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!