Hey all! My name is Stewart ‘Stu’ Jones and I’m the CG Supervisor here at Relentless Software down here in sunny Brighton, UK… Well, I say ‘sunny’, but right now it’s grey and rainy outside. Boo!

Anyway, with the festive season and Blue Toad Murder Files first birthday approaching we wanted to have an extra ‘Christmas Present’ in the shape of a theme to hand out with our game. Please have a read to hear what we’ve done!

The idea of a Blue Toad Christmas Theme was discussed; we’re all big fans of Christmas! As a result a brief was created in which we needed to take the village of Little Riddle and add some festive spirit to the design… Oh, and any reference to an advent calendar would be appreciated too!

We decided that the background should stay the same throughout; however, we wanted to use the iconic detective’s magnifying glass to show a different image each day during December leading up to Christmas Eve. Having the number of images in the theme limited to 24 which spookily coincides with the number of windows in a traditional advent calendar seemed like a good omen!

At first we had an actual advent calendar displayed over the whole screen, but in practice this obscured the XMB and no one could easily navigate the options… Fail! In the end we decided to keep the magnifying glass and the images in one location, and simply have the opening doors of the advent calendar appear at the side. In turn this cleaned up the theme, and kept the XMB options readable and usable.

With everything in place we had to make the theme more festive. Dom Clubb, one of our Lead Artists, came on board to help me out by painting the background image with a covering of snow. He also added holly to the magnifying glass and generally made everything look pretty!

From there we styled the icons to match the theme, deliberately not changing them to avoid any confusion to the player.

With the theme almost complete, I felt that I wanted to add an extra ‘something’ each day. I’m not going to spoil the surprise today though, you’ll have to wait and see the theme in action! After that the art was complete, and all that was left to do was get our images to change out during the days of December. Luckily, this only required some editing to some scripts. From there we did some testing, created some store icons and packaged it up ready for release.

That’s it! All ready for Santa to make it a Little Riddle Christmas for families all over the globe! The theme is released on November 24, so be sure to grab it before December and you can watch the changes all the way until Christmas Eve! The theme comes free with Episodes 1-6 of Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle or it can be purchased individually for £1.19 or €1.49.

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Here it is, the news all you bargain hunters have been waiting for – not one, but two special offers for Blue Toad Murder Files. Firstly we’ve put all our lovely episodes together into one ‘virtual’ box to bring you the Blue Toad Box Set – from Wednesday’s Store update all six episodes can be purchased together for £17.99 / €21.99.

And for those of you that want to try out just one episode before you buy the full season, we’ve put Episode 1 into the sale at 99p / €1.49. If you like what you uncover, we’ll take a discount off the Box Set price (reduced to £16.99 / €20.99).

To celebrate this offer we’ve just released some new screens to whet your appetite.

Episode 1 will only be in the sale until 7th July 2010 so be quick.

Happy super sleuthing!

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Hi Toadies,

You’ve been downloading the free Episode 3 of Blue Toad Murder Files in your droves since we released it on the Store three weeks ago. I just wanted to drop by to remind you that it’s only free until the Store Update on Thursday 25th March so make sure you get it whilst you can. The new episodes, including the season finale, launch on 8th April so make sure you’re up-to-date with the sleuthing of the Blue Toad Detective Agency before then – episodes 4, 5 and 6 will be available to buy individually or as a pack of three.

Thanks for reading and happy investigating.

Jade

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This is our third visit to the PlayStation.Blog to give you some news and hang around afterwards to chat about it. Other than announcing the game this is probably the most exciting thing we’ve said – on Thursday 25th February Episode 3 of Blue Toad Murder Files will be available on the store free for one month. You (and many of our colleagues) might think this is crazy but we’re really proud of this episode and want as many people to play it as possible. You’ll need Episode 1 already installed to play Episode 3.

I know we had a few comments from Australian gamers about the lack of Blue Toad on their store – we’re sorry for the delay but we’re pleased that you will be able to play Episode 1 to 3 from 25th February too. And don’t worry you’ll still be able to take advantage of the third episode free as long as you purchase one first!

We’re around to answer your questions now so let us know whether you think this is genius or barking.

Thanks,

Jade

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Hi everyone,

We had such a great time on the Blog a few weeks ago that we’ve come back to show you our first teaser video for Blue Toad Murder Files!

The comments on the Blog were really encouraging. It’s great for us to have the chance to speak to you directly about your thoughts on the game. Please let us know what you think about the video.

This is only our first video but it should give you a few hints about the style, characters and storyline in the game. We’ll be releasing two further trailers before the game launches so you can find out a little more about our suspects. Although we’re not going to give too much away and spoil it for anyone!

Enjoy.

Thanks,

David and Andy

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