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One thing people have been asking is about what happens after Christmas to the avatars.

They will all be gone!!....

Just kidding :)

The Callander will be going after Christmas but the avatars will still be there just in the standard format ( no calendar or chocolate ). So you will still be able to get them and use them still following Christmas, but that's not as much fun as doing it along side the rest of the Nitrome community day by day right?

You have only 1 more day...can you get them all before the Calander disapears? Go on...what else are you going to do on Christmas Eve?

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

this weeks Pixel Love is Shine by Adventure Islands. We're a sucker for new concepts at Nitrome and we think this one is a bit of a winner!

The basic idea is that you control a platforming character with the keyboard while at the same time a ball of energy with the mouse. The energy ball makes a circle of light illuminating the room so you have to keep it close enough to the player character in order to see what to do.

The Energy Ball will explode on impact though so as well as keeping the platforming character safe you must be careful to keep the energy ball safe too!

The mechanic offers a surprising amount of depth and it's well worth a play!

On a final note about pixel love you may notice that over the Christmas period we have changed the usual side ad promoting the game to a generic Christmas one. We did this to make it easier for us to maintain this feature while we are away for Christmas.

We will revert back to the previous way of this working in the New Year. Also to make you aware this also means there will be another pixel love for you next week as usual on Monday.

You can play the game here

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

It has been a long time since we did a fan art post which is a shame because there is so much great stuff our fans produce! This one seemed appropriate as on top of being a great illustration is also for Bad Ice Cream which is currently hot topic at Nitrome following the recent launch of Bad Ice Cream 3.

This piece was created by Keoen on Deviantart and is one of many pieces of Nitrome Fan Art he has made. He has many others including some Cheese Dreams Planets, the Warlock from Mirror Image and a cute animation of the main Bunny Character from our Mega Mash Game!

You can find the full image and the rest of his work here

Great work Keoen!

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

So we are another week through the avatars advent calendar and approaching the end! We hope you have all stuck with it...it seems that most of you have been which makes us at Nitrome very happy :)

So what are your guesses for the final few avatars and what do people think we will have in particular for Christmas Day?

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

It's done and with a full moments to spare too before the Nitrome team head of for their Christmas adventures! Bad Ice-Cream 3 was a real team effort combining many different people to get the game ready much quicker than it would normally take! Don't think that means we cut corners though as this sequel is brimming with new monsters, new fruit and new ice-cream!

Oh you may want to get right to the end of this one ;)

You can play Bad Ice-Cream 3 here!

Enjoy!

Just a final note that due to the last minute release of the game there could be some bugs...though we did play it through a few times. If there are any we will fix them when were back in the office after Christmas but please do report them to us.

by Mat

Hello Nitromians,

today marks the Nitrome teams last working day in the office. Many of the team need to fly home to their family's and generally it is good for us to take a break from things and regain some energy so we take around a week off at this time. We will be back in the office come the new year.

Unlike previous years this does not mean all things will be stopping while we are gone as we still have a daily avatar release set up on auto pilot for you to find in the Calendar!

We also as long as nothing goes wrong should be launching Bad Ice-Cream 3 just as soon as we are sure we have squashed the few bugs we have found in play testing.

We will have the usual pixel love games go up on Mondays!

Finally we also took on the challenge of doing a blog post a day until Christmas and although we dropped the ball due to technical problems for one day we still intend to stick with it as planned until Christmas Day!

Thanks for everyone who follows what we do and have a great Christmas everyone!

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

along with everything else added to Bad Ice-Cream we have to have more fruit right? We like to deliver and have 4 new fruit just ripe for the picking! So you have the pixels but can you tell what the fruit are?….some of them are a little exotic!

While some of them are just for some visual diversity in the all important stationary fruit some as always have special properties. Rather than reveal what they do we thought it might be more fun to let you speculate...so what do you think?

A hearty handshake and well done pat on the back to anyone who guesses correctly though this time you will have to wait for the release to see if your right. The release is imminent however so you won’t have long to wait to see if you guess correctly :)

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

Here is sneak peek at another of the new monsters your going to be facing in Bad Ice-Cream 3. The sandworm (or should that be snow worm?) is able to burry under the ground travelling past any ice blocks in his way. He is super quick too, so you will have too keep an eye out for the raised ground and tiles as they bump into the air to locate him.

The worms do have a few weaknesses however. They can't tunnel underneath solid walls. They can't surface where there are metal floor tiles, so you can use these as safe ground. The worms can resurface and move around too, so you're not totally safe... but they are much slower above ground, so you can use this to your advantage.

As usual Telemachus did some sketch work for the worm but it took him more iterations to settle on it's final form. We thought it would be fun to show you some of them in the post... enjoy :)

by Mat

Wow Nitromians… we have to admit we had no expectations of telling you prior to launch what the final flavour was in the upcoming Bad IceCream 3! We were so confident you wouldn't guess it that we challenged you all to guess away and you really did shooting past 300 comments! It didn't even take a full day though for Leonard Greenland to correctly guess that the final Ice-Cream flavour was Bacon... it blows us away that you guys guessed it!

It started off as a joke in the office that we would do bacon flavour but when we looked it up we were surprised to find it was real which settled us on the idea!

A little history... in 1973 the comedians 'The Two Ronnie's' joked about the possibility of a Smokey Bacon Ice-Cream in a sketch which also joked about the possibility of a Cheese and Onion and other crisp flavours of Ice-Cream.

A Bacon and Egg Ice-Cream was created for real in 1992 by Aldrich's Beef and Ice-Cream Parlor as an April Fools joke. They made 15 gallons of it and offered it free to anyone who would try it.

It was eventually made tasteful by celebrity UK chief Heston Blumenthal, when he infused an egg custard with bacon to make bacon and egg ice-cream. You would think it would be disgusting but critics seemed to dig it?!

So there you go a real flavor... who would have thought it!

One other reason we thought this flavour would work is colour, which we noticed a few of you were thinking about in your guesses… very clever of you ;) It's important for the ice-creams to stand out from each other and we didn't have a red one, so bacon while not the first suggestion was a good fit here!

You can look forward to the full game soon, so in the meantime get some practise in with the original games here:

Bad Ice-Cream

Bad Ice-Cream 2

by Mat

Today's Pixel Love game choice is Crash TV developed by Z3lf!

You take control of a television set in this clever platformer. The graphics are very well put together and the gameplay is something that will keep fans of challenging levels very happy.

The television set gains upgrades as you progress (for example, you will gain the ability to double jump) but you will need to master the grappling upgrade to get into the later stages of this game.

Click To Play!

Have fun everyone!

by Tom

Howdy partners!

Bad Ice-Cream 3 wouldn't be a sequel without some new awesome flavours! So we have added an additional two to the roster.

We can reveal that the first new flavour is Liquorice! We have an illustration of what she looks like...yep you read right a second female ice-cream!

The other new flavour is a secret but we want to hear your guesses... no prizes but we’ll be surprised if anyone gets it right! We will reveal the mystery pre launch, and credit the person who guessed it correctly first!

You can look forward to the full game soon, so in the meantime get some practise in with the original games here:

Bad Ice-Cream

Bad Ice-Cream 2

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

So we’re another week into the Christmas Avatar Calendar but there's still plenty more to come. We are thrilled to see how you all have got involved and really enjoyed seeing all the conversations you are having with each other in our blog!

We hope you continue to enjoy them and like last week, if you have any suggestions on what you want to see let us know... we certainly are looking at what you all say.

:0)

by Mat

Hello all!

A few days back we revealed after a bit of teasing that Bad Ice-Cream 3 was on the way and that it mixed in a desert theme!

Today we want to highlight one of the many new enemies that are coming your way! The cactus monsters when sleeping act as a wall. Periodically they wake up and will move to a new location and in that time they are red with anger and deadly. They are typically found in lines with other cactus enemies and this new mechanic of moving walls really changes how you must approach a level!

You can look forward to the full game soon, so in the meantime get some practise in on the original games here:

Bad Ice-Cream

Bad Ice-Cream 2

by Mat

Hi Nitromians, 

Today we are thrilled to have noticed that our game Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage was picked by Virgin Media as one of their top 10 mobile games of 2013!

Looking through their list we see many of our own personal favourites like Ridiculous Fishing, Icycle: On Thin Ice, Joe Danger and Year Walk. We would recommend all of them which makes us even more thrilled to be amongst the selection. For the article and full list follow the link.

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

so if you didn't guess from our previous teases our big sequel for Christmas is going to be Bad Ice-Cream 3. This time out we have added some desert infused elements to the winter wonderland which has opened up some interesting ideas to the game...Alien Ice creams anyone?

Linking in with the earlier posts, in this shot we are showing a split between the initial sketch and the final title screen. If you would like to see the full title screen at 1.1 pixels click here.

That's it for now but you can enjoy more soon!

Why not get ready for the game by playing one of the original games.

Bad Ice Cream

Bad Ice Cream 2

by Mat