Do follow me on twitter for server and other game updates: @IanHardingham

We’re putting offline hotseat in the game for both PC/OSX/Linux and iPad versions.  That is what I’m working on today!

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This week I’ve been working on the new unit (which I’ll talk about soon), but what I’ve started on today is Mutators – a medium-sized part of the DLC.

One of the things I really want to do with FS now is to subvert some of the rules and see how it impacts the play of the game as a whole.  Today I’m implementing “Double Kill”, which when activated will remove the only vaguely luck-based element of the game.  When two units engage eath other with *exactly* the same situation, currently a slightly arcane process chooses who dies.  With the Double Kill mutator enabled both units will die.

Here are the other mutators I have planned for the DLC:

- Focus Aim – when move-aiming, if you round a corner and engage someone very close to where you set the target, you are said to be “focus aiming”, and would have a big advantage over that enemy.  This would lead to less camping, as camping units would be killable by moving units if you can predict exactly where they are.

- Move-and-shoot: You continue moving on your plan while targetting and firing at the enemy.

Mutators are enabled from within the Advanced Creation editor, and if you load a game with mutators enabled you will be informed in a very clear way.  They are not allowed in standard match-making.  The new Open Challenge system should work really well with this functionality.  Mutators will be available for AI skirmish games (no guarantees the AI will use them effectively though.)

Let me know what you think.

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I’m still chasing the mid-turn outcome change bug.  By the end of today I hope to have a bulletproof fix for it.

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If you’re doing an FS tournament / casting matches and you would like us to mention / feature you on the blog etc. then please drop me a line on Twitter @mode7games

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These have kept popping up, and I’ve kept fixing individual problems.  I thought we had them all but obviously we don’t.  I’m hoping this is the last one.

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We believe that this legislation could threaten the forms of communication which allow us to act effectively, both as a company and as individuals.

Further information:

Wired UK’s guide: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-01/17/sopa-101
Wikipedia’s FAQ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more
Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://blacklist.eff.org/
RockPaperShotgun – http://www.rockpapershotgun.com

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I’ve also added a couple of new Extermination map generator settings.

We haven’t actually blacked out for anti-SOPA, but we support it whole-heartedly.  Here’s a message from my esteemed colleague:

Mode 7 would like to express our support for all of those protesting against SOPA and PIPA today.

We believe that this legislation could threaten the forms of communication which allow us to act effectively, both as a company and as individuals.

Further information:

Wired UK’s guide: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-01/17/sopa-101
Wikipedia’s FAQ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more
Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://blacklist.eff.org/
RockPaperShotgun – http://www.rockpapershotgun.com

As a final note from me: freedom of speech is the freedom which leads to all other freedoms.  Do we really want to risk giving all that up to stop teenagers pirating films?  No thanks.  And this is coming from someone whose product is pirated a lot.

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Many, many people have asked for new music, so part of the first DLC will be musical!

There will be six pieces of music with the first DLC.

Two of these (Complexity and The Fix) were previously available in the Humble Indie Bundle build as a special extra, and four are completely new.  I have one finished (but not mixed) and one that is in progress currently.

I was really excited to see the soundtrack featured in Gamespot’s Best of 2011 recently, and the ongoing reaction to the music is one of the most encouraging things that has ever happened to me – seriously!

If you want to hear more about the music and also watch me making some of it on my incredibly infrequent live stream, it’s best to follow @mode7games on twitter.

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James is continuing to get the updater ready – we are REALLY hoping to get it out this week.  If you are happy to be a guinui pig then give the test update a go: http://forums.mode7games.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=4193 (there are no very exciting new features as of this minute we just need to test the functionality).

I’m actually hopeful of getting the Open Challenge stuff out this week along with some bug fixes.

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The first thing I’m working on is the Open Challenge system, described here:

http://forums.mode7games.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=4115

Along with some generator tweaks, hopefully for release this week.

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The updater version will be up this week, which will allow us to make changes much more quickly.  Our plans are to immediately (an update out by the end of next week hopefully) address the following community issues:

- 2 week timeout

- level generator

- critical bugs

Along with adding a couple of nice new features, including:

- system tray message support built in

- (a little longer term) an advanced users open-game system for mature matchmaking

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We’re very proud to announce that Frozen Synapse has been nominated in several categories at the 14th Annual Independent Games Festival.

We have been nominated for…

Excellence In Design

The Seumas McNally Grand Prize

We also got an Honourable Mention for Technical Excellence, which is awesome and very welcome.

Do check out the site to see all the other nominees and mention…ees – there are some fantastic games in there!  We’re genuinely proud to be in such illustrious company.

If you’re going, see you in San Francisco!

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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…

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Ian

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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!

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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!

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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).

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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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Ian and I just had an interesting conversation about the iPad UI based on my feedback yesterday.  Here are some of the things we’re going to investigate:

- “Detail mode” – should you have a mode where the camera is zoomed right in automatically, allowing you to fine-tune stuff?

- Linear orders editing – there should probably be some way of just moving an order around a plan in *time* using a slider, rather than physically having to do it, because the iPad lends itself particularly well to sliders.  We’re almost certainly going to do something LIKE this.

- Unit selection – I currently like being able to both move the map and select units at the same time, but a better strategy may actually be to filter out unit selection and just use buttons on the side for it.  Also, forcing buttons will provide an automatic solution for when units are too close together to select easily – it will just completely eliminate that problem.

- Orders menu – I highlighted this as a big problem.  It could be something that’s done with a button or double-tap.

Most of this stuff is impossible to speculate about in abstract (it’s the UI version of “theorycrafting”, if you want a Starcraft analogy – I’m sure none of you did), so what we’re going to do is decide on a subset of things to actually implement; maybe actually following the paradigm of implementing multiple methods for different actions to see which ones work better.

By the way, by being really open about early *thoughts* like this, I really don’t want to attract comments like “OH GOD YOU ARE SO STUPID HOW COULD X THING POSSIBLY…” or “WHY ARE YOU NOT DOING Y…”  This is not the point where we’re really looking for external feedback, as we’re still brainstorming – we haven’t even tested yet – I just thought it would be interesting to document the process in light of where we’ll get to eventually!

Thoughtful feedback is – of course – welcome, however!

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I’ve just had my first couple of days with the “raw” build of FS iPad and I’ve been working on going through the entire UI making notes of conflicts and problems.

I feel reasonably positive at this point that some of the fundamental UI structures in the game will remain in-tact, but also that there are a lot of challenges.

At the moment, we’re using “hold down one finger” to open the orders menu – this is basically not working at all, so we’ll need an entirely different system.

Similarly, double-tapping to make a waypoint is pretty cool, but it’s very easy to accidentally double-tap when you’re either moving an existing waypoint, or scrolling the map around.

At the moment, we’re using “pinch-to-zoom” and “drag an empty piece of map” to do map control – as I’ve just told Ian I love the way both of these are working and I want to preserve them, even if we need something like a separate “I am moving the map around now” mode to do so.  It just feels really natural, as that’s the way you interact with a map intuitively on the device.

It’s interesting how some small UI elements (like the aim handle) actually work reasonably well on the ‘pad.  Obviously, they still do have conflicts and we need to work on those, but it seems like size / distance apart aren’t the only thing that matter with UI’s on the device.

It’s too early to suggest proper solutions to everything at this point, because every solution will have to be a compromise / balance with something else.  The process of getting into the game a bit is productive though, and I hope to have most of my notes finished tomorrow.

The next stage is for Ian and I to figure out exactly what initial changes we want to make so that we can continue testing and iterating.

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Right, let’s get this out of the way first…

First Impressions

The queue to get into Minecon was interesting. It was a fusion of what I call the “PAX crowd” (people who are into games because they care deeply about them as a form, rather than just as a casual distraction), families with kids and excited general nerds.

This demographic was fairly unique – especially the prevalence of the younger generation of gamers.  It filled in a gap in my knowledge of Minecraft as a phenomenon: the idea of it being a family game.

I appreciated Mojang’s policy that everyone was in it together – contributors, fans and organisers were all milling around in the same place waiting for their passes – it was clear what kind of atmosphere they wanted.

Everything moved so quickly (thanks to the staff, who were working very hard trying to get everyone seen quickly) that this ended up being not only the most elegant solution, but also a nice chance to chat to people.

Underground Riches

The show-floor itself was something of an enigma: a lot on offer was very specific to Minecraft fans and confused the hell out of me (and quite rightly so)!  A massive, constant line for Jinx merch was a living testament to the power of Minecraft as a brand.

There was a fantastic little indie area which immediately made me sad that I’d decided not to stump up for a booth.

Here’s four games that really grabbed me:

Air Mech – a spunky little Herzog Zwei-influenced strategic blaster.  I missed the chance to say hi to its creators but they looked really pleased with all the attention it was getting.

Retro City Rampage – guaranteed to be the biggest grossing indie game of next year (calling it), not just because its creator @BriProv is one of the nicest people in indie gaming.  Seriously, this game is going to be flipping huge.

A Valley Without Wind – Arcen Games’ intriguing side-scrolling adventury, open-worldy, unique thing that is yet to get the traction it truly deserves.  With the eternally enthusiastic and super-savvy @GameConnoisseur heading up its marketing, though, it will get there.

At A Distance – abstracted 3D artiness – @TerryCavanagh is a top bloke and the most enthusiastic gambler I’ve ever met.

You may observe here that I’m indulging in what has been called “the indie games circlejerk” by just saying how nice everyone is all the time.

There is a point to be made here, though: one of the things that the indie games scene truly has to offer is a high concentration of genuine friendliness; I’m pleased that this is being retained as people make money and get a lot of attention.

Brian showing off Retro City Rampage

I made the point during my talk (which I thoroughly enjoyed giving, by the way) that it is a rare and precious thing that a big, successful company would invite essentially competing products to show off at its fan convention.  I think that Mojang have a lot of foresight commercially by doing this, and it also sends a signal that they are still part of the indie games community.

Raise Your Weapon

The highlight for me personally was the Deadmau5 gig.  I know some people had trouble getting in, but it certainly wasn’t greater than the trouble it takes to get into any kind of major club event.

I may write more about this at some point, but if you are any kind of electronic musician and you go to see Deadmau5, the experience is that of being completely schooled.  He is just better than you: he’s spent more time thinking about most issues than you; he’s put in an insane amount of hard work to refine a very specific thing that is incredibly effective; he is relentless under an constant barrage of ridiculous public criticism.

I have infinite respect for him.

I’m very jealous of Brian Provinciano, who had dinner with the man himself: appartently they talked about Tim Horton’s, which is absolutely bloody typical, as this happens any time two Canadians are in a room together.

The tequila @meggertson and I were drinking at that event was also somewhat special due to the fact it was actually nice.  I wonder if he ever managed to get the name of it…

It was amazing to be at the launch of an indie game in an expensive club with an A-list musician topping the bill.  I never in a million years thought that indie games would become cool in a mainstream way – for better or worse, that is what is happening.

Strange Memories

Vegas is expensive and ludicrous – I would suggest that you do not go there unless:

1.)  You are going for one or two nights to gawk at it and see shows

2.)  You absolutely love pure gambling, in which case I question your sanity

3.)  You are amazingly good at poker

4.)  You have a secondary reason for going

5.)  [insert Carrot Top joke here]

And now, a brief selection of amusements suitable for public consumption:

-  I was offered escorts by my taxi driver on the way to my hotel from the airport.  “ALL GIRLS LOOK LIKE PICTURE!” he insisted.  I think “time to solicitation” is a good metric for the general seediness of a location.

-  I was offered blank receipts with which to commit tax fraud by my taxi driver on the way from my hotel to the airport.

-  Terry Cavanagh and Petri Purho had an epic spontaneous wrestling match in the corridor of the Mandalay which was completely astonishing.  My video of this cannot be posted for legal reasons.

-  Deadmau5 starting his set with a chunky house remix of part of the Minecraft soundtrack.

-  The slot machines in Vegas airport coupled with the fact that it is impossible to purchase books there.

-  The slot machines everywhere – I was surprised they didn’t have slot machines in the toilet.

-  Andy Moore and Petri Purho having a statistically-driven argument over whether Canadian or Finnish soldiers were better.

Barcraft

Barcraft is the best thing ever to happen to competitive gaming.  It brings people out of their house, gets them to socialise with other fans and opens up e-sports to public consumption.

The Vegas Barcraft took place at Insert Coin(s) on Fremont, which has a fantastic arcade…

…a couple of pinball tables and a nice big screen.

I caught all of Naniwa vs. Nestea, which was awesome, and got to talk to high-level Zerg @drg_kazuke during it, which was equally awesome.

While I was there, the trailer for Michael Krukar‘s TL documentary started playing, and I heard _ensnare_ blasting out throughout the venue – fantastic!

This Barcraft was a little low in attendance due to organiser @wabachaw having to struggle last-minute to put stuff together.  The atmosphere was still great though – I wished I could have stayed the whole time.

I’d love to attend the London Barcraft for next MLG so maybe we can put together a community meet-up for that – I know that a few of you are SC2 fans.

The Game Itself

Not being a big Minecraft player myself, a lot of the content went over my head.  However, I was inspired to start playing version 1.0 properly and I’m enjoying my strange poky little house to which I have added an impressive basement entrance to a gigantic cavern.
My girlfriend looked over and commented, “I see you put the mine in your house so you can work from home.”  I guess the secret, if there is any, to Minecraft is that it reflects your personality whether you want it to or not.

Closing Thoughts

As I said at Explay this year, the main reason I love working in indie gaming is the sheer number of astonishing experiences it generates.  Personally, this was an incredible time: I made great new friends just by tweeting the fact that I had arrived somewhere; I hung out with indies I respect deeply and I got the chance to be at the epicentre of gaming coolness for a few days.

There has been some negativity surrounding a few things that happened.  All I can say is that I hope it’s resolved and that people don’t dwell on it too much: it had an incredibly minor impact on everyone who attended.

I’ve thanked them already, but I just publically want to thank the Mojang team for setting it up: they did an extraordinary job of managing their first event.

I hope it happens again and that I’ll be there for it!

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Red and Black

The Mandalay Bay Resort is sort of also a hotel…

Actually, it’s more like a giant nexus of three hotels, at the apex of which (Do nexi have apexes?  This one does) is a kind of infinite gambling hub.  Small Japanese ladies sit enraptured by the clunky rotation of colourful images and the gentle pulse-wave beep-boop of imaginary potential; intense nerds in pastel colours hunch over poker; a huge shiny white car rotates slowly on a podium.

All of this is overseen by a po-faced tribe of completely square men all clad in black, curly umbilical cords of transparent plastic  extending from, it appears, their heads.

Above, I have documented the “Sports Book Area” which is mostly for the benefit of Ian Hardingham.

On the plane, I read Demand by Adrian Slywotzky (which I’d recommend to anyone who reads business books) and Booky Wook 2 by Russell Brand (which is basically a morality tale about how being consistently impulsive makes you an annoying self-pitying git).

At one point, unprovoked, our pilot piped up, “Here’s a gambling tip from us at Virgin Atlantic: we hear red and black are quite good.”

I am speaking tomorrow night for half-an-hour about Frozen Synapse – I have an outline structure for what I want to say, and I will be incompetently playing single player LIVE ON STAGE for quite a long time.  I’m hoping that my many, many hours of experience watching amazing casters like Tastosis, WolfTrap and TotalBiscuit will benefit my own self-casting, but I may just be gibbering and dying to the AI.

Now, I’m off to meet a man I have never met before who is “wearing a black hoodie and green military hat” – like I said, inauspicious starts…

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Preamble

It begins, as most journeys do, inauspiciously.

The Britannia Europa is what happens if you allow a nasty old pub to fester and allow its dark faux-wooded frame space for expansion, stick a weird patio and 1970′s sliding door on the front of it, then call it a hotel and allow brazen, shouty people to stay in it.

I am here because I have an early flight.

I have an early flight because I am going to Vegas.

I am going to Vegas because of the existence of Minecon –  a fan convention for a multi-million-selling indie game – and because of the existence of Frozen Synapse, a non-multi-million selling indie game.

Both of these things would have seemed implausible to myself four years ago.

At the moment, I’m caught up with the the flatness of airport shuttles and scanned travel insurance documents, but the 10.5 hour flight should provide enough time to contemplate what I’ve got myself into this time.

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Team Liquid are one of the greatest (and best known) Starcraft 2 teams in the world.

Documentary maker Michael Krukar contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to allow him to use some _ensnare_ tracks (my chiptune side project) in a documentary which is being created to support the team and I accepted!

The track from the trailer (“Top Five Control”) is available on my album Impeccable Micro, which is “pay what you want!”

I’m not receiving any money from the documentary itself, so if you like the music, please support me by picking up my albums.

Anyone who knows me has been bored at some point by my rantings about the awesomness of the pro Starcraft scene, so being involved with it in some way is fantastic.  The fact that it’s Liquid is also cool – the first pro match I ever watched was TLO vs. oGs.Hyperdub from GSL Season 1.

If you are intrigued by the documentary then check it out over at Team Liquid.

Also, if you’ve never watched pro Starcraft before, I recommend checking out GOMTV.

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Ian

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Whenever I talk to indie devs I mention the benefits of selling directly – I think it’s something that everyone should do for a variety of reasons.

Show Me the Sales is an initiative started by Cliffski to create something which is going to be good for both buyers and sellers of indie games!  It’s simply a collaborative sale between a bunch of indie devs, intended to draw attention to each other’s games, while giving YOU people lots of money off…

Let’s take a look what we’ve got here…

Laxius Force III – The Last Stand

Evochron Mercenary

Starscape

Scoregasm

Space Pirates and Zombies

Word Pirate

Mr Robot

Project Aftermath

Magical Diary: Horse Hall (yes, HORSE HALL)

AI War: Fleet Command

Gratuitous Space Battles

Planet Stronghold

Solium Infernum

New Star Soccer 5

Revenge of the Titans

TV Manager 2

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon (blimey)

VVVVVV

Smugglers IV

…oh, and some game called Frozen Synapse.

–

All of these games have hefty discounts – if you can’t find something in there to please you then, I submit, you are hard to please.

Please do tweet, blog, Facebook, Reddit etc. etc. all this stuff – indie games live on the oxygen of publicity.

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This has been in the works for a while – we still have a lot of work to do on the interface as well as some additional tweaks, but then it’ll be time for beta.

We’re hoping that it’ll be out in the first half of next year – we’ll be more specific about that eventually!

I should mention that you will definitely be able to play cross-platform with the iPad version.

Finally, I don’t want people to worry that we’re going to abandon FS on its current platforms – we’re actually working right now to hire another team member so we can give it more attention and update it more efficiently.

We gave the guys who turned up to our pub meet in Nottingham a sneak peek of the current iPad build!  Here are some photos…

(If you’re a journalist and you’d like to post these photos, drop me a line at paulmode7 at gmail dot com)

(Thanks to Rich Whitelock for his legendary photography abilities.)

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Our game

A thing.

This is all.

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Follow me on twitter @IanHardingham to get updates

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Ian

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Go to this site:  http://www.mode7games.com/support/getURL.php

64 bit nVidia drivers is a little hard to get to work – drop into IRC (link to the right of this) for some advice.

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Ian

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Ian

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As Ian mentioned, we are now hiring for a C++ programmer on an initial 1-year contract to work in our office in Oxford.  Please do pass this on to anyone who you think would like to work for us – the job advert is below.

C++ Programmer

Mode 7 is an independent game development studio based in Oxfordshire.  Our most recent project is the tactical game Frozen Synapse.

We are looking for a talented and experienced programmer who is happy to work as part of a team.

Direct games industry experience is not necessary, but the successful candidate will have been the sole or lead programmer on various systems and will have held professional programming positions for several years.

Required:

- excellent command of C++
- demonstrable professional programming experience
- ability to work at our office in South Oxfordshire five days per week
- confidence in learning new API’s and in acquiring new skills as needed

Highly recommended:

- some experience with server-client asyncronous programming
- openGL or directX experience
- some experience with scripting languages (Python, PHP etc)
- experience with compiling projects under Linux
- experience with SQL based databases
- some experience with iOS development

What you will be doing in this job:

- working on complete low level systems such as auto-updating solutions and pathfinding algorithms
- upgrading our existing game server architecture to include new features such as a web API to allow data retrieval from web sites
- working with our existing games to add new features
- working with platform APIs such as Steamworks to allow our games to run on these platforms
- producing final distributables for our new products on all our target platforms: Windows, OSX, Linux, iPad
- collaborating with our lead programmer and designer on early-stage projects

About you:

We are looking for someone who is flexible and able to solve problems autonomously, but who is also able to fit in as part of an extremely busy small team.

You’ll need to be able to drive to our office – it’s not easily accessible by public transport.

Salary:

£30k – 40k DOE

Term:

This is a one-year initial contract.

How to apply:
Please email paul at mode7games dot com with your CV

Applications or other contact attempts from agencies will be deleted immediately

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I believe FS can be a game which lasts for years and years, but we at Mode 7 have to give it more attention than we currently can with just the three of us.

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steam.exe -beta courage

To test the patch.  Please test that your single player saves are not affected in any way!

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We had a server problem where UK1, UK2, and UK3 kept dropping out – that should be fixed as of this evening.

Apart from Wednesday the servers have kept up fairly well and I think have been fast enough almost all of the time.  We still have this problem with registrations sometimes failing and requiring a restart, which I’m looking into.

The Steam patch will be back tonight in Beta, and promoted fully by tomorrow evening I hope.

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Looks like we tracked down the problem with the Steam patch and that should be going up again tonight.

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Today I’ll be trying to track down the save-game deleting bug from the patch and then hopefully re-rolling it out.

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