Tossers - an OUYA CREATE game for friends with issues -- COME SEE OUR MANHATTAN DEMO @ MICROSOFT

Hi, I'm Ben (twit|tumb). I've been working as a designer in the games industry for a little over 8 years now (you may have played my level in the original Dead Space). My partner Vikram (a great engineer who has worked for Google and with Katamari designer Keita Takahashi) and I produced a game in the rapidly growing Bunch Of Players Knock A Ball Around genre. We're both members of NYC's games/art collective Babycastles.

Our BOPKABA is called Tossers, and it's inspired by Marbles & Curling, with the twist being that you hurl your teammate instead of a 40-pound chunk of Scottish granite.

tl;dr?


We were much inspired by our friends, The Sportsfriends, and by NYC's wonderful independent game developer community. I imagine we'll stash an .apk somewhere soon enough. This weekend we are busy hosting two different Global Game Jam venues in Manhattan and Bushwick.

Major Dev Plans:
- Redo controls: Tossers was built without access to any Ouya hardware which was... limiting. We have ideas on how to build it specifically for the OUYA controller, but that will require touching one first.
- Powerups & Other Temporary Chaos: It's hard to come back from behind in this first-playable version. We actually have designs for this, but did not have enough time to get them balanced during the jam period, so we commented them out. Teaser: big inspirations here are Mario Kart & Jungle Speed.
- Visuals: Neither one of us is a great artist, so we kept things spare to focus on what we do best. We're both committed to a "clean" look like the one we sort of poorly modeled already, but there are a lot of ways that could go. We'd like to engage some of our friends from the local arts community to create something beautiful & distinctive. We also want to make the visuals more effective at communicating some of the sort of hard-to-read stuff in the game (like who picked up who, etc.)
- Music: Did you know there are a lot of musicians in Brooklyn? We know some of them, and would like to get them involved! As with the visuals, we would like very much to assemble a soundtrack that a big studio could never pull off.
- Non-4-Player Mode: Good AI is hard! But we have a plan.