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Announcing Sideway
Wednesday 06th of October 2010
Hey Playblog readers! Today we’re announcing the awesomesauce that is Sideway, a unique adventure platformer set in and around the oh-so-gritty streets of New York City. The characters and story have been birthed from a fantastic world created by the quasi-evil geniuses at Fuel Industries and W!ldbrain.
If you happen to be at the New York Comic Con on October 8th, we’re officially inviting you to Room 1A21 at 2:15pm where we will officially announce the title as a Sony Online Entertainment exclusive to the PlayStation Network. Yes, that means that I am announcing the announcement here, which I guess makes this a “pre-announcement” announcement!
We are in sooper-deep development at the moment (please send pizza and beer), which means that the belts are coming off and we’re settling into our coding chairs for winter in order to get things all sparkly for a 2011 launch. We’re not ready to spill the beans on some of the really cool features and unique gameplay elements in the game just yet, so until then, take a gander at some early concept pieces and composites from the game that should give you an idea of the world you will be tooling around in as an underground street artist in NYC. It will be an awesome game and we’re excited to be making it.
Keep your eye on playbrains.com/sideway for updates, and be sure to follow us at Twitter.com/Playbrains if you want up-to-the minute news on concept art, development updates, and to learn what Canadian celebrities we are standing behind in grocery store lines.
Madballs on Mac!
Wednesday 19th of May 2010
Hi folks,
We’re pleased to announce that Madballs in…Babo:Invasion is coming to Macs everywhere - today!
When we were designing the BrainCandy engine that MiBI is built upon, we always had Macs in mind - which is why we built in low-level support for *both* DirectX and OpenGL. Of course, when it came time to actually publish Madballs, we ran into a roadblock - no Steam on the Mac (and thus really, no multiplayer gaming infrastructure on the Mac at all!)
Needless to say, we were excited when Valve announced they were bringing Steam (and their games to the Mac) - and have been working hard to make Mac MiBI a reality.
Features of the Mac/Steam version of Madballs in…Babo:Invasion:
- All game modes - single player, co-op, survival and versus
- All gameplay features - characters/classes, weapons, abilities, etc.
- All DLC - support for all downloadable skins, unlocks, etc
- All mission types - support for personal and community missions
- All Steam community features - steam cloud, achievements, leaderboards, etc
- SteamPlay - if you bought MiBI for the PC, you already own the Mac version!
- Plus… PC+Mac players play together! Co-op or versus, doesn’t matter if you’re on PC or Mac, play with/against your friends on all peer-to-peer or dedicated server games!
Now, there are a couple of small limitations in the current implementation - they won’t keep you from playing with your friends and having a great time - but the game will get even better on the Mac when we address these in the future:
- Babo Crash not included - As you know, we added a free embedded version of our mobile game, Babo Crash, to the PC version - we haven’t yet had time to port it over yet
- Advanced shader support missing - We don’t yet have our advanced shaders working under OpenGL… the game still looks great though and graphics performance is top-notch… there will be additional eye-candy in the future once we enable this
- Controller support - we don’t support the Xbox 360 controllers natively in the Mac version yet
- Slower map load times - older Mac’s may experience a 10-25 second black screen at the tail end of our map loading process (this happens while we load all the textures into memory). Furthermore, this delay *might* occasionally cause you to be disconnected from the multiplayer server you were attempting to join. If you get disconnected, just attempt to re-join the server - it will be faster and you should make it in.
Anyway, we happy to provide a new arena for the ongoing battle of Macs vs. PCs! See you online folks!
To pick up Madballs for Mac - click here!
Paul.
And the winners are…
Thursday 13th of May 2010
Hi folks,
We’re finally ready to announce the prizes for our Madballs Fan Video Contest!
First of all, we’d like to do a big shout-out to the Bumpatrol.org folks for doing such a great job organizing things! And of course, to all y’all for entering - thanks a bunch! It has certainly been fantastic to see the love the community has for the game, and the creativity that’s been brought to creating the videos is awesome! We wish we could give prizes to everyone!
To determine the winners we put together a panel of Playbrains employees who reviewed all entries — we came up with a short list of our top 5 - and then we voted on the rankings of the top 5 videos. The results may surprise you
Oh, a quick reminder (and apology) regarding our interim winners! As you may or may not recall, we extended the contest deadline when our Free Week-end got postponed - but some folks had already got there entries in, and we figured they deserved bonus prizes ($50 US) since they’d have to wait longer… Those winners are arramus, finderhome, tukamalight and aprone — and the apology part is that we haven’t sent those prizes yet, but we’ll send them out with the full prizes next week.
Okay, without further ado… here are our winners…
#5 - winning $100 US -> Montage, by Blaze
We liked the tunes, the camera angles and transitions - and the wide use of characters and loadouts…
#4 -winning $200 US -> Madballs Evolution Part 1, by eccod
Great quality scans - game looks great. Also, “Best Cinematography” !
As for the top 3 videos - something very unexpected happened. The top 3 videos all got the same number of votes from our panel… it’s interesting, because the 3 videos are each very different in tone, content and approach. The panel spent some time debating, with proponents of each arguing for top placement of their favorite.
In the end though, we’ve decided to let the votes stand, and evenly split the pooled prize money amongst the top 3! [So each winner gets 1/3 of the top-3 prizes ($1000 + 500 + 350), or $617]
Presenting our three-way tie for first!
Babolon TV, by Sonic4Ever - $617 US
A super creative Machinima effort - we love it!
Madballs Damnation, by Benetti32 - $617 US
Awesome music, great pacing - good mix of SP and MP footage! This is really the best gameplay video - and really shows off our game!
Requiem of Guns, by Tornis - $617 US
Super-catchy tune created from MiBI sound effects - we can’t get the tune out of our heads!
Next steps
Okay, now that we know who has won - winners (including interim winners again), I need you to contact me via private message via the Steam community forums.
We’ll need the following information to start:
- Your real name
- Which video was yours
- Your e-mail address
- Your mailing address
Thanks a bunch folks - and congratulations to all of the winners!
Paul.
Join up with Co-optimus! Sat Apr 17!
Thursday 15th of April 2010
Hi folks,
Co-optimus
Our good friends over at Co-optimus are organizing a Madballs Co-op night to celebrate our first free weekend! And they’re even giving away some MiBI skin codes to some lucky participants.
So - we know y’all were going to play this weekend anyway - so lets join up with them and make Saturday night all about MiBI Co-op! As you know, with both B*D*I and Scorched Campaigns, and the Night of the Chompiis’ Survival Mode - MiBI has tons of co-op fun to be enjoyed!
So, to join in with us:
- Step 1: Join the Co-optimus Steam group here. It’s the best way to learn about all the cool co-op events that they organize
- Step 2: Sign up for the Madballs Free Promo play event here.
Here’s a bit more info… link.
See you online on Saturday!
Paul.
[PS - Any many thanks to our friends at Co-optimus, who've always been big supports of Babo and all its associated madness ]
