BTM finished, not yet released
Hi all,
Last week, we completed the development of Blocks That Matter and submitted the game to Peer Review on the XNA Community forums.
Unfortunately, we discovered this morning that the game didn’t pass the review process. The reason : minor crashes linked to the use of Memory Unit and the fact that you can’t buy the game with a non-online profile on Xbox. Well, those “bugs” are already fixed but when you fail in Peer Review you can’t send a new build immediately and have to wait for a week. So we have to wait 7 days from now before we can submit the game to peer review again…
This week-end was a little sad for us cause even if Blocks That Matter is finished, the fact that we didn’t manage to honor the release date we gave you (April) is a shame. I know, this is our very first commercial game so it’s not like if the players worlwide were waiting for Blocks That Matter to be released, but I hope you’ll forgive us this little setback.
But there’s also good news: Blocks That Matter has been quite well received by the Xna reviewers. We are proud cause we achieved to make a game like this one in only 4 months. It was a pretty big challenge for us and the tiny team we are, so we just can’t wait to celebrate its release with you now.
Not to mention we will start to port the game on computers (Windows, Mac, Linux) in few days. You can count on us to share our advances on this topic during the next weeks.
I’ll end this article with a doodle of Tetrobot, more calm than it has never been.
See you soon, and thank you again for your great support.
@Garry:
Thanks for pointing this project out!
I’ll give it a try and letting know you if I use this or not.
I hope those projects give a support for XAct 🙂 Because we used it a lot with Yann to make some random pitch/tracks/multi track stuff 🙂
@Lorancou:
Thanks for your optimism 🙂
Like Glados used to say: “You remained resolute and resourceful in an atmosphere of extreme pessimism” 🙂
@Onejos:
Yeah, TRC z b1tch :]
@Soli:
Good question. We will definitely try to be on Steam by sending them a resquest… But any game must pass the Valve approval to be eligible for Steam. So maybe BTM will not interest them, even if it’s a small price game (around 5$).
We will keep you informed of the Steam negotiation when we will talk to them!
For PC, Steam version possible?
TRC powa ;p
Can’t wait to play it !!!
Congrats! Best luck for the release, I hope you’ll get lots of buyers. And about missing the deadlines, well that’s a characteristic of great studios 😉 (think of Blizzard or Valve)
Well MonoXNA seems to be discontinued, but ExEn (http://andrewrussell.net/exen) seems to be a promising project, although it is still in development. I never tried Mono myself, but I would be surprised if its performances were really bad 🙂
Hi there, thanks all of you for your support 🙂
We will let you know what’s happening with the reviewers 🙂 Right now the game is back in playtest, with some modification with the way of handling profile, save game, and Memory Units :]
@Garry:
Right now I was thinking about porting BTM in Java, using some lib like http://lwjgl.org/ to do most of the low level support (openGL wrapper, input wrapper… with a support for gamepads).
I though about Mono some time ago… but I fear for the performances, but I’m not a mono expert and maybe the xna implementation can brought acceptable performances.
Did you ever experimented MonoXNA ? http://www.monoxna.org.
Maybe I could do some test before making my Java port 🙂
I had the opportunity to test BTM shortly while it was in playtest state. You did a very good job here 🙂
So good luck fro the next submission!
On a side note, I’m very curious what is your plan for porting BTM to Linux and Mac platforms. I suppose you’re thinking about an implementation of XNA on Mono?
Tenez bon, ça va passer -)
Wouhou congrats for finishing the game!
Now I hope the in the next submission reviewers won’t find other tiny bugs that would force to wait for another week…
Cause I want to play it! 🙂
Hi Michael,
The development of Seasons after Fall is still frozen.
We will probably work on other projects after Blocks That Matter.
But don’t worry, we will talk about this in few weeks.
Have a good day,
William
The game looks very nice, 😀 ill download it when it comes out if i can lol, also do you have any information on seasons of fall release :D? have you found a 2d artist yet can i expect it within a few months :P?
Initially, we were planning a PC release in May (probably the end of the month) but I don’t know if we didn’t start the port right now so I can’t tell exactly. We will give you more information when we will have some.
Logically, the game will be available on this website and we will try to talk with different people in order to find a way to distribute it on more famous download platforms.
Stay tuned !
any idea when the PC version would be out?
and how will you distribute it?