Hey, hey you!  Silence when you talk to me Jim!  I've cobbled together a little preview trailer for BB, and it's HERE so stop what you're doing and go and have a look.  Judging by the fact that you're reading this, you've not got much going on anway so another 45 seconds of your life down the pan won't make too much difference ;)

Dig the variable camera angle baby, it looks better in "real life" but this gives a pretty good flavor of the game it's self.  Looking forward to people playing this one and it will be nice to have a title with a moderate chance of selling on the marketplace, haha.  Enjoy!

Well, it's been a rocky couple of months all together, with the scars from SPfT still a little raw, but we're finally in a position to start talking about Blazin' Balls final "release configuration".  We plan to move to Peer Review on Monday next week, with release coming as usual any time after that.  So here I present the release screenshots which will be visible on the Xbox 360 Dash when we make it to release:






One thing to note in these shots is the variable camera angle.  During a recent quick testing session with some poker friends, it was mentioned that some areas would be better with a high camera angle.  So I wired the right thumbstick to the camera height, using a long bit of speaker cable.  It's a little-known fact the all the games we produce are physically real, and I have ordered 10,000 lego sets to make enough tracks to go round. 

One thing you can't see is the motion blur, because I slowed the ball right down for the screen grabs. 

We're still just around the 2 meg mark for the distro, and all I have to add now is a splash screen.  Not sure what to do with it to be honest, and I'd like to do something in keeping with the Carrum and Space Pirates splash/load screens but ideas are a little thin on the ground at the moment.  Well, I'll have a think about it over the weekend and get something together, and maybe some menu music but I'm not sure about that yet either!  I'm going to take a little time off before starting the next game after BB (mybe for a month, maybe a bit longer) because I have some other projects coming up, but I have a couple of ideas which I'm batting around which I might elaborate on next week as we go through the peer review process.  We've only had one report of hangs in the game and I nailed that bug hard - a bit of a strange one, the xbox was locking up totally when creating a new sound effects engine.  So I just re-arranged a couple of thing, making a single sound engine which is reused.  Hurrah for GameComponents!  I've used loads and loads of them in this project and they've made things so much easier.  I've also got a few nice additions to the standard MStar Games code library, including a new lightweight camera, the sound effects and music engine, the highscore table component and some screen viewport management stuff too.  Along with the collision physics, this has been a really useful project whatever happens post-release but I suspect this will be our best selling game to date.  Not that that would be too hard!

I'm going to bang a trailer together tomorrow for posting on GameTrailers and YouTube, but I'm a little concerned that I can't keep a great framerate going with all the motion onscreen, but I'll just have to do the best I can with what I've got.

In other news, my lab subdomain is now up and running so if you have any interest whatsoever in the other things I get up to (building radios, decoding weather satellite transmissions, a spot of astronomy) then go have a nose at http://labs.mstargames.co.uk and you can also see some of the sat images at http://weather.mstargames.co.uk  I'm always up to something strange and interesting so if you're stuck for something fascinating to think about, give the sites a look why not?

Anyway, almost 4 in the morning so I'd better at least pretend to get some sleep.  It'll be a busy time next week so I'd better try and get set for it.  Pip pip!

(Sent out via GamesPress.Com today - note that more info is available by clicking Blazin Balls in the top or side menus on the site here.  This site.  No, THIS site - the one...yea that's it you got it)

MStar Games annouce Xbox 360 physics-based puzzle/racer Blazin Balls

MStar Games, creators of Space Pirates from Tomorrow and Carrum (available on XBox LIVE Indie Games) today officially annouce their next title, Blazin' Balls - a simple, addictive 3D puzzler and racing game.  At first glance this seems an odd combination, but it will appeal to fans of simple, direct "challenge" games.  Players must pick their path along a space-bourne road comprised of various coloured block avoiding gaps, collecting coins and trying to beat the target time for each level.  The coloured blocks effect your ball in various ways, with some slowing you down, some speeding you up, others making you bounce and a couple of other effects which will intreague and infuriate gamers in equal measure.  The game soundtrack continues the MStar tradition of rich electro-ambient beats.

Following the complexity of Space Pirates, it's a welcome change of pace for studio head DrMistry.  "It's nice to work on a game which is bite-sized, rather than a 5-course banquet.  As a developer it focuses attention on tight core gameplay and as a gamer it's instant gratification, which is the polar opposite of Space Pirates.  It's a simple, pretty stripped-down game with a clean and minimalist aesthetic coupled with clean and minimalist gameplay.  Feature bloat was something we were very wary of from the start on this project because we wanted to really hammer this out and get the basics right before anything else.  But we quickly realised that the strength of Blazin Balls lies in it's simplicity - just your ball and the road and the clock and that's all that matters.  Also, it's much more of an 'Indie Game' than Space Pirates, and truer to the vision of what an indie label should be about - quirky, fun, simple titles."

With only a couple of weeks to go until release testing and a price tag of 80 MSP, Blazin' Balls should hit the marketplace in March.  More details and screenshots can be found at the MStar Games web site (www.mstargames.co.uk)

Ugh, not a great few days.  Been a bit under the weather, and our web/email host has had an absolute brain-spasm, meaning that I've missed about 500 messages over the llast couple of weeks.  If you're waiting for a reply to anything, please forgive me and I'll be with you shortly.  We also lost a few bits and bobs from the site overnight and I've got to look in to that too.  Sorry guys.

So, what's going on?  SPfT is s..l..o..w..l..y making it's way up the UK top ranking list and we've had a couple of really good reviews which cheered me up no end.  There are still a few glitches for me to sort out and they'll be actioned after we've finished Blazin' Balls.  Speaking of which, we're only about a week from the finishing line and I'm in the process of polishing the levels and getting the par times right.  Looking very positive - I'll have to start the old PR machine up again soon I suppose...

Sorry this isn't a longer post, but I have soooo much to catch up on as well as finishing BB.  As soon as I can I will be adding to the Post Mortem report, and writing some stuff about how XBLIG is changing.  Pip pip!