Hello all,

As you may have noticed we have not been updating the blog for a while now. Brendan had to take care of personal matters for a while and I have been mostly busy with my day job so things have not been going as smoothly as we expected. We have realized making innovative games with a reasonable amount of content is a fairly risky and time consuming endeavour. While we are not dropping our commitment to continue making games that match our expectations in terms of quality, we have decided to fall back to smaller, more manageable projects. These projects will include casual games and prototyping new gameplay mechanics, building an archive of resources and ideas which we can later use for bigger games whenever time and resources allow us to. We will remain into this “cruising mode” (:P) until things clear up and we can spend more time focusing fully on the bigger picture.

We will update whenever there is anything interesting and concrete to show. For now, FooBit will act as a thinktank and experimentation lab, while slowly working on separate game projects on the side.

Thanks for your support

Hello everyone! December’s always a busy month so we apologize for the lack of updates, but fear not, we are still working on games! We will post new updates as soon as the new year festivities are over and our daily routines can be resumed Thank you and have fun everyone!

Just a little bit late to the party but hey, it’s still Halloween! So Happy Halloween and enjoy the rest of the day!

It’s been a while since I posted anything, sorry about that – it’s a little hard to break the basement programmer mentality . But we’ve been hard at work on Colomotron, refining the look and gameplay and we think it is turning into quite a nice game. I thought perhaps I should give an update on things and give everyone a sneak peak at what we are working on at the moment, which would be the GUI. Trying to put together a nice slick look for the game menu system. Here’s a capture of the current multiplayer selection screen, for your enjoyment.

Colomotron Multiplayer GUI

Designing videogames is no doubt a tricky subject. The way I see it right now, there are two types of videogames: The indie type (most likely artsy with new mechanics) and the mass market type (The kind of games EA likes to pump out). Indie games tend to surprise me by either their ingenious gameplay or their stunning art styles but finding one with a good balance of both is a very rare case.  However even the better ones that provide a solid package tend to go under the radar because many people are not familiar enough with the gameplay style or it just looks too “out there” for them. Mass market games on the other hand (e.g. Call of Duty) stick to tried and true formula, rarely modifying the gameplay for each iteration. Well I’m not bashing them. The games are good. It’s easy to get into because it feels so familiar, it’s basically the same thing we’ve been playing for the past 10 years but with lots of eye candy and tweaked mechanics that is still very fun nowadays.

So I guess my point is, when we are making games here at Foobit, we have to always take these things into consideration. When we design our games we want to strike the perfect balance. One teaspoon of indie, one teaspoon of tried and true formula, a pinch of substance and mix it all into a cup of awesome We have to think of the people playing our games and try to make it appealing to most gamers, if not all of them (That’s a tough one). Of course that is no easy task… As gamers and “game-architects”, we also want to make the kind of games we have always wanted to create and maybe even push our limits beyond by doing so. There is a risk in deviating from stuffs that has been proved to work but we still have to take it or we will never learn. As designers and artists, we feel the need to satisfy that desire to innovate…and evolve the medium. I believe anyone who is passionate about making games should take that step to try and make games, as a medium, grow.

How do we get people to like something they don’t know anything about / something they do not feel familiar with. Even if they play a demo of it, what can they expect from the full game if they cannot “predict” what kind of game it will be or if it’s gonna be fun for them at all. Well these are all things to think about. I believe it’s all about balance and slowly integrating new gameplay mechanics little by little with every game we make so gamers can adapt to it. Hence why it is very important that we communicate with the community so we know if our little experiments are working or not.

Just thought I’d share some thoughts with you guys today. Thanks for reading. Of course, discussing the subject matter is highly encouraged Feel free to speak your minds.

Ok, inside joke….

Just an update on Colomotron’s development. Things are moving along nicely, it shouldn’t be too much longer before we enter the play testing stage. Right now we are trying to put polish on the look of the game, and by we I mean Victor is working his artsy magic on it . Then I’m going to move onto the multiplayer side of the game, we are going to have a 2-4 player multiplayer mode that I think should be very fun.

Gonna try to cram as much goodness as we can into this game!

Quick Update:

You might have noticed we haven’t updated the DevBlog in a while and there’s a good reason for this

We have decided to jump back to one of our projects previously named “Archus”. It was almost done (at least gameplay wise) so we decided to give it our 100% till its done so we can focus more on our other stuffs after that and not let it float in limbo. The game will now be under the name of Colomotron. It is an actioney and fast paced arcade game with gameplay mechanics which revolve around colours. So it’s gonna be double rainbow all the way!

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

As a follow up to the sneak peek from a couple of weeks a go, I present you the final rendering of Ankaa, previously known as “Red Player” (:P). You can as usual share your thoughts in the comments section.

As you might have noticed, the characters you play in TwinStar as not humans but we will be revealing more about the story at a later stage

I know I have not update in a little while. I’ve been hard at work trying to nail down a final design for our main protagonists and I think it’s getting there! I will not release the full image until we are sure everything is final but in the meantime, here is a sneak peek!

Yes she has a name but it will be revealed when we start getting the story out there. It looks like we might also be going 3D depending on how our tests go.  In other news we have started to think about about level design and player progression. This is a big one so we will spending quite some time on this. We’ll keep you updated.

Good question Will….

We are contemplating the pro’s and con’s of turning Twin Star into a 3D game. We’re going to run some tests and such and see what we see. The decision lies not only in a graphical sense but also in the terms of easing content creation and such. So depending on how these tests go Twin Star could get a whole new dimension to it. ; )