Sumo Squash! is go!

The day has finally come. Sumo Squash! is finally available on the Xbox Live Indie Games service. Stop reading and go download the trial now! I would link to the marketplace page but despite finding it on the dashboard earlier it doesn't seem to have appeared on the website just yet. I'll edit it in when it's available. Sumo Squash!

Twitter groupies might find a few free codes coming their way over the next few days.

That is all for now.

What happened?

Well, it's been a bit quiet round here hasn't it? We made a big push for that XNA 3.1 submission deadline in Feb. and despite receiving our first solid passes from the majority we stumbled into an unforeseen issue with regards to the single Japanese Kanji used (mainly in the HUD). Some members of the community felt that we should have submitted the game under the Japanese language option as well as English as we have a Kanji character in there. Personally I felt that was not necessary as it was a single character and stating the game was in Japanese would be misleading (and could possibly lead to a failure when Japanese speaking testers found that the game actually wasn't in Japanese). The argument was that for all they knew it could have been a racial slur or rude word or something like that. So we failed review in the end. Ah well.

It was silly on my part really. The symbol was used as a bit of oriental flavour and a visual cue, not something you needed to understand as a word. I had forgotten over time that it was even a word from a language to be honest. I'd grabbed it from an unused idea for one of the pick-ups (too small to be legible in the end) so what it said (shield) didn't really make sense where it was anyway as it was to indicate that your special ability is ready to use.

It's taken us a few months but we've now updated the engine to XNA 4 and worked around the issues that raised. Everything seems to be stable and we've fixed a few bugs in the process. The Kanji has been replaced by an approximation more representative of it's task and hopefully this will be enough to get it through the peer review. As anyone who scrolls through the previous posts can see though, I'm not going to hold my hopes too high. There is always seemingly something to halt the process. One day this thing might actually make it on to the service!

It's in review right now so anyone out there willing to go peer review it this time round, thank you. If you have done this several times over the past year, you are a hero. Respec.

Who wants to live forever?

Well, the previous build turned out not to be "The One". It's head was sliced cleanly from it's shoulders and it is no more. However a new challenger has arisen to lay claim to the title and so far has passed many tests, yet the greatest challenge lies ahead: can review be passed without fail before February 7th when all XNA 3.1 games are no longer able to be submitted? This new challenger certainly likes to play it close to the edge but we all know the coolest heroes are the ones that make it look like a close call. For the curious, it turns out a few 'optimisations' had been the downfall of the previous contender.

Anyway, remember that game play trailer I keep banging on about here? Well it actually exists now. Not for the masses yet, but it is close! I'm eager to upload it too, but I must refrain until it is up to scratch. Keep your eyes peeled.

I'll keep you up to date with the review progress and if anyone reading is an app hub member keep an eye out for it on the forums! I'll tweet when it's in review so get a followin' with our funky new custom twitter icon on the right there.

New year, new menu music.

Hello there. As is our way we've been a bit quiet over the holiday period. We ate and drank our fair share and once we started resembling our titular friends we resumed work on Sumo Squash!. This evening we finally submitted a new version into Peer Review and we think is could be "The One". Anyone with an App Hub membership can check it out right now!

"The One" features something in particular I'm quite excited about: some funky new menu music made by The WillStar. Originally Will contacted me about doing some music for the trailer I've blogged about here and it turned out so damn good we just had to get it in the game. You'll get to hear it in the forthcoming trailer. We also incorporated some other feedback we had which resulted in spicing up the loading screens with some helpful gameplay hints and tips, and in the Sumo tradition we liberally threw salt everywhere to purify the code and get rid of evil bugs.


Sumo Squash! could well be available to everyone very soon!

Update.

Hello there, just a quick update from us to say a few bugs relating to memory units and profile nonsense surfaced their heads in the Peer Review build and we had to resubmit a new version. Unfortunately you have to wait 7 days until you're able to upload another build so we're trying to be more vigilante this time! The new version should hopefully be entered again by tomorrow evening sometime and then the waiting starts again.

Also a gameplay trailer is coming soon, I promise! Oh, and as we're talking bugs and videos, here's a favourite of ours that kept cropping up every now and again:

Screenshots!

As promised, there are now some nice big juicy screenshots of the game in the Media section. Go on, click the link in the tab above and enjoy!

Speaking of media we're also on Twitter now! Follow us; it's the only way to find out if Team Sumo slept quite well last night, had a nice sandwich for lunch or almost slipped over on some wet leaves this morning.

‘Sumo Squash!’ has entered Peer Review!

Finally, Sumo Squash! has entered into Peer Review! What that means is that it’ll be poked and prodded in sensitive places by the XBLIG community over at the Creators Club App Hub. As a guide, Peer Review can take 3 – 10 days but some say it could be closer to a month. We just have to wait and see now. Our fingers are crossed it passes first time! In the mean time I’ll be play testing and reviewing some of the current crop of Indie games going through the service and doing my bit for the community.

I also mentioned something about uploading some media in that last post. Well, as soon as I’ve figured out how to post images in a decent manner without breaking the blog (as some of you followers may have seen in your rss readers last night!), it shall be done! There’s also a small gameplay trailer I’m putting together but with current software limitations and lack of a nice, cheap (read free), trailer-y tune to edit too; we’ll see how that goes.