guys hero. The various heroes affect your strategy, giving your monsters some buffs, or maybe allowing more mojo. The wrinkle here is that you can only spawn new monsters around where your hero is, so if you want to deploy forces at the front line, you’ll need to risk him coming under fire right away.

Each monster (of 120 available) has a unique set of stats and two almost unique abilities. You use these monsters to fight the enemies and hopefully break through and take his hero down to win the game.

Using those monster abilities costs mojo points, as does playing cards from your hand. Each turn you get some mojo from your hero, from occupying key areas of the battlefield, and any special mojo-generating abilities of your already spawned monsters. This should ensure there’s lot of things to fight over during a battle, not just a blind rush to the other guys hero for a potshot.

I’ll try to post a more coherent description in the near future once we’ve finished reworking some of the interface elements, and screenshots can be used as examples. I just wanted to post this out there now as it’s been a while and a lot has evolved already…

The proudest moment is yet to come though. I’ve been speaking with a couple of the organizers of the award, back from when we were first nominated to be nominated and they needed some videos etc. Whilst it was never specifically mentioned, throughout those early conversations I had a default assumption that our game would be in some sort of “mobile” category.

But apparently not!  We’re out in the wild with all the massive games such as “XCOM: Enemy Unknown”. The full list of nominees in our category can be seen here. Needless to say we’re not expecting to win this thing, but just being put in the same category as games such as those is indeed an honour for a five man indie team. I’ve been smiling about it for days now…

Click me for the full list of category nominations.

In slightly less dry news, I got a new gameplay feature going today. Learning fast from poor sales of GBWG, we realised that to make a truly successful title it needs to have zombies in it. Well, zombies we now have. Complete with novel ways to dispatch ‘em.

Got a zombie problem? Who you gonna call…

That’ll learn ‘em!

… disco inferno

This is kinda bittersweet for us though tbh, as the game isn’t selling as well as you might expect, certainly for one that’s so well critically acclaimed. I’m thinking of the time when “Vienna” was kept off the number one spot in the music charts over here, by Joe Dolce’s “Shaddap a ya face”

So we thought what the hell, lets try giving it away. With help from FAAD, we’re trying a one week promotion to try and get some eyeballs on our title. That’s right, we’re not just giving it away but we’re paying someone a lot of money to help us do so!

If you try it out and love it, please take note that there are a few iap’s in the game for additional content. Us hungry/greedy developers need sales income to be able to continue bringing you the good stuff. (And to avoid us having to get real jobs.)

If you don’t think the game’s worth a buck or two, please enjoy it anyway – we’d still prefer millions playing for free than nobody playing it at all. Without further ado, go get a freebie: https://itunes.apple.com/app/great-big-war-game/id508002149

We’ve added movement to the monsters now, which has added a great tactical element to the game, both for the multiplayer fighting and the single player component (read: level design). We’ll be offering the game up free to play about with on PC once we get to something that’s roughly alpha, which is exciting for us. I hope we can get plenty of player feedback early enough so we can tweak based on it.

In other news, we’ve also started a bowling game. There are a few others out there, but the key difference between those and ours is that you can control the ball in our game. Seriously, the amount of utter crap we’ve seen whilst researching this is depressing. If you have one of these “games”, please give ours a try once it’s out – you might be surprised that bowling can be made fun and controllable on a phone!

Lastly, we’ve negotiated rights with our PC publisher to include Windows 8 in our previously RT-only release on Microsoft’s store. Yes, there was actually a reason we couldn’t do this before, despite all the “advice” describing how easy it is to do. Imagine that!

Happy Holidays from all of us at Rubicon.