The genre-bending soundtrack of the original Xbox LIVE and Windows PC indie game classic platformer "Face-Plant Adventures" has received a fresh mix treatment for its new release on Bandcamp and YouTube. Fans of electronic music can enjoy a blend of rock, ambient, drum'n'bass and other styles combined in one short and crisp album. Visit the Extras page to play or download the soundtrack!
Showing posts with label Face-Plant Adventures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Face-Plant Adventures. Show all posts
April 11, 2023
December 6, 2020
Replanting Florence
A post mortem
When I started writing the post mortem for the original Face-Plant Adventures, it really was just about getting something done that had been long overdue. Some time after release, my brother (2D artist on the project) had started preparing a draft of an article on the art style of the game but for some reason never finished it. I took that draft as a basis for my post mortem but neither did I intend for it to get that extensive nor did I have any intention of working on the game itself again. But the more I thought about it, the more it saddened me that our game was gone for good after Microsoft had decided to close down the Xbox LIVE Indie Games channel on the Xbox 360 marketplace in 2017. We had never released the game to other platforms so it would be lost beyond recall.
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| While I'm dreaming of a PC port, Florence's dream in the new intro sequence is dominated by golden leaves. |
I decided that this was not a worthy fate for Florence Face-Plant and tried to figure out how much effort it would take to create a PC build of the game. Being a level and audio designer on the project but not a coder, I knew that some of the required adjustments would be tricky for me, and crash, the game's original coder, had long moved on and was not available anymore. But I knew that I would have to rectify at least some of the original game's flaws or else I wouldn't be happy with a PC release.
November 28, 2020
FPA Replanted: Awardments Guide
This post collects a bunch of videos that provide an in-depth look at the Awardments (in-game challenges similar to achievements) that can be unlocked in the Replanted Edition of Face-Plant Adventures for Windows PC. The short guides show how to master some of the 24 challenges.
Gone in 60 seconds
How to get through the Amira Cavern in less than 60 seconds.
October 23, 2020
Face-Plant Adventures Replanted released today
Florence Face-Plant, the plantagonist of our game Face-Plant Adventures, has come a long way since the first incarnation on the now defunct Xbox LIVE Indie Games channel (XBLIG) on Xbox 360. You can read all about the creation of the original game in this post mortem. Not only have the past three months been dedicated to finally bringing the game back from the dead and making it run on Windows PC, it's also been enhanced in several ways, mainly in terms of gameplay and visuals. After taking care of strange bugs and mysterious crashes, as well as precious feedback from QA testers, Face-Plant Adventures Replanted has finally been released into the wild today. Check out some gameplay in the Release Trailer below!
Head over to our Games page to download the Replanted Edition, which is also available on other popular indiegame platforms. And I've saved the best for last: The game will only cost you a tiny little bit of bandwidth as it is absolutely free. We hope you will enjoy the game as much as we enjoyed making it!
October 10, 2020
Fun with Switches and Crashes
Before talking about a nasty crash haunting my game, let's have a look at some gameplay and its switch mechanics. This video shows how to solve the optional switch puzzle at the end of the level "Odd World Of Goo" and how to unlock the "High wire artist" Awardment along the way.
There are some gameplay tips at the end of the video, too, that should help accomplishing this high wire act easily. Now that we got the fun part out of the way, let's talk about a problem that was not so much fun to figure out.
The past two weeks have been a little worrisome. Two of my testers reported a mysterious crash right after starting up the game. While checking the save game the program would throw an exception, but the error message was not really giving me any clue as to what caused the issue. At first I assumed some problem with the creation of the save file, a permissions problem maybe, but after deactivating saving altogether the crash still occurred, which ruled out this angle. I also suspected backwards compatibility issues of the .NET framework. The original game was built using XNA 4.0 and .NET 4.0, my tester's PC is running on .NET 4.8. So I looked into ways of avoiding potential compatibility issues but didn't really get anywhere with this approach.
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| "Face-Plant Adventures RE isn't working anymore." |
But I kept searching the interwebs and read many not very helpful forum threads until I finally stumbled upon an entry in the Steam forums that sounded a lot like the issue I was dealing with. It turned out that several other XNA games would also crash after startup or have audio issues when the Windows Media Player was not installed on a user's machine. To verify this I uninstalled the player on my machine and then was able to reproduce the crash. After checking and creating/loading the save file, the game starts playing back music and with Windows Media Player not available this would cause the crash. I was not aware of this dependency and wouldn't know how to avoid it, but at least I can include this information in the game's readme file now. And now that my remaining two testers can finally check out the game, I will just wait for their feedback before I will finally get the game ready for release.
September 26, 2020
A Glance at Awardments
These videos provide a first look at the Awardments (our in-game achievements) that can be unlocked in the Replanted Edition of Face-Plant Adventures for Windows PC. Short guides show how to unlock the "Gone in 60 seconds" and "Breaking the fourth wall" Awardments.
Some general tips that make obtaining the Awardments a little easier are placed at the end of each video.
While still waiting for feedback on the master build from my game testers, I figured it would be nice to present the Awardments this way while showing some of the game's mechanics and providing some gameplay tips, too. Considering that September is almost over, the release date will most likely be shifted to October, i.e. until I've gathered all the playtest feedback (and fixed all issues/made changes if necessary). Stay tuned!
September 7, 2020
Happy Birthday, Florence!
Today eight years ago we released the original Face-Plant Adventures on Xbox 360. You can read all about the game's development in this post mortem. The title's plantagonist Florence Face-Plant has matured and is a grown up plant now. They have applied some make-up and acquired some new skills, all of which Florence will show off in the Replanted Edition coming soon (possibly this month) to Windows PC. Of course it would have been nice to give birth to the PC version today, but you can't have a garden with lovely plants without some bugs, too.
September 1, 2020
The Art of Face-Plant Adventures
A post mortem
Eight years ago we released Face-Plant Adventures to the now defunct Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) channel on Xbox 360. The game was a Dream Build Play 2012 finalist that made it to the top 20 of the challenge (of ca. 200 submissions) and hit the marketplace in September that year. It was generally well received in playtest and peer review on the App Hub as well as in reviews on gaming websites/blogs and in Let's Play videos after release. Overall, it received mixed ratings on indie gaming blogs and polarized players, who either really loved or strongly disliked it, mostly divided by the title's difficulty. A classic 2D platformer, it featured hand drawn graphics, an original soundtrack, an adventure mode with 11 action packed levels to explore, unlockable medals and awardments, three difficulty settings and online rankings for speed runners to compare their best times.
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April 26, 2014
Sales Numbers Issue - UPDATE
The issue with the wrong sales numbers for our Xbox Live Indiegame Face-Plant Adventures described in my last post has still not been resolved and a mail from us to support has never been answered. The main problem seems to be that the download history for our game is messed up: the game was released in September 2012, but the first five months after release don't show up in the history anymore. Obviously, these would be the months with the most downloads, which are now missing for total sales and trials numbers. This is what the history currently looks like in AppHub:
December 20, 2013
Sad oddworms - Sales Numbers Issue
When we celebrated the first anniversary of Face-Plant Adventures back in September this year, we revealed that with only 210 copies sold, our game was not a commercial success at all. At least, we had surpassed the payout threshold of 150$, so once we would renew our membership we'd be able to enter our account/tax details and get paid a little something.
September 7, 2013
Happy Birthday, Florence!
To celebrate the first anniversary of our debut indie game, we will have a Birthday Raffle on Twitter this weekend with a chance to win a download code for the full version of the game. We will give away five codes and all you have to do to participate is follow the steps described below:
September 7, 2012
Face-Plant Adventures released today on Xbox LIVE
Our debut, Dream Build Play 2012 finalist Face-Plant Adventures is out today on the Xbox LIVE marketplace available in the Indie Games section. Finally, Xbox 360 players can explore the eerily beautiful, hand drawn 2D landscapes of Plantylon while they run, slide, jump and swim through 11 challenging levels in adventure mode, solving tricky switch puzzles and retrieving the lost golden leaves. Three difficulty settings provide players with a way to shape their experience, making it more or less demanding to earn every medal and unlock all awardments. The new launch trailer also released today, shows some of the precision timing, platforming and quick reactions required to make it through the hazardous environments in Face-Plant Adventures.
September 2, 2012
Release of Face-Plant Adventures this week
Some of you probably remember that we had initially planned to release Face-Plant Adventures this spring. But getting the game finished took a little longer than we expected and so the game was not submitted to peer review until mid-June. At the end of that month, the review progress was well beyond 90% when someone found an unexpected fail reason. We fixed the issue quickly and resubmitted the game after the usual one-week waiting period.
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| When will be the day when you press A to play? |
July 9, 2012
Epic Fail In Peer Review
So Face-Plant Adventures failed in Peer Review Sunday last week. Actually, there was nothing epic about it at all, but I thought it would make for a more catchy headline if I called it that. So what was the reason for the fail? I have to admit that it was an issue that caught us by surprise as it is not mentioned on the evil checklist developers have to abide by. We should have known better because the checklist doesn't comprise all potential fail issues and is also rather unclear about many things.
June 24, 2012
Crossing the finish line
Phew! The last three weeks have been rather stressful. I've been really busy searching for, creating and implementing the last missing sound effects. As most of you certainly know, the submission deadline for Dream.Build.Play 2012 ended on June 12 and it had been our goal to submit a mostly final build of Face-Plant Adventures. We actually managed to get the game finished for the challenge but not without some hassle. While testing the build intended for submission the night before the deadline, I discovered a major bug in our switch mechanics which could get the player stuck in a cave in one level. It's always worrying to change part of such an essential gameplay mechanic shortly before a submission, but we could fix the issue just in time and you can now find our game in the DBP 2012 gallery!
May 13, 2012
The end is nigh!
Since we announced Face-Plant Adventures back in February, not an awful lot has been happening here on our site. Actually, nothing at all has happened although we would have liked to post updates and share some insight into the development process. So how come we've been so lazy about updates? Well, the answer is rather simple. When you write about making a game, you don't spend your time on actually making the game. All of our team members have full-time day jobs, so we can only work on the project in our sparse spare time. When I come home at night and have to decide whether I should write an article about level design or whether I should rather work on a level, it would seem more reasonable to me to dedicate all of my efforts to finishing the levels. This seems to have been the right course of action as I managed to complete the final two levels of the game last week. Yay!
February 7, 2012
Meet Florence!
Meet Florence Face-Plant in this announcement trailer and get a first glimpse at the gameplay of this 2D platformer planned for release on Xbox LIVE Indie Games this spring season. The adventure takes Florence on a quest to find the last golden leaves in Plantylon, facing many hazards in a race against time and learning awesome new skills on the way.
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