Hi everyone,

We’d like to let you know that Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles for the Dreamcast will be released on Summer 2008! We’ve updated our website with the announcement, you can check it out here. The sprite ordering for Dreamcast will be available for two weeks starting now and will be very limited, so be sure to grab yours as soon as possible! The game will be available for preorder in the following weeks, and will be published by redspotgames.

New packaging and design

The game will feature an extensive manual in both Japanese and English, as well as new artwork and design for the packaging:

New features for the Dreamcast version

For those familiar with the GP2X version, we’ve added tons of new features,  including: the new Mr. VMU character and dialogues, the new Danger Break system, faster and more accurate gameplay, new Computer Difficulty Levels, fully dual-language packaging and game software (English and Japanese), new artwork and design for the Manual and Packaging, a new ending, rebalanced 2-player battles, tons of new graphics, high-quality CD Soundtrack music with new songs, arcade stick support for the Dreamcast, and much more (but we don’t want to spoil everything)!

Don’t forget to check the new website!

After months of intensive work, a Demo of Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles for the Dreamcast will be released on June 6th, on the German Retro Magazine, Issue # 8, with the help of redspotgames, the publisher of the Dreamcast title Last Hope.

The Demo will be included on a Dreamcast bootable disk and, as the GP2X Demo version, the Dreamcast demo includes two complete Story Mode worlds, 2 Puzzle Mode Stages, and some other stuff. Don’t forget to insert a VMU with at least 4 Free Blocks!

(Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed to keep in touch with the latest news about the development of W&W for the Dreamcast!)

In our last post, we talked a little about W&W’s origins. Today, I’ll post a little bit on how the graphics were created for Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles!

As we all know, the resolution of the GP2X is 320*240 pixels, and though it may sound like a very limited resolution by today’s standards, it houses no less than 76800 dots of pure workload. The reason is that sprite graphics have dots hand placed carefully to make everything look pretty and well animated.

For the graphics, as always, everything goes by the “rule of eights” with me. I already knew that the “Elements” in the game would be 16×16, so all I needed was to make them colorful and to include the appropriate Chinese character inside. Chinese characters are pretty complicated compared to letters in say, English, and sometimes squeezing the whole ideogram in a limited space can be quite a challenge!

At first, they were going to be more “classic” in style. The characters were more calligraphic and the blocks much flatter. Later, I imagined them as cubes, so I had to play with the lighting to give them volume. I wanted the blocks to fade according to the element they represented, so I drew the bursting animations.

So, how did this game come to be?

Hao and I had always wanted to make a puzzle game. But we wanted something a little more ambitious than ones currently available. We wanted one that had a very strong and competitive two player mode. One where skill, practice of difficult moves, and strategy would dictate the winner, much like in a good fighting game. On the other hand, we also wanted to include a story mode unlike anything ever seen in a puzzle game before.

The Story Mode of this game is perhaps its most original feature

We already knew the basics that we wanted: a game with combos and chains. Combos that could be constructed with speed and planning. And chains that didn’t happen by chance, but rather by skill. Also, we didn’t want anything precipitating all the time from the top of the screen. We wanted to have the whole board available from the very beginning to let players start making strong moves right away.

But what did we feel was missing from other puzzle games in terms of gameplay?

One of the greatest puzzle games ever made!

Hexic was too much based on strategy, which made it a little slow for action battles. Bejeweled had nice chains, but it was hard to set them up even with skills. Super Puzzle Fighter II X (Turbo) had a big percentage of chance going on: even great players sometimes lost matches because of bad luck. Panel de Pon (Tetris Attack) had an overall excellent battle system, but combos and other moves became rather useless to experienced players, who rely exclusively on chains, of which you eventually run out.