Nitrome News

Super Leap Day track in Beat Star!

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 19:14:58 BST

A track from our Super Leap Day game is being featured in one of the most popular music games Beat Star!

It is one of three games tracks being highlighted as part of London Games Week! (Joining tracks from Surgeon Simulator and Reigns) The track in question is the Capital Highway tune composed by the very talented https://robkta.carrd.co/ who composed most of the tracks in Super Leap Day

You can't check out the track in the game here!

HTML5 Games and more!

Sat, 23 May 2020 14:08:30 BST

Hi Nitromians,

It has been a long time since we last posted on the blog so there is a lot to get through so settle in!

Today’s big news is that we can finally tell you what we are doing to keep our flash games alive past the end of this year when flash will be removed from popular browsers.

We have behind the scenes been working with the super talented guys at Poki (https://poki.com/) to make our games playable in HTML5! This means they will remain playable in browsers the way they were designed to be played!

The first game is Bad Ice Cream which you can play TODAY by navigating to our brand new HTML5 section: www.nitrome.com/html5-games. More games will be following starting with the Bad Ice Cream sequels over the next two weeks and when we're done, we hope to have the entire flash catalogue of 130+ games playable in HTML5!

Time to talk a little more about the HTML5 versions. They are not ports! The games are running off the exact code of the original games pulled directly from the original flash files. What the wizards making this happen have made is more comparable to an emulator…a Nitrome emulator…eek! Being an emulator of sorts some people may see performance differences to these versions but the code is highly optimised and will improve even further as the team continue to work on it.

Nitrome now have a Discord channel: https://t.co/d7JkJj0G2f . As well as being a great place to discuss all things Nitrome this the place we will be posting early betas of the new games that get converted. Please do sign up here if you are interested in trying them and there will be instructions on how to report any issues you may find with them.

The games being in HTML5 brings some additional benefits. More ideas may be added over time but added today is the ability to play these games on mobile browsers! Please note: You may require a newish phone for the games to run full speed and there are some limitations from the games not being designed with mobile in mind. That said we think the results were well beyond our expectations. We worked closely with Poki to design virtual control overlays that can be configured on a per game basis. Need more than one button check, d-pad or analogue stick check. Landscape or Portrait…both! Please give it a go and let us know what you think! There is even a hidden Easter Egg in there that some of you may find if you look hard :)

You may notice that we have updated the site. We did this to house the new HTML5 games but this also gave us an excuse to do a little house cleaning elsewhere to bring things a little more up to date. We have updated the Mobile section to have all our mobile game, Our Steam section now has our launched Steam games and we finally now have a Console tab to house the games we have launched there. We are very happy to say that we have managed to get the original Nitrome website developer Tom McQuillan back in order to make these website changes! Thanks for that Tom!

You may remember in our previous post that we said we were making a new website. This is not that site. Our intent at the time was to make a new website that focused on games outside of the browser. It was going to be heavily stripped back and more business focused. We progressed some way with this direction but ultimately changed our minds that this was the way we wanted the site to go. A large part of that decision was due to the HTML5 versions of the games becoming a possibility. We still intend to make a new site that will be more responsive (scale and adjust for various mobile, tablet and desktop set ups). We do not have a clear idea yet on when that might happen and as such are not going to make any estimate on when that might arrive. We will give more news when we have more concrete plans.

Finally, as we have not posted an update in so long, we wanted to highlight our move into the Console space and update you on our missed mobile offerings. If you follow us on Twitter where Nitrome are much more active you would hopefully know this but we are aware that not everyone does so here is a recap.

We launched our first console game Bomb Chicken to the Nintendo Switch in July 2018 http://bombchickengame.com/. It was featured in one of Nintendo’s prestigious Nindie Directs and went on to get a Physical release by our friends at Limited Run. Limited Run also helped us port the game to Playstation 4 and produce a physical release for that too. We also launched a Steam version of the game and more recently the game has landed on mobile devices so it is pretty much everywhere at this point!

In April we launched our second console release Gunbrick: Reloaded on Switch and Steam http://gunbrick.com/. The game is a heavily expanded version of our previous mobile release ‘Gunbrick’ which was awarded Editors choice by Apple at the time. The game now includes brand new isometric levels taking the gameplay in a whole new dimension! The games origins can be traced all the way back to Nitrome’s very first icon game (a game that can be played in the 50 x50 pixel icon) back in 2012! Were happy to say this version made its way into this release too :)

Last year we announced a big new console project that is Shovel Knight Dig https://yachtclubgames.com/games/shovel-knight-dig/. It is a spin off title based in Yacht Clubs Shovel Knight Universe. This is by far Nitrome’s biggest and most polished game to date. Please follow our progress on the title on Twitter https://twitter.com/Nitrome and if you haven’t seen it watch the reveal trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPfiBU4ifjs.

On mobile there have been 14 games release since we last updated! We brought our flash games In the Dog House, Colour Blind and Turn Undead to mobile all sympathetically adjusted for the touch screen and widescreen format and with various extras. We also made a full on sequel to Turn Undead too!

Nitrome’s internal studio also produced Flat Pack and Bomb Chicken on mobile and in collaboration with some external studios we also published Spicy Piggy, Sprint RPG, Tower Fortress, Slime Pizza, Nano Golf: Puzzle Putting, Nano Golf: Hole in One, Drop Wizard Tower, Spike City!

Really there are too many to link to here so for more news and links on these please head to our vastly updated mobile section here: nitrome.com/mobile.

We really can’t leave the mobile conversation without mentioning Nitrome’s most successful game to date! Leap Day has just on Monday had it’s fourth anniversary and as we have every year, we launched a big content update for the game. For those not in the know Leap Day is a single touch platformer that has a new level every day…yes that’s over 1460 levels at this point! (OS: http://tinyurl.com/y7arwadt GooglePlay: http://tinyurl.com/y9yzbuah)

Whew that was a lot to get through but I hope anyone who read it all will agree it was all good stuff. Nitrome as always have even more good things going on behind the scenes so you can look forward to even more news in the future.

Stay safe everyone!

From the Nitrome Team

Leap Day - Cloud Saving

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 20:21:54 BST

Hey Nitromians,

Leap Day now has cloud saving on iOS (android is proving a little more tricky, but we are making good progress)

What does 'Cloud Saving' actually mean you ask?

-It keeps all of your Leap Day data synced to play across all of your devices, neat! Meaning you can play on one device and carry on your progress on another.

-Never lose your characters and level progress ever again. Gone are the days of broken devices and lost save date, huzzar!

In other news we are currently fixing a bunch of things in Leap Day such as:

-Cloud saving on Android,

-The broken rolling escaping barrels

-The lonely tall wandering cactus level

-The crazy trapping springs

-Lag issues with the new huge lasers

-Zen Phone2 issues

-And finally trying to see if we can improve lag across various devices.

These bugs and improvements may get fixed in small batches depending if and when and if they are fixed.

We are aware of some other small issues like the frozen upside-down octopus, the eggs that sometimes bounce off your head and the occasional small escaping bugs and wall plant spitters.

We may fix these too given time. But for now we want to give ourselves time to create new stuff instead of just patching rare hard to fix bugs.

Happy gaming =)

More bug squishing!

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 23:18:59 GMT

Hey Nitromians,

EDIT: ver 1.0.5 fixes another few bugs that have reared there ugly heads on Android.

*The latest update is available to download now on GooglePlay (ver 1.0.5) *

* The iOS update will go live as soon as it's gone through apples approval system *

Fixes include:

*(ver1.0.5)*

- Sound bug fix, bg noise was playing when muted over some devices. you can now listen to your misic in peace.

- Sound improvement. The sounds were out of balance on Android because of the Mono formatting options in Unity. You should now experience balanced in volume for all sound throught the game.

*(ver1.0.4)* or newer

- Fixed skip button and freezing bug at the start of thegame.

- Optimized level 14 to run a little better on slower devices.

- Fixed crumble block particle bug.

- We now do not force people to watch the beginning cut-scene. It was causing a lot of people issues, esp on lower end devices.

-Tiny bits of polish like the lanterns now don't swing so oddly in places.

-Build size on iOS is now a lot smaller that the initial release.

We appreciate all of your support and kind words and reviews.

Happy gaming. =)

Amazon Underground!

Wed, 02 Sep 2015 19:41:18 BST

Hey Nitromians,

Great news, Nitrome is part of Amazons new gaming service Amazon Underground - "what's that?" I hear you say!

Well in a nutshell it's a brand new gaming service that lets players download games (many of them pay for titles or Freemium with nasty pestering In App purchases) for FREE! with absolutely no catches whatsoever.

We got on board with the launch of this service and at this very moment you can get Gunbrick and 8Bit Doves at zero cost. All you need is an Android phone and the Amazon Underground App!

There is more info via the link provided where you can download the Underground App via your Android devices or FireHD and Fire HDX Tablets.

Happy Gaming =)

Private Messaging Bug Fixes!

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 15:38:43 BST

Hi Everyone,

I have managed to address the "private messages" bug. The problem was originally that people were not able to reply to private messages that they had received. It should now be resolved!

Feel free to try this out, if you are still having issues with this feature feel free to leave a comment below and I will read through them. I am still busy working through the bugs list from the last article and will update you with my progress as I get through them!

Thanks for your continued help everyone!

Server Maintenance Starts Next Week!

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 16:36:56 BST

Hi Nitromians!

I am going to carry out some server fixes starting early next week (most likely Monday). I'm sure that you may be wondering what that will mean for all of you, so I thought I'd give you all a bit of insight!

Well for starters, once I'm done, I should be able to get those problematic game comments back up and running! Also, I will be making a point of fixing some long standing issues and other things that may have got broken during the original server swap.

If there is anything in particular that you may have noticed, you'd be helping a lot by making a list of things that are broken in the comments below. It will be a great resource for me whilst tackling issues starting Monday!

You will most likely also notice a slight bit of downtime to the account functionality starting Monday. This is just so that we don't lose any of your data during the fixes we plan to carry out.

Well, we hope that you all enjoy your weekend!

Platform Panic (Web Release) Fixed

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 15:56:41 GMT

Hi Nitromians!

We recently heard that some of you were experiencing issues wherein older versions of Platform Panic was displaying on the game page. We have fixed this and now the character upgrades are back!

Apologies for this, some old files must have copied over during the accounts upgrade. I am still working towards fixing the game comments. The issue is much more complex than I first thought. The comments are still there though. It seems that it is a memory allocation issue.

Thanks for your patience. Seeing as this is turning into a little bit of a site maintenance post, how about letting me know of any other issues you may be experiencing? I will list them and work to sorting them out.

Thanks again for your continued help!

Game Comments: Currently Offline!

Fri, 20 Feb 2015 17:50:20 GMT

Hi Nitromians!

We are currently experiencing some issues with the game comments. I have been looking into these for the past two days and think we might be able to get them sorted soon. We will hopefully get them back online next week, until then, have fun playing our games in peace and quiet!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Ready for the Accounts Upgrade?

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 16:35:00 GMT

Hi Nitromians!

Although I haven't spoken about the new account features this year, I've been actively working on them!

So expect to see them very soon! In fact, when I say soon, I'm working my hardest to get the account upgrades ready for you all by tomorrow! We just need to do the final backups and checks, just in case we need to roll back and fix some stuff. It's always better to be safe than sorry!

There might be some teething issues here and there but with your help, we should be able to crush a good amount of bugs early on. You have always been a great help in detecting any past site issues that we didn't spot during development and your continued support will be much appreciated. Let's get accounts running as smoothly as possible!

Well, wish me luck! :)

December 18th XMAS Avatar has been fixed!

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 14:56:45 GMT

Hi Nitromians,

The Christmas avatar for December 18th has now been fixed. Feel free to go and find it!

We will leave the xmas advent calendar on the avatars page for a little while longer so that you can see if you have unlocked it.

Have Fun!

We have moved office!

Tue, 23 Dec 2014 10:05:00 GMT

Hi everyone!

We have moved office recently and have finally got all of the computers internal networking sorted out. As a result of moving, we haven't currently got access to a stable internet line from our new space. Please be patient, we will try to get any bugs that we have noticed with the site and games fixed as soon as we can!

We hope you are all having a great break!

Feel free to still give us feedback in the comments, as we can still reply from time to time using our phones!

Endless Doves, A Festive Update!

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 15:52:45 GMT

Hi Nitromians!

We have just released a rather festive update for Endless Doves on the Web, iOS and Android versions!

Get Endless Doves!

We hope you like the new additions.

Game Preloader Fixes

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 17:19:32 GMT

Hi Nitromians,

Just a quick blog post letting you all know that the preloaders have now been fixed.

There was an issue on our servers that has now been resolved relating to file compression.

It was making some older games unplayable (like The Bucket).

We have automatically cleaned the cache of games that were affected so there is nothing you will need to do to see the changes we have made besides playing the games!

Happy Gaming!

First Christmas Avatar Released!

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 15:57:26 GMT

Hi Nitromians!

We have just started our Christmas advent calendar and have released the first one today! We think this avatar is a bit on the easy side, can you find and unlock it?

Expect to find a new avatar to collect every day until Christmas!

As always, please don't spoil it for others. Have fun!

Endless Doves - (Website Scores Fixed)

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 14:08:02 GMT

Hi Nitromians,

We've just uploaded a new version of the Endless Doves game for the website.

This new version should resolve the highscore spam issue. We flushed the scoreboard too, but you can just re-submit your score upon crashing the character and it will be back in the scoreboard!

Well, that is all - happy gaming :)

How is nitrome.com running for you?

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 13:54:10 GMT

Hi Nitromians,

We are looking into the recent transfer of the servers and are just double checking that everyone is having a great experience!

So, to help us gauge how the site is performing we'd like you to leave a comment below and let us know if the site is running faster, slower, buggier etc and we will look into any concerns that may arise.

We are aware that some of you thought that this maintenance would include the accounts upgrades. That is on its way, but was not part of this scheduled maintenance! Expect the extra features soon!

Thanks again for your patience!

Server Maintenance Carried Out!

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 17:05:37 GMT

If you are reading this post, then your account is now live on the new servers! Hurray!

We are still currently in the DNS limbo period, so this means that the DNS is still propagating around the world fully.

Another two days should have everyone fully running on our new servers!

Thanks for your patience, happy gaming!

Beginning Scheduled Website Maintenance!

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 13:50:24 GMT

Hi Everyone,

As I mentioned last week, I'm about to begin the scheduled web site maintenance, so for the time being, you may not be able to log into your accounts.

Do not worry! This should only be the case for a short time period. You will still be able to play games on the site durin this time!

Thank you all for your patience. The longest it should take us is 72 hours for server propagation, usually it should take less time than this for the majority of you. So check back soon! :)

New Account Features coming soon!

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 17:22:43 GMT

Hi Nitromians,

We haven't spoken too much lately about the accounts upgrades that are soon to come to nitrome.com, so we thought we'd shed a little light on what to expect!

You will have the ability to comment directly on other member's profile feeds. You will also get to post updates to your profile for other members to read. This will add a higher level of customisation to your profile page!

We will let you know more about what other features to expect in this accounts update next week!