Update

I am, once again, back in the UK.  Yes I know you knew that already, but it seems a pertinent way to start this post anyway.  I appear (touch wood) to have escaped jetlag in this direction for only the second time in my twelve visits to America.  The first was my legendary “gap year lite” with Ollie Norman-Longstaff in 2001 when we got drunk on the plane, passed out on the plane, woke up for landing and arrived back in dsl in the middle of the tennis tournament, got wasted again (obviously), and then did the same kind of thing for three days in a row.  This time… well, it didn’t require as many chemicals.  Maybe it’s age.  What a self-indulgent paragraph this has been.

So, I ended up doing even less productive coding while on holiday than I had planned.  I kept up doing design on our contract TV stuff and helping Paul keep the graphics pipeline moving, but did very little Synapse coding myself.  In fact, I hardly played Synapse – and spent quite a lot of time analysing why.

As I’ve said before, Synapse is above all else a game designed for me.  I believe that I am approximately 10,000 times better at deciding what I like than what other people will like.  I also believe that I am fussy enough and ADD enough that if I make a game I really truly love then a lot of other people will think it’s pretty awesome too.  That’s my approach, and I think it’s working well so far.  It’s the number one lesson I learnt from Determinance – as an indie, you should be making your ideal game, not your idea of what others’ is.

So anyway.  Why wasn’t I playing Synapse?  The answer, I think, is that I was in uber-relaxation mode and SECURE isn’t all that relaxing to play.  It requires you to put a massive amount of concentration and thought into turn 1, and it requires an intense attention-to-detail throughout.  Now those things are very much part of Synapse, and symptoms of some of the things which make Synapse good.  And SECURE is an excellent game mode I think.  But for me, I need another game mode which is just not quite as mentally challenging at all points to play.  EXTERMINATION, by the way, I view as a pretty rough mode and while fun for a while doesn’t really stand up to long-term play.

I’m not going to go into further detail now, but this week I’m trying to finalise another game mode, called DISPUTED.  DISPUTED will debut in the next update which I plan to have out on Friday (no promises, but I hope so).  When you guys see the rules of this new mode, I’d expect you to see where I’m coming from with all this stuff.  I’d be very interested to hear what you guys think about the current game modes too.

The next update will also have the long-talked about in-game IRC and system tray notifications and the current graphics snapshot, which is quite a lot better than the old beta but still has a long way to go.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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