Let me introduce myself, my name is Kate and I am the new Community Manager and resident Gal Friday at Fire Hose Games. What does that mean for you? That means that you will be seeing more updates, more exclusive Fire Hose games information, and more interaction between Fire Hose and their fans than ever before.

The party has started and it is here.

There is so much that I want to talk about– Slam Bolt Scrappers is more than likely the best tower strategy meets brawling match up I have ever played and there will be lots of news about that title coming up soon. (Speaking of which if you haven’t played SBS yet why not go ahead and fix that over at the PSN store? ^_^ ) Go Home Dinosaurs is ridiculously fun and educational. (Did you know that dinosaurs were, in fact, made of bacon? True story.)

For my first post though I just want to say hello and tell you a bit about myself… By which I mean I will provide a quick rundown of the games I am playing that were not created by Fire Hose. ^_~

I am currently playing RE4 on the XBOX 360.I am also dabbling with Atlus’ Catherine and am looking forward to both 2K Games’ XCOM and BioShock Infinite from Irrational. I am also a big fan of Twisted Pixel’s Mr. and Ms. Splosion Man. I am especially fond of Ms. Splosion Man singing bits of Spice Girls songs. ^_^

Everybody loves to splode.

I enjoy several different types of games from platformers and RPGs to puzzle and FPS style gameplay– if there is a controller or a computer screen involved I will more than likely play for hours on end ignoring all basic human needs for nutrition until I have gotten all endings, achievements, trophies, or other spiffies.

I am also relying on video games to get back into shape and am currently moving and grooving my way to a better me using Harmonix’s Dance Central as a key piece in my exercise strategy. (Hey, did you know that Dance Central is actually part of the Fire Hose portfolio? It’s true!  …. maybe I can get someone here to fix it so that Poker Face shows me loosing 6,000 calories per round…. ^_^ )

There may or may not be footage of me on Youtube dancing around to Maneater with a blindfold on.

So, that is a bit about me. I look forward to getting to know all of the Fire Hose fans out there and providing you with heaps of news, exclusives, pictures, videos, the works! If you have a question or comment drop me a line or find me on the Fire Hose Facebook Page or the Fire Hose Twitter. ^_^

Egg on our face time!

I’ve gotta own up. Last week at the post mortem talk about Slam Bolt Scrappers I misspoke and inadvertently misrepresented the current state of Gamebryo. I said that it was dead, which is not the case – in fact it the engine is very much alive and is still in development thanks to Gamebase Co., Ltd. What I should have said during the talk was that the uncertainty of the future of the Gamebryo engine is what had us concerned.

I apologize for the confusion that my misstatement caused. Working with Gamebryo on Slam Bolt Scrappers was an absolute pleasure and Emergent (and more recently Gamebase) went above and beyond in terms of being a good partner for our studio. I’d definitely recommend the engine to any devs looking for a great cross platform solution for their game.

Whew! I feel better. Time to go play some Mrs. Splosion Man. That game is awesome.

Ever wonder what we think of Slam Bolt Scrappers? What we feel we did well, and where we think we goofed? Well, today is your lucky day! Last night I spoke at the monthly video game developer meet up here in Boston and gave a run down of what went well and what didn’t go well while we were making Slam Bolt Scrappers (what is called a post mortem in the vernacular), and it was really interesting!

In the talk I discuss how we messed up (tutorial problems, too chaotic), how we did well and got lucky (working with SOE, getting the game out early and often), and what was bittersweet (not putting in networked multiplayer, being especially innovative). If you are a SBS fan or interested in how games are made I highly suggest checking it out, it’s a fun watch!

Also, here are the slides if you want to check them out:

It’s been a long wait, but the PSN store is finally back online! SWEET! That means that you can get your two free games, check out a bunch of new content that updated during the outage, and most importantly, you can buy Slam Bolt Scrappers. Yes, life is good.

We know that a lot of people were bummed that they couldn’t get our game this past month, and of course we’re concerned that some former PSN store users my be apprehensive about coming back. To help sweeten the deal a bit beyond what Sony is already doing we’ve decided to drop the price of Slam Bolt Scrappers from $14.99 to $9.99. That’s means you can get a face full of four way multiplayer mayhem for 1/3 less than before. Pretty awesome, amiright?

So go grab Slam Bolt Scrappers in the PSN store now for the new low price of $9.99. If you like it tell your friends and get them to play it too! If you don’t like it tell your enemies and inflict it upon them.  Happy Scrapping!

Hey SBS fans!

We’re excited today to be releasing the original soundtrack for Slam Bolt Scrappers! We’re offering it as a free download over on this page.

The 13 tracks making up the soundtrack were composed and produced just for SBS by me and Jeff Nickel, who’s also responsible for the soundtrack to our thugged out team video. This is the first released game music for both of us — we learned a ton and had a blast getting the tracks ready for the game. We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to them too.

So go download the tracks now, or listen on YouTube to get a taste!

Starting at 4PM today, one of our superstar programmers and GAMBIT alum, Sharat, will lead the folks at GAMBIT through the journey that was the development of Slam Bolt Scrappers. As you may know, SBS has gone through a number of iterations, and Sharat will be showing off those early prototypes while discussing the different elements we changed between each and why we decided to change them. The original post can be found here: http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/2011/04/friday_games_gambit_040811_-_a.php.

GAMBIT holds a special place in the hearts of everyone here at Fire Hose Games, so we’re very excited that they’ve invited us to come talk about Slam Bolt Scrappers today for this week’s session of Friday Games at GAMBIT! Friday Games is a particularly interesting series at GAMBIT where each Friday they take an analytical approach to looking at games and games issues from the past, present… and FUTURE. Recent sessions covered the history of Tetris, the censoring of sex in games, and, of course, the history of Michael Jordan in video games, starting with 1993′s NBA Showdown. A list of events at GAMBIT (including past Friday Games) can be found here: http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/events/.

Hope you can make it!

As Alec noted last week, Issue #1 of the new FF series (the successor to Fantastic Four, now that Johnny Storm has been killed, penciled by Steve Epting) shows Franklin Richards (son of Reed and Sue) playing a video game he has just lost, and that game is Slam Bolt Scrappers!

The shot is from SBS circa Fall 2010 (after PAX Prime, when the health bars were vertical instead of horizontal, many months before release).

Here is the actual image they found on the web and used!:

And here is a side-by-side of the comic art and the original:

As far as we can tell, they set the Hue (in Hue/Saturation) to 180 and then the Cutout filter was applied (before the non-SBS text was overlayed).

In the process of unraveling this, I started playing with the Cutout filter and the Hue/Saturation of other shots from the game. Here were some of my favorites. What do you think? Any of these worth a spot in the Modern Museum of Art?

And the ultimate question: Are the results as cool when this is tried in other games, or is it only in the splendid chaos of Slam Bolt Scrappers?

–Jason

P.S. Hey Steve Epting: next time you are in Boston, come visit us!

Back to the controversy! Jason flips the book open to a page where the FF crew and some alien children are gathered around a TV playing a game. They are losing. OBSERVE:

ZOOM.

ENHANCE!

This does, in fact, appear to be a screenshot of an early prototype of Slam Bolt Scrappers – probably the build we showed off at PAX Prime 2010. I’ve highlighted a few items for my case in the picture below.

The first thing to jump out at me was the HUD on the left side. That is almost exactly the same as the HUD we had in the prototype we showed off at PAX Prime 2010. On top of that, there appear to be many different colored squares. Furthermore, in the bottom right, there is a T shaped piece of colored blocks, which is quite common in SBS. And if you really look closely, on the lower right side, there is a green circle in the middle of a square shooting a line at the other blocks. Looks a lot like our purple laser guns… but green! IT’S SBS I TELL YOU!

So, there you have it. It looks like a trendy artist put an image of SBS on a TV in a Marvel comic. Heck yeah! #WINNING.

EDIT: I found this old screen shot from PAX East 2010 (courtesy of SpawnKill) that shows our old HUD. Looks pretty similar to me!

After the dam level we were very worried – the game wasn’t quite good enough to make a full version, and it wasn’t quite bad enough to warrant a new prototype. On top of that we were running low on money and were concerned that if we didn’t figure something out soon we’d run out of gas before finishing the game. However we knew something had to give, as we weren’t getting the traction we wanted that the core fun was lacking.

We came up with a “last ditch” design for a new level that tried to blend the best bits of prototypes 3 and 4. We figured we’d keep the simpler fighting from the dam level while trying to incorporate more interesting building like in the tangram iteration. We knew we wanted to dial down the confusion from building with triangles and we figured squares could be simpler. After a month or so of jamming we came up with this.

Obviously this eventually morphed into Slam Bolt Scrappers, but it’s worth noting how many differences there were. The gecko bad guys and heroes were ripped straight out of the dam level, and you can see that the dash attack was even still in. The concept of dying and reviving was also lifted from the dam level, as well as the idea of getting blocks from defeated baddies.

The building here looks similar but there are some key differences. Initially the idea was that you had to build rectangles (not squares), with the height determining tower fire rate and the width determining power. Thus you could have a tall, rapid fire weapon or a squat, powerful weapon. The coloring is also different – here green is shields (note the green circles “protecting” stuff underneath it) and blue recharges the player’s dash meter (obviously this got cut in the final game.) The red missiles and purple lasers are somewhat similar, though you can see that the art here is extremely early. It’s also interesting to note how we changed the shields from circles to protecting adjacent weapons to reduce confusion.

The win condition in this game is pretty different too – you’ll note that there are some gold blocks with flags in the corner of each tower. These are “king blocks”, which were analogous to the king in chess; kill it and you win. King blocks didn’t fire but did regenerate quickly, so you had to get a focused attack on it to win. We wound up cutting this feature as it felt bizarre to have a special block that was important and didn’t do anything, but it’s interesting to see how it morphed into SBS’s concept of gold rimmed blocks that slowly regenerate health (we though the regeneration idea was pretty cool).

Once we had this prototype we were faced with a difficult decision. Should we run with the block building prototype (~1.5 months of work), the dam level (~4 months of work), or some combination thereof? We had huge discussions back and forth on the matter, and finally we decided that we had to jettison the dam level due to mediocrity. It was an extremely difficult choice to make as we had to kill our baby and throw out huge amounts of work, but ultimately it was the right decision to make.

After deciding to focus on this direction for the game we knew what we had to do next – start pumping in tons of new bad guys, make interesting new levels, improve fighting, and of course make different and fun types of blocks for players to use. We started jamming on designs and tried out a ton of different things, and by the summer we had narrowed down what we wanted to do to a manageable list. We entered production, and a few months later we finished the game in Feb 2011.

That’s the story of SBS!  We spent a ton of time prototyping and revising our game play mechanics, but ultimately I feel it was worthwhile. Next time though we’d like to do it a big quicker – prototypes 1-4 took us almost a year to do! Knowing when to keep plowing forward and when to ditch what you’ve got is probably one of the hardest things for indie devs (or any developers) to figure out. Thanks for reading this far!

After finishing our work on Dance Central with Harmonix it was late August 2009 and we were trying to figure out what to do next. The prototype we had worked on so many months ago felt stale and unpolished, and we were certain we could do a better job if we started from scratch. Furthermore with the Nintendo greenlight we decided to switch engines to Gamebryo since it was cross platform (i.e. we could switch release anywhere, assuming we got lucky and managed to find a publisher willing to back us).

So we started over in the new engine with the following goals for improvements:

• Make the game easier to just pick up and play
• Combine the fighting and building better. In particular everyone should have to fight and build at the same time, and at no point should you just be doing one thing while your teammate handles the other.
• Make building simpler. People were spending too long thinking about where to put blocks in the tangram prototype so we wanted to decrease mental load for building.
• Make it easier to just dive into the fighting. In particular we wanted to make it feel more like a button mashing brawler.

Here’s what we came up with:

Once again, huge changes. Probably the biggest that you’ll notice is that this version was far more polished than anything else we had done before – we finally figured out (more or less) what direction we wanted to go in artistically. The cartoony look would eventually carry over to Slam Bolt Scrappers, and some parts (like the viking helm and sombrero) are still available in the game now.

The building elements were incredibly simplified – beat up geckos, get material, and then slap it on the dam to try to plug up holes. Doing so caused the material’s color to change to match the builder, but that was it. This was really the simplest direction we could come up with for building, and  in hindsight we went too far. The tangram building may have been too complicated, but swinging this far in the other direction was a mistake too as building never felt very satisfying and was more of a chore than anything else. The game was fun despite the building, not because of it.

The brawling in this game was simplified as well to a simple button masher. This made it very easy to get in to but not especially deep, something we wound up fixing to some degree in Slam Bolt Scrappers. You can also see that the players have a dash attack which consumed energy that gradually restored on its own with time; this wound up getting tweaked into the comet power up. The one power up that did exist in the level, the ice gun, was cut as it was felt that the hero shouldn’t have a ranged attack.

While the level had a cool side scrolling feel you didn’t feel much of a sense of accomplishment when you moved from one area to the next, nor weas there much of a sense of danger at any point. Going underwater felt (and sounded) cool but was super confusing as there was no such thing as drowning and the lose condition was water reaching the top of the screen. Finally the boss fight at the end of the level was just… long. Not especially rewarding, not especially fun, and certainly a grind.

We submitted this build to several competitions like IGF and the Indie Games Challenge in late 2009… and failed to place in any of them. Meanwhile we were hearing grumbles from testers that the game felt mediocre, and that they weren’t sure they would want to play a full game that felt the same as the one level that we had created. We knew something was off, but we weren’t sure how to fix it.

Another big problem we were facing was a rapidly ballooning scope for the project. The game was supposed to have a different building mechanic on every level to keep it feeling fun and interesting, and we had no idea how to actually go about designing that. We had a tentative design for level two but we weren’t even sure how fun it would be, and the task of making a different design for every level was daunting.

We knew that while this game was better than the first versions in some ways (especially in terms of looks) it was probably worse in others (perhaps in terms of game mechanics) and in late December 2009 we weren’t quite sure what we could do to fix it. At the end of the year we all went on break, hoping that in 2010 we would get some ideas for how to turn things around.