… a.k.a. Gimbal Cop v0.3!

Today (just in time for GDC), the game formerly known as “Gimbal Cop (And The Case of the Objectionable Hypercorrection)” finally loses its sticky working title, and becomes … drumroll…

Along with this spiffy new title, we’re very excited to announce the beginning of the CosmoKnots alpha on mobile!!  The game is currently available on Android through Humble, and iOS users can email us to get on the TestFlight (first-come-first-serve!).

Continue reading ‘CosmoKnots: The Great Name Change (Debate?)’

Rejoice, it’s your favorite time of the week-or-two: there’s a new Gimbal Cop version live!  This new v0.2.3 adds the ability to view a replay in-game immediately after finishing a round/level, a settings screen where you can adjust mouse sensitivity and invert vertical control, and two new pieces of music. Also, we’re debuting our new short-form changelog.  Also-also, check out this new gameplay video, showing a full run of “Spacewheel” and its newfangled post-level replay:

Continue reading ‘Gimbal Cop Alpha Update #4 (v0.2.3): Post-Round Replays, Settings Screen, New Tunes, Changelog’

Howdy Gimballers!  Version 0.2.2 is up and running, most notably bringing a rear view mirror to the game, as well as improvements and fixes to the knot system. Read on!

Continue reading ‘Gimbal Cop Alpha Update #3 (v0.2.2): Rear view mirror, knot tweaks’

We’ve just launched v0.2 of Gimbal Cop, which introduces a new world map feature to the game.  We wanted to add this map for a lot of reasons, mostly to drive home the fact that the game has a branching-difficulty campaign, and to let players switch between the levels they’ve unlocked, letting them switch to a harder or easier branch.  I took some notes as I worked on the feature, and in this post I’ll go over some of the thought process, technical details, and lessons learned in developing a brand new feature, from idea to shipped.  

Allo again Gimballers!  Excuse the few-week delay since the v0.1.1 update, but here we are with a brand spankin’ new major version number to celebrate a brand spankin’ new feature: a world map!  We’ve also added post-level buttons to share your replays to social networks, a button right in the game to take you to our new Gimbal Cop Feedback page, and plenty of little fixes and tweaks.

Read on for all the deets.

Continue reading ‘Gimbal Cop Alpha Update #2 (v0.2): New World Map Feature! (+ replay sharing, feedback, and betterings!)’

Howdy Folks,

We’ve pushed Gimbal Cop’s first update!  How exciting.  v0.1.1 is currently live, meaning that’s what you’ll get if you get the game now, and if you’ve already bought and downloaded the game, you can update it through Humble as well.

Continue reading ‘Gimbal Cop Alpha Update #1 (v 0.1.1): Performance and VR improvements, new version notifier’

It’s official folks, Alpha has landed, you can find it here!

As we’ve harped, the game is very much still in progress, with many features and much content to come, but we are pretty happy with the state of the game, and felt it was the right time to start sharing it with anybody who wants in, and to start soliciting your feedback (at the moment, you can send your thoughts to team@defectivestudios.com — we’ll be setting up forums and a feedback form, along with various other communication channels this weekend.

Some of the immediate and low-hanging-fruit updates we’re planning for the following week or two include: a world map to show you how the various levels connect and branch, and to allow you to go back to a previous level; track switching, letting you play as any of the other 4 tracks we have in the game than good ol’ Octo (and a fix to make the LOD system not suck); an in-game replay sharing feature so you can post your crazy runs in a web player to share with your friends; and coins and a metagame, and the related high-score tracking and viewing.

Further down the line, we plan to add multiplayer support to this Snake mode (you might notice that it’s already hosting and joining a local server, because sometimes it freaks out and locks the port :O), as well as the long-promised Tunnel mode, featuring Runner players racing along the track as the Architect player creates it.

Well, it’s been a lot of work and not a lot of sleep, so that’s all for now folks.  Exciting exciting times!!

That’s right, folks! The Gimbal Cop Alpha will be available THIS WEEK! It’s Finally here!  Well not exactly — again, this’ll be the alpha of the game, meaning there are still significant content and feature changes and additions we have in mind (as opposed to Beta, which to us means “feature complete but buggy”).  We’re taking the increasingly popular indie (and AAA? Oooooooo) approach here of putting up a paid download of the game well before the final “we can stop working on it now” release.  It’ll be $5 (or whatever you want to pay) this week and for this general version of the game, and will likely rise with future major updates (free for anyone who’s already bought the game of course — so get it while it’s cheap!).

Continue reading ‘Gimbal Cop Win-Mac-Linux-VR open alpha lands THIS WEEK!’

Excellent news, continued!  I just wrote a long history of what Defective’s been up to on Gimbal Cop for the last year or more since we last really made any public posts or announcements.  If you’re curious to hear what’s been going on in the project, feel free to catch up on that.  If you’d rather just cut straight to the excellent news that is the Now, read on!

Continue reading ‘Part 2: The Here and Now’

Excellent news everyone!  After what’s felt like a very long stealthy period, I dare say the tunnel of Gimbal Cop is showing some light at its end!  We’ve been working on this project for a while now — just about two years, with some fits and starts — and the game’s passed through many phases in that time.  In this post, I’ll describe what we’ve been up to in our long dark phase, and I’ll follow up with another post about the present excitement, the private alpha stage we’re in now, and the forthcoming public alpha/beta phase.

Continue reading ‘Part 1: Breaking Stealth Mode’