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Yes, you can build your own blocky TIE Fighter dragon monster thing
If you become skilled enough with Blast Works' item editor, there's no end to what you can do! Like this ... thing with what kind of looks like the sides of a TIE Fighter as ears! It's pink and spiky and shoots triangles at seaplanes! Then, when you've finished creating horrible monsters made out of neat-looking white-outlined blocks, you can take them on with up to three friends -- also flying around in homemade avatars.This set of four screens found at Wiiz doesn't just tease the multiplayer and the capabilities of the editor, but also shows the creation tool at work. Now we just have to find a way to become creative before the game comes out.
Blast Works developers on creating the game's creation engine
Blast Works: Build, Fuse, and Destroy developers Budcat Creations have started blogging on IGN about the process of remaking Kenta Cho's TUMIKI Fighters into something much more than the original free game. According to the blog, the remarkable item editing capability grew from a desire to create more complex ships than the original game engine would allow. So they built a more fully-featured Shape Editor.They then stipulated that the artists had to use the Shape Editor to create all the game's assets. The final Shape editor used to develop the levels and the Shape Editor on the disc differ in that "the limits to the maximum dimensions of an individual block and the total number of blocks were removed in the PC version for prototyping." Feedback from the artists then went into refining the engine. The results can be seen above, in this amazing video of a ship being constructed. We were excited enough when this was just a port of a free game. Now it's a completely new game, and one that looks like it absolutely should not be missed.[Via NeoGAF]
Blast Works lets you build all kinds of stuff
For a while, all we've known about Blast Works's editor mode is that it was feature-rich and awesome. Gametap's Jared Rea (formerly of Joystiq!) got to mess with the editor during a hands-on preview, and found not only an edit mode, but an incredibly versatile shooter creation engine. Apparently, ships made of "over 100 pieces" are possible, and feature user-defined hitboxes and gun placements. Levels feature custom backgrounds, which can be layered for parallax effects, and populated with enemies designed and placed by the user, which shoot bullets that are also user-drawn. Any drawn element can be used for any other, so enemies can be placed in the background, or used as the protagonist's ship, or anything else.We really hope to see a community built up around trading custom ships and levels online, through which we could be shooting forever.
Blast Works delayed, for a decent reason
At one time, we dreamed of filling the period between now and the big holiday releases with lots of shooting, courtesy of Majesco's Blast Works. We most recently found it scheduled for an October 16 release, which was acceptable to us. But Majesco announced yesterday that Blast Works has been delayed until the first quarter of 2008. Our hopes for playing it this year have been exploded into blocks and caught to add firepower to the junk-composed spaceship of our disappointment. The good news is that, with the extra time, developer Budcat Creations will be adding the capability to share custom ships and levels, as well as high scores, over WiiConnect24. The bad news is that -- oh, right, the rest of the post was the bad news.[Via Game|Life]
Blast Works developer seems to care about the game
We must admit that we're very impressed with Budcat Creations so far. We assumed that they were just some guys to whom Majesco farmed out the development of Blast Works (to replace the one guy responsible for the PC version), but an interview with Siliconera paints a different picture-- or assembles a different ship from discarded blocks, to use a more thematically appropriate metaphor.It seems that Budcat was the catalyst for the remake: they originally pitched the idea as an Xbox Live Arcade game, and then hooked up with Majesco for a PSP release, which became a Wii release instead. In addition, they approached Kenta Cho independently for his blessing before Majesco did so. It's very comforting to have a team of real fans of the game working on the remake. Despite its apparent budget status, there is the possibility of real thought going into it, rather than just hasty porting.
Majesco takes advantage of freeware license for Blast Works
How would you respond if you were an amateur game developer and a publisher approached you about remaking one of your freeware games for a home console? If you were ABA Games' Kenta Cho, you'd dismiss the publisher and your own game in a supreme act of powerful nonchalance.When Majesco announced that a version of TUMIKI Fighters was being made for the Wii, we kind of assumed that Kenta Cho himself would be involved in its creation, or, at the very least, at the receiving end of a nice check. Why wouldn't we assume that? But apparently that is not the case.The original game is under a BSD license, which means that anyone can use it, even commercially, as long as they include the proper copyright notice, and they don't use Cho's name to endorse it without permission. And that means that Majesco can just pick up this game and set Budcat Creations to work on a new version. They don't even need permission, because Cho put it (nearly) into the public domain. Before you jump on Majesco for "stealing" free IP, you should know that they did ask Kenta Cho for permission. Cho, being the baddest dude in game design, basically "whatever"-ed them, saying "I'd received an offer of porting TUMIKI Fighters to Wii from Majesco and Budcat and I replied [they could] feel free to use it under the BSD license." Like he didn't even care. Maybe he's just nice and principled: earlier in the same interview, he said "...I want to help many amateur developers to create their own games. I released all my games under the free software license with the source code. I hope the source code helps someone to create a game by referring to or using a part of my code."
