Archive for June, 2008
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
EC saw The Happening last night and we’re furiously emailing about it. I’ll let you know what consensus we come up with, although he didn’t see the boom mike in what I think is the most important scene to understanding the film so it may require a purchase of the dvd before we thrash it out.
I may start work on a prototype we’re doing today; don’t have much else to do. Bin and Burn are having a barbeque in the evening and Clacy is out celebrating his and Emily’s results (congratulations guys) so I’ll have to decide what Lizzie and I are doing. It depends a bit on how wasted she gets at her school reunion this afternoon.
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Friday, June 20th, 2008
There are some pretty awesome things sitting on my desk. And I’m not just talking about the Novint Falcon. The work we’re pitching for at the moment has got me pretty excited.
This is where we’ve got it better than most (not all, but most) indies. We’re kind of making an indy game in Synapse, but we’re also Industry with our more commercial projects. Which sucks in some ways, but does mean we get to be involved in lots of big crazy things which are very exciting.
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Friday, June 20th, 2008
Got a lot of testing and tweaking done today, but I’m not feeling particularly satisfied. I even tried out puting health in this afternoon – something I’m pretty opposed to in general (sorry if you haven’t played Synapse yet, this will all seem a bit oblique) – but that didn’t make a positive difference. Which is good really, because I absolutely do not want it in.
Er… yeah. At least I can be happy that Synapse is set up to allow very easy tweaking, iteration, and tuning. Determinance never got to that stage – gameplay changes were always like pulling teeth to implement. Synapse is written in such a way as to make it as easy as possible to change things, and that’s incredibly important.
We basically still have this problem that assaulting is too hard. I’m pretty pleased with defending thus far – I think it’s fun and that it works pretty well and it’s also pretty easy. But people defending, or rather people who aren’t moving, are at so much of an advantage right now that it just isn’t working.
So, I think that’s what I’ll look at next.
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Friday, June 20th, 2008
Ooh, Warez Determinance. Yeah, as Archa points out in a comment to EC’s post below it’s not clear whether these sites really do have a cracked version or not. I feel generally ok about it because the cracked versions can’t play online. I think I’d be pretty upset if people were just playing the full thing for free willy-nilly.
Lots of Synapse gameplay stuff today. It’s a bit hard work to play on Offense on a lot of the maps – the kind of thing you might be in the mood for once or twice a day, but not several times in a session – and I’m really trying to address that. The idea is that Synapse should be fun to relax and take a punt on tactics with. You want to look at the situation, decide your tactic, implement it, then bam you’re done and you can do the next one. At the moment offense feels too difficult.
I’ll let you know how I’m getting on.
Bin is making buttons in Photoshop next to me, which is actually a great thing for him to be doing. Good looking button maker is a skill we need. Ying is working on DS animation. EC is businessing. Productive friday!
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Thursday, June 19th, 2008
It’s looking like cracks of the retail version of DT are surfacing – it’d be nice if you’re searching for a crack to have a look at our site instead and realise that 1.) the game isn’t that expensive 2.) we need ongoing revenue from it to keep making our interesting PC titles. We’re not big whingers on piracy – I once had an interesting chat with some pirates about cracking the game – but suffice it to say that I don’t think putting $19.99 into the pot to keep indie games coming out on the PC is much of an ask if you’re a committed gamer. We don’t use nasty DRM and our registration process is painless (trust me, I buy and register music software on a regular basis, and you REALLY don’t know what you’re talking about until you’ve had to plug in a USB dongle and run three separate programs before you can use software you’ve paid over £300 for).
That was rambling – buy Determinance, please don’t download illegal versions. Keep the indie dream alive!
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Thursday, June 19th, 2008
We had an exciting meeting today, unfortunately the boredom of NDAs means I can’t talk about it. But be excited for us anyway.
Bin and Burn are playing Synapse in the office, and it looks like Burn’s enjoying himself a lot. That’s good.
About to go to dinner, so not much else to say right now. See you guys later.
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Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
So, our local MP is the MP for Henley and it was Boris Johnsson before he got elected to Mayor of London. Now he’s stepped down we’re having a bi-election. I got three campaign slips in my mailbox today.
Um, right. Didn’t realise that was going on.
Blimey! Thank god the voting booths are private etc.
Er… yeah ok.
However, despite all of this, I’m still voting for the nice man in blue.
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Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening last night and it did not dissapoint. If you haven’t seen it you have to go and see it right now. I have never, ever read reviews which so universally misunderstand a film.
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Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Through the magic of looking at DT accounts set up over the last four days, I can exclusively reveal that Determinance is available in boxes in shops in Germany. Why do I need to look at our accounts table instead of just asking our publisher? What a question. I’m not answering it.
Through a different (but related) magic I can also tell you that two Germans are logged in and playing Determinance right now… but I can’t find them on the servers. Either they’re playing single player while logged in, or their playing on a private lan or something. It’s probably the first one.
It looks to me like about sixteen people have bought the game and created an account in the last week. Now, “sixteen sales in the first week on shelves” is not exactly setting the world alight. But I’m still kind of happy about it.
If any of you lovely German people are reading this, please take a photo of the DT box and your cat and email it to me at ian BAT mode7games BLOT com. I promise to post it here.
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Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
I know what I’d do if I was ridiculously rich. “Ridiculously” as in “Bill Gates”.
I find the idea of completely free (as in speech) internet a big deal. I know that we pretty much have it here right now, but what if there was a nuclear apocalypse? What if there was a big war and society changed and we didn’t have that freedom any more?
If I had billions of dollars, I’d put a server with a big-ass hard drive and fifty receiving dishes on the moon. I think it’s the cheapest way of getting the internet FOREVER no matter what happens on earth.
Why do I think this?
1. The moon always shows us the same face, so you’d only need one receiving station and whenever your bit of the world could “see” the moon (day or night) you could see the recieving station.
2. Satellites run out of reaction mass so don’t last forever. My moon-server could go on forever just by solar energy.
3. The moon is pretty stable, in fact the only thing to worry about (barring humans pissing about on it of course) is meteorite strikes. That’s why you’d need a butt-load of dishes to ensure at least 1000 years of operation.
4. It doesn’t take appreciably more energy to get a signal to the moon than it does to a satellite (most energy is required just to get past our atmosphere anyway) so existing satellite phones would be enough to get the ‘net from the moon.
5. The Moon Server would need a huge amount of disc space and would have to be massively stable… but I think that’s possible with today’s tech. The OS requirements would be interesting because you’d want to give users a good amount of freedom but the thing has to be damn secure.
6. The ping, obviously, would be too bad to play Tribes on unfortunately.
7. You’d get the net about 50% of the day (depends a bit on your location), which is pretty good I reckon.
I find the idea of post-apocalyptic humans spread out accross the world in jungles communicating with gas-generator-powered sattelite phones and laptops impossibly romantic.
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