Determinance screenshot

Archive for March, 2010

30 Days of Music Has Moved!

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

30-days-of-music-has-moved

Now doing this on my personal blog due to passive aggression – go!

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Do reviews ruin games?

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

do-reviews-ruin-games

Rest assured, he will not be making THIRTY such posts.  It has been dealt with.

I don’t like knowing what’s going to happen.  Especially in films, and that’s why the Heist genre is my favorite.  A review, even one which doesn’t really contain spoilers, can nevertheless spoil.  Take Just Cause 2 – the reviews tell me I’ll love it for ten hours and then get bored.  I would have prefered to love it for ten hours, without the knowledge that I was going to get bored, and then get bored.

So I’ve decided I’m not going to read reviews of games I think I want to play, and only look at the scores.  Controversial?!

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30 Days of Music

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

30-days-of-music

Stealing this from Kieron Gillen who stole it from someone else etc.  I will also break the rules.  A lot.  And may not finish.

Ian will hate this / be amused by this / post shit Steps songs in parody/homage/desperation.  Only Malakian will read this.  Probably.

Let’s go!

Day 01 – Your Favourite Track

Robert Miles – Children

There’s nothing more irrational than a favourite.

I listened back to this just now and it really still does it for me.  I can forgive the tired old Korg presets and the general dance-compilation-fucking-advert-blandness; I can forgive those things because I still love the melody.

It’s the fall, or rather falls, that do it for me.   Tragic would be overblown: it’s hope and then a check,  or a turn, or  a caveat.  But it’s an unspoken and quite mathematical interval; cold and heartfelt.

I’ve always struggled with songs and lyrics: I keep finding myself  niggling with phrases or inflections.

But as soon as I heard this, I just agreed with it, partially because there were no words to argue with, and partially because my 12-year-old self had already learned to embrace tunes propelled by that thumping-a-pillow-sounding dirty old analogue kick.  It didn’t make me want to dance: it just made me able to start listening, for some reason.

But that was just the medium.  The new thing here was the voice of the tune on top: that naive Grade-3-piano-ish calling, keening thing that nobody had ever seemed to do before; it threaded accurately through the things I believed.

I didn’t give a slight fuck about Dream House or proto-Trance or whatever (nobody else did either): this thing paced the mechanical parts of my brain then slipped in past them to whisper.

There’s no doubt that this track made me determined to write music myself, which is a good practical reason to vote it up, but in all honesty I have no idea why I love it so much.  It seemed like it had arrived to tell me something: that’s real fanaticism.

Its impact should have been dulled by now: I have heard thousands of more sophisticated records in the genre, and it’s a genre I’m deeply analytical about when I’m trying to write in it.

To survive that, in tact, when I went back to it just now: that doesn’t have to mean something.  It just is something purely irrational.

The acid test: I just felt a flicker of guilt that my favourite song isn’t something more profound.

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New update is in the updater

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Full download will be up in half an hour.

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New beta this afternoon

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

new-beta-this-afternoon

Things are starting to hot up around here.  We’re hoping to feature-freeze on Friday, and in anticipation of that we’re hoping we have the UI finalised for this build.  I’ve done a couple of small tweaks, and a pretty massive move-aim change/addition.  And now… I need it bug tested!  I’ll post again when the update is up.

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Export to youtube

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

export-to-youtube

JamesU has been beavering away on our export-to-youtube functionality.  The general idea is that once you finish a game, if you like it, then you just click on button and the game gets encoded to a video and straight to youtube.  And we’ve got it 90% working!  Here’s one I just uploaded:

Be sure to click it up to 720p!!

Disclaimers are that sound and particle effects aren’t working, and we’re still tuning the quality, but I’m pretty happy with it.

As a user, you have to wait for the video to encode, but not to upload – that happens in the background and we’ll probably put a little status bar at the bottom to show you its progress.  It depends on your computer, but expect the encoding to take around three times the length of the game – so if the game is 30 seconds long, then you’ll probably be waiting for 90 seconds on a medium-ish PC.  We’d like to know if you guys think this is a serious problem btw.

I’m really really excited for this feature, especially with reference to Facebook and Twitter integration.  We all get irritated at games flooding Facebook with crap, but this is actual content – short and entertaining to watch and personal.

As a final feature, you can upload un-finished games too, so if you want to ask people’s advice on a situation you can.

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Time-handles

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

time-handles

I hate time-handles.  Not in the same way my Esteemed Colleague hates them (he would prefer they didn’t exist I think), but I do hate them.  Maybe by explaining to you – dear readers – what they are and where they came from, maybe then I will rediscover my love for them.

In general, turn-based games get the spatial part of the planning pretty good.  Your unit is going to go from A-B, and when he gets to B he might duck or something:

Easy.  But in a simultaneous-turn-based game like Frozen Synapse, you will often want do so stuff temporally.  You will want to stay in the same location, and do various stuff there over time, like aim in different directions.  “I want to stay at this doorway, wait for a second covering it, then turn round and cover behind me for a second, and then look into the doorway and move on” is a common thing to say to yourself while playing.

This was not an easy thing to do in Laser Squad Nemesis.  LSN’s sole nod to temporal planning was a “wait 0.5 seconds” order.  This did not do the job.  One of the very first things I thought while playing LSN, all those years ago, was “given how well the ordering stuff works in space, why not just have time represented as space“.  Thus the time-handle was born:

And you may be starting to see the problem – that looks like a bit of a mess.  But bear with me.  The horizontal line coming out of the green waypoint is the time-handle.  It’s length denotes 3 seconds of time (as shown by the “3″ on the right).  The unit will “consume” orders from left to right over time.  When you’re watching playback and the unit gets to the waypoint, the line moves to the left and is consumed by the unit, so you always see what’s left to happen.  The system works very well, or at least it works ten times better than any other approach to temporal orders I’ve seen.

I told you to bear with me.  Mainly because you haven’t seen the real problem yet.  Here it is:

Now that’s properly confusing.  Two time-handles on top of each other.  The time-handle takes up space on the map; space which is sometimes in use by something else.

Esteemed Colleague is angry, and rightly so.  He waves his lightning stick at me and declares that I must come up with a solution to this mess.  He rants and raves about priorities, and density, and clutter.  He cares not that six years ago I came up with a truly revolutionary way of dealing elegantly with temporal orders.  He only cares that there is the possibility of this mess.  And he is right.

There is great peer pressure on me to collapse time-handles when the waypoint they are attached to is not selected.  And that would help.  But it would also take away the ability to grasp the core of a plan at a glance.  Who knows what duck orders might be hiding in a collapsed time-handle?

Maybe colour-coding is the answer… maybe there is no answer.  I am distressed.

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Extermination generator being updated

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

extermination-generator-being-updated

Hello everyone.

Extermination is the most basic game mode – it randomly creates a situation (completely random level architecture, teams, and unit-positions) and then just asks you to kill and not be killed.

The Extermination generator has been getting pretty old – experienced players use the game mode less so more work has gone on stuff like Secure and Disputed.  But with all the new people playing Synapse, Extermination is seeing a resurgence.

And thus, I am making the generator make more fun maps.

Log in now to see the first update, which favours larger and equal teams.  The second update will do some work on the positions of the units.

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Where has the Village gone?

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

where-has-the-village-gone

We’re in crunch right now, so we haven’t been able to do the podcast for a while – sorry!  I know that, if you’re reading this, you’ll be one of the people who is really into the show – we have to prioritize our game right now; I’m sure you understand!

I’m thinking of ways that we can still get a cast out in the near future, though, and I’ll keep you posted about that.

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Goldeneye: the first “cover” game?

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

goldeneye-the-first-cover-game

What did the “cover” genre teach us?  That moving and shooting at the same time is too much.  It’s much more fun to move, and then to shoot, and then to move again.  Especially when you don’t have a mouse.

Goldeneye actually shares a lot with the cover genre.  You tend to move somewhere, and then hold down the aim button and do the firing bit, and then move again.  It’s a great mechanic, which I’m re-discovering in the (mostly excellent) 360 re-make/port of Perfect Dark.

(Two important pieces of Goldeneye trivia: 1, the game was originally an on-rails light-gun game, which is why the shooting mechanics are so superb.  2, the devs wanted to have you reload your gun by removing and inserting the N64 RumplePak.  And Nintendo didn’t let them because it would damage the hardware.  Best. Idea. Ever.)

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