Man Up Time Studios

Merchant to the Stars

admin — Fri, 03 May 2013 05:05:51 +0000

Adventure! Excitement! Net Margins!

You are the merchant to the stars. The top salesman in the tri-dungeon area. When a hero needs a new Pole-arm, or poison embed short swords they know who to come to.

Buy only the best gear from adventuring heroes, hone the weapons and armor to add new powers and abilities and sell back, for a tidy profit. All the excitement of a AAA RPG without all the fuss of combat. Maximize your profit, and minimize your losses as you become the ultimate shopkeeper.

As you level up, you will unlock new tomes of weapons that will aid your heroes as they battle in dungeons not fit for man, nor beast. Merchant features an entirely procedurally generated world, guaranteeing you will alway see something new.

Merchant to the Stars is the creation of the Doctor of Science, Mark Levin, who previously created such games as Top Gun and Warpgate. With additional art from Steve Tze, sounds by Adam Fothergil and music by Whitaker Trebella, Merchant will remind you what it is to be in a fantasy world all over again.

Pathways Into Darkness

admin — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:00:11 +0000

In August of 1993, Bungie Software released Pathways into Darkness the most advanced and ground breaking First Person Shooter for the Macintosh.The game broke new ground combining Adventure gameplay with the new First Person Shooter game that was just emerging onto the scene. As time passed, the Macintosh hardware and software changed and the game Pathways into Darkness was no longer playable on a modern computer… Until Now.

Painstakingly recreated and updated for OS X, Pathways into Darkness is now free and available for ancient grizzled fans and newcomers to the series.

Sixty-four million years ago, a large extra-terrestrial object struck the Earth in what would later be called the Yucatan Peninsula, in southeastern Mexico. The dust and rock thrown up by the resulting explosion caused enormous climactic changes in the ensuing years, and many of the Earth’s species became extinct during the long winter that followed.

The object itself was buried thousands of feet below ground, its nearly two kilometer length remarkably intact. It remained there, motionless, for thousands of years before it finally began to stir- and to dream. It was a member of a race whose history began when the Milky Way was still a formless collection of dust and gas- a powerful race of immortals which had quickly grown bored of their tiny universe and nearly exterminated themselves in war.

This particular being, whose name no human throat will ever learn to pronounce, was part of the cataclysmic battle that formed Magellanic Clouds, billions of years ago. It died there, or it came as close to dying as these things can, and drifted aimlessly for millions of light years before striking the Earth.

The heat of impact liquefied the rock around it, which later cooled and encased the dead god’s huge body far below ground. As it began to dream, it wrought unintentional changes in its environment. Locked deep beneath the Earth, strange and unbelievable things faded in and out of reality. Vast caverns and landscapes bubbled to life within the rock, populated by horrible manifestations of the dead god’s dream.

Only during the last few centuries has the god begun to effect changes on the surface of the Earth. Grotesque creatures have been sighted deep in the trackless forest of the Yucatan, and strange rumors of an ancient pyramid- which is neither Aztec nor Mayan- in the same area have been circulating in the archaeological community since the early 1930′s.

The god is awakening.

It is up to you to prevent the sleeping god from waking up by detonating a low-yield nuclear weapon. Unfortunately things don’t go quite as planned. During the jump from the C-151 your primary parachute fails, and you are able to pull the reserve only moments before crashing through the forest canopy toward the ground.Two hours later you awake, unharmed except for a few bruises, to realize that most of your equipment is missing or damaged (fortunately someone else jumped with the nuclear device). The muzzle of your M-16 is bent just enough to render it useless, and the bag holding the spare clips for your Colt .45 is lost in the deep jungle underbrush. About the only things which didn’t break were your flashlight and survival knife.

You finally reach the pyramid, by foot, at a little after 0600 (6:00 AM). The rest of your team must have entered nearly four hours ago. Armed only with a knife, and the knowledge contained in this briefing, you follow them …

Everyone Dies Alone

admin — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 05:38:10 +0000

Coming soon, a game about mutually assured destruction.

End of an Era

admin — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 21:10:11 +0000

The last Freeverse boot at Macworld Expo. All iPhone games, no Mac software in sight.

You might notice I like to talk about when I worked at Freeverse. The thing is, those 7 years were probably the most important years of my life. Freeverse encompasses my entire time in New York City, marrying my wife and the birth of my first son. Not to mention all the games I made.

Ian Lynch Smith wheeling his son through the disordered chaos that was the 24th Street Office.

When I left Freeverse, I did so because truthfully, I could see the writing on the wall. When ngmoco bought Freeverse it was a mixed, but mostly positive experience. ngmoco provided Freeverse with financial stability and the ability to try bigger things. When DeNA entered the mix by purchasing ngmoco, things changed. I’d like to say for the better, but we all know how that turned out for me (hint: I don’t work for Freeverse or ngmoco anymore).

It's me, younger and less confused than I am now

Even after parting ways with Freeverse as a company, I never parted ways with the people. Especially important to me were Ian and Colin, the President and Vice President respectively of Freeverse. I met the brothers when Mark got me a job interview. Ian was just a guy in his 30s with shorts and flip-flops, and Colin, slightly older. was casual in his own way. It was the very essence of a rag-tag operation, out of an awesome brownstone on 24th Street with computer desks in what was previously a living room, and the president sitting in the kitchen. Behind Ian was the apartment’s refrigerator with an Xserve parked on-top, lovingly nicknamed “Fridge”.

A nice roaring Northland fire in the office. 3 People get that joke.

This was the house that Burning Monkey Solitaire built, with Ian and Colin at the helm. As I moved up the ranks in Freeverse and began producing, Ian and Colin shared more and more with me the inner workings of the business, and valued my input. In turn I learned so much about business, design and development and even life than I ever thought I would learn in college. Even now when I begin a new project I go back to the initial designs and documents first used in Wingnuts 2 or Marathon.

This is the team that Ian and Colin built.

Leaving Freeverse, I could take solace that it would still be there, doing awesome things. Not anymore. Today marks Ian and Colin’s departure from Freeverse, the company they started in 1994. I can’t pretend to know all the details or reasons, but I can bet it rhymes with “em pee go co”. There will still be a legal entity named Freeverse after the Smiths leave, but Freeverse as we know and love it is gone. Games will shine on, and live on past this.

At the 5th Ave Cube grand opening in NYC.

Thank you Ian Lynch Smith and Colin Lynch Smith for everything.

Then on top of all of this, my partner in crime, Mark Levin is also leaving Freeverse.

Mark Levin, Doctor of Science, inflating a shark.

Mark got me my job at Freeverse, he was lead programer on many games I worked on. It was his brilliance that went into every game. The tricks he pulled, the mad science he conjured out of Xcode will be things of legend. Mark made the iPhone do things that nobody else could. He was conservative in his estimates but flawless in his execution.

If there was such a thing as a dream team of programing, I’d take Mark first pick. I’m excited that he and I are working on a game together for iPhone. Getting the band back together, so to speak.

Rock on Mark “Doc” Levin! \m/

Marathon Part 2: Durandal

admin — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 15:00:42 +0000

Continued from Part 1.

Original render for the Drone

Forge and Anvil opened the world to me. I could create what I wanted. I became enamored with Marathon. I would post on Marathon.org (eventually become a Mod there). Submit to the Story Page, and of course work on ill-fated mods, or as we called them TCs (Total Conversions).

I officially released Marathon: Infection a 7 map scenario with some new weapons (I think) and a new monster, or a modified monster. It was full of bad spelling, bad art and bad designed. But it was out there. To the 2 or 3 people who played it, thank you.

A metallic style that looked too new for Drones

After that I set my sights on a super ambitious project–Pfhorathon (stupid name). The idea was you were sent back to the Marathon by the U.E.S.C. to investigate what happened. But the twist is, you are a prototype human/pfhor solider. Not sure how that plot worked. I somehow roped a few map makers to working with me, got some art out of a guy named Patient Zero (this is important).

The entire project was super ambitious and never finished. Now-a-days I could probably pull it off in a few months. Honestly if someone could just reproduce Forge exactly in OS X I could do it. The current tools are not there for OS X.

A distressed metal used in the final design

Final design with the weathering and battle damage

But I virtually met some great people working on this mod. Namely I met HaveBlue and Patient Zero. Later on I would meet others to play StarCraft with, or Unreal Tournament. Even into college I kept up my love of Marathon. It had grown away from playing the game and working on mods to just talking on Hotline. Like all the time. I would chat with these people at all hours of the day and night. Eventually formed a Diablo 2 crew. I’m sure Diablo 2 is responsible for me dropping a few classes, switching from Computer Engineering to Marketing and a few Fs on exams.

Terminal Layout in XUI

Through all of this my love of Marathon grew. Thanks to the story page I understood the story, and how complex it was. I started to follow the BLAM project (you know Halo) and start to understand what game dev was (just a bit).

Concept Menu running on the Xbox 360

Flash-forward several years to college graduation. My girlfriend (now Wife) applied to graduate school at a few places and got accepted to Columbia in New York City. So we moved to NYC. At this point I had these dreams I would be a games journalist. I was the assistant editor of my college paper, I wrote for a local mag, and was actually paid to put down words on video games (shocking to think that I was paid to write consider how sloppy this is).

So in NYC I started looking for a job while my wife was in school. I went to some dead-end sales jobs, and was a bit discouraged. The plan was to only stay in NYC for the duration of my wife’s schooling. So one of those hotline guys I hung out with, HaveBlue, well he lived in NYC and had shown me around when I first got there. He sent me an email (or maybe an IM) asking if I’d be interested in working part time at the small game studio he had just gotten a job at. I replied that I’d crap my pants with joy.

Work in Progress controller layout

In 2004 I interviewed and became the 8th Freeverse employee. Marathon ran thick at Freevese. Routinely Ian would call out “Marathon” from his Presidential desk in the kitchen and we would all fire up a LAN game.

There wasn’t a ton of work for me to do at Freeverse when I started. My official job was to package up the internet orders, and take them to the post office. I would arrive at work around 1 PM and be out at 6. But I was there looking at game dev. I got to be a voice in the 2005 edition of Burning Monkey Solitaire. I shortly took over customer support.

Early character sketches by Steven Tzé

There was a game that was in dev that I saw on Steve Tzé’s computer one day. It was a plane game called Wing Nuts 2. They let me check it out, and it had an editor; WingNuts & Bolts. This is still the best game editor I have ever used. I’m sad that not many people got the chance to work with it, it’s brilliant. Very quickly I took to the editor. It remind me of working in Forge and scratched that game dev itch.

If I had a rocket launcher...

It wasn’t long before I had the game really moving in dev. My official job became make WingNuts 2. I was coordinating art and programing (I got a lot of things put into the game that were never on the roadmap). While I’m not credited as the Producer on Wing Nuts 2, I think it’s obvious that’s what I did.

Wing Nuts 2 shipped to critical success. It won a Macworld Eddie and got a runner up Apple Design Award (a white plastic cube). I think it sold good to. I think I then worked on some other games, I honestly don’t remember what.

What I do remember would change my life once again. It was late on a Friday evening, around 5:30 PM. The phone rang and on the caller ID was “Microsoft Corp.” I answered the phone and handed it to Colin, as Ian was out that day.

I don’t know why, but I could tell this wasn’t a cold call sales, or something worthless. Maybe it was the look on Colin’s face, but there was the sense something was happening. And something did happen, something wonderful.

Large purple theme'd splash screen not used

Continued in Part 3.

The careful fragmentation of iOS

admin — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 15:00:09 +0000

There’s a lot of musing flying around on the net about a 7 inch iPad tablet. Now I’ve been pretty wrong in the past about Apple and their products. I was on the “Apple won’t make a Tablet computer” side, and I bet against a retina iPad (I didn’t think the profit margin was in there for Apple at that size). So when it comes to weighing in on the existence 7 inch iPad, I think I’m going to sit this one out.

But it got me thinking bout the original iPad. At the time Apple launched the iPad, the App Store was already a huge success. There were hundreds of thousands of very polished, high profile apps, all built around a 3:2 screen ratio. So when the iPad rolled around, many people were put off by the 4:3 ratio that a 1024X768 display brings.

A few weeks ago, a story was going around that all laptops were set at 70 degrees to make customers play with them. Weather or not this is bullshit, it does raise a kind of interesting bit of customer psychology. If you have to invest a bit of time configuring a device, you embrace it, personalize it and perhaps love it.

Back to the iPad with it’s 1024X768 4:3 display. I had been working in 480X320 since 2007 and suddenly there’s a new size to play with. But Apple could of easily made the iPad a 960X640 display. Doing so would of guaranteed all iPhone apps would fit perfect onto the device, with no compromise (ignoring image asset sizes).

But instead Apple changed the entire display. I’m sure there are countless reasons, from supply chain down to Steve liked a particular size. But something really magical happened when developers got their hands on iPads. They were forced to adjust their programs to this new size. Just like a customer adjusting the angle of a MacBook in the Apple Store, developers had to change some things around, and in turn embrace, personalize and of course love the iPad.

This is why, despite the iPad being fragmentation in the ecosystem, was a good thing for developers and customers (and of course Apple).

We’ve seen fragmentation all over the place in Android. And what happens every time is, some hardware vendor slaps some crap together, and then forces Android and a bunch of apps to work within this cramped space. Imagine walking into a Best Buy and finding the Laptops secured with restraining bolts and bars that kept the screens locked at 70degrees with no way for customers to adjust them. The Nexus7 is getting a lot of attention and it sounds like, for the most part it’s a pretty good device (for an Android device). It’s kind of clear what happened to create a decent Android device. The Google software engineers got their hands on a new bit of hardware and invested the time to get to know it, and embraced it. Will customers embrace it? If developers do, the customers will follow.

Now back to the theoretical 7inch iPad. We’ve got two screen ratios in the wild, a 4:3 and a 3:2. If the 7inch is one of those ratios, then that’s the kind of apps we will get. Either compact iPhone apps, or more sprawling iPad apps.

But what about the missing ratio? 16:9. We get movies and TV shows in the aspect already. It’s not a stretch to make games at this resolution. And if we go to a 16:9 aspect ratio, developers will once again have to invest time in configuring their apps for the device. Is very careful fragmentation the key to a successful new product launch?

Marathon Part 1

admin — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:00:27 +0000

This is the first part of a 3 part retrospective of the game Marathon, a subject very close to my heart.

To say that Marathon is an important game to me is an understatement. It has pretty much influenced my entire working career as well as my education.

It all starts with an Apple Computer.

Character sketch of the Hunter

My father was put in charge of picking out computers for DHL back in the early 80s. He choose to go with Apple because of some sales guy somewhere, or perhaps the IBM guy was a dick. Not really sure on the specifics. But anyway he picked Apple (I mean it was the early 80s who wouldn’t?)

That started my family on a Apple path that I would thankfully continue. We had an Apple II LGS which I remember fondly as being a good computer. It had no hard disk, and everything ran off 3.5 floppies. I never owned one of those 5″ monsters, I’m kind of sadden by that.

I had great games for that computer, Thexder, Apache, Kings Quest and Space Quest 2 (my favorite). It also had system disks that let you into the GUI Mac OS (maybe 5 or 4? I don’t remember).

It was a great computer and was used for years. Eventually I learned to draw on it and I had drawn an awesome thing as part of a report for school and tried to print it out (we had an Image Writer with a color printer ribbon). I ran into an error with not enough memory when I tried to print out this report. Not realizing this was a RAM issue, I tried deleting things. Ultimately I lost my entire report. I was rather heart broken. At this time, very few kids would do reports in schools typed on computers. And if they did, I can guarantee I was the only kid putting in computer generated graphics.

This prompted my dad to take me with him that weekend to buy a new computer. As I had said, we stretched that Apple II way longer than we should of. We saw two computers. I think there was an HP something running Win 3.1 and then we went to an Apple Retailer and they had a Macintosh LC III. It was amazing. They had it hooked up to this beast of a 17″ monitor. It had a CD ROM kit.

Concepts of the Pfhor for 3D modeling

The sales guy offered the LCIII in a config with an Apple II emulator in it (on retrospect, I bet they just put a Apple II on a PCI card or whatever they were called back in the day). The idea was we could keep all the old LGS software we had. Sadly the Apple II emulator wasn’t compatible with the LGS. But by that time we were set on the Mac.

Don’t worry this gets to Marathon soon.

This new computer was a beast. It played CD ROMs and music CDs. When Christmas rolled around, all those great computer catalogues started to arrive. MacMall, MacZone, MacSomething. I always went right to the games.

I wasn’t a huge gamer. I was the last kid on the block to get a Nintendo. I was a Senior in high school before we got a Playstation. But somehow I really loved games. In the middle of the games section was a postage stamp sized screenshot of what looked kind of like Doom, but with aliens and space. Looking back on the image, it’s hard to tell wtf is going on.

Work in Progress models of the Pfhor fighter

But there it was “Marathon” I had never heard of it, my friends had never heard of it. So many games back then had amazing descriptions for what was a dinky little racing game, or some asteroids clone (I’m looking at you Spaceway 2000).

Marathon arrived for Christmas of 1994. It had a strange box and came on 4 floppies that were impossible to install (seriously, Insert the last part of the archive first?). But once it was up and running, holy crap. It was this amazing world of aliens and darkness. I played it a ton and it was enjoyable. But I wasn’t hooked. It would never of been my favorite game. There was nothing wrong with it, but it just didn’t grab me.

A year or two later I was out furniture shopping with my family and we stopped by a bookstore and there on the shelf was a yellow box. Marathon 2. I didn’t even know they made one (I didn’t have the Internet until sometime in 97).

First version with Armor

I picked up the game and installed, as it came on a CD. It was such an impressive box. Sadly the game was a bit more advanced for my 8MB of RAM LCIII. To whoever at Bungie spent all the time on the phone with a kid from Nebraska, thank you. I know I burned an hour two or three trying to make the game not stutter on my old computer with you on the phone.

Arms and lower body armor

Eventually there was only one solution, we needed more RAM. First we got RAM doubler, a magical program that I still don’t know how it worked, but I turned 8 MB into 16MB. This was good, but not good enough.

Eventually we upgraded the computer to16MB of real honest to god RAM (at probably a cost of $2,000 or something absurd). With RAM Doubler it skyrocketed to 32MB. I was flying high.*

And thus I played Marathon 2. I still don’t think I fully understood what happened in the game. But it was fun, vibrant, and supported mods. By this time I had the internet and had discovered the world of online Marathon resources. I beat Marathon 2 using a few mods (and never beat it legit like). This held my interest for a while. But still I wouldn’t say I knew what happened in the game. I had a love of reading at that age (still do) and I loved scifi. So why I don’t remember the plot is beyond me. All I can think is my gaming sessions were short and spread out over a long time.

In game shot of enemies spawning with no AI logic

At some point we upgraded at a Macintosh 7500 or something. I forget the model number exactly. It was in incremental update, let me go back and revisit Marathon 2 a bit.

Then we moved from Nebraska to South Carolina. This was a devastating move for me. It was at the start of my Junior year. I was leaving all my friends, and going to a school I would only be at for 2 years before leaving it for College.

There was much bargaining between myself and my parents. One thing I got was the family would get a new computer after the move. It was a PowerMac 300 something slash something. I know it was 300MHz, had a built in Sub, but was not the G3 chipset. It was a beast. I just went from 75MHz to 300! It even had a graphics card. Some 2MB of video ram ATI thing. A friend of mine got me a copy of Unreal since I now had a computer with a GPU. I never played the first Unreal past the 2nd level. Tucked away in the box that came with the computer was a small silver and black CD in a white sleeve.

HUD concepts, reused for 480i displays

It was Marathon: Infinity. Now I knew Infinity existed at this point, but nobody ever described it properly. It was billed as an expansion or maybe just a collection of levels. Not as a complete story. I thought it was little more than D!ZONE but for Marathon. But I put the disc in to check it out. I think I finished the first level (I might not of) but there was this other folder with Forge and Anvil. The Marathon editor tools.

Render of the Pfhor fighter in Wallpaper size

This was the moment, this is where I fell in love with Marathon.

Continued soon in part 2.

Gun Runner Price Increase this Friday!

admin — Wed, 30 May 2012 19:35:17 +0000

This Friday I’m going to raise the price of Gun Runner from Free to $1.99. This is the heads up everyone, giving you a chance to grab it now while it’s free.

Why am I doing this? I’m a big believer in Free to Play, but one of the many reasons I started Man Up Time, was to have full freedom to experiment with game design, and business design. So starting on Friday I’ll raise the price and see what the hell happens.

I’ll be sure to post graphs of all of this to detail what the hell happened.

#becauseWeCan

Gun Runner 1.2 Hella Huge Update, Tell Your Friends!

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:24:21 +0000

Purple Death Beam destroys everything in it's path

Former ngmoco Game team unleash retro-freemium gaming fury with Gun Runner!

For Immediate Release, San Francisco CA

From the award winning-game Designer and Producer behind iOS classics MotoChaser, Top Gun and Flick Fishing comes a new true indie gaming experience. Gun Runner version 1.2 is free to play, mobile gaming the way it was meant to be played, a fast-paced action shooter with oodles of ‘80’s retro cred. Blast through hordes of Alien Mutants, collect coins, and cash in for weapons not meant for this world. With an instant classic chip-tune soundtrack by impresario Syphus, Gun Runner is must-have game for anyone who knows what up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-b-a-b-a-select start is all about.

“This has been a labor of love from day one” says Executive Producer Bruce Morrison. “Working at ngmoco, working with big teams, long development cycles, the joy of gaming kind of got lost — we needed something to recharge our batteries. Gun Runner was that kick in the ass we needed.” Partnering up with Kristian Bauer, he founded Man Up Time Studios to chase their passion and make the kind of game they wanted to play.

Gun Runner, an Endless Runner, is the purest distillation of pick up and play fun. Every time you run, you face an endless stream of bad guys, challenging new coin patterns and random platforming levels. With an art style lovingly crafted to evoke classic 8-bit shooter gameplay, and a nearly endless array of fantastic weaponry to collect. Roasty toasty flamethrowers, bullet spraying machine guns and energy firing plasma guns — whatever your play style, you’ll find what you need to annihilate a legion of evil Dropships.

With alll new power-ups to let you cheat death, double, quadruple and sextuple your coin amount or overload your weapon for devastating firepower, and a cast array of improvements and enhancements, Gun Runner 1.2 demands your immediate attention – and your free download.

Download it today!

Available for now from the Apple iPhone®, iPad® and iPod® Touch

About Man Up Time Studios:

Man Up Time Studios was started by game designer and producer Bruce
Morrison with the goal of making cool games that kick ass. Bruce spent
seven years doing just that at Freeverse and ngmoco.

Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone®, and iPad® are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

Gun Runner 1.2 Submitted

admin — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:00:06 +0000

Phew! What a ~~week~~ Month!

Purple Death Beam just murder-ates everyone in sight

I just submitted the very awesome 1.2 version of Gun Runner. It features, in no particular order of Awesome:

More Guns to shoot!
More bad guys to shoot!
More drop ships at once to shoot!
Awesome power-ups, such as weapon supercharge, super speed, coin multipliers and extra hearts
Lots of bug fixes, improvements
Anything not awesome was made awesome

I’m also trying two new things. The first is SessionM. It’s a kind of real rewards for achievement system. I really like how they put their package together. It’s all HTML 5 driven, so it can be configured via their portal. On top of that, it’s got real style. I implemented this system for user retention. Really I just wanted to add something extra, I mean how cool is it that you can get an Amazon.com gift card for just playing Gun Runner?

I’m also giving Chartboost a whirl. No, it’s not a iTunes bot system, it’s a cross promo network. You can opt in and show promos for whatever Zynga app is the flavor of the week, or you can choose to only cross promo with another specific app. When you do that, no money exchanges hands, it’s totally indie friendly, and the SDK is super easy to use.

The 1.2 update should be out in about a week, maybe sooner if Apple’s not busy.

Badass explosions and chainguns