Squad Based Gameplay

Here's what Timo promised. A gameplay video of the penguins! As you can see the Emperor Penguin is surrounded by little helper penguins that give their lives to protect the Emperor! What devotion! Heheh... When playing the Emperor you can pick up more little penguins to help you and also protect you from the furries. As you can see on the video, Timo is picking up new penguins after he loses some of them. I find this game mechanic really entertaining myself! This is totally my new favourite character in the game. Wait till you see the Emperor's beast mode Martin!

Soon you'll get to play with the penguins as well if you bought the Elder Gore character pack. Enjoy the vid!

I'm happy to announce that we received the improved John Gore coffee mug yesterday to the office. It's looking really good and we are planning on launching the store around the end of January. Here's a pic from the back side of the mug:

Nice Huh!?

Minigore Monster contest is about to reach the deadline for entries. You still have tomorrow to submit yours! Then we will start to argue, umh, I mean discuss politely, which entries will be in the top 10. I have to say, It's a bunch of difficult decisions for us to make. Among the entries we received a really impressive piece of Fan Art! Here's John on a laptop by Adam Fairhead.

Thanks Adam! You can visit Adam's site here: http://fairheadcreative.com

Be careful with the New Year's rockets and firecrackers and have fun!

Three little things...

I hope you all had a great Christmas!




1) This weeks bigger blog post and video will be about the penguins. It will also be about another gameplay addition that involves more than two playable characters on screen simultaneously!

Any guesses how the penguin thing is gonna work?


2) Cult of Mac liked Minigore Episode 4 icon! This is what they said about it:

We love the Minigore icon purely because it features a lovingly crafted picture of an elderly couple wielding a sawn-off shotgun and an uzi. However, it’s not just this Minigore icon that deserves to be recognized – with each update comes a new icon and every one of them has featured a great graphic.

It's great to see that people notice the icon. I put lots of work in each one of them and I can't wait to show you the next icon! It's very different from all the others :)

15 Best iOS App Icons in 2010


3) More and more great contest entries are being submitted as the contest is approaching the grand finale! The following entry was drawn on an iPad by Cedric Philippe:



I happened to stumble upon it in his blog over at:
cedricphilippe.blogspot.com

There's still time to submit your own entries and win an iPod touch or Wacom Intuos!

AI Controlled Player Partner for Elder Gore Pack!

Merry Christmas everyone!

We have been working to have an AI controlled character in game to help player to fight off furries. The character who is following the player can get the beast mode, weapon upgrades and has a health of it's own. If the player dies before the helper dies, player gets the control of the helper and can continue playing. This is a nice addition to people who don't have a stable WLAN and/or are missing a second device for multiplayer. You are of course allowed to play with the AI character even if you don't have these problems.

Many of the reported multiplayer issues are possibly caused by a poor WLAN connection. However we tested the build by walking to the 4th floor of the building when we had the router on the 1st floor and it worked fine. There was so much concrete between the router and the devices it's hard for me to imagine any worse WLAN situation, really. Anyway, since it seems the problems are there, we are going to try to find ways to improve the multiplayer over wi-fi so that it will work better. We have also been working on the multiplayer over Game Center and it's improving steadily. We even worked on a voice chat over GC, first working version done!

Thanks for everyone who found and posted bugs on the blog, it really helps. There should be an update coming January where we try to address all the most important bugs. As Timo said earlier, there's not going to be a submission before January because of the holidays. There's nobody to approve the submission at Apple, and we need a break too :)

MOUNTAIN SHEEP WISHES YOU HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!! Eat well, spend time with your family and be nice to Santa ;)

Multiplayer update is out!

Feature list:

- Introducing cooperative multiplayer over WLAN.
- Co-op gameplay addition: Stay closer to your friend to increase the firepower.
- Tons of new John Gore dialogue and system that selects the comments randomly for each game to add variation.
- Elder Gore character pack. Grandpa and Grandma might be old, but they do know how to handle guns. More characters will join that character pack later.
- Full retina display support. Includes splash screen, menus, HUD & Encyclopedia. New cover art for encyclopedia.
- Hires level backgrounds from the iPad version. (requires retina display)
- It's raining snow on the snow level. (requires 3rd gen device or better)
- Many bug fixes and improvements: Bullets don't go through totems, new level emblems etc.


Let us know how you like and what you would improve in the comments! Revival gameplay seems to be a hot topic and we've discussed a few ideas about it. It would definitely decrease the waiting time if other player dies.

I'm guessing the iPad version could come out in January. App store doesn't accept new submissions during Christmas (23rd - 29th December) so we would have time to test it properly during that time and then submit on 30th for example.

New multiplayer footage!

It's a new week again for us developers to bring you some news about the game. As you know we submitted the Episode 4. As we are waiting for it to go through Apple, I'm going to show you a video showing me and Kimmo playing multiplayer:

Some of the features are still under development and will be in further updates. We have already tested Game Center online multiplayer and it worked very well from Helsinki to London over 3g network. Still needs some minor adjustments and of course beta testing. This considered we are expecting online multiplayer to be ready quite soon.

Also got a nice surprise for you, some people have been asking about Minigore related merchandise and we are currently designing different kind of coffee mug themes. We actually ordered a few for quality checking purposes and had to make some adjustments. Here's a pic of the very first version of a John Gore themed coffee mug. The picture turned out to be rather dark on the mug. The next version we made a bit brighter and are waiting for the mug to arrive so we can check if it's "customer" ready. About the merchandise in general: We are going to go with a minimum profit to keep the prices as low as possible.

If you got some nice ideas about themes in the merchandise, it would be nice to know. We have already decided to go with John Gore and Elder Gore themes. We were planning to have t-shirts also, but the first version turned out to be of a poor quality and that's something we don't want.

Episode 4 has been submitted!!!

We finally submitted the newest update with the local wi-fi multiplayer. There was some problems with the submission, since we had to hotfix the build about 6 times before we finally got it the way it was supposed to be. Let me just say that things are much more complex when multiplayer is involved.

Right now we have our fingers crossed that the update would make it through Apple before Christmas. It seems unlikely at the moment. We have received reports their approval during December will be uber slow due to many developers submitting updates & apps. There's nothing we can do about it, except to hope for the best.

Some brand new co-op screens featuring Enviro-Bear and Evan Hsu (Second screen has Xmas Gore & Santa duo):





Online multiplayer & bluetooth will follow in a later update!


Also as the Minigore Monster Contest is still alive and kicking, I must remind everybody that you still have the time to submit your entry! More info about the contest can be found from the blog post made WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2010.


We also decided to extend the rules a bit (don't worry nothing dramatic) so that all the entries and artwork posted on the forums will automatically be considered for the contest. This means you don't necessarily have to post your work to the email (sheepcontests@gmail.com) in order to participate.

Some people who sent their entries have been wondering if we received their entry. Unfortunately we don't have time to reply to everybody. If you are unsure if we got it or not, check your email account's "sent" folder to see if it is there. If you can't find it, or don't know how to check, you can resubmit your entry to make sure.

The bringer of news is here...Episode 4 news that is!

Remember some of the menus and other non-ingame things not being retina resolution? Now everything is! This and fixing the multiplayer, getting characters ready and adding three times more speech for John Gore (courtesy of Egoraptor of course) is what we've been doing the past weeks. Here's some insight to Ep 4 features!!!

Splash Screen:

Elder Gore characters are going to be in the next update! They are old, senile and GRUMPY.

They do create havoc with guns nevertheless:

Multiplayer co-op has entered a second beta build test phase. We nailed a handful of wi-fi bandwidth related bugs with utmost effectiveness and it's a lot more playable than before. Things are looking good! Unfortunately I don't know when the build is ready for submission but we are looking into a December release. We want the co-op be as smooth as possible of course.

Zombie Gore and Undead Jenny multiplayer shot:

The forums are a starting to be a nice lively place! We have a lot of members posting their art, discussing the game or just getting to know each other. We have about 35 topics revealing and discussing contest entries! I highly recommend the place! In case you haven't joined the forums already, you can do it here: www.mountainsheep.net/forums

Before Minigore there was RamMan

Before John Gore we had a physics based game concept called RamMan. It was a game about blocky treasure hunter running around a level evading a monster. The player had no guns, he only had a grappling hook & slippery shoes. The grappling hook and his slippery shoes allowed him to swing around obstacles and make RamMan hit the obstacles instead. The gameplay was based around accurate timing and use of momentum:



The ancient beast who is chasing him is the RamMan. If you combine ramming and man that's pretty much what you get, literally :D




3d models of the characters that were modeled in Zbrush:



RamMan & the treasure hunter posing in their final form:




The temple is many floors deep. As you complete each floor the earlier floor will break into pieces and you fall on the deeper floor. Only on the deepest floor you can finally reach the green jewels of the statue and defeat RamMan by putting the jewels into his eye sockets.




Very blocky test scene:




Mockup of how it would have looked like:



I might have some video buried deep in the archives, I'll update this post if I can find it.

-UPDATE - Here's the footage I talked about:


DISCLAIMER: This is old and buried game which never made it into full production.

Multiplayer is just around the corner!

Minigore now has around 1,5 million players worldwide! Amazing huh?! After we put Minigore free on App Store, the download amounts skyrocketed. We were expecting the downloads get bigger, but we certainly didn't expect this much!

New update finally came out, and the feedback has been very positive. I'm glad about this :)

We have started multiplayer beta testing! Hold your horses, everyone... I know how much you wait for Ep 4 to be ready. However, there is still going to be some fixing before we are ready to submit the update with multiplayer. Beta testers are currently working on the multiplayer aspect of Ep 4, but not yet the graveyard / zombies. Why? -You might ask. It's because we want the beta testing to be less chaotic. This way we can pretty much isolate the problems of the multiplayer without having to be concerned about the bugs in the zombies -part. Splitting Ep 4 into two releases isn't an impossible option either and in that case you would get your hands on multiplayer very soon.

New favicon for the Minigore forums:

Tons of Things

Greetings, destroyers of furries!

I have tons of stuff to tell today. First of all, as some of you already noticed, Minigore is free for a limited time on App Store. Be sure to tell all your friends who might enjoy this awesome game! After putting Minigore free, we have raised the ranks and are currently #2 in free games US App Store and #4 in free apps US App Store. This is huge! For those who did not know, US is the biggest market many iPhone/iPod touch games have, and that is the case for Minigore too.



Secondly, the contest has seen many great entries so far. I only have a small complaint. I WANT MORE ENTRIES!!! I'm quite sure you have friends who would like to win an iPod or a Wacom! The competition also created something nice in it's own: The Mountain Sheep Forums. So be sure to register and chat with other fans, check out fan art, competition entries or just talk about the weather... You can find the forums at www.mountainsheep.net/forums

There's more! We submitted the new update of Minigore for iPhone/iPod touch! So you'll get to play White Gangster Gore soon. This build also has Encyclopedia with 3 pages on it. Also fixed the new achievements not always registering and the muzzle flash bug with the bushes. We also submitted HD version update with multitasking!

Some people might have encountered the launching of Minigore to end up to a black screen. This means there is not enough memory available for the game to run. You may have too many apps open simultaneously or may have used an app that leaks memory. Either way, closing other apps or restarting the device should help. We are going to update Minigore later this year to inform you with a popup if it has indeed run out of memory at start.

And because I finally ran out of breath and have nothing more to say, I let you guys enjoy a picture of John Gore taking a bath :D

Minigore Monster Contest! Big Prizes!

We held a tagline contest last year where the winner ended up as a playable character in Minigore. Evan Hsu was the lucky one with his catchy tagline "Tiny creatures, Giant adventure!"


It's that time of the year again so let me introduce the next Minigore themed contest:

Click the poster for a hires version!


We would like you to design a monster that fits into the minigore universe. You can use whatever means necessary to make your fantastic creature. This includes digital painting tools like Photoshop or Gimp, traditional art tools, clay, super sculpey, matchsticks & glue, baking cakes, snow, ice sculpting, 3d software, Zbrush, pixel art, papercrafting, blood... maybe not the last one, but you get the point :)

If you plan to draw your monster with pen & paper just scan it or use your camera to take the picture. You must however add a text "minigore monster!" to one of the corners with the same type of pencil, pen or crayons you used to ensure us that the picture is indeed made by you.

Send the pictures to sheepcontests@gmail.com with a description of your monster, its name and its abilities. Also, add in your full name, your address and e-mail (if it's not the same you used to send the pictures). We need your contact information in case you win some of the prizes in the competition. Mountain Sheep will NOT use your contact information in any other way than to inform the winners.

We will pick 10 best monster designs and then we will create a poll out of them for everyone to vote your favourite. We will consider the following judging criteria when picking the 10 finalists for the poll:

1) Creativity
2) Technical skill
3) Effort (you get extra points for making the monster using extraordinary methods)


The deadline for submitting entries is 31st of December 2010 (12.00 (UTC +2 timezone). After we shortlist 10 entries the public voting will be held and the winner will be the design which gets the most votes!


We've got some awesome prizes for the winners:

1st prize : Wacom Intuos 4 M A5 Wide
Top of the line drawing tablet from Wacom. It's same model I used to create all Minigore art.




2nd prize : iPod touch 8GB (4th generation)
It's the latest iPod touch featuring retina display.



3nd prize : Minigore poster and a mug
Cool Minigore themed merchandise.


Everyone at Mountain Sheep is super excited about the competition and I personally can't wait to see what kind of crazy designs you guys & gals come up with!


UPDATE: I did a couple examples to answer few questions and to get you even more inspired to throw together some crazy designs!



Let your imagination fly! The monsters can be as tiny as an ant or as big as a mountain, it could be designed as playable character or it could be a boss, or just a regular monster. If you want to go the whole nine yards it can be put into elaborate setting with a moody background and other characters.

Discussion about entries Minigore Forums

Gangster in white

Hello!

As briefly explained in my last post, theres a new update underway shortly and it includes the new playable character White Gangster Gore, here's the splash screen:

..And a pic showing all the health states of the White Gangster Gore (the final version has dual shotguns).

Also included first 3 pages of the Encyclopedia. And various bug fixes. We had some problem with the achievements in the last release, they have been fixed now. It was a bit tricky since when Kimmo made a fix for the lost dlc achievements, a new achievement related bug was born in the progress. This is pretty much how game development often goes, you never know what's going to break next when you fix something. The code for a game as small as Minigore is quite a bit of text and complexity (I think it's around 30,000 lines). ANYWAY, the update has entered another test phase, and will be submitted shortly.

I have some good news for everyone out there who would like to (or has already) design a creature in the Minigore Universe. Yes, it is time for a contest! I will make a new blog post on Wednesday describing the rules for the competition. There has been some rumors about having the latest iPod as one of the prizes ;). Here's a picture Timo made that might give you some ideas. I suggest you start warming up your crayons!!

EDIT: Added the picture of the health states and the in-game appearance of the White Gangster Gore.

Graveyard news

Hey all!

We just started beta testing the next update of the game with Gangster Gore in a white suit, dual wielding shotguns. First version of Encyclopedia is included too.

This weeks blog post is about some polish on the future content: graveyard and the zombies. At the end of the post I will make a small Q/A -section from the questions I've picked from the comments and will try to shed some light on them. First here's some new screen shots from the zombie level. The chest you see on the pic is a "treasure chest" that will give you more kills. Also Timo changed the walls on the level shorter so that the enemies wouldn't get stuck behind them. Vlado used his magical programmer skills and shader technologies to make the blood look SUPER.

Questions and Answers:

Q1) What happened to the grenade ability that was going to be in ep 3?

A1) It didn't suite the gameplay fluently, so it became a grenade launcher instead.

Q2) What happened to Old Man Tackle?

A2) Timo says: Work in progress.

Q3) Why playing Sensei Evan leads to a message "Too skilled for leaderboards."?

A3) Currently we are going with a one leaderboard only and Sensei Evan is not balanced compared to other characters. Only a handful of people have managed to get Sensei and we think it would be a bit unfair for everyone if Sensei was the only character you could get to leaderboards with.

Q4) What's the point of the star system?

A4) At this point the stars are only showing the amount of time played with a character. There has been some ideas about how we could use the feature to make it more worthwhile to get full stars but for now we are not planning on implementing any of them. Personally I find this something that could be done after more important parts of the game are done.

Q5) What's the situation with the Ep 4?

A5) Getting there. Multiplayer needs more work. Next in line is a "revival mechanism" in Co-Op. No more exciting news, sorry. Kimmo is working on merging the iPhone/iPod version code of the game with the HD version code to make future implementing easier. Release date is NOT going to be November 2010. That's all there is to say about the release date for now.

Q6) Game Center support for older devices?

A6) Can't be done. Unfortunately it's not up to us (Mountain Sheep). Someone was hoping we could have OpenFeint working simultaneously with GC, but we are not going to go back to OF. This because it requires too much regular upkeeping from our part.

Poll. Patch talk...

Hey!

After the release of the Halloween Episode the feedback has been mainly positive, we are happy about this. The two new dlc contect achievements not working properly is going to be fixed in the next update. The black screen bug is also being looked into.

Anyways, here's a poll about Encyclopedia. The first three pages will be Minotaur, Elder Gore couple and Jenny Gore. We'd like your opinion about what's after them!? Here's the poll:

Minigore Halloween Episode is out!

It’s Halloween, everyone! Let’s see what we got in store for you this year!

- New playable character Undead Jenny who is as lethal as she is dead.

- New scoring system with multipliers.

- Minigore now fully supports Game Center and has removed Openfeint. Don't worry though, the new scoring mechanism will allow you to top the leaderboards once more!

- iPod Touch 4G support.

- Fixed flip screen bug on iPhone 4.

- Multiple graphical improvements, including muzzle flash for all weapons.

- Remade better looking snow level.

- Animated hearts as health indicators.

We've done some major changes in the game logic so if you have any issues please report them in the comments. Next version with the first three Minigore Encyclopedia pages is almost ready for beta testing, so testers be ready :)

Comic!

Hello!

As everyone is waiting for the update to get through Apple (including us), I decided to publish something you guys have never seen before. A sneak peek to Minigore Comic. Yes, that's right. We plan to add it to the game bit by bit, just like Encyclopedia. The purpose of this is to have a way to tell the story behind the game in a nice looking, clear way. Just like Encyclopedia, the Comic will be included in future updates, not as an in-app purchase.

Here's the cover:

As you can see, Tim Mcburnie has been working on the Comic. He's doing a fantastic job! Just in case you didn't know his work before this, here's a link to his website. Enjoy!

Tim Mcburnie: Portfolio

Halloween Episode submission!

Greetings!

It's again time for a weekly post. Got some good news for you! Here goes:

We have submitted the Halloween Episode.

Now it's really up to Apple if it will make it in time for Halloween but we have every reason to believe this would be the case. According to Apple they manage to review 87% of the updates withing a week. Even if Minigore falls in to that unfortunate 13% we still have about 6 days for them to get it done.

Many people were confused this being Episode 4, but It's not. If I have to give it an Episode number, I'd say it's like Episode 3.9x. This is what is included in this update:

-New playable character Undead Jenny Gore matching the Halloween spirit!

-Completely remade snow level.

-Kill multipliers, "kills" instead of "score".

-Gamecenter support.

-Retina Display support for iPod 4G.

-Various bug fixes (including the flip screen bug on iPhone 4).

Minigore HD for iPad will not get this update. We wish to update the HD version straight to Episode 4.

I hope you guys enjoy this version as much as I enjoyed testing it!

About Game Center being compatible only with the newer generation devices, we are aware of this. I'd like to be able to do something about it, but I really can't. We are following Apple's footsteps with supporting the newer gen and Game Center seems to be the way to go. It also works faster than OpenFeint. For the users of older devices, this is unfortunate.

Encyclopedia!

Hello everyone!

This weeks blog post is about a new feature called the Encyclopedia. It's going to be implemented to the current game bit by bit each update adding some more pages. It's a book-like illustration of the characters and the enemies in the game. It shows helpful stats (health, speed, strength, etc) and some information expanding the Minigore lore and universe. Here's a teaser sketch:

The grandpa is my favourite :). The final Encyclopedia is in colors.

For the past week we have been busy testing and fixing bugs found in the Halloween Episode beta. The current testing team is really active and analytic and I'm happy to be able to work with them to make Minigore a better experience. This is also why I wasn't able to write on blog yesterday, the "BUGgers" keep me busy ;D

Multiplayer is taking so long because the game was not originally designed for multiplayer and the code had to be almost completely redone. Timo wrote about this before and it hasn't changed.

Someone also asked my highscore in Minigore. It's hard to say really because I've mostly played the new version with the "kills" instead of the old score method. That said I did get around 3500 kills on insane difficulty with gangster gore and about 5500 with Sensei Evan on insane difficulty. I suck, I know. :D

Cheers.

Halloween Episode

Hey!

As the title says, we will call the next update the halloween episode. Some new features included:

New splash screen.

New start menu background:

And a gameplay screenie with some new stuff on it ;) However I'll let you guys guess what's new here! *BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!*

EDIT: Removed the contact request, because it was no longer needed.

Update Details & Promo Codes

There's several things we are throwing in from Episode 4 to the latest update, it turned out to be not so small update!

Let's start with how the beginning of the game looks on each version:

(Click for full-size comparison)

1. Scoring system reworked. "Score" has been changed to "kills".

2. Multipliers. You get more kills for bigger targets and blowing up the fur bombs when other enemies are in range gets you even more extra kills. Beast mode gives double kills.

Multipliers, hearts, muzzle flashes and kill counter:

Info about the bug fix coming up!

There's detailed info about the bug fix update coming up in 24 hours!

In short: we put in a lot more stuff from Episode 4 into it as you can tell by looking at this screenshot:




Jussi has been in fever since middle of last week so I might be the one doing the post if he's still feeling ill today.

Game Center

Hello.

We are currently working on the flip screen bug fix affecting iPhone 4, other models should not be affected. The fix itself shouldn't be too hard to make, we just hope it goes through Apple swiftly too. We plan to release support for Game Center at the same time. This naturally means the leader boards will be reset as we change the current system to kills instead of score.

As a side note, we are not trying to offend/disrespect/ignore anybody by releasing an update that does not benefit people with older generation devices. Making the game support Retina display is very important for the future development of the game as the amount of older devices will become smaller. In the Retina display update there was also a bug fix that DID benefit everybody. Especially the owners of older devices. The explosion of the crates lowered framerate and sometimes crashed older devices. We changed the explosion so that it is no longer as demanding on the hardware.

Retina display and framerate support for iPod touch 4 is being made too, we just got ipt4 to the office.

Retina display update is out!

The update should be available for download in the coming hours!
US iTunes is already showing the new icon:

The icon features Kimmo's favourite character "Easter Bunny", everyone else at the office would rather jump off the window (1st floor) than play as that character ;)

The update adds support for retina display (iPhone 4 only) and faster frame rate on iPhone 3Gs, iPod touch 3rd gen and iPhone 4.

UPDATE: We don't have iPod touch 4 at the office yet - it seems like the hires mode doesn't activate on it, also it's possible the faster frame rate doesn't activate either. This update was submitted around the time when iPod touch 4 was introduced so it's gonna need a new update to add support for it.

There's a huge difference in the level of detail between normal and retina versions:


For some reason JPG artifacting is more noticiable in the left side image, but other than that it's a fair comparison. I took the left side screen shot on an older iPod touch and the right side capture was done with iPhone 4.



You can download the update here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minigore/id324016249?mt=8


bharter: Thanks for mentioning the missing link!