Determinance screenshot

Visiting the Village: Episode 17

July 3rd, 2009 by Ian

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Episode 17 is finally here!  This week Ian and I discuss the Nomad, Gamebone, Gearbox and a panoply of other brands and trade names.  Enjoy it utterly.
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3D walls, tweaks, bleeps, tweets and forging ahead…

July 3rd, 2009 by Paul

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A very chaotic week this week, as I’ve recently moved house which is always horrifying for anyone working on, well, anything!

Our technical artist implemented the first version of the 3D walls: this is looking great and really adds a lot to the prototype art.  The first version of the turn controls is also in now.  Here are a couple of grabs:

3D walls test 2

3D walls test

That doesn’t particularly do them justice (they look great when you scroll around), so I’m sure they’ll feature in a forthcoming video.

I’ve been working on the first actual in-game music this week: it was pretty much all I could do when I didn’t have an internet connection (thanks BT!).   This has been quite challenging as I’ve had to set up my studio in a brand new room and the monitoring situation is less than ideal.  I’ll be doing some much more in-depth posts on the music soon, and I’m hoping to do some writing in various music tech mags about the project.

The style I’m going for is a mix of stereotypically cyberpunk influences (the electronica / drum and bass of Ghost in the Shell meets some bigger, more euphoric Vangelis-style sounds) with some orchestral stuff, then some dirtier lo-fi 8-bit chip stuff underneath.  I wanted to take all the electronic influences I love and then wrap them up into an interesting bundle.  Production-wise, this is very challenging: I’m currently experimenting with an overall sound pitched somewhere between a super harsh, over-punchy Noisia type brickwall limit and a more spacious soundtracky feel. I sometimes feel that modern game soundtracks lack the punch and aggression of dance music: they’re more influenced by big film scores, whereas I (in my youthful idiocy) find myself wanting something more in-your-face.

I was quite interested in Sascha Dikiciyan & Cris Velasco’s score for Prototype which uses a lot of found sound and weird string articulations: I need to build a bit more of a library of weird metallic sounds to get that influence in there.

Anyway, here is a quick bit of test concept music I did when we were in pre-production.  It’s pretty rough in a lot of ways but might give you an indication of what we’re going for.  I played this to legendary game composer Richard Jacques in his hotel room in Germany (long story) and he said, “Really nice production”, so I must be doing something right…Apologies for the shitty Garritan strings - I’ve since upgraded my orchestral libraries to non-shit ones!

Frozen Synapse Game A Functioning God (early concept music) audio - Mod DB

Ian is continuing to work hard on the single player - the conclusion we came to after trying loads of different game modes is that we need to have an AI-driven SP with emphasis on broad attack and defence missions.  We’ll still try to get some of the cool aesthetic stuff (like assasination etc.) in there if humanly possible, but the game doesn’t work well with heavliy scripted scenarios.  It’s more like a fighting game: it’s all about defeating your opponent at close quarters rather than exploring areas etc.

PR is going well as I’ve recently completed our first PR list with around 800 sites and journalists on there.  I’m hoping to get our first “announcement” release out soon with some of the concept art to bring people on board with development, following what we’re doing and listening to our podcast.

I should mention that Visiting the Village Episode 17 is out today - here goes…


Frozen Synapse Game Visiting the Village: Episode 17 audio - Mod DB

If you’re enjoying our updates and this preview of the game so far, please tell other people and encourage them to come here.  Following me on Twitter is a good way of getting insta-updates through the day if you’re excited about Synapse.  Thanks for your ongoing support - it means a lot as it’s so hard to get quality publicity for an indie game these days: there are so many of the blimmin’ things around!

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Played-first theory

July 3rd, 2009 by Ian

I have a theory, which is that if you play a game and love it, you will not like other games in that series anywhere near as much.  More specifically, if you play Game X and love it, then you will like Game X 2 less.  If you play Game X 2 first, then you will like Game X 1 less.

Half Life and Fallout are good examples, because I’ve heard multiple people saying how they either liked the first or the second much more than the other, and it was always the one they had played first they  prefered.

So, survey time - can you guys come up with examples which go for or against this?

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Podcast is late! But don’t fear, OLD podcast is here

July 2nd, 2009 by Ian

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The new podcast will be out this weekend, but if you abolutely MUST have a Village shot today, here is a link to a beta test Village we did ages ago.  I do not guarantee the quality!

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AI calculation time revisited

July 1st, 2009 by Ian

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Single player has been a bit of a slog in the last month.  Creating a good individual experience from a multiplayer game can be tough.  In the end, I just decided to make an AI to play as much like a human as possible and then information redacted.  Anyway, I’m attempting to optimise the AI today and I once again come back to the question of: how long is ok for you to wait while the AI works it’s stuff?

My personal opinion is that 30 seconds is absolutely fine, and a minute is generally going to be ok.  We have some in-calculation “amusements” (more on that later) so help pass the time (no it’s not a casual game), and I really think a minute is actually ok.

The problem is that a minute buys you a lot more processing on a modern computer than an old one.  The AI needs to be scalable to not take half an hour on netbooks.  Synapse’s AI is scalable, but starts to be significantly less intelligent when you go too low.  Right now we could get the AI running on a netbook in under a minute, but the experience of playing the AI would be pretty different.

What do you guys think about this?

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When the most popular games are the least analysed: EA Sports

June 30th, 2009 by Ian

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Here’s how it goes with the Madden and NCAA Football games:

Every odd year: fix minor bugs with last year’s games while ignoring the major bugs

Every even year: Add new, buggy features no-one asked for

Big bugs basically never get fixed, except by accident.  This year,  Madden is trying to do better by bringing on some people from Head Coach 09.  Here’s a great interview with the guys in charge by the always-excellent Bill Abner.  You’ll see some more frankness here than you’d expect from an EA Sports franchaise.

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Podcast possibly late this week

June 29th, 2009 by Ian

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Esteemed Colleague Paul has moved house this weekend, and is without internet currently.  We may need to push Village back to friday, just to warn you guys.

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2 mild links

June 26th, 2009 by Ian

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A new @Play is  up - still my favorite column on the net.

Also from Game Set Watch, how about a high-end department store using Street Fighter iconography in their advertising.

Sorry, we’re not a link-farm but both of those came up in the same hour and they were both very good.

Had some really exciting Synapse graphics stuff today, and done some work on our huge NAME-REDACTED contract… very exciteable today.  I better go play some tennis to calm myself down.

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Visiting the Village: Episode 16

June 25th, 2009 by Ian

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Episode 16 is here, rattling its sabre.  This week, Ian and I discuss console controversy, Day of the Tentacle and exploding prostitutes.

Here is a link to the Mark Kermode Transformers review we mentioned.

Here is a link to indie gaming for economic justice.

Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.

 
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Manifesto Games closes

June 24th, 2009 by Ian

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Link.

Manifesto Games was an indie-centric portal which had almost no PR the last two years.  I link it here because it was the first “publishing” deal I ever signed - we got an agreement with them to sell Determinance in, I think, fall of 2006.  I remember being pretty excited about that.  In the end, we sold almost nothing through Manifesto (something like 6 copies - GarageGames.com were our second distributor and much more successful), but I’ll always remember them.

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