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!

Hey everyone, hope you all had a great Christmas / New Year.

After a much needed break, we’re back in the office fixing up the remaining gamma bugs. Once they’re squashed, we’ll be giving out a bunch more keys (lots more than last time) – so you should have a load more people to play with! Should only take a couple of days…

Anyway, thank to everyone who left feedback over Christmas, it was incredibly useful!

Happy Christmas to everyone from the Beatnik team!!

As you can probably guess from our quietness, we’re all huddled up at home eating our body-weight in turkey. However, rest assured, we’ll get around to patching Plain Sight as soon as we can muster up the strength to move away from the tv set and the millionth repeat of Die Hard…

Hope you all have a great holiday.

Cheers!

PS: shout in the forums if you want access to the gamma test, we’re all in a particularly good mood today ...

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. As expected, there were a number of teething problems with the first couple of versions the Plain Sight Gamma. But, what the hell, that’s what it’s here for!

Anyway, we aim to have a patch ready by the end of the day we have a patch ready that should smooth out the majority of problems. Also, the dedicated servers should be fixed, so those experiencing a laggy connection should have a butter smooth game experience as soon as possible…

For those who didn’t manage to get a serial number, no need to cry, we’ll release more later on. If you’re nice to us, we’ll probably give you one anyway!

For those members of the forums who’ve helped out – thanks a million! 

Happy Christmas Plain Sight fans!

  We’re giving away 1000 serial numbers for the gamma test starting NOW!

  CLICK THESE WORDS

  A great deal of work has gone into Plain Sight over the last 11 moths, so the number of fixes/improvements is a far too long to list. However, briefly, the gamma has:

  - 4 game modes!
  - 5 maps !!
  - power-ups !!!
  - robot upgrades !!!!
  - graphical prwettyness !!!!!
  - improved stability !!!!!!
  - improved networking performance !!!!!!
  - auto updater !!!!!!!!
  - and more !!!!!!!!!

  PLEASE NOTE: This isn’t the full final game. The final game will have loads more stuff and be on sale in February…
 

PS: Why only 1000? Well, last time we were a little overwhelmed, our servers died and it all went tits up. We’ll be releasing more over Christmas, however, if you just cant wait that long, go and bitch a moan in the forums. We might take pity on you…
PPS: We’ll be hosting some dedicated servers so even those on a lag-tastic connection can play along.

1000 people are going to find out tomorrow….

I feel like I should give ‘shout-outs’ to inspiring indie developers more often. Today it’s all about Infinite Ammo…
Haven’t heard of them? Well, check out this video…

Pretty inspiring stuff! Anyway, Infinite Ammo is run by Alec Holowka - an insanely talented guy. As you could probably guess, chatting to him about his development methods, ideologies and storytelling is a truly enlightening (and rather humbling) experience. Check out this write up on Destuctoid covering Alec’s last talk at GDC on the subject.

I think Alec’s games pretty much speak for themselves.  If you haven’t already, go forth and play the wonderful Aquaria (which won the IGF a few years back) or Paper Moon (created alongside Adam Saltsman of Canabalt fame and Flashbang Studios).
They should help you pass the time before the Plain Sight open beta…

PS: it gave me a warm happy feeling seeing a snippet of blurry footage showing us all on a bus at GDC….. good times!

Once again, the crunch begins….

The Beatnik team have two ugly deadline approaching. The first is the alpha build of the Channel 4 project (in two weeks), the second is final open beta of Plain Sight (in three weeks)

Blog posts may be a little sparse during this time however, rest assured, we haven’t stopped loving you. Please post general banter and encouragement into the forum monster. Entertain us, because it sucks to sleep in the office.

(unless you’re John, who loves sneaking into the office and sleeping under his desk when drunk )

We’re working on a special addition to the Plain Sight game, something secret, something wonderful.

We’ve been watching how people play and we decided the game needs a little extra oomph; something to give you a little edge, something for you to care about. What could it be I hear you ponder? Well…you’ll just have to wait and see