Archive for March, 2010
Saturday, March 20th, 2010
It’s been a while since people were trying clumsily to define the difference between Casual gaming and… well, whatever isn’t casual gaming.
For me, the distinction is simply: to what extent a given game engages my brain while I’m playing it.
Casual games:
Plants vs Zombies (and indeed every Tower Defense game I’ve ever played)
Tetris
Match-3
Diablo and Torchlight (controversial!)
If I’m playing a game in a general trance, and I might as well be a vegetable, then that’s casual gaming for me.
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
The new beta is uploaded, both via the updater and via the usual download – if you’ve forgotten it come ask me in IRC.
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
There’s going to be a new beta today, mainly showing a (slightly controversial) new control scheme. This not being Determinance, announcing a new control system at this point in the day does not point to my growing insanity.
Anyway – I’m really hoping you guys will play around with the new system and tell me exactly what you think. In Lyx’s case, I probably don’t have to hope very much.
EDIT: Just to be clear, “new control scheme” means that the bindings on the mouse have been swapped round.
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Friday, March 12th, 2010
Paul will post more on this next week, but for now:
We went to Reading University
About 30 students played the game
Most played for at least an hour, some as much as three
80 multiplayer games were played
Almost all gave me the impression that they really liked it
We got a lot of good useability feedback.
Win!
(And if anyone would like to have an idea of how this compares to the Reading beta test we did with Determinance, take a look here (including a comment which I still, four years later, find incredibly difficult to read) and here).
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Hey guys.
A big thanks for everyone working through this new beta – we’ve had quite a few crash bugs and those tend to be very annoying. I’m uploading a new beta this afternoon which will address quite a lot of these issues.
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Greetings from the trenches.
We’re working non-stop on bug fixes, crash fixes, inserting sounds, designing sounds, changing ui elements, graphics stuff, everything. It is hard.
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Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
I was checking out the database today, and found that over seven hundred genuine competitive games of Synapse have been completed since the first beta began in August. Of those, over five hundred involved no members of the core Mode 7 team.
The vast majority of these games were played in the last 6 weeks, or in August and September – there wasn’t much action between October and January.
I think that’s not bad!
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Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Hey guys.
A small update has been released to address a crash issue Lyx reported last night. The fix is available through the updater, or by a separate download I can give you in irc.
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
It is here! Use the auto-updater if you can, or download from the original location if not. If you’ve forgotten where that is, come and ask me on IRC.
Mac build will be available later today.
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
The new beta will in fact be available today, hopefully in a couple of hours. This has loads of new features in but plenty of rough edges as we still have a lot of graphical glitches.
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