Thursday, November 30th, 2006
We’ve accomplished a lot in the last two days – it’s great to have things moving forward again. We hope all you prospective beta testers are revving your metaphorical engines ready to break the game over and over again while we cry tears of pure misery.
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
While he’s been automoving, I’ve been making some final sounds (again!) and dealing with some admin at my end. Thought I’d mention again that the Determinance soundtrack is available to buy right now from Freedom Road Records for only £7 if you’d like to check it out before the release of the game.
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
From now on we will be removing the word “freeform” from the set of words we use to explain Determinance. It seems that people think that means it’s a free-roaming sandbox rpg, as opposed to what we meant, which was that the swordfighting itself was freeform.
This was my favorite marketing slogan:
Unfortunately we had to drop that because, aparently, real Samurai don’t fly around distant planets talking smack either.
Maybe “Real flying space-samurai use mice to have complete control over their swords while duelling in a Soul Calibur-esqu fighting game” would be better.
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
My esteemed colleague and myself had a very successful set of meetings yesterday, and despite having a really pretty damn hard December to prepare for our January launch we’re energised and excited. The beta will be starting this Sunday, and quite a few of this blog’s readers will be involved. This final test is really for stability purposes: it’s highly unlikely that the gameplay will change before our first release now.
The testers will find the system I’m working on today – the automove system. Basically, IGC showed us that our greatest remaining problem is that people find DT too frustrating to start with, so I’m putting in a begginner system which just moves for you, keeping you at the right distance to slash or block for most of the time, so you can learn swordplay first and worry about timing and speed later.
It’ll be very interesting to see how that turns out.
Lastnight’s football was half an amazing game of football. A snow game full of Seattle blunders at 3AM is precisely what the doctor ordered; marred slightly by the snow stopping at half time.
Staying with the NFL, I’m not really a fan of the new Thursday Night Football. I think it’s a huge strength of the NFL that it’s the sport that owns Sunday, and I think a lot of it’s success is that people get a rest from it during the week and are rabid for football come Sunday. It’ll be interesting to see what effects it has on the teams involved winning the week before and after – well, it’ll be interesting in fifteen years when we have enough data. But I guess you could see teams faring worse the weekend before and the same or a little better the weekend after.
Sunday, November 26th, 2006
Over the next week or so, him and me are going to be attempting to lay out what I’m going to have to call a “roadmap” for getting Determinance ready to launch in a true sense. This is going to be challenging to say the least, but finally sorting out this game once and for all will be fantastic.
I’m itching to make some announcements to you in line with that, but you’re just going to have to make do with some sporadic updates to the website in the meantime.
If you want to preview Determinance, and get some content up on your website/magazine before we hit the review stage please get in touch with me. Your time is beginning to run out.
I just like to say thanks to all the sites and journalists that have got behind us so far. It means a lot to us, and we hope that we can deliver a game that lives up to expectations. Onwards!
Sunday, November 26th, 2006
Due to server difficulties and the desire to fix a certain bug, the beta will be delayed by 1 week. Huge apologies to everyone waiting for it to amuse them on a cold Sunday, I’ll be around on IRC a bit this afternoon to take the flak.
Saturday, November 25th, 2006
As of 10 this morning I am now back in the UK. This will result in considerable blog post increment.
Friday, November 24th, 2006
A thousand apologies if you’ve sent through a comment using our web form and I haven’t responded recently. I will endeavour to get back to you ASAP. Seriously, we really appreciate all the people who have said nice things about Determinance – how much they’re looking forward to playing it etc. That’s some motivation right there.
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006
I’ve received about ten beta applications in the past couple of days, and I’ll be dealing with all of those on Sunday.
Saturday, November 18th, 2006
Never ones to give a “bigup” to anyone who hasn’t yet given us any coverage (HELLO EDGE! HELLO!)…I have to say that the new Edge File series published by everyone’s favourite “evil” specialist publishers Future is actually spectacularly good.
Now, I’m sure a lot of people are going to complain about the fact that it cherry-picks articles from different editions of the groundbreaking mag, rather than reproducing issues wholesale, but they are completely daft. If you are a collector type, you can still seek out those rare special editions on the auction site of your choice, but for the rest of us “human beings” who are interested in catching the mood of the games press at key industry turning-points like, for example, ‘93/’94, then it’s indispensible. £8 is a lot to pay for something which is essentially a big glossy magazine, but then, as the foreward clearly indicates, Edge was always intended to be expensive.
Edge still stands out as an actually decent games magazine with a strong – but admittedly sometimes completely terrifying – personality, and celebrating that with a bit of self-indulgence is perfectly fine. I’m sure the RAM Raider will hate it.
Must-reads include the giant hype articles about the 3DO and Jaguar, a brilliant Rise of the Robots preview (which the slightly gothy girl who served me in Borders made an allusion to), and some amazing features, including a post-Syndicate one on Bullfrog when they had Magic Carpet, Theme Park and (lol) Creation in development at the same time. That’s something like an essential for anyone interested in game development.
EDIT: The 7/10 review of Doom is astonshingly amusing – it also demonstrates why being measured, analytical and carefully examining something in context can make you seem fairly silly.
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