Greetings Robot Lovers,

Here’s a lovingly crafted gameplay trailer showing off many of the jumping,smashing soaring wonders of Plain Sight. Enjoy!

Whilst lovingly (and sometimes inappropriately) putting the finishing touches to Plain Sight, we finally got around to getting some music. 

Christopher Chong, the incredibly talented brains behind MajorC Audio (other keys available upon request), took on the task of fusing suicidal robot madness and jazz. 

Here’s a quick snippet of what he came up with.

  Plain Sight Title Screen Music (preview)

During a Sunday afternoon file purge, I stumbled across this old video from August 2008:

It was recorded the week we finally got networking “working” the visual style Plain Sight down pat. It was basically unplayable, but that didn’t stop us being massively excited.

From a developer perspective, it’s incredibly weird to re-watch/play early iterations of a game. Everything looks so similar, but you know there’s not one line of code or art asset that hasn’t been changed a hundred times. 

Yes, we totally underestimated the amount of work that needed to be done, but at least we never digressed from the original vision. I think that’s pretty impressive …

So, after nearly 2 years we’ve got a REAL release date for Plain Sight. It’s the 22nd of March. It’s set in stone and, obviously, we’re now bricking it…

This means we also have the final feature list, here it is:

• - 13 Multiplayer maps

 
• - Battle up to 20 players

 
• - 5 self-destructive gameplay modes:



• Deathmatch
 
• Ninja! Ninja! Ninja! Robozilla! – mini ninjas unite to bring the gargantuan Robozilla down to size!
 
• Lighten Up – Detonate on a target area with as much energy as possible, the best detonation wins the points for that round.
 
• Team Deathmatch / Weakest Clink – Play a standard Team Deathmatch or up the stakes by having a communal score bank.
 
• Capture the Flag – Well, it looks more like a beacon… but the gameplay is the same.

 

• - Level the playing field with in-game power-ups



 

• - Spend your experience points on 30 different robot upgrades



 

• - Perfect your skills in offline practice mode



 

• - Ships with dedicated server software



 

• - Steam achivements

..and a price: $9.99

That’s dirt cheap. I doubt it’d get you two pints in London, so you have no excuse not to buy it.

Anyway, the game is going to be on Steam, Direct 2 Drive, Impulse, GameTap, Metaboli, Gamers Gate and Get Games Go

Currently, only our Steam page is up and running.   We’re cranking up our marketing machine and shall be having a final (v.brief) open test of the game before launch.  

It’s all Jacks fault!  Blame him!

Look how smug he is! It’s sickening…

This is nothing to do with Plain Sight, but we figured we’d show you something to do with the Channel 4 project we’re working on.

It’s in Unity, so all you have to do is click here and (fingers crossed) it should pop up in a new window.

There are no guns, points or robots - just a vertical slice of the environment art style. Most of this was done by our resident environment guru Jack in 2 weeks – impressive stuff!  

In Plain Sight news; there’s a big patch coming out next week. It’ll have new gameplay modes, millions of fixes and a brushed up UI. It’s looking pretty ace and is certainly something we’re keen to show off to a boatload of people. So, if the servers are feeling a little empty, nil desperandum, things will pick up soon…

A new version of the Plain Sight gamma test has been released.

Fixes include:
- Improved networking. Now feels more ‘fair’.... it’s hard to explain.
- Better performance
- Working dedicated servers.
- Lots of little bug fixes…

Here’s hoping the auto-updater will work ok!

So we’ve been working hard resolving all the bugs you’ve reported over the gamma. We’ve found some interesting issues with the server corrections we’re trying hard to uhhh…correct. While most the bugs have been fixed we’d love to improve the over feel of the gameplay over the dedicated servers and thought we would have nailed everything down by today…but we haven’t.

Rather than give you a partially fixed version we’re going to hold off a few days more until we’re good and happy it’s ready…then we’re going to give you as many dedicated servers as we can muster and invite loads more people to play with hopefully insuring there are always people playing Plain Sight.

Thank you kindly for your patience.

Typical British weather, it’s never quite good enough. With panic-stricken news stations forecasting apocalyptic storms with snow flakes the size of Danny DeVito, the Beatnik team woke to a pathetic layer of snow dibbled over London town.

Which meant we had to go to work.

Damn it.

Never mind, there are other places in the universe where the sun always shines and robots are always happy. I think it looks like this:

PS: New Gamma patch should be up tomorrow/next day. Once it’s deemed stable, we’ll release a load more serials.

PPS: after writing all that, NOW it starts snowing properly… looks like we’re having an office sleepover!