Gridrunner Revolution online scoreboards live, festive pricing - Yak

Llamasoft: Gridrunner Revolution online score tables, awesome new pricing

- Llamasoft online scoreboards now open
- Free upgrade for existing Gridrunner Revolution players
- Gridrunner Revolution and Space Giraffe now available for under $10 each
- Both games available for an outstanding $14.99 the pair
- Gridrunner Revolution soundtrack now available from Turbo Recordings

Llamasoft are positively stoked to announce that a much-requested feature has been added to Gridrunner Revolution in the form of online scoreboards for all play modes. Users can sign up in-game to join the Llamasoft online scoreboards and rank themselves amongst players from all over the world. The online score tables are viewable both in-game and on the Llamasoft website.

We have spent a few weeks to create a robust and practical online scoreboarding system which will be used in every new Llamasoft release from now on. Register your profile once to have access to the system in all upcoming Llamasoft releases on any platform.

The updated version of the game containing the online score functionality is available right now. Existing users should just download a new copy of the game, uninstall the old version and install the new one. New menu options in-game allow users to register for and use the online scoring system.

Furthermore, in the spirit of the season, we are offering our games for an offer price which, if you haven’t already got them, you’d be as crazy as a Scientologist to miss out on.

Both Gridrunner Revolution and Space Giraffe are now available for just $9.99 each.

Gridrunner Revolution is one of Metacritic’s Best 40 PC games of 2009. It features a graphically unique style coupled with gameplay which is enjoyable and accessible and which goes far beyond what appears at first glance to be simple shoot-’em-up action; all set to a pulse-pounding soundtrack created by the artists of Turbo Recordings. Players learn that beauty is worth more than mere aggression, and that using the game’s mechanisms creatively to achieve the most aesthetically pleasing results is what truly yields the best scores. Scores which you can now compare with other players all over the world thanks to the new Llamasoft online scoreboards.

That such a game is available for less than the price of a chicken Vindaloo is quite remarkable.

Space Giraffe PC is quite simply one of the best and deepest abstract shooters ever made, and those who love it are truly passionate about it to the point where many list it amongst the best games of all time. Players learn to push the boundaries of their perception in order to prevail in a game which leads them through astounding synaesthesiac vistas to entirely new and inordinately pleasing states of mind. Discover for yourself why PC Gamer rated this game a “Must Buy” at 92% and why Space Giraffe PC is considered by many to be one of the most original and beautiful games ever. The PC release improves considerably over its Xbox 360 ancestor, featuring enhanced shader effects, extra levels, and sensuously accessible gameplay that will invigorate your senses and expand your mind right from the very first level.

For such a groundbreaking game to be available for less than the price of a couple of London pints represents outstanding value in both gaming and recreational procedural neuromodification.

Perhaps most incredibly, in a Galaxy-shaking event the likes of which has not been seen in this sector of the Universe since Great Lord Xenu started blowing up space ghosts with H-bombs in Earth’s volcanoes 75 million years ago, Llamasoft has harnessed the power of Matter, Energy, Space and Time to bring you both these excellent and outstanding games for the seasonal sleighbell eggnog Rudolphtastic price of only $14.99 for a bundle of both games. That you can buy two of the best and most distinctive PC games of recent times, created by Llamasoft (founded in 1982, one of the longest-established software houses in existence, and still actually making software rather than simply trying to sue anyone who dares to use the words “llama” or “soft” in their games) for less than the price of a dodgy kebab and a tin of Red Bull after the pubs have kicked out but you’re still pissed and hungry - it’s truly one of the most outstanding bargains in the history of Mankind, and a true marvel of the modern age.

The new versions of the games are available from Llamasoft right now:

http://llamasoft.co.uk/grintro2.php

And will be available on Direct2Drive as soon as the new build goes live there (any time now; check the prices, when they are the new ones then the new build will be live there) and shortly on Steam too.

We would also like to mention that Turbo Recordings have released an excellent soundtrack album of the tunes from Gridrunner Revolution. If you loved the tunes in the game, now is the time to add them to your music collection. The album features a variety of artists from the Turbo Recordings label:

Dahlbäck & Dahlbäck:
Forsberg Loves the Acid

DMX Krew:
Texture Mapping
Radio Bliss
Placid Acid

Jesper Dahlbäck:
Mega Signalizer
Super Connector

Lazersonic & Zak Frost:
Aquaplane (Unit 4 Remix)

Mr James Barth:
Workin the Truth
For the Lords

Popof:
Chiken Flavour
Tempered Dance

Proxy:
Decoy

and is available from Turbo Recordings here:

http://www.shop-turbo.com/browse/music/digital/?id=1348

It’s a great way to enjoy the music from the game even when you are not playing, and a great way to check out the work of some of the great artists on Turbo’s books.

That’s it for now. We would be most happy if you would spread these tidings of great joy far and wide, and if you spot any lost reindeer send them to me };-).

More progress on my iPhone game engine - Yak

For those interested in how this is coming along, here’s another little video. Not so much actual game stuff this time, as I mentioned last week I’ve been working more on the surrounding infrastructure, stuff that needs to be part of the engine and is needed by all games. Getting it all squared away now means when I do start producing games I can concentrate on making games and not redoing UI all the time.

None of it’s that pretty for now - I just want to get all the component parts in and working; the actual look of it will be set up individually for each game anyway. But you can see the parts are there - title screen, menu buttons, scrolly hiscore tables, the ability to hold state if the iPhone interrups the game or if you have to close the game with the home screen; it’s recognisably a proper iPhone app.

I’ve a bit of stuff to finish up on game state serialization this coming week, and Giles almost has all his ducks in a row with our online scoreboards thingy, so hopefully in the next few days I can start building that into the engine too.

Click here to see a short video of the latest engine progress.

Latest iPhone engine update - Yak

Bit more of my iPhone game engine working. The Time Pilot bit you’ve already seen (now with added Roby explosions). Rough sketch of a Sheep in Space style scrolly shooter. Game where you are a flock of goats eating grass on platforms, and a basis for a puzzle/dexterity game based on my old game Deflex.

Now most of the game-y stuff works in the engine (sprites, tile layers, explosions etc) I need to work on the more mundane stuff like a framework for title pages, instructions, settings, score tables and such. Then I can come back and develop these rough ideas into real games with proper graphics.

Click here to see the video on Vimeo }:-).

More iPhone twiddling - Yak

Here toy can see a bit more progress on my iPhone game engine. In this clip you can see it doing a little Time Pilot style shooting over parallax tile planes, then a bit of Defendery stuff (still using the Starforce tileset which looks a bit rubbish for a Defendery thing but serves to demonstrate the parallax layers working).

Lookie at the video here.

Now into town for a pasty :).

River of Goats - Yak

I’ve been continuing to work on my little iPhone game engine. I put up a little video here which you can take a look at:

Click here to see the River of Goats video.

In the video a river of goats flows over some blocks, and you can adjust the goatflow by tilting the iPhone.

I must admit I am rather enjoying coding the iPhone and it’s been quite quick to come up to speed on, despite the fact that I am not at all experienced with OOP and so found Objective-C a little brain bending at first. I’ve decided now would be a good time to learn more OOP, but I’m not really going to use Objective-C to do that. I’m doing most of the stuff in C++ and only dealing with ObC when I have to talk to Apple’s OS. That’s not out of any particular dislike for Apple’s stuff, only that I’d rather concentrate on something that’s more generally used and which will be useful cross-platform, and C++ is much more widely used than Objective-C.

I’m enjoying it so far, and I can see how it’ll make it nice and easy to do games fairly quickly once my engine’s done. Got quite a lot of ideas for small, fun things to do on the iPhone.

First steps on the iPhone - Yak

Got my dev licesne sorted from Apple yesterday and I’ve been working on just getting some simple stuff up and running just to test the water as it were.

Click here to see a little video of my sprite class wibbling some sheep and bobs around.

Seems to be good fun so far, you can chuck a reasonable amount of stuff around in OGLES and I should soon have enough stuff together to be able to chuck out some simple games. I’m going to do a few really simple games at first just to get used to the process of doing stuff and getting it through Apple’s approval process, so look out for some quick and dirty 59p games in the hopefully not too distant future }:-).

Gridrunner Revolution continues to do well and we’re in the process of getting it onto some key portal sites so watch out for some further announcements regarding that in the coming weeks. More reviews are coming in and they are all pretty much universally excellent. Nice to have a game be so well liked :).

Hols in Portugal were excellent as ever, we were very lucky with the weather and it was blazing hot the whole time we were there (it finally rained about 3 hours after we’d left). Not so hot back here at home, heating on and it’s very definitely autumnal, sheepies needing extra hay as the grass is getting a bit thin. Got a decent bit of geocaching done out there too which was fun, first caching done out of my home area so it was good to bag a few.

Heading off the grid for a week }:-) - Yak

I’ll be off the grid for a week. Time for a little R&R before coming back and getting fully into the iPhone stuff (so far I’ve made an app that downloads text from the LS web site and which has both Grunt and Moo buttons). Fun with OGLES awaits when I get back }:-).

Gridrunner Revolution continues to garner good reviews, including this rather unusual one:

Read the review at Dead Pixel Live.

and there’s one from Gamespot UK about to drop }:-).

Not a bad state of affairs to be leaving with, and looking forward to getting stuck in to the new work when I get back }:-).

More Appreciation for Gridrunner Revolution - Yak

Gridrunner Revolution was featured in Gamasutra’s “Best of Indie Games” feature:

Game Pick: ‘Gridrunner Revolution’ (Llamasoft, commercial indie - demo available)
“Perhaps due to all the complaints against Space Giraffe, Minter tried to make Gridrunner Revolution easier to just pick up and learn to play, while still maintaining the little important intricacies which make him such a good game designer. The full version comes with two hundred levels to blast through and a couple of unlockable bonuses that will please fans of the old Gridrunner game.”

Read the entire feature at Gamasutra: Best Of Indie Games: Every Generation Needs a New Revolution

Destructoid had a few reservations about the easiness of the beginning levels, and had to get over the fact that they hadn’t liked Space Giraffe, but still ended up liking Gridrunner Revolution and rating it 75% with a “Buy This” recommendation:

“Gridrunner Revolution is a game about discerning order out of chaos. It is a game about being completely overwhelmed, yet triumphing through a keen knowledge of the game mechanics. It is a game about using gravity wells to redirect bullets and create literal walls of death. It is also a game about getting shot, and bouncing off your enemies like a sentient pinball until you can grab a flying sheep and save your ship.”

Read the entire review over at Destructoid

We now have enough reviews in for us to be given a Metacritic rating, and given what we’ve had so far, at the time of this entry our Metacritic rating is a very respectable 84/100.

Check out our current Metacritic score.

Currently I’m awaiting the delivery of a Mac Mini here at the Llamasoft barn. Why am I getting a new Mac? Well, I fancy a go at doing a bit of iPhone development, and although I already have two Macs here they are both g4s and are unable to run the iPhone development environment. So I’ll be getting into iPhone dev in the cheapest manner possible, by getting the cheapest current Mac there is.

Basically I think a change of pace is needed. the last couple of things I’ve done have, for one reason and another, ended up being quite long projects, and to be honest I think it’d be a lot more fun (and more helpful in terms of cashflow) to be doing shorter projects, turning out something new every three or four months rather than in a year or more. The iPhone seems to be just the right kind of platform to try that approach on, plus I am kinda intrigued by it as I’ve mentioned before, what with the touch screen and accelerometers and all.

If I build myself a decent enough little framework on there it’d be fairly easy to get it to work on the Mac as well, and it’d also be fairly easy to bolt it on top of Neon on the PC side of things. So given a bit of work I could end up with something I could use to do shortish-but-fun iPhone projects with and also have PC and Mac versions fall out as well with only a little more effort.

Bottom line should be more Llamasoft fun on more platforms and more frequent releases once I’m up to speed }:-).

More Gridrunner Revolution reviews }:-) - Yak

We have more Gridrunner Revolution reviews coming in, and the warm reception enjoyed by the game so far is continuing }:-).

First up is Hardcore Gamer, who rated the game a very respectable 4.5 out of 5.

“Gridrunner Revolution is a fantastic arcade shooter that will sink into your brain, demanding more play time because it’s just so incredibly accessible. Every game is different thanks to the layout of the gravity sources, making each play unique as you look for the optimal place to not get killed while simultaneously maxing out the Boost meter. There are no patterns to learn, only behaviors to understand, making for a game that needs to be understood instead of memorized. Experimentation leads to addiction, which leads to seeing bullet patterns on the inside of your eyelids.”

Read the Hardcore Gamer review here.

Next is a review on a site for VJs, createdigitalmotion.com. It’s ratrher cool to see the game being reported on such sites given my enthusiasm for mixing up visual synthesiser type visuals with gameplay.

“If you wanted to see a game that seemed to draw from the VJ and visualist experience, though, the idea of attacking the eyeballs rather than just giving them photorealistic fake virtual worlds, Llamasoft’s work is on a very short list.”

Read the review at createdigitalmotion.com

All good stuff, I’m very pleased to see the game continuing to be well received all round }:-).

First Gridrunner Revolution reviews - great so far }:-) - Yak

So after having sent out a lot of review copies of Gridrunner Revolution, we’re now starting to get a bit of feedback from them.

First up is Eurogamer, sho definitely seemed to enjoy the game and gave us a very respectable 8/10 score in review.

“The situation is never simply ‘kill the enemy’ - you score higher points for destroying baddies using more intricate and complex arcs of fire. Heaven knows how it judges one fire-pattern to be better than another, but it works. The right ship-type at the correct orientation firing at the right angle near a black hole can set up dizzying eddies of destruction; streams of fire that turn into complete loops, or double back on themselves in figure-of-eight patterns, or wazz around in the sort of delightful curlicues and treble-clefs you might see on Mozart’s scratch-pad after a night on the laudanum. It’s a mechanic that’s compelling, at times exhilarating, and turns the game from a simple, if charming shoot-’em-up into something rather more inspired.”

“…for a miserly 20 bucks (around £12.50 at time of writing), it’s something of a shoe-in, for shmuppers and Jeff Minter fans alike.”

Read the entire Eurogamer review here.

We also have another solid 8/10 review score from Danish website Gamereactor: (Totally Google Translated text follows, so the weirdness belongs to Google and not the reviewer!)

“The enemies look like almost recognizable organic shapes, and exploding in pixels bang When cross thousands of colors from the screen. Patterns, numbers and updates the toner in and out of the picture, while a nearly invisible image of an ox sudden fills the screen. The whole thing is wrapped in so many colors that you repeatedly have surprised on the screen is about to give up.”

“Grid Runner Revolution but a slap goosebumps cause of originality, madness and captivating gameplay for a minimal price of just over 100kr. It is a gaming experience of the same caliber as Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD, there just are born in very different, colorful clothes, but the lure with a playability that makes that all the time just to give it one more attempt.”

Read the Gamereactor review here.

To round off this entry I’d like to finish off with one of the most eloquent player descriptions of the game I’ve yet come across. I am sure she won’t mind me borrowing her words because it’s obvious she totally gets what we are trying to do with this game.

“..this one, I think, is a masterwork of the form. Unlike Jeff’s previous game, Space Giraffe, GR:R gently takes you by the hand, says “this game is about making pretty things; here are the basics, now let’s have some fun”. It is not hard - it is gloriously easy. It wants you to sit there looking awesome on-screen, and it aggressively encourages this in its scoring mechanics. Finding that sweet spot for a high-scoring bullet trail makes you wander around and produce all kinds of pretty curving, shifting streams; the “sheepie save” from the previous incarnation of Gridrunner has changed from something technical and impressive into something you do with ease and, occasionally, delight.

So yeah, buy this game now, it is awesome… Download the demo, fool around. This is everything that is awesome about video games, in a beautiful, polished package.”

And coming from someone who’s a pretty damned awesome artist I’m particularly happy with that evaluation :).

So yeah, nice to see some reviews starting to come in, good to see that they seem to be pretty good, and most of all it’s great to see when people are just flat out having a heap of fun with the game. That’s what it’s all about after all }:-).