Thursday, September 21st, 2006
We have a release candidate, subject to testing tomorrow morning. Yay.
Things in this business are never bloody well done. We still have to worry about our Master and Authentication servers, and our updater. But the game is now in a package which is basically sellable. And that’s a big deal.
Thursday, September 21st, 2006
Josh Lowensohn over at GR gives us his thoughts on the preview version. An awesome preview to get; we particularly enjoy:
Instead of trying to memorize button combos, you just use the mouse like you would your blade. The result of this control scheme makes for an easy to pick up game that provides instant tactile satisfaction.
Oh, and my head swells dramatically at his comments on the music, of course.
Thursday, September 21st, 2006
I have returned from a nervous_testpilot-related project in London which has been highly productive despite coming at a really bad time as stuff on the game is so mental right now. END LIVEJOURNAL.
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
I’m fixing some good bugs, but the crash bugs remain. They don’t seem to want to come out to play when running in debug build: which makes my life actually about ten thousand times harder.
My esteemed colleague is off doing an engineering session in London, so the number of emails I get has dropped by about 99%… he should be back tomorrow.
Monday, September 18th, 2006
I am watching as a hastily-constructed AI plays against a proper AI, attempting to make the game crash. In real life I can’t program a robot to do menial tasks, but in the world of Determinance I can: this guy will randomly swing his sword while bumping into the water and taunting for hours while I get drunk. I mean play Pathologic. While getting drunk. I just hope I’m sober enough to take the right action when my little electronic child succeeds in his short life’s only mission.
Monday, September 18th, 2006
Simon Wang is a fast-moving gentleman and it’s that quality which has garnered him the dubious honour of penning the first (to our knowledge) full preview of Determinance on the net.
Top quotes:
“This game is innovative and very, very fun.”
“There’s none of that Red Steel-esque ’slow down’ crap, just pure swishing and swooshing.”
“With the release of Defcon in a few weeks, and Determinance on the horizon, things are looking up for Independent gaming.”
He makes the point which we’re going to hear so very many times in the next few months: this game should be on the Wii. Yes, it should – Nintendo’s rhetoric has been all about encouraging innovative development, but there’s been no “in” for us there so far – it’s still all about who you know.
Well, Nintendo, you know where we are.
Monday, September 18th, 2006
Superb blog Reticulating Splines (Blog Name Of the Year Award 1998) posts some more “games are damaging” journo-nonsense for our mockery and puts up some standard, if eloquently-constructed, defences.
Why do people always talk about games improving reaction time? While that’s true, I think it’s perhaps not nearly as vital as games improving judgement. Intelligent games require you to develop a skillset to make a series of rapid effective judgements within a set of highly constrained parameters: essentially synthesizing one of mankind’s greatests acheivements (rationality) and excercising it.
Judgement is great, we use it all the time (hopefully), and it makes us do stuff correctly and helps us on the way to competence. Games allow people to achieve competence in abstract and have fun while they do it, they also allow people to examine the processes by which the attain competence in activities, which is also profoundly useful.
So there.
Monday, September 18th, 2006
This week is all about getting a release candidate ready by Friday.
There are a few serious crash and go-wrong bugs between us and a viable release candidate. As anyone who’s played a lot of video games knows, a release candidate may well be rough around some edges and have a few bugs… obviously I don’t expect Determinance to be perfect by Friday. But I do expect to have a version that I’d feel happy selling to you guys by that time.
What happens after that relies on a lot of different things, but it’s an exciting time and there will be more announcements very shortly.
Sunday, September 17th, 2006
Yeah, we’re having a fantastic time with people starting to play our game and really liking it. So my esteemed colleague does the natural thing: he attempts to fuck it all up by making some completely unsubstatiated claims about an unreleased game on a different system. He then talks about current-internet-games-phenom Dwarf Fortress – which I promise you he knows nothing about. I have some good intelligence that he was so enraptured by the world-creation-and-discarding bit of DF that he bases all of his opinion on the game on that. And because I know what he’s like, I can tell you that what he thinks about the world-creation-and-discarding bit of DF is that it’s like a load of ascii cheerleaders doing an abortive dance for his own pleasure. Now imagine that and understand where he’s coming from with the whole civ-df-rs-dt metaphor. He is coming from his own ass.
Sunday, September 17th, 2006
Something we hear all the time, and occasionally from well-meaning people is this: “You guys must have crapped yourselves when we heard about Red Steel.”
Here’s the thing: Red Steel is a completely different kind of game to Determinance. Yes, it has swords in it; yes, the new sword-system is based around giving the player more freedom of movement than the original sword-system (essentially canned movement) but that is literally as far as the comparison can go.
We have huge respect for people trying to make a sword-fighting game of any kind because we know how damned hard it is: we have worked through more sword-control systems than you have forks in your cutlery drawer, so if there’s one thing we can actually say with assertion about this ridiculous industry it’s that we know we have the best sword system possible. Period.
That’s why we’re quite happy to say in all probability to the best of our knowledge that our sword system is better than Red Steel’s and that Determinance will be a better sword-fighting game. What “better” and “sword-fighting game” mean in that context is pretty darn subjective: I’m not equivocating here. We can say our game will be better because it’s whole approach differs in a way which, obviously, makes it more attractive to us, and we believe will make it much more attractive to a certain group of hardcore players.
I think Dwarf Fortress is a better game than Civilisation in the same way that Determinance will be a better game than Red Steel. I really like both Dwarf Fortress and Civilisation….what does that mean?
Exactly.
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