Last Update: 6/26/07
Marble Blast Ultra
Marble Blast Ultra is the latest in the classic Marble Blast series. Get ready for an arcade action masterpiece with stay-up-all-night gameplay and an insane level of visual polish.
Suitable for players of any age, Marble Blast Ultra transports you to a futuristic 'astrolab' arena suspended high in the clouds. Compete against each other by navigating your marbles through moving platforms and dangerous hazards, while collecting rare gems and power-up enhancements, in an effort to complete each course in record time. Compete head to head in Xbox Live Arcade multiplayer.
Suitable for players of any age, Marble Blast Ultra transports you to a futuristic 'astrolab' arena suspended high in the clouds. Compete against each other by navigating your marbles through moving platforms and dangerous hazards, while collecting rare gems and power-up enhancements, in an effort to complete each course in record time. Compete head to head in Xbox Live Arcade multiplayer.
Dale Nardozzi - TeamXbox said,
Marble Blast Ultra is one of the more entertaining Xbox Live Arcade games; it stands alone in its genre.
Publisher: None/Unknown
| Developer | What I Did | Difficulty of Development | Anecdote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Programming and some "Management" | Harder than Planned | In the middle of development, we dropped the three multiplayer modes we were work working on and and combined them into the single multiplayer mode featured in the game. The infamous "friend's leaderboard bug" was caused by a sort comparision function that only returned 0, or 1, not -1. The programmer (who shall remain nameless :) did not detect this even though he stepped through the code in the debugger, because the dataset used to test was not large enough to expose the bug. | |
| Graphics Programmer | Harder than Planned | ||
| made art | Average | ||
| Play Testing and Level Design Suggestions | Not Bad | "Hey you should make a level with Gravity Modifiers inside a Cube! Or, hey, what about a HUGE pyramid that you could go inside of?" | |
| Artist | Harder than Planned | Ben Garney, Adam deGrandis, and myself made all 35 marbles in a day at the very last minute, pretty much by chance as a pass to "spruce up" the marble art a bit. Ben wrote a kick-butt Fresnel shader that we hacked up in a bunch of ways and just whipped out a bunch of really simple skins that looked great with Fresnel applied. Oddly enough, all the reviews commented on how great the Marbles looked! If they only knew how they came about totally by chance. :) | |
| 360 Tech, Gameplay | Still having nightmares | I put in a 40 hour week in between Friday 6pm, and Monday 8am. | |
| Graphics Programming | Average | Helped optimize, and also made the marbles prettier. (I wrote nearly all of the marble effects in the game.) | |
| Level Design & Art Direction | Harder than Planned | I'm don't think that using the level editor to toss your opponents off the edge during a multiplayer match is technically cheating. | |
| mechanics tweaks, multiplayer game design, pinch-hit coding, "producer stuff" | Harder than Planned | Favorite "overall" moment: The first time we played the rough cut of what would be the multiplayer mode we shipped with... and it was fun! I think this point was a real turning point for the mood of the whole project. Favorite coding moment: Finally getting the reticle target following arrow screen cues almost right. Maybe on my next game I'll actually get them really truly and in all ways working correctly. My apologies to those whose arrows freak out on the gravity levels. Also, sorry about the jump away from surface thing... I want to fix that too. Favorite post ship memory: Walking around Holland with Pascal Bos saying "Marble it up!" repeatedly in his Dutch accent. Favorite new level that will blow away the serious multiplayer MBU gamers when they finally get to play it: Spires. | |
| Nothing | Not Bad | I didn't work on this game, or if I did anything I can't remember what it was. I think someone added me because I worked on the original Marble Blast code. Some of that code may have made it's way into this game, but if it did it was pretty insignificant. So basically, this project was a piece of cake for me. I think the other guys did a awesome job on it though. | |
| GUI | Harder than Planned | Shortly before the code lockdown of MBU, my car was hit by a drunk driver. My leg ended up severly bruised and swollen and I was unable to walk very well for about a month. So I worked from home on a number of the finishing touches and localization changes with my leg elevated up on my desk. Code was locked down and in testing by the time I returned to the office to work. | |
