TOM FRANCIS
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You Don’t Have To Be An Engy To Work Here But You Do

If you don’t habitually read six thousand words of comments after a scrollbar-breakingly long post, you may have missed that Cloak Raider’s put together an awesome comic strip of my suggestions for the Engineer unlockables, using Garry’s Mod. The portable Sentry in particular is winsome to the max: I picture the Engy pushing it round like a trolley. The wheels are even little Team Fortress 2 logos, although that might just be coincidence. Click through for the full thing:

Looks like Valve had a chance to get started on my list while I was away. Nice work so far, guys, but in future I’d appreciate it if you’d run any name-changes by me first.

You Can Sell Your Diablo 3 Loot For Actual Money

I was at Blizzard last week to play a bit of Diablo 3, and find this out: it has an auction house where players can buy from and sell to each other for real money.

It’s both crazier and slightly less evil than it initially sounds: it’s not Blizzard selling this stuff, and while they take a transaction fee, it’s not proportional to the item value. They say they expect it to break even.

The crazier part is that you could actually make money from this system, with no risk: you get a few free listings a week, and you can use them to sell items you found for real money without even having given Blizzard your credit card.

Lots more details, screenshots and quotes from Blizzard in my piece on PC Gamer. I am broadly negative about it.

Update: I’m in a podcast with Graham and Tim discussing what we think of all this.

Update: My preview of the Diablo 3 beta is also up now. The game itself is really, really good I’m afraid.

 
Update: Now we’ve done a video where me, Tim and Graham talk you through what’s going on in the latest footage.

You Can Now Vote For Gunpoint In The IGF

The category we’re a finalist for is Design, but all finalists are also nominated for the Audience award, which is decided by you suddenly very attractive people. If you’d like to help Gunpoint achieve ULTRO FANTASY DREAM, take a sec to vote for it here!

Remember, you’re free to vote for any game, unless it isn’t Gunpoint, in which case you are asked to ignore your own preference and throw us a pity vote. Look how small your character is on-screen! That makes us literally the little guy. Also I’m new at this lol *falls over*.

You Can Now Knock Guards Through Windows

If you jump at them hard enough. I forgot the guards would need a falling animation for this, so it wasn’t on John’s list. It’s cool though, I’ve got it covered.

Update: John’s proposal to fix this:

Update: What we actually ended up with.

Yeah, Me Too

I’m the one on the left – a slinky Draenei huntress. I have no idea if I enjoy World Of Warcraft or not, but I’m definitely physically dependent on it at the moment. I think the reason it eats so much of our time is that they’ve hit upon the gaming equivalent of TV: something comforting and unending that requires little effort from you. You’re always progressing through it, consuming New, but it’s dilute New, tastes a little like Old, and you’re drinking it slowly.

I’m Sobaseki on Steamwheedle Cartel, and I’m only level 7. I’m in it for the pets – Rhianna was telling me about a Scorpid she had called Mexican Pete, after the way he waved his claws nonchalantly as he scuttled, and at that point I knew I would have to be a Hunter. I wanted to be a Blood Elf – the Draenei are a bit of a non-concept as races go – but my colleagues are all Alliance filth and I faced exile if I stuck to my Horde inclinations. I don’t have a problem with pets, like all interesting stuff being held off till level ten, but I wish they had enough ideas to keep that feeling of progression going through the later decades. As they get exponentially further apart in the time-invested stakes, the interest and value of their perks simultaneously plummets, and it’s kind of a lethal combination for me.

It’s a much more pleasant game to play once you fiddle with the controls a bit, I now discover. If you enable Click-To-Move, you still don’t get rid of the endless error messages during combat, but your idiot does now fix most of them herself. She still says “It’s too far away!” when told to attack a distant target, but now she actually moves in range and does it. Ditto for usable items and talkable NPCs. It’s also handy for making long journeys with single clicks, without having to hold anything down or risking going too far if you, er, alt-tab away. Which I have a tendency to do a lot. In fact:

Update: Okay, the preceding paragraph is also an update, but this is why I’m really updating: tonight I…

Dressed up as a tree!

Seduced a crab!

Rode around on a big old elephant!

If they just took out the 80% of quests that are utter dross, it’d be a fantastic game. I still don’t have a proper pet yet, just a feeble cat I befriended, and christened Clawgasm. I’m torn between a better cat, a big ostrich, a small and rubbish crab, or holding out for something stranger. I’m leaning towards the small and rubbish crab.

Writing vs Programming

Writing is like having a conversation with someone who can’t reply until you’ve finished.

Programming is like having a conversation with a robot who screams at you if you pause in the wrong place, electrocutes you if you change your mind, and explodes if you ever use the future tense.

World Of Lifecraft

Rich pointed me to a post putting forward the concept of Massively Multiplayer Productivity, and I haven’t been able to find anyone who’s actually come up with a formal system for how it would work. The concept is that, in order to give the menial tasks you do in real-life the same addictive quality as the menial tasks in World Of Warcraft, all you need to do is assign experience-point rewards to them. Your To-Do list becomes your Quest Log, and every few thousand points you level yourself up – you have become a superior human being by getting things done.

So all it needs is a fair system of assigning experience points to the different kinds of things life requires you to sort out, and some markers to indicate when you would level up. I suggest:

Level-ups are awarded for the following XP amounts:

And so on. (If you didn’t spot the pattern, you’re probably not geeky enough to need to turn your life into a MMOG in order to get anything done). Notice that you start at level 0, just to emphasise how worthless you are until you’ve done something.

Well, I’m level one already and I haven’t had breakfast, so I think a bacon sandwich is in order. Any suggestions for more quest types or rewards?

World Of Goo Is Coming To Steam, Gentlepersons

Upupdatedate! Caleb points out that 2D Boy have now confirmed that pre-ordererers will be able to use their magic code to register the game on Steam and receive it there too. Fine job, Valve! I guess I forgot I got a magic code.

It’s also coming to Greenhouse and Direct2Drive – we care less about that here at James, but it’s great to hear they’re getting so much distribution-love.

Update: It’s coming to Steam, with eight achievements, and it only took ten months of me badgering them to sign it! Person-who-signs-things, Jason Holtman, notes in the announcement that “More people have told us to get World of Goo on Steam than any other title coming this year.” Possibly that IP-spoofing spam campaign was a step too far.

I’m buying it again. Direct from the developers is a good way to buy things, because they get all the money, but Steam is a good way to own things – on any PC, automatically updated, and nothing to lose.

Original post:

World of Goo (out Monday, £10/$20, 3-4 hours long, DRM free) is made by people for whom a level must have a point, and that’s strange to modern eyes and fingers. We’ve come to expect that games have a format, and a steady stream of content that fits it. This set of weapons, these possible enemies, plot delivered to you through this earpiece, progress implied by an increase in that stat, and all future experiences will be variations on those seen thus far.

World of Goo doesn’t have a fixed format; it is squishy. Whatever world it wants to take you to, the fundamentals of the game bend to realise it. Whatever engineering concept it wants to play with, old mechanics are plucked out and new ones glopped on to explore it. And whatever conceit of modern life the game chooses to mock, the entire visual grammar of the world inverts to caricature it with dreamlike brilliance.

It makes absolutely no sense that the art, writing, design, levels and music could all be done by the same guy.

WordPress Wizard

Woo-EEE-Ooh-AAA!

I knew BeBot – a beatific tuxedo’d robot for the iPhone who sings at your touch – was awesome. I didn’t realise he was awesome.

Via, of course, Waxy.

Woo

I was shamefully unable to leverage my super-VIP insider access to get access to a Wii before last week, when Nintendo sent a free one to more or less every magazine in the office except us. I played the one they sent to our kids’ mags with one of their staffers, a non-gamer, and was beaten resoundingly. That alone seemed to vindicate the Nintendo agenda here: she won her first point against the AI in Wii Sports tennis, and it’s hard to think of a game on any other platform that a non-gamer could succeed at so immediately.

But that intuitiveness doesn’t quite last. When the novelty of waving something around rather than mashing buttons wore off, neither of us were clear on how our avatar’s movements related to our own. Frequently they’d do the exact opposite of the real-world motion. Having played on Tim’s a lot more now that it’s officially out in the UK, I still don’t think it entirely works.

Last night was just six people messing around, which is about as casual as gaming gets. But even in that environment at least half of us kept getting stuck in situations where the game thought we were doing the opposite of what we really were, and screwed up the shot. Personally my problem with these situations was that I didn’t know how to avoid them: it usually lost track of me when I was moving very quickly, but if I tried slowing down so it could keep up, it didn’t register what I was doing as movement at all. In the end I found myself creeping the controller slowly back to where my avatar was holding it, slowly enough that the game didn’t know I was doing it, then pulling it back to where I wanted it at a Wii-friendly speed. In other words, I spent more time thinking about the control mechanism than I would have with a mouse-driven golf sim.

We did have a fantastic doubles match of tennis, and for a while I really enjoyed golf, but in both cases it was when I treated it as an abstract game rather than the real sport that it started to make sense. I started doing really well in tennis when I finally accepted that the game couldn’t care less which way I swing the racket, only when I swing it. I have a feeling each mini-game has an abstraction like this that I need to learn before it starts behaving the way I expect it to – in fact perhaps they’re all about timing and speed rather than the actual nature of your movement.

It gets said a lot that you do better when you just play it like the sport and don’t think about the controls, but it never worked out that way for me. I’ve played a lot of golf, I still play a lot of tennis, and I know how balls behave. Most of the time Wii Sports is close enough to attribute the difference to lag or ineptness on my part, but for one in five shots it ignores your movement completely or does the exact opposite of you. And the only way I can avoid that happening is by forgetting about the real action and doing what I know the game will register.

That can be great fun, but it’s not what I thought the point was. And when we’re getting our parents or spouses into gaming, we shouldn’t ever have to start an explaination with “It’s really just about…” That’s what they already think games are, fancy graphics hiding simple timing challenges. I wish their introduction to our world could be with something artful, sophisticated or profound, something that shows games as worlds more than toys.

I think there are going to be some incredible games on the Wii, but now I think they’re not going to be very skill-based. Now I want to play games that relish in how satisfying the motions are – because they are – rather than demanding a level of performance from you that forces you to strip away the illusion and work out what the game’s really measuring: timing or speed alone rather than the direction and arc of your movements. Ironically I think I’m going to enjoy the single-player games more than the multiplayer ones, because multiplayer is always going to be about who can best grok the system. In fact the thing I keep thinking about is a Half-Life 2 port – sucking up and firing things out with the gravity gun would be five times more satisfying if it was done with a grabbing and a punching gesture than it is with two mouse-clicks.

Witch’s On First

Me: Huh. I just got an achievement.
Graham: Which.
Me: Pharm-Assist. Oh shit, Witch!

Why Terriers Was Axed

“Based on what these people saw in those two episodes, the FX-centric viewer just rated it lower in areas such as intensity, suspense, sexiness. When you talk to the USA-type viewer, they rate it lower than their favorite shows because it’s not a land in which every babe is hot, and the sky is incredibly blue, and everybody lives in an apartment three times as big as they could legitimately afford, and everything comes out great in the end. What we ended up with—and this is a much more nuanced and complicated answer—was a show that somehow fell between two brands.”
FX president John Landgraf Continued

Why Isn’t There A Gunpoint Kickstarter?

I get this question a lot, which is lovely because it suggests people want to support the game and are happy to pay to do it. Thank you! I will very much want you to do that at some point!

Kickstarter is awesome and I may need it some day for something, but not Gunpoint. Here’s my thinking. Continued

Why I’m Letting Heat Signature Get Bigger

Here is a video blog about that, and how I’m changing how I think about working on it.