GG Community pre-release of Atomize

I have the great pleasure of announcing not only the unveiling of the development studio I am co-founder of, but also its first commercial product!

Buried Alive Interactive is a small team looking to do what it is we all want to do; make great games. Primarily consisting of two individuals at the moment, we've been working with GG technologies for about two years now. Prior to this, we wrote several smaller 2D and 3D games using home-brew engines, mostly for learning and fun.

When T2D came out, we were drooling at the potential it represented. Somewhere there's this three page list of game ideas and concepts that was thrown together in a matter of hours while tinkering with the engine for the first time. Needless to say it inspired us greatly.

Fast forward to the New Year (hope yours was great, btw) and here we are on the verge of the commercial release of "Atomize". This is aimed at the casual space but with an effort to build in a lot more replayability than the average downloadable casual game, and appeal to a fairly broad array of tastes and gaming skill.

Without further ado, some screenshots:










Some brief game features:

- 120 levels in 30 unique graphical themes
- Unique casual-player oriented online multiplayer, with support for games with 100+ simultaneous players
- Five different gameplay modes in all (three are unlockable 'extras')
- A rather addictive mini-game that has wasted a LOT of my time
- Online high score rankings accessible via the website as well as in-game


At the moment we are just fixing up a few last-minute bugs and doing a final polish of the graphics (especially particle effects). We will be soft-launching to the public in the next couple of weeks.

However, we'd like to thank the ever-awesome Garage Game community for, well, being awesome, by inviting them to be the first people to give Atomize a test-run, give us feedback and criticism, let us know how it runs on your hardware, etc.

Visit our brand-spanking-new website through the side entrance, at www.buriedaliveinteractive.com/main and click on the 'Try' button to download the current Release Candidate.

There are a few known issues with this release:

- Performance is a bit rough on slower video hardware (Intel video, XTreme they aren't). The game has a 'Slow Computer' check-box in the Options panel that turns off some of the shinies to improve frame-rate. We'll be tuning things before final launch, and integrating the awesome speed improvements in the latest versions of T2D as well.

- The Armadillo protection system is popping up a second dialog box when the game quits on some hardware. Nothing major, just annoying.

I think that's it for known issues. If anyone comes across anything else, let us know.

The demo-wrapper by default allows for a 60-minute trial period by default, however the first dozen or two people wishing to see more of the game are welcome to email us and we'll send out a 24hr evaluation key. Just send us your name and the hardware key from the lower-left corner of the game wrapper screen (the dialog box that starts when you first run it).

Also a lot of the juicy extras are unlocked during gameplay, so we couldn't help but sneak in a cheat code of sorts to let people get immediate access to them during this pre-release. I'll send that info out to anyone that requests it as well; it'll work on the 60 minute version as well as the 24h eval key. :)

Boy, the butterflies are gnawing at my gutstrings something fierce! Nothing like your first born being splayed out for all to see for the first time to get the heart murmuring. Or maybe its a heart attack. I dunno. But if it is, I may be slow to respond to mails for a few days.