One week ago I changed Frozen Synapse’s ending from this…
…to this.
Today, as planned, it will change back.
I was inspired to do this by a couple of comments I read on Twitter about fans asking Bioware to change the ending of Mass Effect 3.
My intention was not to comment on that situation specifically: only to explore the idea of changing the ending of games in general.
Changing the ending of a game that has already been released is a fascinating prospect to me because it is such a complex proposition. Could it make any sense? What happens to the previous ending? How can a story have two endings? I thought I would conduct an experiment… (more…)
All they have to do is extract that zip file to the same directory they installed Frozen Synapse to (i.e. the one that contains the binary and the psychoff directory).”
This is not a criticism of Bioware or anything they have said / done. It is an experiment: I wanted to know how this felt. Honestly, it felt like vandalising my own work, which was interesting.
We took community suggestions about ponies and dinosaurs, as well as including the words “moist” and “dolphin-proof”.
The new ending will be around for about a week before it will disappear, and probably only be accessible as an easter-egg.
I am calling for other game developers to do this because I think it is a fascinating and weird thing to do.
Ian usually does the regular updates but he is away at the moment because (shh…) it’s his birthday.
We have just about recovered from our IGF win – once again, thank you so much for supporting us.
Firstly, as they say on the internet, “I’ll just leave this here.” It’s a mashup of one of the tracks from the FS soundtrack and one from the AssCreed soundtrack, by the amazing Jesper Kyd:
We love any fan stuff like this (naturally, I like music stuff!) so tweet me with it if you’ve done something – @mode7games
James, Mango (who you may know from the FS IRC) and I are working hard on the iPad version this week. My goal is to have the entire UI functional and bug-free enough to use sensibly by Friday. This is a somewhat ambitious goal, as we’re adding a couple of completely new things and obviously changing quite a bit, but I wanted to get a whole picture.
After that, it will be refined a bit and then we’ll do a very closed beta on it (possibly just friends and family) before refining it further and rolling it out to a wider closed beta.
The team in the office will expand significantly soon as two of our freelancers will be coming in to work for a bit. I’m actually looking forward to that quite a bit as we’ll get a lot more done with everyone together.
Work will also continue on the DLC soon – as some of you have seen, we’ve released a limited beta which has been useful. Art for the new unit is in progress and we recently had a pass on some of the menus and UI’s getting everything ready for use by Actual Human Beings. Bin and I still have quite a bit of work to do on the single player but I’m confident that will go well and it won’t be too long before we can get that out.
GDC showed me just how limited the current tutorial and early part of the single player campaign still are. I think there is still definite room for improvement there. We will be doing a new tutorial for the iPad (naturally) and that may lead to some revisions to the PC version.
I wanted to write a little bit more about our GDC experiences as well as putting some video up, so hopefully I will get a chance to do that next week.
