These ideas, combined with some comment Mark had made about some kind of 'music of the heavens' type look contributed to the creation of the astrolabe background animation and the extensive use of circular arches that support the in-game geometry. My goal was to give the game a greater sense of realism, material-wise, but to enhance the very simple, almost mathematical feel of the levels without too much additional work. Ultimately, things started to get very tight time-wise, and I pulled together the first version of the look that ended up in the final game. We followed many potential routes, from dark matrix-ish worlds, to mechanical mad science looks. We knew that we would not have time to create an all-new interior format that would allow for more organic construction than DIF was capable of, especially considering that we didn't want to rebuild all the levels from scratch.

Many of the great designs our team came up with really relied on curved surfaces to look good.

However, there was a deadline hanging over our heads, and at the time it looked like we really didn't have much time to get the look up and running. Spending enough time solidifying the look and getting the entire art team to buy in would probably have saved a lot of trouble in the long run. Unfortunately some of that confusion carried through much of the project. While we knew that a change was needed, there was a lot of confusion early on with the art design. Because of its flat patterns and bright colors, there wasn't an easy way to show off the 360s capabilities while sticking with the same style. The original art design by Brian Hahn of Monster Studios was starting to show its age. You might have noticed that MB Ultra looks a little bit different than MB Gold and other previous incarnations. There is a lot that can be said about coding, gameplay, scheduling, and management lessons that we learned from the project, but I am going to leave that to other team members and focus on the art design. As it turned out, that was easier said than done, and we learned a lot of lessons along the way. When we first started this project, it seemed fairly strait forward - Microsoft wanted Marble Blast with added multiplayer race functionality for the Xbox 360 launch. Even after just a few hours though, some users were starting to be able to give them a run for their money. I watched over Mark and Pat's shoulders as they layed down some smack on upstart live players. People are already posting time challenges for the single player levels and having a blast in multiplayer. Since then, over 1000 people have posted high scores on the leaderboards, and the online forums have lit up with discussion of the game.ДЄs we'd hoped, it has been really well received so far. Today at around 2:30pm PST, the game went up on XBox Live Arcade servers. The journey to Marble Blast on the 360 has finally come to an end.

Marble blast ultra play online