We are extremely pleased to announce that our Wii version of Geon is out to buy in US stores right now. We really enjoyed working on this version – the Wii is a great little machine to play games on and a joy to develop for. This version has all the great stuff we crammed into the PlayStation3 version, including 4-player last-man-standing and team-geon modes for those of you who like a bit of competitive action in the living room!

Geon:Cube is available to buy now from Amazon.com – see our store page for a direct link.

From UFO Interactive’s site:

GRAB YOUR CUBE IN THIS PSYCHEDELIC, PICK-UP-AND-PLAY ACTION PUZZLE GAME OF RAPIDLY CHANGING TACTICS, BRIGHT COLORS, POWER UPS AND FRENZIED SPEED TO SEE WHO IS THE UNDISPUTED GEON MASTER!

Frantically race against your opponents playing as one of eight Geon emoticon cubes as you collect pellets and score goals, while preventing them from doing the same! Utilize unique power ups as you go back, forward and upside down in this easy-to-play-hard-to-master title!

General game play (PSN version)
Geon isn’t just about collecting pellets. If you want to win it’s essential that you stop your opponent from scoring and that they don’t stop you. Expert Geon players will learn to keep track of their opponent whereabouts and will also keep watching their pellet meter. Knowing when your opponent’s Geon cube is full gives you an indication of when it is time to hunt them down/defend your goal. The following general game play tips should help improve your Geon skills.

Try to always carry a powerball, this will make your cube roll faster. Grab one even if you aren’t planning to use it.

Attacking as you opponent exist a loop is a good tactic

Opponents will be out of control as they travel around a loop-the-loop so lay in wait for them and trigger a bash attack just as they reach the end.
Your cube will move faster when jumping (but you won’t collect pellets) so use jump to travel quickly across the grid, when trying to evade an opponent or when trying to catch them to stop them scoring.

Try to keep a close eye on your opponents pellet meter. If they are nearly full you should attack quickly to regain the advantage. Attacking when they are nearly full will cause them to lose more pellets.

The shield not only protects you from your opponents attacks but can also be used to counter attack when you are on the same side of the grid. Bumping into them while the shield is active will cause them to take damage – but it is difficult to pull off.

Grab one of your opponent’s powerballs when you flip over to score a goal, if nothing else it’s one less for them to use against you!

When you select a grid think about what will work best with your powerball selection. Some powerballs have a slight advantage on large open grids whilst others work well on small and intricate grids.

Try to be systematic when collecting pellets. Make sure that stray pellets are not left on distant parts of the grid as this will cause problems/delays later in the round.

So I was down at GameSpot HQ today joining Guy and Alex in their soundproof basement for their latest podcast. It’s a pretty good format, they cover a wide selection of games news and reviews, and so we were pleased to have the invitation to talk a little bit about Geon, how it started out on Xbox Live Arcade, and how we’ve been busy porting it to PSN and Wii. We also talked a little bit about what we’re doing next as well as how Strawdog Studios got started, which is something I always forget is interesting to many folks. The whole idea of setting up your own company to make games can be either crazy and/or inspiring! I’m pretty sure we’ll write more about that one day.
Anyway the podcast homepage is here, but you can hear today’s epsiode right here.

So our brand new best friends over at wonderwallweb have uploaded their first thoughts on Geon, and it certainly seems to have created the right emotion with them anyway! We’re really pleased to read that they have enjoyed the game, and taken the time to note some of the things we hoped would get recognition: the new tutorial, the new strategy behind the emotions and level designs, and the refined competition in the various game modes.

So for this review, www, we salute you!

http://wonderwallweb.com/article-481-Geon-.html

So we’ve all been playing Geon this weekend, and having a great time. It’s strange how different it can feel to actually play the game you’ve spent a year working on, and it’s hard to remember all of the small discussions and design decisions that helped to shape the final mix. After 3 months of QA and TRC checks it’s also hard to convince yourself that there’s really no bugs left in it! (well that we know of anyway!)

Overall I think we are all really pleased with how well this version of the game has turned out, and the improvements we’ve made since the XBLA version really have gone a long way to making the game purer, and more addictive. The AI in league mode plays really well (thanks to Jack) – some of the bots seem to keep coming up with some brilliant strategies that Jack claims he’s not coded! Emergent behaviour? Hmmm…. who knows!

The online game mode got some testing this weekend too, and seems to be holding up pretty well (I promise that one day we’ll post up an article about all the machinery we had to build to make a twitch game like Geon play reasonably well over the internet!), we all had a bunch of good games – particularly Dan who’s clearly been playing online all weekend to earn his place in the top 100.

Well, I hope you guys enjoyed it too, if you haven’t already downloaded it – get to it! It’s a steal for $10…

So we have the official release dates – Geon is going up onto PlayStation Network state-side on Thursday 25 September, with the European release to follow the week after.

Since the guys over at ps3trophies.co.uk were asking about trophies and stuff, I kind of spilt the beans over on their forums, and now their scoop has been broadcast all over the net!

Life moves pretty fast in the land of digital distribution….

Those of you interested in what goes on behind the scenes of the game development business might like to head over to IGN and read their article entitled From Cuball to Geon and beyond. The article focuses on the various business challenges that we faced in getting the game to market.

The article discusses how the game was originally conceived back in 2005 as Cuball (Cube All) and pitched internally using a pre-visualisation demo. All the games we develop here at Strawdog Studios start off with a video, which is used to get buy-in from the team and ensure that everyone understands what we are aiming for. The next stage was to produce a playable demo to pitch to a publisher but, as a small and relatively new development studio we didn’t have the necessary funds to pay for this.

The article highlights the amount of time that gets eaten up by business with months needed to raise investment, months needed to negotiate publishing deals, more months needed when publishers fail and you have to find a new publisher, as well as the time it takes to decide upon and register (trademark) a game name. As the article shows, Geon was in fact the third name for the game, with one name being dropped because it caused confusion (people thought that Cuball was a Pool game) and another, Ora, being dropped because it conflicted with an existing trademark. In short there is an incredible amount that goes on behind the scenes in a game development company that isn’t actually development (and eats into the time available for development).