GUNPOINT
A stealth puzzle game that lets you rewire its levels to trick people.
Mailing List
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Release
Out now! $10!
Platform
Windows, Mac and Linux.
Problems?
Tell us about it! Literally do tell us about it, or nothing will happen.
Yes, You Can Monetise Videos You Make Of This Game
Here's the formal permission bit.
Other Projects
Here's a page about what else I'm working on and what else I've done.
Team
Design/Code/Words
Character/Level Art
Background Art
Mission Music
Title Music
Menu Music
Theme
By Tom Francis. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
Gunpoint Art Style Mockup
Edit: This isn’t new, just separating it out from this so it can live on the new Gunpoint site.
Gunpoint’s at a really exciting stage now – character animation for the player and the basic guard type is done, so the game has a lot of its final ‘feel’. And John’s just passed over the first set of environment art, along with a mockup showing all of it crammed into one showcase level – a real one would be less busy. And check it the hell out (click):
It looks way too good. Now I feel like I’ve got to make a proper game or something. The background is obviously just a stretched version of Fabian’s original at the moment, but the rest just looks done. Which means I’m way behind on the coding side of things.
So by the end of this weekend, I want to have all of Gunpoint’s Act One working: that’s the first for or five levels, which mostly use this tile set. It’s sort of about escape anyway, come to think of it. By the end of them, the player should understand all the basic mechanics and have played around with crosslinking a bit – enough to see the point of it.
It’ll also kick off the plot, and resolve the most immediate part of it, but how much of that will work at this stage I don’t know. I’ll certainly get the actual dialogue in there – so far, writing has been the easy bit.
More Gunpoint
Anonymous:
Edit means apropos: Is How It’s Fucking Going supposed to be dead?
http://www.pentadact.com/2011-08-27-how-its-fucking-going/
I had to remove that and one other from the listing to get a better idea of what normal posts looked like in the new Gunpoint site design – put them back now.
As a journalist, how easy is it for you to jump into creative writing? This is probably a dumb question (plus I know you did that short story for Machine of Death), but English and writing have never been my forté, so a a programmer, I can make systems and logic, but not words.
Enlighten me oh mighty Tom of Francis! :)
In terms of writing dialogue, I don’t really know yet – it isn’t needed for the build I’m working towards, so all I’ve written is a draft of the first conversation.
Figuring out the plot, though, has been surprisingly tough. Both the short stories I’ve written came easily, but with a game you’ve got a weird limitation: you don’t know what the main character will do, think or feel. Some games just assume they do know what you’ll do, think or feel, or tell you what you’ll do, think or feel. Luckily the freelance spy theme provides a good structure for avoiding that: the story starts with the clients, and all I have to do is provide you with a personal stake in their problems.
That said, it took a while to come up with something that would break down into a series of discrete missions, and I rewrote the outline about five times as I got increasingly unhappy with certain twists and characters. In general, I cut both: I’ve tried to keep it to as few characters as the story absolutely needs to function, and in about three different cases I’ve removed a big revelation because it felt fake or artificial.
It’s still stupidly, stupidly complex, and that’ll definitely cause problems, but I’m not going to simplify it until I see how it plays out in the context of the game.
Anonymous:
Hey man love the game and all but noticed in the blog post you wrote: “that’s the first FOR or five levels” you used the wrong four. You should have written the first FOUR or five levels. Sorry for pointing this out but a grammar Nazi has to do his job, does he not?
Jason L:
Not really; ‘just following orders’ didn’t work at the Hague. I used to be like you, and there’s still a place for correction when, say, a person consistently makes a given error (i.e. let’s pile on Brian Crecente forever). In the real world, though, entirely excellent authors make typos and brain glitches from time to time, and it’s just not worth anyone’s time or effort to ‘fix’ them in a conversational medium.
This mock up looks amazing. The youtube video, while showing gameplay more than graphics, looked fun, but really doesn’t do this justice at all.
Keep it up!
You have inspired me to make a stealth based game no i will not be stealing your rewireing.