I want to thank everyone who showed interest in Cobalt during Minecon 2012! It was a fantastic weekend for us and I really enjoyed helping people around the Cobalt areas. We held our first official 1v1 DM tournament, in which community member Acontin won first place followed by Ivar from Sweden.
The version used at Minecon was v116 ALPHA, and is not yet available for download. Among other things, it featured a new game mode called Challenge. In Challenge, you focus on doing things as fast as possible, like getting from point A to B. Today we created more maps for the mode. Here is a sneak preview:
We have also added local high score lists with epic voice acting feedback by Kinten to all relevant game modes:
Huge thanks to all the volunteers during Minecon that made it all possible!
It’s over 1.5 years since we wrote about the 1.17 update to Harvest, and finally we’re able to release an updated version. It won’t be 1.17, but 1.18 (fixing a couple of more things), and this time also with builds for Linux!
The game changes are:
Invert scroll direction setting
Added drag-and-place buildings, if you keep the mouse pressed the game will place the next building at the edge of the energy range from the previous one
Made it possible to select and sell multiple buildings at once, also added “getSelectedBuildings” Lua hook
Added an option for the defenses to hold fire
Shaded map edge
Map expansion marker line
Double-size minimap for resolutions larger than 800×600
Changed damage calculation of missile turrets
Removed the age limit of solar plants
Removed the boss aliens
Energy links will attempt to avoid sending energy to links that are pointing towards itself
Made it possible to change language setting in the settings menu
Changed so that Poseidon and Ares are unlocked by gaining award points
And we’ve also changed a bunch of stuff in the engine:
Replaced the standard Lua intepreter with LuaJIT2
Replaced BASS with OpenAL for sound effects
Made profiles and save games “Program Files safe” (see more below)
We at oxeye are currently hard at work with bringing the Cobalt pre-order to you ASAP. In preparations for this we would like to share our visions of what Cobalt is and how the development of the game will play out over the coming months.
I am very excited about getting this alpha going as soon as possible, but in reality it looks like we are not going to be making it in October since ironically the pre-order stuff will not be ready until the very last of October. But its not all bad cause I love to polish stuff! I will be working like a beast in the meantime to make the alpha as enjoyable as possible.
While we await the “days of alpha”, I would like to take this opportunity to find out some stuff about who you are but more importantly, what your hardware is! this thread!
If you have questions about the game, please use our Reddit page
Furthermore, I (thewreck) will be idling in the IRC-channel #Cobalt on esper.net. Cya there!
Today we can announce that we are going to collaborate with Mojang (creators of Minecraft and Scrolls) to bring Cobalt to the masses Mojang will help us with marketing, publicity and distribution, while we continue to develop and add stuff to Cobalt. This is more of a team effort than the usual developer/publisher combo, and the first experimental attempt for Mojang to help another indie game developer to launch their game.
We will go with Mojang to PAX Prime to demo Cobalt and take on challengers at our 2-on-2 Capture the Plug booth. If you are at PAX, make sure you pay us a visit. We have launched a Cobalt-dedicated site at www.PlayCobalt.com with the specifics and a brand new Cobalt trailer!
PS. If you want to contact us, send a tweet in our general direction (@OxeyeGames, @vraket, @jeb_, @Kinten or @anosou), or an email to info@oxeyegames.com
Since the beginning of time we’ve had problems keeping our forums clean from spam. At one point our Dawn of Daria forum had over 30,000 bot accounts, and the forums here at OxeyeGames.com have had their share of dildos and ads for online drug stores. Upgrading the spam filters doesn’t seem to help much, and we’re growing tired of it.
We discussed closing down the forums altogether since it’s easier to contact us via Twitter (@vraket, @kinten, @jeb_ and @anosou) or email anyway, but having forums is a good way of letting players get in touch with each other. So our new idea is to piggy-back on the Reddit and create an Oxeye-related community there, which hopefully will be easier to keep relevant.
This is just a small update on the matter that I will be working at Mojang this winter and onward. Mojang, and especially its founder Markus Persson (Notch), is pretty famous for the game Minecraft, and I really look forward to helping them out! This feels like a perfect match to me. I’ll be able to do what I feel I do the best, and Mojang is a successful company that has the “indie spirit.”
This will not change matters for Oxeye very much, either. Project B is mainly developed by thewreck and Kinten, and if anything it could even help Oxeye a little since I will need to move to Stockholm, where they already live
About Project B, we will be announcing its new name very soon!
You are now reading our blog from our new fancy hosted VPS! Blog comments and our forum should be up and running again, but please let us know if something is amiss.
The main reason for the move was that our previous host updated PHP to a version that broke our wiki, and they weren’t interested in doing a rollback just for us. We felt that it was time we took our destiny in our own hands, and lo and behold: the wiki is working again! (As an unfunny note, at our previous host we weren’t able to use the wiki, but spambots could still create spam accounts… Been cleaning that up now, though.)
Thanks everyone for a great Minecon 2012!
Hello friends!
Since the beginning of time we’ve had problems keeping our forums clean from spam. At one point our Dawn of Daria forum had over 30,000 bot accounts, and the forums here at OxeyeGames.com have had their share of dildos and ads for online drug stores. Upgrading the spam filters doesn’t seem to help much, and we’re growing tired of it.
