Less Than Royal

Sammy Awards + New Tetramayhem Beta

Greetings, true believers!

Sorry for the lack of recent updates — Rob, Jon, and the rest of the Royal family have been tied down with various jobs and school responsibilities for the last few months. Rest assured, we haven’t given up on games development. This summer should see us focusing on tearing down and optimizing Tetramayhem’s code, hopefully culminating in that release on Xbox Live Indie Games that we keep talking about. However, in the meantime, we have some rather exciting news for you:

We’ll be presenting Tetramayhem at the Sammy Awards, UC Santa Cruz’s first annual game awards ceremony! I hear it’s going to be a something of a Big Deal — a lot of great games are going to be shown off by a lot of excellent people. Please come and show your support for local independent games development if you can!

Anyway, motivated by the fact that Real Industry Professionals™ might be playing Tetramayhem for the awards judging, we’ve snuck in a few hours of work fixing the most common complaint with the previous beta we had on the site: limiting control of the Block Dropper to player one. Now, a quick press of the Y button will allow any player to take control of the Dropper, which should allow for a lot smoother gameplay when playing with multiple players.

Check out the new beta over on the Games page! As usual, we’d love to hear whatever you think about the game — leave a comment on this post, or hit us up through any of the social media links available through the sidebar on the right.

See you at the Sammys!
-J

Tetramayhem Beta available now!

This is not an April Fool’s joke! This is not a drill! www.lessthanroyal.com is live (Bookmark it! Follow it! Digg it! Tweet it! Like it!), and we’re serving up hot, tasty plates of home-cooked gaming deliciousness!

Moreover, in addition to our existing indie smash-hit (ahem) releases Mirrorrim and Centerlights, we’ve got a whole new slice of co-op gaming goodness in the works called Tetramayhem: Drop Blocks and Four Smoking Barrels. It’s new, it will be coming out on Xbox 360, and it’s got ingredients from all your favorite generes: platformers, shooters, puzzle games, match-3s, Goo-based building games, the works. Even with all that meaty gameplay, the game is looking great and is currently more fun than a barrel of hyper-caffeinated monkeys. However, we here at Less Than Royal Games are firm believers that the monkey is a supple beast, and that you can always squish a few more of them into the monkey barrel. Or something. The point is, Tetramayhem could stand to be even more fun, and that’s where you come in…

Tetramayhem: DBaFSB is currently available to beta test on PC!

Skip on over to our Games page to download the newest beta version, invite a few friends over, crack open some adult beverages (provided you are of legal drinking age in your state / province / country / self-declared sovereign nation), and prepare to have some fun!

Unfortunately, life isn’t perfect, freedom isn’t free, and people don’t walk around on stilts. So there’s one or two caveats to the smorgasbord of pure, unadulterated joy that is Tetramayhem. But let’s begin on a high note:

THE GOOD:
This is our first multiplayer game! Cooperate to rejuvenate a polluted Earth with up to four players, whilst competing to blast the most mutants and grab the top score!

THE BAD:
As Tetramayhem is designed for the Xbox 360, the PC beta is only playable with gamepads (that means no keyboard / mouse controls!), and is only guaranteed to work with Xbox 360 controllers. So that means you’ll need an Xbox wireless USB adapter or four wired controllers to fully enjoy its soon-to-be-legendary four-player cooperative gameplay.

THE GOOD:
This is the most work we’ve every put into a game, and it had the most people working on it! This means its bigger, better, badder, and bodacious-er than any of our previous releases. It’s the least we can do for you, the player, because…

THE BAD:
This will be our first for-pay release. Sorry, folks, it’s a necessary evil — Microsoft won’t let us release games on the Xbox for free! But…

THE GOOD:
It will be as cheap as we can possibly make it (200 80 MS Space Bucks, or $1 to those of us more used to decimal money), and again, is currently FREE TO PLAY ON PC!

This deal won’t last forever folks, so be sure to hop over to the Games Page and download the beta while you can! And then please send us feedback in a comment on this site, via Facebook, on Twitter, through our email (lessthanroyal [AT] gmail), or however else you fancy! Hell, even if you don’t have any feedback, why not send us a Tweet or email regardless? We just love hearing from our players!

While you’re at it, why not click one of the shiny social media buttons below this post? Impress your friends and neighbors with your support of hip, up-and-coming indie game development!

-J

Games!

Hey everybody! We’ve got a website now! Check out the games in the GAMES section. We’ll post news and other interesting stuff about our games here, eventually. Enjoy!