A quick Race The Sun/Flippfly update

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Wow, has it been almost 3 months since our last blog update? It has!

We wanted to give our fans and followers a quick update to let you all know what’s up.

PC Update
We’ve been working hard on a PC version update, for Steam, GoG, and Humble builds.
It’s mostly a bug-fixing update, but we’ve also got a flashy new UI, with better controller support, and that better showcases the user-created content the game has to offer. By the way, you have seen the Workshop entries for the game, right?

The new update will also fix a lot of issues related to network connectivity/leaderboard submission, and will generally be a much more solid experience.

We hope to put a beta build up on Steam within the next few days, and a full public Steam/DRM Fre release within the next week or two.

Playstation Update
We’re making great progress on the Playstation version! Vita performance was a big task, but we’re getting pretty close to where we want it to be now.
Right now, David Laskey is helping us implement leaderboards, cross-platform cloud saves, trophies and more. And Forest is working on a new game mode, which you’ll be able to see soon.
We’ll be submitting the game to Sony certification soon, and once we’re further along in that process, we’ll announce a solid release date.

What’s Next?
As you may have heard, we announced Hexarden this spring. We haven’t had a lot of time to work on it since the announcement, but it’ll be high on our todo list once we get the Playstation version of Race The Sun out.

Additionally – we’re thinking about how to give our minds a bit of a creative workout – we’ve been working on Race The Sun for about two years now!
So we’re thinking about doing some form of extended Flippfly game-jamming later this summer. More details soon.

Lastly – we’re not done working on Race The Sun! We’ve still got Oculus Rift support in the pipeline, and we’re discussing ideas for how to keep the game interesting beyond level 25. We can’t wait to share more!

Race The Sun Workshop Contest Winners!

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Alright everyone, the moment you’ve been waiting for!

First, we’d like to say: this was an extremely close race. There were several levels that were in a virtual dead heat for the grand prize, and we really had to dig in and play them repeatedly.
The other thing that made this tough is that, given the randomized nature of the game, it was often hard to compare our experiences with each other, and day-to-day.

Here is a Workshop Collection for your convenience, containing all of the finalists – hit the “subscribe all” button and check them out!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=243224624

We hope that everyone had a great time, regardless of placement in the contest. We certainly appreciate your contribution to our community, and hope you’ll keep making levels!
Additionally – we want to hear from you on how to improve the tools. We were super impressed with the creative and unexpected ways everyone used the world creator, and we want to enable even more crazy stuff! We’ve started a thread here to get the conversation going – please join in!

Without further delay – here are the winners!
(Note: Some spoilers below!)

Continue reading…

Race The Sun Workshop Contest – Finalists!

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Hey everyone – very sorry for the delay in announcing these finalists – Steam was having some technical issues that prevented us from playing all of them after the submission date!

In total there were about 56 entries – which is great! We hope to do more of these community events in the future.
We played every single one of them, considered the community’s ratings, and have come up with a list of 20 finalists!

Here are the finalists, in alphabetical order:

bloody hell v.2
the city
dlv sky machine
galactic space battle
guitar hero v 4
gizeh 0.1
Jötunheim
joyride
Kings Way v2
the last sunset
mainfraim
mayan_prophecy
meteor shower v1.5 beta
point2hexagon
skylands
Space Adventure
speed woods
tatooine
temples
world of cards

To subscribe to these worlds, see the RtS workshop here:
http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=253030

Among these, a few very special ones stand out. We’re going to take tomorrow and play these in more detail, to make sure that we’re not missing anything!

If you entered the contest and would like some specific feedback on an item – feel free to reach out to us and we’d love to give you some thoughts!

Workshop contest update – delay!

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Hey all, due to some unforeseen technical issues preventing us from downloading all of the contest entries, we’ve had to delay the finalists announcement for the Workshop contest. We’re talking with Valve and working to resolve this ASAP – hopefully by tomorrow.  Thanks for your patience!

Official Race the Sun Level Building Contest Rules

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Workshop-Contest-Banner-Just-Text

Workshop support for Race the Sun on Steam is live as of today, March 10, 2014. To celebrate we’re selling Race the Sun at 50% off and kicking off a level building contest.

To participate just submit a Race the Sun level you’ve created between March 10 and March 24th with the tag “Contest” on Steam. On March 25th we’ll announce as finalists and on March 28th we’ll announce winners.

Prizes:

Grand Prize (one winner): Your choice of either a $100 Steam Wallet card or a pair of 3 day passes to PAX East. Plus; a Race the Sun T-shirt, a signed Race the Sun Poster, 3 Race the Sun Steam Keys and a grab bag of Race the Sun Stickers and patches- plus a little something extra TBA.

First Prize (Up to 4 winners): A $20 Steam Wallet card, a Race the Sun T-shirt, a signed Race the Sun Poster, 2 Race the Sun Steam Keys and a grab bag of Race the Sun stickers and patches, plus the extra which we’ll announce during week two.

Second Prize (Up to 5 winners): Choice of a Race the Sun T-shirt or a signed Race the Sun Poster plus a Race the Sun Steam key and a grab bag of stickers and patches, and the TBA extra

Runners Up (No Limit): Race the sun patches and stickers and a Race the Sun Steam Key – plus the extra which we’ll reveal next week.

 

Rules:

  • Anyone can enter by submitting levels for Race the Sun through Steam Workshop before March 24th with the tag “Contest”.
  • There is no limit to the number of levels you can submit, although each level creator is entitled to only one prize.
  • Winners must be able to provide a mailing address for physical prizes- Flippfly will pay for shipping but recipient may be responsible for VAT or other costs in some areas.
  • Winners of the PAX pass grand prize will receive their PAX passes in the mail before PAX and must supply their own transportation and lodging.
  • Winners will be selected according to the following criteria:

Creativity - We like seeing new things created with the level editor! Show us new types of objects, new movement patterns, or crazy things we never imagined! Try to move beyond the types of objects you see in the existing built-in worlds.

Fun    - It should be fun to play your world. This is hard to define, but think about the gameplay. It can be challenging or easy, but make sure the user is having a great interactive experience, and not just watching a visual spectacle.

Polish - Take some time and make the world really look great. Think about the color palettes you use, the movement patterns the objects have, and the difficulty. Also think about making things change up as you progress through the regions – just like the built-in worlds.

Popularity – Votes through Steam workshop will be seriously considered during the selection process.

 

Good luck!