Face-Plant Adventures Remastered OST released

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!

Aeron's Descent v1.0 is out now!

Aeron's Descent, the first chapter of Vaults Of Vvorr, is now available as a free stand-alone download on itch.io and gamejolt.com!

Drop into a metroidvania-ish platformer adventure and explore the caves below the Hills of Silence, where you can discover two mine shafts you can plunge yourself into to reach the vaults deep underground.

Ten vaults are just waiting to be looted by you, but beware the Vvorrminions guarding the treasures! The vault under the Shrine of Vvorr will only be accessible, if you manage to recover all 18 Seals of Vvorr from under the Hills of Silence, though. The key you will find in this vault not only grants access to further treasures but will also open up the path to an encounter with the evil Vvorrlock himself!

You also get to compete in seven time trials and two bug races, all of which are optional but that reward you with a lot of experience points, which you will need to unlock Aeron's special skills. Check the pause menu in-game to see a list of skills available in Chapter 1. Reaching the shrine also unlocks boost barrels for the mine shafts, so you will be even quicker on your way down to the Vaults Of Vvorr!

Head over to the Games page to download Aeron's Descent now, I hope you will enjoy the adventure!

Aeron's Descent v1.0 in testing

After some more balancing adjustments and minor fixes, I created a new master build of my platformer Aeron's Descent and started in-depth testing. If I don't run into any major issues, the game will be released later this month and will be available in the following stores:

• itch.io
• gamejolt.com

Aeron's Descent is the first chapter of Vaults Of Vvorr - a gravity-defying dungeon crawler adventure without the crawling but lots of frantic jumping, dashing, sliding and running on walls and ceilings! Explore gloomy caves, drop down huge mine shafts, enter the many vaults to collect treasures, battle undead creatures and recover the Seals of Vvorr!

Check out the new Chapter 1 Trailer and follow me on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok for updates!

Brand new Battle Trailer and Chapter 1 re-release

"Aeron's Descent", the first chapter of Vaults Of Vvorr, has been unpublished for now but will soon be re-released (again as a free stand-alone download) on gamejolt.com and itch.io. Since the initial release last year of the first builds of Chapter 1, the game has evolved quite a bit and now includes much more content. Chapter 2 is mostly done while the final and 3rd chapter is still work in progress but is coming along nicely. I decided to re-release Chapter 1 so it reflects all the things that have been implemented over the past year such as overhauled visuals, enhanced controls, as well as gameplay and balancing improvements. Check out the brand new Battle Trailer to catch a glimpse of the exciting things you will soon experience in Vaults Of Vvorr and follow me on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok for updates!

New build of Aeron's Descent available

Build 0.1.0.595 of Aeron's Descent has been released. Experience the first chapter of our retro pixelart platformer Vaults Of Vvorr in glorious fullscreen, now conveniently available in the options menu with the latest update! Previously, fullscreen could only be activated via a commandline added to the game's desktop shortcut, something only players who read the readme textfile included in the package were aware of. The new fullscreen option can be found in the main and pause menu under "Help and Options > Settings". Furthermore, the update includes a major bugfix: The player's level, skills, collected seals and unlocked awardments will now reset properly when starting a new game. A bunch of minor visual improvements and adjustments to tutorial messages have been applied, too. So now is the perfect time to check out the game and satisfy all your OCD needs while getting a jumping and running workout at the same time!

Download Chapter 1: Aeron's Descent from the Games page and enjoy! Let me know how you like it and get in touch anytime here, on Twitter (@oddworm) or via oddworm[at]gmx.com.

Aeron's Descent available now

After three months working on the project day in and day out, I finally published the first chapter of Vaults Of Vvorr last night. It is now available as a free download on Gamejolt and itch. Testing the master build still uncovered some minor issues that needed fixing and I also couldn't resist adding one final feature to the time trials. It's never a good idea to implement a new feature shortly before release. But I missed this one sorely during testing and just had to get it in there: When viewing a time trial, a green checkmark now indicates whether you've already mastered it. What's still missing is a timer in the HUD, though. I also tweaked the second bug race of the chapter and made it a bit easier to leave those nasty bugs behind.

Depending on your play style, Chapter 1 will take somewhere between 30 minutes and one hour to finish (probably longer the first time around). After you've (literally) dropped into the adventure, you get to explore the caves below the Hills of Silence, where you can discover two mine shafts you can plunge yourself into to reach the vaults deep underground. Nine of these vaults are just waiting to be looted by you, but beware the Vvorrminions guarding the treasures! The vault under the Shrine of Vvorr will only be accessible, if you manage to recover all 17 Seals of Vvorr from under the Hills of Silence, though. You also get to compete in seven time trials and two bug races, all of which are optional but reward you with a lot of experience points, which you will need to unlock Aeron's special skills. Luckily, you can unlock boost barrels for the mine shafts, so you will be even quicker on your way down to the Vaults Of Vvorr!

Head over to the Games page to download Chapter 1: Aeron's Descent now, I hope you will enjoy the adventure! Feedback is very much appreciated, so if you have any suggestions or issues to report, feel free to get in touch here, on Twitter (@oddworm) or via oddworm[at]gmx.com.

Vaults Of Vvorr in development

During this week's PitchYaGame event on Twitter, I announced a new game I'm currently working on. Vaults Of Vvorr is a gravity-defying dungeon crawler without all the crawling but lots of fast-paced jumping and running on walls and ceilings - but see for yourself!

Players will drop down huge mine shafts, enter the many vaults to collect treasures and recover the Seals of Vvorr, which are needed to defeat the evil Vvorrlock. This mean mage has unleashed an army of undead creatures upon the once peaceful landscapes of Plantylon, but our hero Aeron is determined to put an end to the Vvorrlock's reign of terror and will dispose of his many minions with well-aimed kicks in their heads and his throwing knives.

I'll try to get a demo out next month, so watch this space for further announcements!

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!

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.

"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.

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!

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.

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:

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.

Happy Birthday, Florence!

It's incredible how time flies as it's already been a year since we released Face-Plant Adventures to the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace. To be honest, from a commercial standpoint the game hasn't been faring well on the platform with only 210 sales so far as of this writing. Still, we are happy with the outcome of our work and consider it an accomplishment to actually have finished the project and to have a proper game out on a video game console.

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:

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.

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.

When will be the day when you press A to play?

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.

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!

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!

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.

Features: - adventure mode with 10 action packed levels to explore - classic platforming action - optional switch puzzles - three difficulty settings - unlockable medals and awards - online rankings - hand drawn 2D graphics with eerily beautiful landscapes - original soundtrack For further updates watch this space and visit http://face-plant-adventures.blogspot.com/ Follow Florence on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FloriFacePlant