It’s the final Marble It Update! of the year!

And what a year it’s been! Let’s look back at 2018: The Year of The Marble!

While development of Marble It Up! started in 2017 – the first big public hinting at MIU! came in the form of a forum post by Mark in late January of 2018. It very much did turn out to be a good venue to share the news – as several future members of the development team saw it there as well!

The team grew, and so did the vision for Marble It Up! After January, there was little in the ways of publicity – but only because there was so much work to get done:

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In 2019 we’ll be publishing in-depth retrospectives on varying aspects of MIU!’s development (design, art, coding, and more) – stay tuned, and take a gander at the above screenshots from the process!

More to come!

Several months (of hard work) later – on August 27th, 2018 – we officially announced Marble It Up! to the world! Mark Frohnmayer and Ben Garney sat down to take us all through the major ideas and goals of the game in our Announcement Trailer. On social media and even in the YouTube comments, we found a reservoir of community enthusiasm!

People of all kinds of backgrounds and ages were sending us their personal stories of how games like Marble Blast had shaped their childhoods or inspired them to develop games or even got into gaming in the first place!

It’d be an understatement to say each of us were moved by these stories – it was incredible hearing such excitement for Marble It Up! and it definitely helped to keep our own spirits up during the stretch toward the game’s release.

During the month between announcing and releasing MIU!, we showed off a whole slew of Marbles, revealed game features, explored level design with Alex Swanson, and got an in-depth physics post from Ben (with those sweet black & white GIFS).

We also launched the Marble It Up! Official Discord!

With all the questions and excitement… we just couldn’t wait to reveal our plans for the future of Marble It Up! – so on September 28th, Mark shared the Marble Roadmap! We’ve hit several of the points outlined and are working hard on the others (more on that later).

And just like that – Marble It Up! released for Nintendo Switch in North America on September 29th! It was an incredible experience and – with the power of Twitch and Discord – we were able to get instant feedback on the game in the first minutes of being live! Talk about nerve-wracking!

Over the next month, we’d be making progress on the first Map Pack, MIU! on Steam, but the next milestone came exactly one month later; Marble It Up! released in Europe and Australia on October 29th! Players could now Marble It Up! around the world!

On November 16th, MIU! came to Steam… and then swept Twitch for a weekend! Being on the front page was a mind-blowing surprise in the middle of the day – then players started to join the community after watching their favorite broadcasters and Marble It Up!was being streamed all the time! As a team, we’ve watched nearly every single broadcast of MIU! and it never gets old seeing a player watch World Record replays for the first time – it’s magic.

On the topic of magic…

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It’s been said many times, many ways – but we’re astonished by the talent and enthusiasm in the community! The November 16th Steam release supported the Steam Workshop and every day – literally every day – new creative maps are popping up in the workshop! We’ll have our work cut out for us when selecting maps to put on consoles!

And now it’s the final week of 2018! The year has been incredible between getting the game out there and being surrounded by the best community in the world. It’s been a wild ride of a year – so here’s our New Year’s resolution:

We’re gonna top it.

Multiplayer, new mechanics, new Marbles, a new map pack, new platforms (and more efficient support for current ones), a community map pack, and so much more that we can’t talk about yet! Oh, and keep an eye out for some Multiplayer Beta tests.

That’s all from us for 2018! We hope your New Year is filled with friends, family, and Marbles.

Happy New Year! Hey 2019… Tag – you’re it!
– The Marble It Up! Team –