Hi everyone, how you guys doing?

What started for us as an idea almost 3 years ago is now about to invade your lives. On Tuesday, 24 November Gravity Crash for PlayStation3 will launch on not only the North American PlayStation Store but also on the European PlayStation Store, two days ahead of the normal store update on Thursday.

When we started working with Sony on this project towards the end of last year we knew little of how encompassing or indeed how much we’d achieve, and I have to say we are incredibly proud of what we’ve created these past 12 months.

The game is being launched as Trial & Key type. When you download the Trial edition you will get access to 4 of the levels of the full games 35 single player planets and 12 multiplayer maps. You will also get full access to the editor, where you will be able to create your own levels straight away, however only when you buy the game will you be able to Publish them to the PlayStation Network for anyone and everyone to enjoy.

Actually, I’d like to geek out for a moment. All of us at Just Add Water are complete geeks, so one of the little things we included in the Trial edition, which as far as we are aware no one else has done before: on our Sell screen (All demos/trials have these) we have a dynamic “Published Levels” line that tells you how many custom made levels have been published to the PlayStation Network. Personally I can’t wait to watch that number getting bigger and bigger over the coming months!

Which brings me to the subject of price …

£6.29 / €7.99 / $9.99 US of your earth money, will buy you …

• 35 Single player levels, including hidden and boss levels.
• 12 Multiplayer levels.
• 3 Multiplayer modes.
• Different player ships.
• Special weapons.
• Weapon power-ups.
• 20 devious Trophies.
• Leaderboards.
• Over 200 editor items.

Talking of the editor, just to reiterate what I said in the previous blog update, EVERY level in the game has been built with the editor you get in the game. To give an example of the editor here’s a little development diary from us along with a bit of editor action!

And finally, during December we will be releasing a few extras via the PlayStation Store, like wallpapers and themes. So all I’ve got left to say is thanks for your support since the game was announced, and we hope you enjoy it when it’s released on Tuesday, and we can’t wait to see what you guys can create with the Editor!

Slainte

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Hi folks.

This is Stewart at JAW, developers of PSN and PSP super-retro title Gravity Crash. The guys at SCEE asked me kindly to write a post about the game, so here it is.

Back in 07, myself and Dave Parsons (project lead) were sat in a coffee shop and a long conversation ensued on all the things we loved about gaming in the 80s.

Pixel perfect collision detection, that sense of tactile movement, simple controls, the richness of things to do but with less buttons needed to do it, memorable and distinctive musical scores. During the conversation Dave showed me something he’d been working on. A vector-based old-skool shooter that takes me back to days of Jetpac, Asteroids, Defender and my favourite features from many other classics, all refined and rolled into one.

I instantly fell in love with it and we began building it into what you now see as Gravity Crash. Think of Gravity Crash as our love letter to 80s classic shooter gaming and you’ll have a rough idea of what we’re building.

In aim of displaying a modern day vision of our retro love, we decided that since we’re on PS3, we should probably tap into its ‘flash stuff’ powers.

As a result of this, we have the game running at 1080p and 60 frames a second. You’ll also notice very subtle visual FX using FX Shaders to give us the object glow, and other such effects throughout the game.

An original Gravity Crash screenshot

(more…)

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