Some of you may remember me from my last game (Pong-Karuga) or perhaps my Unreal Tournament 3 maps. Well, today I come to you with a brand new game! It's been about 6 months since my last game and I'm proud to say that there are less bugs in this one than the last one. The game, called Up and Atom, is another class project and our first group game project. We had 2 months to make a game as a group of 4, and I think we're all pretty proud of what came out of it.

First, a little information about how it started out. At the beginning, we were given the topic of "Physics." Now, our first idea wasn't quite what our game became. Originally it was going to be an action platformer with Physics elements. Things like: a gun that would shoot black holes, or switches that could change the direction of gravity, but we quickly realized that what we had in mind was pretty much just a standard platformer. We didn't want to just make another platformer (I should say platformer one more time), we wanted to try something different. We tried coming up with a few more failed ideas until someone suggested to us that we look into Molecular physics, and that's when it all started coming together.

Up and Atom is a molecular puzzle game. At it's core, the game is about bonding the atoms together to form molecules. Molecules have to be made in an alternating fashion, meaning the color of the first atom must match every odd numbered atom, the even numbered atoms in between can be whatever color you want though (including the color of the starting atom). To help mix things up, there are also so "special" atoms peppered throughout the board. These specials include radioactive atoms that will blow up the finished chain, or the solid atom (yeah it doesn't make much sense... but whatever :P ) which can't be used in a combo and must be destroyed by the other special atoms.

The game also has 3 play modes: Survival, Puzzle and Versus. Survival mode has you racing against the clock to make as many chains as possible. For each chain you complete you'll gain back time as well as some points. Make a chain of 7 or more, and you'll get yourself a score multiplier. Your objective is just to last as long as possible. Puzzle mode has you completing a series of puzzles (no way) with a certain completion criteria such as "Clear 21 atoms in a single chain". And versus is, well, versus. You can play against the CPU or with a friend (you'll have to have a 360 controller to play second player).

There is also a profile system that will keep track of your gameplay stats and achievements! This was one of my favorite parts about making this game since I love achievements so much. Some of the achievements are pretty simple (completing the tutorial) and others are so hard that none of us have actually unlocked it fairly (lasting for 5 minutes in survival mode), and other are just time consuming (Get 25 million points across all survival playthroughs).

Overall, we had a lot of fun seeing the game come together throughout the 2 months we spent on it, and we hope all of you will enjoy it to! Yes there are still some bugs (if you find any, let me know and we'll try and fix them), but the game isn't unplayable by any means.

Also, in the next few days I'll be writing up a sort of postmortem to talk about the things that I felt went right, and the things that went wrong. Hopefully this can give some more insight into the development process and the improvements to looks forward to in future Odd Man Out games.


A little taste of the gameplay.

Download Up and Atom

Oh, and before I forget... If you want to help us in making our next game you can check out our Kickstarter page and donate to our cause.