Posted by Al

Fri, 10th Oct 2014

The first Flame Over previews are in!

Hi everyone,

It’s been another interesting week here at LJ Towers as we move towards finishing Flame Over. We’ve hit alpha recently so now we’re busy heading towards beta, polishing everything in the game, adding the remaining powerups, improving the UI and integrating feedback from players at EGX to improve the experience for all types of players. It’s important we get this right, especially in a game that’s so demanding of repeat play and death after death after death! :) To show you a bit of the progress we’ve been making I’ve added a few new screenshots to this post. Enjoy!

The Lab theme offers far more dangerous layouts. This isn’t gonna end well… :S

As well as heading towards a beta build, we’ve also found time to take Flame Over on the road for the first time, with the aim of getting preview coverage from gaming websites and magazines. While the ball has only just started rolling, it seems like Flame Over is already popular with the critics, which is great considering we’re by no means done yet!

The more dangerous Factory-themed rooms can be tough, but where there’s fire, there’s money!

Last Friday we got the ball rolling with a visit to Keza Macdonald at Kotaku UK. After we’d handed the Vita over Keza spent over an hour playing, repeatedly getting burnt, frazzled and singed before managing to get to the second level. The fact that Keza kept playing with ever-greater determination made me feel like Flame Over’s difficulty is falling on the awesome side of frustrating. While you might die a lot in the first few sessions, you always feel like death was your fault for being too greedy, impatient or inattentive.

After our meeting we got a lovely preview article earlier this week, which you can read here. My favourite part of the whole thing was the starting couple of lines:

“Flame Over is what Spelunky would be if you played as a firefighter. It’s damned hard, but oddly compelling, too.”

I’ve previously mentioned Spelunky as an influential game in the action-roguelike genre, and while we’re very different games in terms of actual gameplay and action, it’s great to be compared to what’s probably my favourite EVER game, even at this early stage.

The Lab features some new hazards including chemical fires, like this one.

We’ve also received another in-depth preview after EGX, this time from Digital Spy, which did a great job of breaking down Flame Over’s gameplay content. You can catch the whole Digital Spy Hands On here.

So far we’ve had some great coverage, with yet more to come as we continue showing the game to plenty of other journos throughout the land. Next week we hope to take in some of the UK’s leading games magazines, so more news on that as and when it happens. :)

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with all things Flame Over by subscribing to the blog, or to ourFacebook,Twitter, Youtube and Google+  pages, where we will be posting all the news from Laughing Jackal.

Cheers!

Al