Determinance screenshot

Archive for June, 2007

Liveblogging

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

We’re on our way to drink with Gibbage!

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Nooooo

Friday, June 29th, 2007

Dear Life,

Please stop commercial things I LOVE being destroyed, probably by stupid management.

Love,

Paul

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Translations, Phonogram and A Musical Update

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

Today I have been working on trying to clarify some of the language in Determinance for potential translation. Preparing translation kits in general is a pretty mammoth task which has been aleviated only by some automated cleverness by one of us and also relentless plugging-away-non-cleverness by both of us. It’s a HORRIBLE thankless job: if we ever have underlings I would FEEL BAD about paying one of them to do it, it’s really that disgusting.

Anyway, it’s nearly done now, and once it is we’ll be heading down to Monsieur Gillen’s launch party for the collected edition of Phonogram tomorrow night. I still haven’t actually got a copy of Phonogram, but I’m assuming that there may be some chance of correcting this on the night. It will also be cool to see Kieron in a non-work (for us) context again because we had an awesome time when we hung out in Bristol watching disturbing local bands. I also got really excited about buying a shoelace from a corner shop at one point as well.

I’ve been working away on a couple of musical projects recently and I’m pleased to say one is coming to fruition. My debut EP on Nu Energy Limited will be out shortly and if you like any of the music from Determinance you’ll DEFINITELY enjoy it. I

The tracks are also on this brand new Freeformation compilation album which has a lot of phenomenally great hard dance on it – http://www.nuenergy.co.uk/new/nec/newsDetail.php?id=1286 

hope to work on some more dance music soon – I’ve got an opportunity to do some slower trancier stuff again and that’s always where part of my heart will be firmly (at). If you like such things, we’ve been listening to Gareth Emery’s world-beating podcast a lot recently – if you like dance music of any kind you must listen to it.

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Die By The Sword

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007


Jaime Fristrom has just blogged a short story about DBTS. It turns out that they originally designed DBTS as a one-on-one fighter, a little like Determinance’s Dual Arena mode, but then a guy on the team called Chris Busse made a prototype of DBTS as an adventure game because he was convinced it would be better. It worked, and DBTS turned out as it did.

Really interesting to hear of that kind of decision being made on a title so close to my – and Determinance’s – heart. We had a lot of trouble finding the right core-game mode.

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Goblets

Friday, June 8th, 2007

There have been a lot of Crysis previews this month.  I’m looking forward to that game more than anything else, but a couple of things that have been talked about concern me.  I don’t really want to play a superhero FPS, and I wonder if having loads of Gadget stuff like slidey levels and low-gravity levels will mean there isn’t enough FPS meat.  Let’s hope my worries are unfounded.

Bioshock is everywhere this month, and it looks like we’ll be playing it in 8 weeks or so.  I am absolutely going to get it day 1, and I am really fascinated to see what they’ve done with their actually freeform approach.  Every bloody journalist seems to want to just talk about the morals of killing little girls, frankly the least interesting bit of the game’s aesthetic.  Never mind.

Meteos 2 is terrible.

Richard Jaques is awesome!

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The Big Music Talk

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Tomorrow, I’ll be talking at Cambridge Regional College about doing music for indie games.  That’s not all that exciting: what is exciting is that my co-speaker will be game music legend Richard Jacques.  If you’re lucky enough to be a student there then make sure you come along at 1.30pm – it’s not often you’ll get to hear someone who is literally at the top of his field drop some wisdom on what one might reasonably deem to be “your ass”.

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Money

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Today Mode7 received the first money ever from sales of Determinance, February through May from our lovely partners at GarageGames.com.  Honestly, this doesn’t feel like any kind of milestone – what’s happening with the retail release in August is so much the biggest thing going on right now.  And we’re not anywhere near covering the “costs” of Determinance (basically server costs and accountants’ fees), so I can’t pass any of it on to the team.
The day I can go to Geoff, James, Tristan, Eric (wherever he is), Nick, and Chem and actually hand them some cash and say “yes, we eventually made some money” will be a milestone.

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Alcohol + morning after = silly DT mods

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

I have no idea why, but at about 5pm on any day that I am hugely hungover I get an incredibly desire to make a stupid game.  This is usually a pretty bad idea, as being hugely hungover is exactly the state in which it is very hard to program.  And because I know that I tend to try to do the game-creation method I find easiest – a Determinance mod.

I don’t usually get that far before my hangover gets the better of me and I give up.  Two weeks ago the idea was Determinance RPG (BRILLIANT IDEA) but I didn’t get anywhere.  Last week was not in fact a DT mod but a weird Lunar Lander game which actually did get quite far.

This week ladies and gentlemen, inspired by playing Double Dragon Advance, I decided to make Determinance Brawler.

I’ve got as far as being able to, er, punch (by pressing Numpad 5), and if you hit someone they get damaged and do a cool pain pose.  I’ve been put off slightly by a collision problem I need to solve (if neither player is moving collision goes quite wrong), but I may come back and add, um, kicking and blocking.

I probably won’t, but I might.

Oh, and what’s good is that this is all done from script – showing the uber-modability of Determinance.

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