News
Thursday update #01 - Colliderz
May 12th, 2011
A while back the art lead on a 15 year-old game called ‘Colliderz’ got in contact with us. He’d seen Metal Drift and recognized some similarities. He sent a link to a promo video for Colliderz, and we thought we’d share it with you fine folks.
Colliderz was slated for a simultaneous launch on Playstation (1), Saturn and PC. But it didn’t make it. I’m imagining they had a bunch of the same hurtles we had on Metal Drift. For us, it took quite a while to find an arena size and a weapon set that worked. We tried a bunch of sizes, concentrations of obstacles, multiple levels etc. It was a long process. Colliderz went with a small arena with fast vehicles, which likely led to a bumper car experience. We wanted plenty of room to navigate, encouraging more racing moments. A comparison might be a football field vs. a basketball court.
Funnily enough we both were inspired by ‘Speedball’. I guess there aren’t too many futuristic sports game, so you take what you can get. Colliderz ended up with a more faithful reproduction of the Speedball mechanic, mainly because the arenas are free of obstruction (something we never considered).
When we started building Metal Drift we wanted to make something closer to the tank battles in ‘Tron’. The sport elements and speed appeared slowly over time. It’s interesting to find a game that landed in a similar spot we did after a lot of wandering.
-W
Sending Auto-Repair Packs to Japan
March 17th, 2011
Direct 2 Drive asked us to be a part of a promotion they’re running to help with Japanese relief efforts.
Now with each copy of Metal Drift you buy, $1 dollar goes to Japan. I’m not sure if they’re mailing them cash, or presenting a giant check, or what. I’m not even really sure which organization the money goes to. But rest assured, it will definitely be heading west, and probably end up in the right hands.
http://www.direct2drive.com/10367/product/Buy-Metal-Drift-Download
This is probably the best reason we could ever offer to pick up a copy of our game. I should mention that it’s not just us, but any game made by this list of participating publishers will result in funds going to people that really need them.
http://www.direct2drive.com/staticpage.aspx?topic=relief
There is also a place to just make a cash donation.
Metal Drift Comic and Desura
February 24th, 2011
First off, we just released on Desura! Desura is the publishing arm of ModDB/IndieDB. They cater to Indies and were fantastic to work with. The publishing process took about an hour! If you haven’t picked up Metal Drift yet, you can grab it right here with this convenient button they supplied us:
This last week I’ve been working on a comic (our first) to cover one of the defining features of Metal Drift; its “‘Sploadiness”. Brian and I have had a ton of conversations over the last few years, discussing the improvements we could make to Metal Drift. We never actually had the one in the comic, but it approximates the mood. One of us will be super excited about an idea, and we have to try to convince the other that it’s awesome, and worth doing. Usually we use English to describe our ideas.
I’ve wanted to try drawing a comic for years. I used to redraw Calvin and Hobbes constantly when I was a youngster. I would love to do a couple of comics from the perspective of the pilots in the tanks in Metal Drift as well. Hopefully I’ll have time for that soon.
While I was working on the comic, I recorded it, sped it up, and put it in a video. Check that out below:
If you liked this video, I hope you’ll subscribe to our channel (below). We’ll be posting new stuff there constantly, I promise!
-W