By the way, we announced earlier this week on our Tribute Games Facebook page that we’ll be showing Mercenary Kings at the IGDA DemoNight in Montreal next Tuesday 22nd. Be there! But if you can’t attend, you’ll have another chance to see (and even play!) the game before its release at PAX East in March where we’ll have a booth.

Here’s some animations I did for Ninja Senki. It was a lot of fun animating these tiny sprites.

Click on images for original size.

Since it can be a challenge to animate rotating geometry, I made a low poly model of the ship before animating it.

And here’s an unfinished tileset for a city level.

Hope I can go back to it someday!

Wizorb was first released on Xbox Live Indie Games last year, and today marks its 1st anniversary! To celebrate, we decided to drop the price of Wizorb to 80 points on Xbox Live Indie Games.

We’re launching a Kickstarter for Mercenary Kings today! We really want to make this game the best it can be, and to achieve that we need additional support.

We hope that people will see the huge potential of this game like we do and will be willing to participate in this adventure! Our backers will get cool rewards (the most basic one being a digital copy of Mercenary Kings and a digital copy of Wizorb).

We tried to describe Mercenary Kings as thoroughly as we could on our Kickstarter page, so you can check it out here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/322438897/mercenary-kings

As you might have guessed by our Kickstarter project image (shown above), Paul Robertson will be doing the animations for the game. On the art side, Jonathan “Persona” Kim, and Stéphane Boutin are also involved in the project, so you can be sure that it’s gonna feature some fancy graphics!

In related news, Wizorb is currently part of the summer sale on Steam (until July 23). It’s 40% off, so you can get it for only $1.79 USD! Also, if you haven’t had enough Wizorb and you’d like to play it on a Playstation console, the PS Minis version of the game developed by Beatshapers will be out on July 24.

This is the first footage of our current game project at Tribute Games, Mercenary Kings! The game is currently in an early prototype stage, so a lot might still change. The music for the trailer was provided by Patrice Bourgeault and the animations were done by Paul Robertson.

These are the very first ideas set down on paper for Wizorb. Mostly scribbles in Frenglish. Lots of this have changed throughout the development of the game.

The entire staff of Tribute Games (Jean-François Major, Justin Cyr and myself) attended the Montreal edition of the molyjam during the weekend. It was our first game jam and even if making a game in 48 hours was really hard, it was actually a lot of fun. Jean-François did the programming, Justin made all the sprites, and I did the backgrounds, title and some level design. Our team also had the extra support of Jean Chan who made the sound effects and the catchy chiptune track. Francis Coulombe provided the art for the gruesome game over sequence and Renaud Roi-Des Monstres Cormier lent his voice (scream) to Bobby, the main character of the game.

For the art style, we tried to go for something close to MSX games.

In “Friends ‘Til the End”, you control Bobby with the left analog stick and Choppy (the helicopter) with the right analog stick. Choppy carries a nuclear missile, so you must bring it to a scientist in order to defuse it. Choppy must always stay inside the range of the remote control, otherwise it will crash which leads to catastrophic consequences.

If you’d like to try it (it’s free!):

Download Friends ‘Til the End