Monday, March 9th, 2009
Just testing some new stuff – nothing to see here. Working on sorting out a slight blog revision and adding some new idents in preparation for…the thing we’re going to launch this week – we’ll see how it goes.
http://www.mode7games.com/persistence_nervous_Testpilot.mp3
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Monday, March 9th, 2009
It’s time to mildly increase the size of the beta, and to get people playing regularly I’m going to start a league. Every couple of days new matches will be arranged between you and another beta tester, and you’ll be emailed when that happens. The scores will be in-game and on this blog at the side.
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Sunday, March 8th, 2009
EC’s coming over to the office today and we’re going to have a mammoth Synapse session. On the agenda: where do we go from here? What bits do I work on?
I’m relatively happy with Quick Match – little randomly generated 4-turn Situations which will be the compulsive, tea-break and 1am staple of the Synapse world. What is not so good right now is the default gamemode for longer matches. The balance between a game mode which is easy to understand, and a game mode which is best for non-noobs, is a tough one to strike. And we don’t think having two primary gamemodes – one for noobs and one for non-noobs – is a good idea. The best games have one strong mode.
We’re going to be introducing something pretty special next week, and it’ll be accompanied by a mild rejig of this site. I’m not teasing! It’ll actually be next week, quite possibly Tuesday.
I’m having a nightmare with text rendering using Gdi+ for TV work. It would appear that you cannot, for love nor money, measure how long a string is going to be when it’s rendered. Time to get out my Haxsaw.
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Thursday, March 5th, 2009
Uber TV day today – I’m helping with the re-coding of the “1 vs 100″ (that’s a quiz show) application (the thing which maintains the game state while on air) into our libraries; I’m battling canadians to get 3D working; and I’ve got the Krytpon Factor Final Airing party in London tonight with the crew. I probably need a day off Synapse, I’ve been working pretty non-stop with it.
In some ways, this is a difficult time for Synapse. A closed beta is actually extremely hard to get going, especially with an email game like Synapse. In fact, Synapse isn’t so much an email game because your average game plays so quickly, but that’s the genre. Anyway, the point is that with only 10 or so people to choose from, it’s hard to keep momentum up. I think I may try an organised ladder system which involves people playing an organised game at least every two days, and emails them to remind. But the point is that with a very few people, coming from all sorts of gaming backgrounds, it’s hard to get a critical mass. When the open beta starts I really hope that won’t be a problem.
Also on Synapse, I think the single player approach may be beginning to take shape. It’s fairly unusual, but I’ll keep you updated.
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Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Hands down my favorite gaming column of all time is @play, John Harris’ fantastic Roguelike series on GameSetWatch. If you read all fifty of the columns you’ll learn more about game design than you will in any other arena. Here’s the Spelunky post, which at the bottom has links to all of the columns.
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Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
I’m sorry for not posting much atm, tv work and Synapse coding are taking up most of my concentration. If you’d like to be involved with the beta, either email me (ian @ this website’s address) or leave a comment here.
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