Hi all.

All the worlds economy has gone to hell this week. So what did we do whilst all this were happening?

We’ve been developing games you know. Games that can cheer you up when all your mortgage is
making you sad.

And this week, we’ll share some more insight regarding our two announced projects, Umami for PSN and eXfusion for next-gen mobiles.

eXfusion updates

during the summer months, eXfusion has undergone a lot of tweaks and optimization. All this has resulted in the game being showcased running on the apx 2500 during nvidia’s nvision event. The graphical style has also been revised and polished and we can share with you today some screenshots of this updated graphics.

Recently Håvard Christensen, lead mobile developer, gave an interview to german windows mobile games site. Here is a short excerpt:
1. How did your company got involved in development for embedded devices?

Actually, this is a part of the company’s start-up story. We did an ES2-based project for our bachelor degree and showcased it at the Nordic Game Developer Conference. By pure chance, we bumped into an nvidia rep. from the mobile division. We showed him our work, and revealed our plans to start up our own company. He told us to keep in touch; two months later, and we had begun cooperating with nvida and we took our student project into business and formed Tumbleweed Interactive.

You can find the whole interview here: LINK

The interview will also appear on the site’s main page after it has been translated into german.

And finally, here are the new screenshots of eXfusion.

So, that’s it for eXfusion for this week. We’ll be back very soon with videos of this actually running on the apx device, so stay tuned for that!

Umami time!

Umami development has moved forward a lot lately, but not much has been shared with the public. Let’s speak with someone on the Umami-team and get some updates. With me, I have the level designer of Umami, Kris Jet.

So what’s going on with Umami, there hasn’t been much info released lately, why is that?

We know that first impressions are very important, and we’re careful not to release screenshots that we don’t feel reflect the final product. But don’t despair, early november we’ll have new information on Umami, with both screenshots and additional information.
Previously, there’s been mention about registering for playtesting, do you have an ETA for when this will take place?

Our playtesting routines are increasingly important to Umami’s continued development, and we’ll be testing the early levels and tutorial environments with external testers VERY soon. As we’ve mentioned on the blog before, to sign up as a potential playtester, send us an e-mail at krisjet@tumbleweedinteractive.com.
When working on Umami, what other rhythm games inspires you?

Some of my favourite rhythm games are the Guitar Hero-series and the Nintendo DS gem Ouendan (better known as Elite Beat Agents outside of japan). I certainly draw inspiration from them when determining what parts of the music to synchronize to.

Umami is not JUST a rhythm game though, so when it comes to overall level design I guess my inspiration comes mainly from the Mario-series.

How do you create a level, what’s the first step in the creative process?

The first part of level creation starts with synching the button presses to the music. From there I decide where it would make sense musically to place obstacles, gaps and such in the level. It doesn’t always work out quite the way you might think of course, so it requires a lot of tweaking and testing, as most games do.

any other words you’d like to share with our readers?

Keep reading the Tumbleweed blog!