Shatter came out July 23rd and everyone at Sidhe rejoiced.
We worked hard on this, Antony (programmer), Corie (artist), and Rory (programmer) in particular. Producer Alan kept track of our madness and helped with the design load. Jon provided his design “get it done damnit” know how. Dan and Daizong made nearly 400 levels which were then refined to the 80 found in the game. Module provided so much music and love, with Jos acting as intermediary and music producer, that it’s safe to say that it wouldn’t be Shatter without his audio genius. Mario kept our eye on quality the whole time and is responsible for the very popular friend’s next best score feature that has players chasing the leaderboards. I provided design support and a sounding board for Antony and Corie, beat the boss design into submission, and acted as their cheerleader whenever I had the chance. Many, many people at Sidhe touched Shatter at one time or another and they all helped make it great.
The love Shatter has been getting is astounding and I can’t believe how good it feels. Shatter is sitting at 87 on Metacritic today and players and reviewers really get it. It’s not a big game, it’s not terribly complicated, and it’s not out there to set the world on fire with cutting edge game design. Instead it’s a tight twist on an old classic and it will make you smile when you play.
A game given time to cook, iterate properly, not rushed and it turns out as well as you could hope. Who would have guessed?
I took a few photos at the launch party, the set is up on my flickr, but I like this one.
