Dinosaur fans, rejoice! We’re incredibly excited to announce our brand new game, Go Home Dinosaurs! We’ve been working really hard on this for the past few months and we can’t wait to show it off for the first time next week at PAX in Seattle. Gonna be attending the show? Then be sure to stop by our booth and try it out! We’ll right in Indie Alley and next to the PAX 10 in booth 6408.
But what’s this? You want to know about the game? Well wonder no more! Go Home Dinosaurs! (GHD! to the cool kids) is a fun new take on tower defense where players fit together puzzle piece shaped weapons powered by small, cute mammals to defend against invading, mischievous dinosaurs. Gophers shooting lasers! Pterodactyls attempting to crash your BBQ! METEORS RAINING DOWN FROM THE HEAVENS! Oh, and did we mention that you can level up your character and gain new dino destroying abilities by collecting and trading cards? It’s true!
This game has it all, blending short, simple, easy-to-get-into fun with deep mechanics that keep things exciting and new. Pack your bags dinos, ’cause you’re going home!
IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN … to the March 15th release of Slam Bolt Scrappers on the PlayStation Network. To help steady your mind and ready your fingers for this slamtacular mash-up of brawling and building headed for your living rooms, allow me to humbly present: “The Official Slam Bolt Scrappers Trailer, Best Trailer of All Trailers.” Bask in its weaponized-block-filled glory!
Slam Bolt Scrappers is an epic game about blocks and baddies, friends and foes, building and destruction. The journey began long ago: We had discovered a powerful recipe by deciphering encrypted instructions found on ancient stone tablets. We followed this recipe for millennia, meticulously mixing strange ingredients from exotic locales. The result is a game with the perfect combination of multiplayer beat-em-up brawling and strategic puzzling. The result is Slam Bolt Scrappers. *cue epic music*
In SBS, players fly through the air above their team’s tower, punching cthuloid grubs to get colored blocks. Placing these blocks into squares of the same color turns them into powerful weapons that automatically attack their opponent’s tower. By punching baddies, building larger weapons, and saying mean things about their opponent’s face, one player will destroy their enemy’s tower and emerge victorious. 1-4 players can compete in the co-op campaign, fighting a variety of baddies and bosses, or duke it out in the multiplayer battle mode, unlocking new weapons and levels as they brawl.
We’ve put a variety of weapons in the game for your block breaking pleasure. Teal lightning blasters, purple laser guns, and automatic green drills are all at your disposal, but the ultimate weapon may be the dreaded black cannon.
The black cannon is unique in Slam Bolt Scrappers. Unlike all other weapons, the black cannon must be manually loaded and fired for each shot. Instead of using their blocks to build more weapons, players fly into the green arrow on each empty cannon and press the circle button to load their block into the cannon. The cannon then finds a target and fires a flaming block, causing massive damage to whatever it hits along with splash damage effecting other nearby blocks.
Using the black cannon in fights always has devastating results. There is nothing like wiping out a huge weapon in your enemy’s tower with a single shot. Well, nothing except wrecking a boss with these same flaming projectiles.
So, if you want to get some hands on experience with the black cannon, be sure to pick up the game on March 15th. If the trailer got your heart racing and you can’t wait to use the cannon, stop by booth 1133 at PAX East for a hands-on sneak peak. To win a free copy of the game at PAX East, check out our post on the contest here. In the mean time, join our Facebook Fan Page (facebook.com/FireHoseGames), and follow us on Twitter (@FireHoseGames) for more updates!
Are you going to PAX East? Do you want to know how to win a free copy of Slam Bolt Scrappers? Here’s the key:
WEAR A CRAZY HAT!
Hats like this are +1 crazy.
The Fire Hose team will be at PAX in booth 1133 showing off Slam Bolt Scrappers (you may notice us by our funny, red fire fighter hats). If you come by our booth and think your crazy hat can out crazy our crazy hat, grab someone on the team and show them your crazy… hat! We will randomly be selecting a handful of crazy hat wearers to receive free copies of the game. Of course, you’ll get extra points if you slap a Slam Bolt Scrappers sticker on your hat!
A crazy hat means a hat that is notable or unusual in some way. In other words, wearing a Red Sox hat might not get you a ton of attention, but wearing a top hat or a party hat on top of it will probably catch our collective eye.
Oh and, spread the word! The more hat-wearers, the better. Because, as you already know, Slam Bolt Scrappers is partially a game about hats.
When designing SBS, one of the first things we talked about was “How can we reward players for completing particularly difficult challenges in a meaningful way?” Trophies are great and all, but they don’t really have any impact on the game itself. So, in SBS, when you unlock a trophy, you automatically get a new hat that your player can wear in the game. This seemed like a great extension of trophies, but we ended up getting a little carried away.
We came up with many more hats and challenges than we originally anticipated. So we added in a “Challenges” list with 10-20 hats (and challenges) in addition to those already associated with trophies. These challenges were a really fun way for us to show gamers what we, the developers, thought were difficult tasks. One of the most serious challenges was a 1v2 match with one player against 2 computer players on hard. We literally spent days playing matches against the computer trying to beat this challenge – one of our brave testers tried for at least 3 hours straight. Finally, one of the programmers figured out how to do it, so we held a massive celebration involving… hats. Yeah, we’re pretty cool.
OK, I admit it. WE’VE BEEN QUIET LATELY. Since PAX Prime we haven’t been saying too much. But it’s for your benefit! You see we’ve been busting our ass, and just last week we hit Alpha, that magical milestone where every feature and mode has been added to the game. It’s the first time that we can look at the game and see the entire thing in all its glory.
So great, we’re done, right? NOT QUITE MY FRIENDS. The game is wicked buggy, and while every level, boss, and block type might be in, a lot of stuff doesn’t quite look right, or we’ll occasionally get the mysterious crash of mysteriousness. As you can imagine, we’ve got a lot to fix. Still, it’s pretty sweet that we can have 4 people sit down together and play through the entire campaign, or play anything in the battle mode.
Perhaps you live in the greater Boston area, and are intrigued by all the new kick ass-edness in Slam Bolt Scrappers? Then why don’t you visit and try out the game! Drop us a line (test <at> firehosegames [dot] com) and we’ll get you set up.
So you thought the slides from the PAX Prime In(die)credible talk looked cool, but wished you could catch the actual panel? WELL FEAR NOT MY FRIEND, we have it for you here! Yes, it’s a glorious 6-parter video of my talk with Robin, Nathan, Dylan, and Andy. Worth watching if you have, erm, a free hour!
Thanks to Nick Dahms for being an awesome human being all around, he taped it and then posted it on the interyoutubes.
