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First Contact in all of its Map Editor View glory

I’ll admit it: I’m an adventure/platformer gamer at heart. Mario, Lara, Samus…we’re pretty tight. I like exploration. A break in the action. A little atmosphere.

As hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake my preferences in designing MiBI’s first level. We had tossed around a few ideas of what we wanted the Campaign to be; I had played a little Gauntlet, shot my way through Contra, and consequently protoyped some mindless blast-a-thons. They were a bit ‘meh’, honestly.

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On a regular basis, we’re gonna have our lead Level Designer Adam post some hints and secrets and tips and general discussion about the levels in the campaign. He’ll also take you through some design decisions and maybe tell you why the level is the way it is….First up is probably going to be the most, uhh, “challenging” of the campaign levels, Snowblind.

Designer's-Eye View of Snowblind

Ok, so there are probably some people out there who won’t like Snowblind. I can live wth that.

Let me explain. I had this crazy idea of stranding the player in the middle of an open wasteland, left to fend for himself and navigate his way through a white maze of wonder and excitement. This level would not hold you by the hand; you’re on your own, buddy. “The core players will love it!” I said to myself, “This’ll allude to the desert in King’s Quest V! The white wasteland of Final Fantasy VII! The sprawling mazes of dungeon crawlers of yore!” It was one level out of the campaign, so why not?

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For the next several Mondays, we will bring you up close and/or personal with major features of MiBI. Why? Because the game is very broad and very deep and this is one way we can make sure folks know about all of our features lest they be missed. Today’s kick-ass feature is…Avatar Attack!

To explain Avatar Attack!, I need to give a little history first. We

…the competition is getting fierce, and these guys are pretty much copying our game verbatim:

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

Clearly, the geniuses behind “Close Range” have spies on the inside at Playbrains. I’m also not sure if I’m happy or sad that if you put our gameplay footage in that vid and didn’t change anything else about the story, you’d pretty much still have an Onion video. I’ve settled on “happy”.

But remember, folks…if you buy only one “shooting people point-blank in the face” game this year, make it Madballs in…Babo:Invasion: “Where every shot is a head shot…“.

(Hat tip to K-Yack for finding the link. I chuckled…)