It’s been a cool ride since Brutal Arena hit the OUYA store 3 weeks ago. To date Brutal Arena accumulated some 400+ players – many more than I initially expected. At the moment Brutal Arena has picked up 35 ‘Thumbs Up’ in the sandbox. The metrics to ‘Escape the sandbox’ still seem to be a mystery, but hopefully it’ll make it out soon!

So in celebration I’ve just submitted a Halloween themed update (Should appear on the OUYA within the next few days)

This version (1.3.4) adds a ‘Halloween’ level…

… as well as 2 new playable characters.

In other news, had a great time showing Brutal Arena at the WA Games Showcase 2013.
Got some good feedback and overall folks seemed to enjoy playing

I’m going to be showing Brutal Arena at another local event on Halloween too!
As usual, each update also includes a bunch of fixes/changes. Some of the ones for 1.3.4 include:
More work on the controllers (Big update coming)

• Early support for Wireless X-Box controllers (Eg the USB dongle still may cause some problems when mixing with other controllers)
• Built in mapping for Generic X-Box Pad (Eg Spartan controller)
• Skip detected devices with ‘keyboard’ or ‘mouse’ in the name
• Players now press ‘O’ to join on the main menu
• Particle effect when joining on main menu – and when selecting character
• Fixed floating blood splats (Eg sometimes appeared when falling in the hole on the Reactor level)
• Glowing ball effect around weapons and pickups (To make it more obvious that players can pick them up)
• Fixed a problem with the blob shadows (Issue with Mecanim) and made the blob shadows darker

The OUYA .apk is available from the home page as well as Win/Mac/Linux experimental builds.

Happy Halloween!