Friday, December 23rd, 2011
I have been working on a collaborative chiptune / fakebit album with my good friend Binster for a while now, and this is the fruit of our labour. Please go check it out if that sounds like something you might be interested in…
Friday, December 23rd, 2011
Frozen Synapse is currently a whopping 75% off on Steam! If you have not yet picked it up, then we suggest you do so immediately.
Monday, December 19th, 2011
We’re hoping to get the auto-updater working this week so that we can start pushing updates easily.
Ian
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
Hi all! My name is James and I’m the new Mode 7 employee. One of my first jobs has been the creation of a system that automatically generates a list of all complete matches played on the server and then publishes that list to the web. I believe that system is now ready for a public test. Currently it’s limited to matches on UK1 and UK2. We’ll see how that goes before rolling it out to all servers.
It’s usually regenerated at about 9am GMT (today was an exception) but please wait until at least 9:30 to allow it time to upload to our web server. Also try and imagine that if you all download it at the same time that could end up making it pretty slow for everyone.
The files are available at http://mode7games.com/fsmatchlist/uk1/fsMatchList.csv.gz (~8MB) and http://mode7games.com/fsmatchlist/uk2/fsMatchList.csv.gz (~2MB).
You can email me any questions or suggestions you might have using jimmeh@<this domain> or I’ll answer them directly in the comments below.
We’re excited to see what you guys come up with!
Monday, December 12th, 2011
It’s that time of year again…
Please vote for Frozen Synapse as Indie Game of the Year over at IndieDB!
Here’s how:
1. Click the giant green button!
2. Click the red “Top 100 of 2011″ button – it is a little way down the screen on the left-hand side…
3. Click the “vote” button next to Frozen Synapse!
(No, I don’t know why it has to be so complicated…)
All we want to do is beat Minecraft at something…we live the impossible dream! Anyway, please vote and help us get even more of the publicity that our dark hearts crave so dearly. Thanks!
Monday, December 12th, 2011
What’s that on top of my MackieHR824 monitor? Could it be two awards for Frozen Synapse from the inaugural IndieVisibility awards? Don’t worry, the Golden Teabags will be in their rightful place in the office soon.
Yep, we won Indiegames.com Strategy Game of the Year and RockPaperShotgun’s Best Glowy Lines Award!
I was also nominated for Nicest Man and then beaten by a lawyer. Fail.
Here we are accepting the Glowy Lines Award – you can see that I am ranting, typically…
Many thanks to Dan Marshall for organising the tomfoolery – it was cool to see a lot of UK indies in the same place behaving in a relatively acceptable manner.
Go here and check out a list of the other winners!
Monday, December 12th, 2011
With this arrival of James we’re getting things moving to start providing much faster and more regular FS updates. This week we’re working on getting an auto-updater out to everyone so we can patch regularly without it being difficult for you guys to get the updates. This is our number one priority and once that’s done it’ll be so much easier for us to do quick changes.
Also, we’re now making the entire UK1 matchlist available every 24 hours so that people can produce their own rankings websites. The first is http://www.mode7games.com/fsmatchlist/uk1/fsmatchlist.csv.gz , and this should be updating every 24 hours from tomorrow morning. (That file is a little old).
Monday, December 5th, 2011
We’re very proud to announce that James, the latest member of the Mode 7 team, has started work with us today. He’s been a member of the community and helped us out for a long time so it’s great to have him on the team. Please be nice to him if you see him around the forums!
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
We’ve just talked through some of the test systems we’ll be implementing for the iPad interface.
The point of this is to allow us to:
1.) Check out a bunch of different styles and ideas
2.) Provide enough workarounds for current problems that we can get more into the meat of the UI than we can at present.
I really like this approach because it’s about preventing arguments – many, many UI issues are extremely subjective and easy to misunderstand in abstract. If one person says, “I want a button” and the other says, “I want a slider” , it may actually take less time to implement both and try them than it will to try and thrash that out with a multi-week long argument…although I assume your mileage may vary depending on what your GUI system is like!
Here are some of the things we are thinking of doing:
Tap to select, THEN drag to move
This was Ian’s suggestion to eradicate confusion between objects – this could be a good direction
Keep map movement and unit selection together
I’m very keen on the idea that you can quickly scroll the map around, then choose the unit for which you want to make a plan seamlessly and without modifiers, so we are going to aim for that
“New Waypoint” Handle and Button
We’re going to try two different ways of adding waypoints to a plan.
Orders buttons
The Orders Menu may turn into a more permanent “Xcom-style” set of buttons at the bottom of the screen
Delete button!
There will be a big, prominent button that allows you to delete WP’s and orders - we have this in our current build but it’s a bit hidden.
Time + / – buttons
We won’t be using the time handle system in quite the same way as we do on the PC – there will be a new system for waiting
Playback vs. Planning
As some games do, we may remove the UI during the first run of a turn’s playback so that you can see everything better.
Help overlay
Owing to the lack of screen space we will probably have to break one of my rules about always having descriptive text available within easy reach for a pictorial button – instead of that, we’ll probably have a “question mark icon” help overlay which can pop up over the screen to explain what the hell all the buttons do.
Temporal slider for orders movement
Physically dragging orders around the screen may be too onerous, so we’ll probably have a new UI element which allows you to just move them along a plan using a slider.
Eradicate double-tap
Double tap is currently quite annoying and happens a lot by mistake – hopefully we will get rid of it.
All of that stuff is totally up in the air currently – just thought I would let you know our thinking. I’m really looking forward to actually being able to play the iPad build properly as a game – at the moment it’s kind of impossible.
People have asked me if any UI changes will make it into the PC version – I will be looking at people’s UI issues from the Hotline, Bugs and Wishlist threads at some point next year to see if we want to make any PC-specific changes. Also, if there’s a UI element on iPad that people love, I can’t see why we wouldn’t want to integrate that back into the PC version.
This kind of stage is fairly difficult – you don’t want to under- or over-commit to specific methods, just try to be as objective as possible about potential solutions. Anyway, confidence that we can make a nice robust UI is still high, so we will see how things progress.
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