Friday, January 15th, 2010
(If you have not received an email about the new beta, and you believe I have promised you access in the past, please send me an email – ian BAT mode7games BO’ com – it’s probably my fault).
The new beta is live! EXPECT MORE SHORTLY
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
The beta is pretty much ready, and shalt be released tomorrow. Everyone who has a beta account will get an email, and I hope to see some action over the weekend!
I’m still trying to find a ladder system which I like. If there are any that you guys are especial fans of, comment them here.
New Village this evening as well, I believe!
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
We are getting tantalisingly close to a new beta release. And this one is a really, really big one. I have some bugs to fix on Monday, and a few features to add today and tomorrow, but next week you should be able to get the New Frozen Synapse. Let me start off by giving you some background.
During the August beta test, I noticed the following things:
1. People really, really liked Frozen Synapse
2. People drifted away after a week or so
I thought about this, and I worried about this, for a long time. After a huge amount of thought, I decided that there were three issues.
First, the process of starting a game was far too convoluted. Here’s what it looked like:
a. Decide you want to play Synapse
b. Start and log into Synapse
c. Try and find someone to play with – this usually involved going into the chatroom and asking someone for a game
d. Decide what game mode you want to play
That process just will not work. Most importantly, having to interact with someone before you start playing is a complete and utter no-no. Human interaction of that kind is just plain stressful. Not hugely stressful, but stressful. The system should pair you up unless you specifically want to play with someone.
We had the quick match system, but it never worked very well – if it couldn’t find you an opponent immediately, it would put you in a game with no opponent so you could do your first turn, whilst it tried to find you one. This sounded like a good idea to start with, but in the end people just didn’t trust that they were going to get an opponent, so didn’t use QuickMatch.
I’ve completely got rid of Quick Match, and replaced it with a simple “Traffic lights” status system. There’s a new Status Bar at the bottom of the screen at all times now, and by clicking part of it you change your status:
(This is all work in progress graphics and will be less ugly later)
When you first open Synapse, you’ll probably want a game, so you’ll click through to green. The system will try and find anyone else on green and match you. It’ll wait twenty seconds just to make sure someone else doesn’t come online wanting to play or finish a game. If it doesn’t find another green in twenty seconds it’ll automatically give you an orange player – orange are people who are happy to play two games at once, or are just sitting with Synapse open happy to play a game if someone comes along. If there are no oranges it’ll send a final pleading request to any reds (which will be easy to ignore if the red really doesn’t want to be disturbed). If none of those things work, the GMs and admins will be mailed. But I sincerely hope that one of those things will have worked.
Anyway. This may seem like a minor thing, but getting this right is absolutely crucial to our success. Getting a game of Synapse needs to be the most simple thing you can imagine.
And now onto problems 2 and 3.
Leaderboards were not doing enough to entice people to play competitively. We need a much bigger carrot, it looks like to me. Also, because Synapse has always been very focussed on the one game mode (Secure during the August beta, Disputed since then), playing more than a couple of matches in a row has been a bit dull – it’s not that fun to play the same rules over and over again.
My solution to this is much bigger thing. In fact, I probably should have talked about it first. Oh well, I hope you’re still reading.
I introduce to you: The Campaign.
You have a base. Everyone has a base. Rather than individual synapse matches being detached, individual things, now every game you play is connected and matters. Every victory you score gives you extra resources to put into your base. Your base defines what your attack squad is (you start out with a lowly two machine gunners, and it’ll be a while before you can afford the really powerful units), and various other things.
So far, so XCom. But on top of this, each part of your base is a proper Synapse map, and you have to organise your defensive troops in it. Many mission types happen inside your or other people’s bases, such as:
Hostage rescue
Assasination
Escape
Corruption
Infiltration
And how you’ve set up your defenses, and which parts of your land you’ve decided to occupy, will have a big impact on how those missions go.
The design for Campaign is still in the fairly early stages, and a lot of things will be added and changed while we test it. But it is playable right now, and it does work. You’ll be able to play it next week… there will be bugs!
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Firstly, a massive thank you for getting us into ModDB’s Top 100 Games of the Year – this is a huge boost for us and we really appreciate your help.
I can’t tell you how much publicity like this will help us – there are so many indie games out there now. We have worked incredibly hard on this game and there is a very long way to go still, not to mention the amount of work we’ll have to do to get people to notice. People coming and looking at info about the game for free is invaluable at this stage.
With that in mind…
I have to ask you to vote AGAIN (sorry about this!) for us to actually win an award.
If you voted before or you have a ModDB account…
1.) Go here http://www.moddb.com/games/frozen-synapse
2.) Sign in to your ModDB account using the panel at the very top of the page
3.) Click on the large button which says “Top 100 of 2009: Vote Now”!
If you haven’t voted for us before…
1.) Sign up for a ModDB account here
2.) Go here http://www.moddb.com/games/frozen-synapse
3.) Sign in to your ModDB account using the panel at the very top of the page
4.) Click on the large button which says “Top 100 of 2009: Vote Now”!
Many thanks!
The Entire Mode 7 Team.
Monday, January 4th, 2010
Happy new year everyone! Have a podcast as a present from us. It was late. That was Bin’s fault. Bad Bin!
I am working on exciting Synapse stuff. I made a big breakthrough last week between Christmas (did not have that much fun at christmas) and new year (I had waaaaay too much fun at new year), and I’m pretty excited about what we’re going to be unveiling soon.
Having said that, designing testing and iterating a game which is: meant to be played over the course of several months; needs to be fun with two players and two thousand players; and does not have any direct analogues that I know of to copy from… that is hard. Hard!
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
We have recovered from the festivities sufficiently to get behind our
microphones and blab about things like gamer gender, fat people, Browser
Pong and Duke Nukem Forever. Listen now!
Check out links from the show on our official Google Reader page.
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