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Hi Nitromians,

Today's pixel love game is Pause Ahead developed by Askiisoft. The game is filled with wonderful pixel art and it also boasts a refreshingly clever and original game mechanic. When you pause the game, everything pauses, but your velocity remains intact. This means that you can pass through obstacles and then resume the game to continue.

The puzzles are well designed too, making great use of this game feature. We really enjoyed the music in this one. It has an authentic chiptune feel yet it's also right up to date.

Click To Play

Join us next Monday for another Pixel Love choice!

by Tom

Hi Nitromians,

I don't mean to keep posting every day any more but we do seem to have a lot of noteworthy events to get out there...so erm I still am...but it will stop soon I promise!

Today we have a new fan made project that we became aware of over the Christmas Break and it is a little special! User 'Sim' has managed to make his own level editor for our game Square Meal....impressive!

It's online here so anyone can use it to make levels but a limitation is that you can't test them without Sim manually putting them into the game. The good news is that he is doing just that and already has 50 of them! We will be interested to see what people come up with!

We have worked on two fan collaborations in the past at Nitrome...there was our Steamlands editor which spawned the Steamlands Player Pack and Skywire VIP Extended where two fans had recreated the entire game in Scratch and made an entirely new set of characters. We then worked with them to put their characters and clues into a real new addition to the game that lives on the Nitrome Website.

We are unsure yet given that players can't test levels if the quality of the levels will be sufficiently good...at the moment they seem very hard (I only got to level 3). But you guys have a habit of surprising us and if Sim is up for it and if you can make 50 good levels then Nitrome would be open to launching the levels as an official player pack. 

So challenge set....lets see what you do :)

by Mat

Someone at Pocket Gamer clearly likes what Nitrome do, as not only did they list Icebreaker as one of their top ten games of the last year but they also asked our thoughts on significant events in the mobile industry over the last year.

Our comments are shown along side other mobile indie heavyweights such as Simogo's Simon Flesser, TinyCo's Will Luton, Vlambeer's Rami Ismail and Halfbricks Phil Larsen. Topics range from the rise and fall of Micro Consoles to the unstoppable behemouth that is Candy Crush Saga!

If you would like to read it head over there via this handy link.

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

We've decided to make a change to the blog. We have added a "READ MORE" button to the bottom to posts that we considered to be our longer articles.

Clicking the button will expand the text to it's full length. This is handy as it allows you to get a quick overview of what the article is about, for skimming through.

Whilst doing this, we also fixed an issue with Internet Explorer (IE) which was not displaying the blog correctly. There was a problem with some of the articles that made them break when browsing with IE.

Thanks for reading everyone, have a great weekend! :)

by Tom

We've updated Bad Ice-Cream 3 to fix some issues that you helped point out to us. 

Fixes Included in the Update:

• Avatar bug: present now only collectible in the level where it appears.
• Alien bug in multiplayer mode: alien will now be able to kill other players after the first player was killed.
• Level 29 in multiplayer: all players will now be in the level.
• Level failed popup window: menu options now have accurate hit boxes.
• Title screen: Touchy icon changed to double pixel to match the rest of the artwork.

If you have seen any other bugs that we have not listed here, please let us know and we will look into them.

Click To Play Bad Ice Cream 3

Thanks for Playing!

by Tom

Hi Nitromians,

we're only just into the new year and already we're off to a cracking start. Pocket Gamer, one of the leading sites for mobile coverage listed Nitrome's very own Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage in their top ten games of last year!

We are thrilled to have been given the award especially given the quality of games in the rest of the line up!

You can read the article here!

Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

The Nitrome team are back in the office now so we can get back to the exciting things we have planned for you this year. Jon and JK are going to be straight onto the second part of Cheese Dreams New Moon so you can look forward to that and the Icebreaker update and Android build should be getting close to a releasable build so we will keep you posted on that but we're hoping it will be fairly soon now!

We said in a post over Christmas about another mobile game that's on the way so when we feel comfortable with a release timeline we should start teasing that and as always there are other browser games on the go that will come out as they are ready....it's already shaping up to be an exciting year ahead!

by Mat

Happy New Year Nitromians!

we are not yet back in the office but we thought it would be good to use the time to cover some of the pixel art we have missed!

we always love it when fans come up with something a little different based on our work and we feel this qualifies nicely. Jeferson Damasceno Lima must have spent many hours adding full colour to our 2.0 Skin!You can see the full image on his account here.

Along with this he also recoloured the original classic skin that you can see here.

It raises an interesting question about our skins that we constantly struggle with at Nitrome. Do we go full colour aka the Party skin or does the busyness of that make the site ugly or harder to use? Should we go more minimal? Or is the variety of approaches the way to go letting the user just pick their preference?

Either way I think we can all agree that it is pretty cool seeing these images in full colour!

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

Recently I have been talking to the folks at the Nitrome Wiki about potentially giving them their own section within the blog.

The Nitrome Wiki for those who don't know is a very extensive resource built up by loyal Nitrome fans about everything to do with Nitrome. There is literally everything you could ever want to know about Nitrome there and we actually use it ourselves at Nitrome to find things out sometimes as it is quicker than looking it up in our own resources!

This collaboration is being discussed between myself and Wiki member Nobody who a lot of you will know from all his blog comments. He is discussing with the rest of the wiki team what sort of topics they might cover so I thought I would open it up to you guys for suggestions...what would you like to see them covering? Likewise do you see any problems arising from such a collaboration that we should be prepared for? Whatever your thoughts we would love to hear what you all think!

As a final note...this is very much at the concept stage at the moment and nothing has been finalised. As such there is even the chance that this could still not happen, but we are hopeful this will become something very special.

You can visit the Nitrome Wiki here.

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

this weeks Pixel love and the final one of 2013 is run and gun game Blitzer by SilverGames. The games mechanic replies heavily on shooting downwards to help with jumping. It's a highly playable little romp and we felt the sprites reminded us of Vlambeer of Super Crate Box fame....which means they are really nice :)

We hope you enjoy the game and well be back in the office next week to find another pixel love for you all to enjoy!

you can play the game here.

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

for a long time now Nitrome have been experimenting with mobile. From the very beginning we were experimenting with unreleased mobile Chick Flick, there was the long time halted Super Feed Me and finally our Touchy app followed by our first finished mobile game Icebreaker. We're still going with Icebreaker on porting and updates but a few of you will recall that back before Icebreaker was released we also teased a top secret project on the mobile page at 25% complete.

When Rovio got involved as publisher of Icebreaker we needed more people on the team so that project was also put on hold while we finished it.

We did however have another team start work on a different game and they have since before the launch of Icebreaker be quietly working away at it. With all the false starts on mobile and with a general frustration from people who waited for Icebreaker following the initial announcement we have be wary of saying any more about the project until it is actually done.

I am happy to say we are getting closer to that point so when we can comfortably feel it is actually ready we will plan a marketing campaign and finally reveal it...this time at a much closer time to the actual release.

So is this a tease...sure it is but we thought you would like to know that we have been busy behind the scenes on something new!

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

when we did the last memory lane about Chick Flick a few of you asked to see the original art so they could see how it had changed. Well that was the original plan but was left out due to Mat being off at the time and him not mentioning it in the notes...doh!

So this is a small update to that to show you the original art. As you can see it is much the same as how it turned out in vectors which is not surprising given that it was the same artists working on both but you can clearly see the pixels in the original phone versions much smaller screen.

A few of you also asked to see the original video we made to show it off. We hunted high and low to find it in all our old back ups but unfortunately could not find it so we will have to consign that to memories.

One final interesting fact was that the phone version was going to have a secret stage that arose from a programming glitch. The way you rendered in J2ME was very different from how we used to program in flash in and you had to tell the screen to refresh the parts you wanted to refresh or it would paint each frame over itself as it moved. We accidentally left this on and thought it looked cool and surreal despite making the game much harder. New had the background designed like a tv tuning card which highlighted the effect really nicely on top. As this was not the way flash rendered things it did not make it into the flash version.

You can see a few other images from the game here on the Nitrome Wiki (yes even we use it to find things about Nitrome)

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

We have some exciting Icebreaker news! One thing we have wanted to add to Icebreaker is to make it Universal and implement cloud saving. It was very complicated with the branching level structure if the game but we finally think we found a solution that works. This is going to be applied to the iPad version of the game so when the next update comes there will be iPhone only and universal versions of the game.

This update should arrive in the next update which will also include new levels in a brand new pack and be the launch date for the Android build!

by Mat

Now that the Christmas Avatar Calendar is done and the Nitrome crew are all off work it would be normal to assume that there would be no more posts until were back.

Maybe you expect a pixel love on Monday or maybe not even that! Well I'm happy to say that not only will there be a pixel love in its regular spot but we also got a little carried away preparing posts for before Christmas (when we were trying to post every day).

Because of that we still intend to have a few posts prior to us coming back including an Icebreaker update and a few others you won't want to miss...Stay tuned!

by Mat

Hi Nitromians,

thank you very much if you ventured to our little site on Christmas Day itself! It is quite humbling to think with everything else going on today that people would opt to visit!

Today marks the final day on the Nitrome Avatar Advent Calendar so we hope you all enjoy that! Did you like todays Avatar? We thought it would be quite cute and festive :)

We at Nitrome are all off at the moment and won't be back until the New Year....stay tuned for a great 2014!

by Mat