Thursday, July 17th, 2008
I’m actually working on fixing boring collision bugs in Guile today, but a quick feature popped into my head this morning and I had to put it in. If someone mentions your name in IRC while you’re in-game the chat line will be printed in the in-game chat hud and a little notification noise will sound. Just a cool little thing I wanted to put in, and it only took me 15 minutes.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
Just had four people on the server at once: me Bin Merglasch and Archa. The net code was working better than I thought and I was just about able to have a good duel with Merglasch, who’s in Germany. Got some obvious stuff that needs fixing though.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
I recorded a duel Bin and I had. Sorry for the lack of sound… I forgot to press the right button on Fraps.
[EDIT] Great… youtube encoding means you can hardly see my sword in the video. Oh well, guess it’s mildly interesting anyway.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
I’ve been working pretty much flat out on Guile for almost two weeks now, and after the major gameplay breakthrough on Monday and the great presentation (of something else) yesterday I’m taking a bit of a day off from coding. I’ve got a ton of things I want to do on Guile before the week is up, only some I’ll be able to do. Probably jumping, ducking, and side-jump-attacking will make it, and hopefully I’ll fix the lag issues enough to actually get a game going on our server.
EC and I are going to Develop the week after next. I’m looking forward to getting wasted and pissing about around industry people, and he’s looking forward to covering the Audio Track for Music4Games.net. In fact, I better try and book a hotel.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
My previous post was a bit ego-centric actually. Paul’s done a fantastic job getting us even in a room to pitch for this work, and Bin did the art and he’s done a fantastic job. An impressive team effort.
My sleep’s been a bit disrupted this week due to Jasper, my Mom’s new puppy, which is also I guess the Mode 7 dog. Ying’s been working in our kitchen to keep him company, but I think Bin will take that job today. Working in a room with a puppy for one day: fun. More than one day: not so fun, I think.
We’re finally switching off BT Broadband today. BT has just been an atrocious, atrocious service and when I rang up to cancel and the guy said “so if we offered you a better service for a lower price you’d consider coming back?” I just laughed at him. Not only would I never consider coming back, the implication there is that they are withholding a cheaper, better service for people who try to quit. That’s not something I respect in a company.
We’re moving on to Loud’n'Clear, a private ISP service we get because we co-lo with them for our game server. I’ve had a server of one kind or another with them for eight years and they’re fantastic guys; a real small company atmosphere who try and help you out.
I’m doing some design work on Puzzle Catz this week, but as usual that only takes up a small amount of my time because of the programming time for Ying to code the changes. So I need to spend the rest of the time getting Guile into a state I’m happy to leave it in for a while. Which unfortunately means some boring bug fixing I think.
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
We had a presentation for Mystery Game X to Big Publisher Y today and… well let’s just say it went pretty damn well. I designed something, prototyped it in a week, and I appear to have hit it out of the park. I feel good.
Monday, July 14th, 2008
Not having a great evening tonight… but nothing to do with work. Anyway, let’s ignore that and get on with news!
Guile Alpha 2 is up on the forums and if you’ve got a LAN and a brother (or a friend or something) I would really love it if you could give it a go. Paul and Bin and I had a pretty good play session on it today and I think it’s the best 2 player Determinance (yes, or Guile) experience I’ve ever had by a good margin.
I was possibly going to see EC tonight, and the first thing I was going to go on at him about was this. This whole Guile thing is just an absolutely fascinating experience. I don’t think you could have predicted this, but apart from anything else Guile is an incredible learning experience (something EC, in fact, told me he thought last night). While I was making Determinance I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. And I slightly feel I have the same problem with Synapse. But with Guile, I feel like I’m in a helicopter over the wood with a guy who knows the wood telling me about the wood and showing me a map of the wood. It’s a massive exercise in seeing what my problems as a designer are.
My biggest problem is polish. I’m not good at it. I find it hard. And I don’t mean “making the menus look nice” (that’s EC’s job anyway), I mean actually turning a system with promise into a robust game mechanic. Whenever I get to a good point with something, where it’s clearly starting to work but is massively rough around the edges, I kind of stare blankly at the idea of smoothing it’s edges until it’s perfect for half an hour, and then think of some other system which would be cool to implement. It’s feature creep but to the nth degree. And I need to work it out. Oh well, knowing the problem is the first step etc.
I’m going to sign off now as the amount of beer in me is growing to a slightly unstable state. More tomorrow.
Monday, July 14th, 2008
First alpha was not exactly a resounding sucess, with Richy telling me I should go back to coding Synapse. Have no fear, this is a scheduled break from FS and will last not much longer.
Second Alpha, with vastly improved (again) strike detection, should be up this evening.
Monday, July 14th, 2008
As you may know, we’ve been working with Novint for some time.
But this is by far the most astonishing development yet…
“Eddie Murphy then grabs the Falcon and pulls it out by the handle. The camera view shifts to a view of him using the Falcon to take back control of the ship.”
That’s right, the Falcon’s movie debut is coming to a cinema near you.
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
Yeah, this has been a long time coming, but we’re proud to announce that Determinance has made it onto an A-list digital distribution platform.
Visit our product page and buy other cool stuff (like Precipice by those Penny Arcade people) while you’re over there.
We’re already getting sales coming through and I hope this will bring some new players to the fold – cheers to everyone at D2D for supporting indie gaming and making this happen for us.
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