Sorry for the downtime.

Ian

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We’re scheduling the servers to be down on Tuesday May 15th from 10.00 BST to 18.00 BST.  We need to do some stuff to get ready for the big new update and DLC launch.

Apologies for the downtime.

Ian

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This is a great thing for our fans to have done – we really appreciate it.

Ian

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- Robin is polishing the levels for the DLC mini-campaign

- We are tweaking the riot shield unit to makeit a bit more powerful and easier to use

- iPad interface work continues but is mostly in a bug fixing phases so we can evaluate some of our recent choices

- Work continues on the new game prototype, with Simon and Rich joining us in the office this week to start graphics stuff in earnest

- Last week I finished mixing the additional music for the DLC and it should be sent off to mastering soon.  There is a small chance I can get up to the original 6 tracks I intended but it’s looking like it may have to stick at 5 right now

- Last week I also did some good Secret Business Development Things that I hope will come to fruition this year

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We’re currently working on the following things:

- New music tracks for the DLC

- New levels for the DLC

- New game early stuff and graphical stuff

- iPad stuff including optimisation, and interface things

- Some interesting biz dev stuff will hopefully happen this week

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…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…

Aims

I decided to change the ending of Frozen Synapse for several reasons:

- I wanted to see how it felt and experience the process of doing it

- I wanted to see how existing fans of Frozen Synapse would react to it, as well as including a couple of community memes and suggestions to amuse them

- I wanted to play around with the idea of a stupid ending for the game, something I had initially considered but then rejected

- I thought it would get us some attention and some sites might cover it as an interesting experiment

- I wanted to encourage other developers to do the same thing so that we might gather more data about changed endings

Method

My method was to collect suggestions from the community, insert the new changed ending into the game as a temporary update and then watch the responses.

The suggestions from the community which made it in were:

- “Moar ponies”
- “Moar dinosaurs”
- It should be silly but still make sense
- It should have the words “moist” and “dolphin-proof” in it

I definitely took community suggestions which aligned with my own desires in this instance, but it seemed like people were on the same page as me: this was to be a playful and silly ending.

Initially, I thought I would only change the text, but then I couldn’t figure out how to work ponies and dinosaurs in, so I asked Rich to draw a picture…

(THIS IS THE ENDING OF A COMPUTER GAME)

Here were some of my goals when writing:

- Parody the original ending

- Create a “ludicrous” ending – the kind of ending that would leave you totally bemused if you finished the game and encountered it

- Play around with the idea of taking community feedback in an overly literal way

- Play around with the ideas of expectations and ownership concerning endings

It turned out that changing the ending wasn’t too hard technically (thanks to Jimmeh) and we even found an annoying audio bug in the process!  It was also a good test of our updater, through which we are planning to roll out all kinds of things (including two much-requested community features) fairly soon.

Results

How Did this Feel?

I described the process of doing this as “vandalising my own work”.  Replacing something you’ve slaved over with something completely daft, written in about twenty minutes, is a kind of mindless vandalism, but it was certainly enjoyable.

I didn’t mean this to imply that changing any ending in any way is vandalism.

During beta, I changed quite a few things about the Frozen Synapse narrative based on community feedback: certainly the opening went through a few iterations.  I generally feel that adapting things with targeted use of feedback can be really helpful, especially if you’re starting out writing game narratives.

This definitely made me realise quite how pompous the previous ending was, and that some of that slightly tongue-in-cheek pomposity would have been completely missed by many players.

The Reaction

I’ve decided to approach this section of the results by categorising reactions and giving each category a representative name…

Ponies and Dinosaurs

This was just a straightforward appreciation of the new ending as a joke, or an engagement with the concept.

Sample comments:

“I for one enjoy this new ending. Originally i was disappointed to find no ponies and dinosaurs were present in the ending sequence, even though they were alluded to several times during development….Great work mode7!” (John)

“I am also very entertained by this. I very much enjoyed Frozen Synapse from beginning to end, and find this new and temporary social experiment ending as very entertaining. Most people are taking the temporary change as a direct attack against them for wanting the ending to Mass Effect 3 changed.

What is interesting is how many of you people are taking this so seriously, as if it were a direct attack upon you for not liking the ending to ME3 and wanting it changed. I too would like something done about that, but I do believe you are all missing the point. I don’t see how what the devs have done to FS should really upset you that much. They’ve definitely found out something through the social experiment.” (Fireflash)

“Eat a Dick”

At the opposite end of the spectrum, these are just straightforward insults and simple expressions of hatred, usually focussed at myself, the story or the game; or a breed of comment which implied that I had wrought commercial failure for Mode 7.

Sample comments:

“Eat a Dick, Paul. Just eat a Dick, okay?” (AnotherFan)

“I hope your company goes under.” (Kyle Kelly)

“No one played your game for the story. No one cared about the characters. The ending was irrelevant.” (BillyBobSnortin)

“Frozen Synapse Used Publicity Stunt!”

Naturally, there were people who only focused on the publicity-stunty (stunted?) nature of our actions…

Sample comment:

“Frozen Synapse used publicity stunt!  It’s not very effective.” (HarmoniaDiscordia)

Insulting Customers

A few people told me that I was directly insulting my own customers with the changed ending.

Here’s a good “Insulting Your Customers” / “Eat a Dick” combo:

“I was following your studio with interest, and bought two copies of Frozen Synapse. You’ve misrepresented and insulted me as a customer. I will never buy a game from Mode 7 again – and what’s worse, this was a totally pointless excercise. No one played your game for the story and thus the narrative was absolutely unimportant.” (A Former Fan)

Another “Eat a Dick” / “Insulting Customers”  variant…

“I’m a developer in the industry and I have to say that I would never want to work with you or your ilk. You have proven to have no respect for your customers(free or not) and would sooner alienate a large disenfranchised group than try to understand them. I will never hire any of you.” (Tarage)

“You’re Not Fucking Da Vinci”

This brand of comment expresses the opinion that indie developers (especially small ones) should avoid “art” and focus on the straightforward development of entertaining products.

Probably best summed up by this anonymous email I received…

“Hey bro, just wanted to let you know that me and my friends won’t be buying any of your games after your shit about the ME3 ending.

When did indie developers stop becoming real people and start becoming elitist pricks who think they’re gods gift to gaming? You guys, you and that Fez creator, are acting worse than Bioware.

Wake the fuck up, you’re a fucking small game developer, you’re not fucking Da Vinci.

PS: Read Totilo’s article on Kotaku you fucking moron, this is a good thing, and if you weren’t so fucking stupid you’d know that. Don’t bother responding, this isn’t my real email.

Sincerely, Someone smarter, more artistic, and all around better than you.”

(Anonymous)

Here’s another comment which is somewhat similar:

“What a pretentious statement that you’re making about something you probably know little to nothing about. I’ve never heard of you before this but now I know to avoid you and tell my friends the same. There’s a reason you’re an indie studio without a large following and it probably stems partly from being rude and self-righteous.

If you want to produce art produce art and advertise it as art. I BUY games and I am a CONSUMER of a PRODUCT. They are not poems for me to ponder over unless that is what I was promised. If I was told I would receive something it is my right as a consumer to get what was advertised.

That said games can still be art and video games are still an art form, but the art is achieved in a dialogue between developer and player and the “artist” must still appease the customers by at the very least not lying to them.

If Michelangelo told the Pope he would paint the ceiling and painted it blood red with a five pointed star on it he wouldn’t have received complaints he would have been executed. Here consumers are angry that what they were told they were getting wasn’t what they expected in the same why the frieze Michelangelo painted was art but he still had to conform to expectations because he was being paid for it.

So all you people using the art argument…nuff said”

(Kirival)

Biowhere?

One group was adamant that I was commenting on Mass Effect 3, but disagreed as to which side of the argument I was apparently on:

AGAINST THE FANS:

“Way to be a jerk to all the Mass Effect fans out here.” (Jethal)

“What an ass, I have bought your game at full 25$ price and you put insult people you have no clue about.  I will not buy your game ever again. (doomleika)

FOR THE FANS:

“Oh, I get it! THIS ending is like that steaming pile of nonsensical garbage that BioWare slapped onto Mass Effect 3 at the last minute. And when you guys go back to your other ending–you know, the one that makes sense and works as a climax to the game–that will be like when BioWare finally fix their incredible fuck up and revise the ending of ME3 so that it makes sense, too. Well, played, fellahs! gg xD” (Recentio)

“Why is everyone so insulted over this? I feel its displaying that Bioware thinks it can peddle polished crap to you as an ending and can get away with it, because *Bioware* thinks the consumer is a moron. Not these guys. These guys have just scraped the poo away so you can actually see what you got with ME3. Its hardly an “insult to consumers” (Mip11111)

Conclusions

- Changing the end of Frozen Synapse was most frequently read as a comment on the Mass Effect 3 situation, despite:

a.)  this genuinely not being my intention
b.)  my repeated assertion at every possible opportunity that this was not the case
c.)  there being very little evidence in the actual ending itself to justify that reading

Whenever I defended myself, I was told that I was lying:

“Please don’t try and twist what you were originally trying to do, which was patronize those of us who have problems with the mass effect 3 ending. Quite frankly, it’s even more embarrassing than the childishness you’ve already displayed by doing this in the first place.” ((Previously) A fan)

“They claim to be defending the “artistic integrity” of Bioware and their choice to fuck up the ending of ME3. So they made this ending to spit in the faces of the Bioware community.” (Vapsyyvox)

Incidentally, I challenged Vapsyyvox to provide evidence of where I had claimed this and he did not reply.

I made some efforts to reply to comments which I found interesting or which I think represented a particular viewpoint well.  Overwhelmingly, people did not want to engage in this discussion, but there were a few incidences where they did….

I think people are quick to label “rage commenters” as idiots or “typical [INSERT POPULAR GAME NAME HERE] fans” but actually I think there is something a bit more sinister here.

A lot of these people are fundamentally intelligent, but they act in a stupid way because they are rushing.

If they had actually spent time playing through Frozen Synapse (of course I didn’t expect this in most cases), or reading about the ending, or even just thinking about what exactly they were looking at, they might not have gone to the fastest explanation they could find (“This is about the thing which happens to be on my mind RIGHT NOW and I feel strongly about that!”) and may have been more open to nuance.

It was genuinely worrying to see people who inferred from a news item that I was responding to the Mass Effect 3 situation (which is not what I was doing) launch their pitchforks at me without slightly engaging with anything I was saying.

This controversy totally overshadowed all of the original intention behind the change, such is the power of mass knee-jerk responses.

- Reasonable commenters comment less and comment slowly

There were some people who took a much more measured view of things, and they were among the last to respond.  I think this is a trend that is probably well known but it’s something important to bear in mind if you are being bombarded.

- Many people want to take everything literally, and they do not want to think about voice

This is related to some of my earlier points: nuance is generally completely lost in the storm.  If you are writing anything which may seem inflammatory on a purely literal level, be sure that many people will respond only to that content.

I would be genuinely afraid to publish anything with even slightly controversial content for that reason: writers who dare to do that are extremely brave, especially within the conservative world of mainstream gaming.

I am never going to forget Ramcat, someone who very generously helped us test the single player out a lot.  The first line of text in the single player campaign is:

“Welcome to Markov Geist.  It’s easy to forget there have been other cities.”

His verdict?

“Improbable.”

Now, a line from the new ending:

“We can’t expect the endings of our stories to conform to our own preconceptions.”

The fact that intelligent people can take this statement as an emphatic assertion of my personal beliefs, and also as an insult against fans of a particular game, is completely baffling to me.

Here are some reasons why I believe this line is problematic, and I apologise if this is just pointing out a set of blindingly obvious things…

- Who are “we” and to whom does “our” refer?  This line could easily relate to a writer, a reader or even a character.

- “Preconceptions”: doesn’t this entirely depend on who we are and what our preconceptions might be?

- The context of this line is troubled to say the least: it comes just after a pink picture of a pony and dinosaur who are rocking rather spiffy top hats and dancing.  To my mind, I would probably take that as a cue that not everything is being spoken in earnest.

- The narrative voice:  SPOILER ALERT (as if that even matters any more): as is clear from the previous ending, the voice at the end of the game is that of the player, speaking as his own antagonist.  Since that’s already a fairly complex relationship coupled with the fact that the things we tell ourselves often don’t tend to be completely factual, surely that might cast a bit of doubt on this line?

- The tone: I thought that most readers would take the intensely ludicrous preachiness and self-importance of this line as a clear cue that it was, perhaps, not to be taken in earnest.

- What was that about actions and words again?

Most of the new ending, with its not-so-subtly wrought references to Streets of Rage and House of the Dead 2 (!), as well as its gentle mockery of the original ending, was glossed over in favour of a reaction to the simple action of changing it.

People saw the trolly pony and assumed that I was trolling pro-change Bioware fans.  In fact, I was trolling endings and our players in a way that I thought would be amusing.

I was definitely intrigued about the attention this would get: not because I was stirring up controversy, but simply because I was doing something weird.  I sent out no press releases – I only contacted one journalist because he had previously asked me to do so, and responded to (I believe) two emails from different sites.  I didn’t want to push this because I wanted to let the actions speak for themselves.

- Fucking Da Vinci

There is a healthy and supportive audience out there for intelligent, nuanced games.  I would encourage them to be louder, to reason with the angry ragers (it does work sometimes!) and to keep trying to be nice.  The ragers get all the attention, but you guys are the reason that we bother to put any effort into games beyond the bare minimum required to ship the things.

People who rail against pretentiousness and elitism are generally scared of being left out.  They don’t like the idea that people are making things they don’t understand: this makes them feel insulted.  I just feel genuinely sorry for anyone trapped in that state: if you are that threatened by art then I can’t imagine how you deal with any group of people.

I regret being a bit snappy with some of the commenters; it is hard to avoid snark when someone has just told you to consume a phallus or they have blindly flailed at everything you have done in order to make themselves feel better after unjustifiably getting very angry.

Some people would say that I shouldn’t have responded at all, but I feel that’s the equivalent of leaving a comment and then running away.  I thought I would show my feelings openly and also challenge people when they said something I didn’t understand or believed was unjustified.  The amount of people who said things like, “I find this insulting” and then refused to tell me why was another disturbing trend.

TLDR: I changed the ending of a game.  I thought it would make some people happy and it did but it also made a lot of people angry.  The angry people made the dino sad:

(Thanks Rich!)

I hope you enjoyed the changed ending and the responses to it.  It will be changed back today and the things I’ve learned will hopefully help me to write better stories for games in future!

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So we decided to take some community suggestions and change the ending of FS…

Here is a video of the new ending (thanks Dongulator), which obviously contains spoilers:

If you want to see this without completing the game, you need to download the update and then do this:

Open the console with `
playCutscene(alternate);
Close the console with ‘

If you are a Linux user, here’s Jimmeh to tell you how to update…

“Linux users can download the update from http://updates.mode7games.com/frozensynapse/fs_newending.zip

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.

Hope you like.

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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.

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I made this video as a token of my appreciation – time to collect your award!

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Thanks,

Ian

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- New unit

- New game mode

- Mutators

- Existing campaign playable in co-op

- Hotseat (this will be available to all, not just the DLC, but it’s being tested in the DLC beta atm)

- Timed turns.  Might not be in this week, maybe next

The discussion of 2v2 and 2vAI was very even – almost exactly 50% either way.  So we’re going to do both.  But we can only do one for this DLC, and I’ve gone with 2vAI.  I’m sorry for those who will be dissapointed, but we have made the *entire* existing campaign co-op, along with adding a load of new missions too.  We’ve been testing co-op in house and it’s really great.

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- A man made fifty million dollars from a game he made completely on his own.

- That man, jokingly, offered to fund an old industry legend’s next game.

- This was a major news story.

- There is a service which allows you to ask people for money for something you haven’t even started doing yet.

- The old industry legend – thoughtful from the offer from the man – decided to take a punt on this service.

- The service got people to raise over a million in less than two days.

This new online economy for things which have no per-unit cost is evolving at an incredible pace.

In twenty years we’ll have worked out the right way to do this.  It’ll be standard.  And we’re going to be telling our kids and grandkids about the day Notch inspired Tim Shafer to try Kickstarter.  The day everyone decided to stop asking one person for a lot of money, and instead ask a lot of people for a bit of money.

I’m so excited to be part of it.

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All Platforms

• *EDIT*: Extermination “opposite sides” maps occur less frequently, also have a zone you have to defend
• AI Level 4 Added
• New open challenge system
• Much easier to update the game now
• Pressing the I key now allows you to selectively ignore a unit by its number

Bug Fixes

All Platforms

• Mid-turn/post-turn outcome change bug was fixed
• Added a desynch warning to help prevent anything similar happening in future
• Some changes made to the level generator
• AI Level 3 crash fixed
• Fixed an issue with the sniper

OS X

• Fullscreen mode works again

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We are working on a fix to go through the new auto updater soon – today or tomorrow.

Sorry about this, and thanks to MadDogMcFie for helping us track it down.

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We would really appreciate it – there is such strong competition this year and we would love to come away from the IGF with something!

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James will put up a changelist later today.

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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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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!

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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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State of the Game

If you’ve heard me talk recently, or seen anything about how FS has been doing, you’ll know that we have over 300k users now. Sales continue to be good, even with the massive numbers of discounted copies which were sold during the Humble Indie Bundle and we’re confident that we’ll have a good Christmas.

We have some challenges still to overcome: as Ian mentioned, we’re taking on a new person to help us provide better support and updates for the existing version; at the same time we’re pushing forward with the iPad build.

Thoughts on iPad

I’m a very recent convert to the iPad and I absolutely love it. Here’s why in a nutshell:

- It’s much faster to do certain things than an equivalent device or netbook

The combination of portability with a very effective “sleep” mode make it the thing I reach for when I want to check something or look something up.

As a musician, I’m very keen to try out things like Touchable which look like they could transform some of the stuff I do.

In terms of games, I just whipped through Scribblenauts (which is just pure unashamed silliness) and I am being entertained by Infinity Blade right now. Ian is a 100 Rogues fan so I probably will pick that up too.

Will it work?

FS is a complicated game and it’s not for everyone; much of the iPad market is casual. However, we’re starting to see people hankering for deeper games. Here are the conditions in my mind for FS performing well:

- Great interface

- Great press / feature by Apple

Not easy!

Press

We’re quite lucky in that FS’s existing performance means that iOS sites are willing to talk to us and take us seriously. I’ve had mails from quite a few indie devs recently along the lines of “journalists don’t reply to my mails”.

The sad fact is that there has to be SOME kind of story behind what you’re doing. “Unknown dev announces unknown new IP with generic-looking gameplay and not-very-good-art” is not a story, and it’s hard to make it one.

I think with FS that getting the attention of the media will be easier than for some other projects, that just leads to…

Jabbing My Fat Finger At the Screen

How are we going to make the interface good?

The PC interface for FS is far from perfect, I will admit that freely. It’s massively improved from what we started with way back during the early days of development, and for the majority of play it works very well. There are specific situations though, where it can still be a nightmare, and I wish we could solve all of those problems.

I think we can solve SOME of them, and I hope to do so, but how will this translate to the iPad?

I think one of the core issues is differentiation – it’s very hard to know what you are selecting at any one time, especially in a cluttered view. I have some thoughts on this which are germinating, and I hope to try out our existing build of the game (which is basically vanilla – i.e. your finger is the mouse right now) seriously very soon and start making a list of interface problems we need to solve.

Hopefully I’ll be able to talk through those on here at some point.

I’m away next week (and I don’t currently have clearance to tell you why!) and I will keep you updated on my…movements.

Let’s take this wonderful journey into the world of touch together…ugh. Better end there.

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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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