Shortfuse Blog

Hey dudes! Colosseum has been up for grab on Xbox LIVE Community Games for a week by now, and we’re seeing mixed reviews and comments so far on the game. Some dudes really love the game, which is cool, while others seem to hate it like it’s school kitchen’s peasoup. We guys at Shortfuse would really appreciate your comments on the game, good things or bad things. We wont bite recieving bad comments (except Lars perhaps). So comment on!

Lars and I are going to Dreamhack in Jönköping November 27-29 to let you Swedish guys try Colosseum. Jönköping is a medium sized town in Sweden very similar to Salt Lake City in one aspect. Anyway, I’ve landed a deal with Steel Series so we do have some nice gaming headphones waiting for you if you participate and win our Colosseum tournament this weekend.

This Sunday Colosseum passed peer review (many thanks to all you reviewers) and is up for release on Xbox LIVE Community Games on November 19, which is cool! We decided to roll for 800 microsoft points, as Colosseum turned out being pretty slick, according to us. I have to say that late Friday night (November 19), when we submitted Colosseum, was quite a surreal night for us – two years of awesome work sent away with a simple click.

Anyway, this week has been a real chill week. The office has not been overcrowded so to speak =). Most of the guys have enjoyed to actually play other developers’ games like Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2. I’ve not tried Fallout 3 yet but Gears is a blast for sure. Dudes, I just love the chainsaw, WRRRROOOOM WROOOAAAAMM! Hihihi.

So tomorrow is the Big Day when Colosseum goes live. To all you guys who will pick up Colosseum, please feel free to comment your game experiences on the blog. We really like to get your opinions on the game, good ones or bad ones. Cool.

Now I have to clean up my messy desk and gear up for tomorrow’s releaseparty!

Today’s bonus is our latest video made my Lasse:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=502a70d5-548c-44f5-bcad-b394d478cbc0" target="_new" title="Colosseum">Video: Colosseum</a>

This is the week of weeks. The crunch time is going exponential and we’re already clockin in about 50 hours worktime each since monday. This is pretty insane really. Tons of work, no real food, little sleep and a lot oc cola and coffein makes life kinda… special, like a week long LAN, but serious (?). Okey, enough of the martyrdom stuff. Today we have overcome some really huge, annoying crash bugs that we experienced yesterday, which is good. The art guys and the designers have put everything into place and made some final balance adjustments. Also, the singleplayer campaign works smooth, and for you guys who have already tried the multiplayer part, this might be cool for you. Colosseum is up for playtest for devs at Communty Games and we’ll submit Colosseum to peer review before this weekend.

This is pretty exciting to be honest and the original guys that have been here for two years can barely believe we’re so close now. As you probably know, we’re self loving people I’ll post some crunch photos (yes, they might look that any other photo so far, but what the hell). For once, someone brought a real camera so the photos are actually decent.

Welcome to our lives!