Airburst XBLA movie teaser
23/07/08 00:58
Things are starting to come together on Airburst now. Enough that we’ve been able to stick together a short teaser video of a small part of the game’s action. It’s still work in progress of course, but you get to see a couple of elements 
Click here for larger version
or the YouTube verson to share among friends http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts0JcGbuUns
Click here for larger version
or the YouTube verson to share among friends
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts0JcGbuUnsAirburst iPhone & Zune Wallpapers
23/07/08 00:58
Airburst XBLA iPhone/iPod Touch and Zune Wallpapers are now up in the Airburst XBLA section on the site.
Will be more of those to come so stayed tuned
Will be more of those to come so stayed tuned
This way to the secret title
17/07/08 20:59
The XBLA version of Airburst is now testing on Partnernet, the special testing network for Xbox developers. We’ve put it up so we can run some tests, but also so other friendly neighbourhood Xbox devs can have a play
It’s still under NDA and there’s plenty of work left for me to do, so don’t post screenshots or anything, but feel free to drop me a line if you spot anything that shouldn’t be there.
Oh, and one feature just for the devs as it won’t be in the final version due to the new Dashboard they showed at E3. Check out the dash when you’re in Airburst
It’s still under NDA and there’s plenty of work left for me to do, so don’t post screenshots or anything, but feel free to drop me a line if you spot anything that shouldn’t be there.
Oh, and one feature just for the devs as it won’t be in the final version due to the new Dashboard they showed at E3. Check out the dash when you’re in Airburst
X5560 Experimental Title
18/06/08 21:37
Getting there!
Still a while to go before Airburst is ready for everyone to play on their Xboxes (and even if I knew when it was likely to be released, I wouldn't be allowed to say anyway), but we've just passed an important development milestone and things are definitely taking shape.
We're still working flat out to get everything finished, but hopefully should have a little bit of time to put together a bit of gameplay video and some more screenshots for everyone to have a look at.
Still a while to go before Airburst is ready for everyone to play on their Xboxes (and even if I knew when it was likely to be released, I wouldn't be allowed to say anyway), but we've just passed an important development milestone and things are definitely taking shape.
We're still working flat out to get everything finished, but hopefully should have a little bit of time to put together a bit of gameplay video and some more screenshots for everyone to have a look at.
Title not found
10/03/08 17:51
No, it's not done yet!
We have however put a couple of screenshots up (www.unscripted360.com and www.360sync.com got them up first over the weekend) to show the work in progress. Hopefully more shots and stuff as we go.
We have however put a couple of screenshots up (www.unscripted360.com and www.360sync.com got them up first over the weekend) to show the work in progress. Hopefully more shots and stuff as we go.
Get your titles from Titles R Us!
15/02/08 00:13
Things are progressing pretty well at the moment. Hopefully at some point we'll be allowed to show some screenshots, but until then I get to do vague blog posts about stuff without giving away any real details
I've been doing a lot of work on the network code recently with a lot of help from Martin Piper over at ReplicaNet. It's mildly brain boggling trying to persuade network packets to time travel in order to cover the inherent lag you get when communicating over the net, but so far it's working pretty well. Once you get around the problem of network packets going back in time and killing their own grandparents it's a lot easier.
We've also got another testing party coming up soon. It'll be interesting to compare the feedback from that to the initial one we had here, especially as Airburst is a bit more feature complete now.
I've been doing a lot of work on the network code recently with a lot of help from Martin Piper over at ReplicaNet. It's mildly brain boggling trying to persuade network packets to time travel in order to cover the inherent lag you get when communicating over the net, but so far it's working pretty well. Once you get around the problem of network packets going back in time and killing their own grandparents it's a lot easier.
We've also got another testing party coming up soon. It'll be interesting to compare the feedback from that to the initial one we had here, especially as Airburst is a bit more feature complete now.
Insert witty title here
04/12/07 14:44
ok, so nearly falling back into my old ways of forgetting to post anything for ages. Possibly because I'm working hard on Airburst, but more likely because the life of a games developer isn't half as exciting as some people think!
There's also the problem of having to be careful what I actually write here. I can't give any details on release dates or game features as that makes the marketing team unhappy. Making the marketing team unhappy is never a good plan.
I could talk about technical stuff of course, except that rather a lot of it is under NDA. That and every coder I've worked with knows I'm not a spectacularly technical coder anyway
The actual coding and design is progressing nicely (in a non specific not giving out any sort of timescale or feature information kind of way), I'm having fun messing with the controls. Going from the original Airburst's 3 key controls to having the 360 Controller's array of buttons was a classic temptation to completely overcomplicate things, but I've managed to hold off from forcing you to require the chatpad to have enough buttons to control everything (actually, control is much easier on the 360 controller than the old keyboard controls).
We've been experimenting with different control layouts and options too, which is always fun. Especially when the controls have to work for all the different game types and for as wide an age range as possible. Airburst Extreme's players range from 5 year olds to granddads, so I need to make sure that we're not excluding anyone.
There's also the problem of having to be careful what I actually write here. I can't give any details on release dates or game features as that makes the marketing team unhappy. Making the marketing team unhappy is never a good plan.
I could talk about technical stuff of course, except that rather a lot of it is under NDA. That and every coder I've worked with knows I'm not a spectacularly technical coder anyway
The actual coding and design is progressing nicely (in a non specific not giving out any sort of timescale or feature information kind of way), I'm having fun messing with the controls. Going from the original Airburst's 3 key controls to having the 360 Controller's array of buttons was a classic temptation to completely overcomplicate things, but I've managed to hold off from forcing you to require the chatpad to have enough buttons to control everything (actually, control is much easier on the 360 controller than the old keyboard controls).
We've been experimenting with different control layouts and options too, which is always fun. Especially when the controls have to work for all the different game types and for as wide an age range as possible. Airburst Extreme's players range from 5 year olds to granddads, so I need to make sure that we're not excluding anyone.
look an update!
18/11/07 18:40
Working on (amongst other things) the game selector this weekend.
To clear up some early confusion when we first mentioned we were doing Airburst for the Xbox 360, this is a completely new Airburst. We wanted to call it Airburst 360, but the lawyers pointed out we'd need to release another 357 versions of the game before we could get away with that. As a good chunk of Xbox owners won't have seen either Airburst or Airburst Extreme yet, we went with the easy option and just called it Airburst again. Mac users can think of it as Airburst 3 if they want
For those Xbox gamers that haven't heard about Airburst yet, it's an extreme sport played at high altitude. Each player sits on a raft of balloons and controls a bat. Razor sharp flying balls called bursters are then released and players have to defend their balloons while trying to burst their opponents to knock them out of the sky. Add in a whole bunch of powerups and different game modes, plus each character having an Extreme power to try and tilt the balance in their favour and that's Airburst in a nutshell.
For those of you that have played Airburst and/or Airburst Extreme, this version is all the best game modes from the first two (without having to play through the Story mode we added in Airburst Extreme to unlock them) with a whole new, written from scratch engine so we could tune everything for the 360 and its controllers (including a certain new controller with oversized buttons).
To clear up some early confusion when we first mentioned we were doing Airburst for the Xbox 360, this is a completely new Airburst. We wanted to call it Airburst 360, but the lawyers pointed out we'd need to release another 357 versions of the game before we could get away with that. As a good chunk of Xbox owners won't have seen either Airburst or Airburst Extreme yet, we went with the easy option and just called it Airburst again. Mac users can think of it as Airburst 3 if they want
For those Xbox gamers that haven't heard about Airburst yet, it's an extreme sport played at high altitude. Each player sits on a raft of balloons and controls a bat. Razor sharp flying balls called bursters are then released and players have to defend their balloons while trying to burst their opponents to knock them out of the sky. Add in a whole bunch of powerups and different game modes, plus each character having an Extreme power to try and tilt the balance in their favour and that's Airburst in a nutshell.
For those of you that have played Airburst and/or Airburst Extreme, this version is all the best game modes from the first two (without having to play through the Story mode we added in Airburst Extreme to unlock them) with a whole new, written from scratch engine so we could tune everything for the 360 and its controllers (including a certain new controller with oversized buttons).