TOM FRANCIS
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Let Us Mumble You Through Our Supreme Commander Game

 
We finally got around to turning one of our many SupCom matches into a video you can watch. It’s the one written up in the latest mag, six of us versus two cheating AIs.

Some Incredible Brink Images On Dead End Thrills

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 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.

The Greatest Team Fortress 2 Update

Gunpoint Delayed To… I Don’t Know, Christmas?

Game release dates should probably be phrased as “I don’t yet know why the game won’t be ready in July.” I’m changing this for Gunpoint to “I don’t yet know why the game won’t be ready by Christmas.”

It’s going well now, actually. But here are the two things I didn’t know when I predicted July:

1. Rewriting the collision system, which I had planned for, would take an amount of time I had not planned for. It would also send me quietly mad on Twitter.
2. Integrating new art and animation, which I had planned for, leaves the game pretty much unplayable until it’s done. This, I hadn’t planned for.

2 means I can’t make much progress on the game’s levels while John is still working on the character art, because you can’t make what you can’t play. He’s burning through it super fast, though, and it’s starting to look awesome in-game. The player character, Conway, has just the right mix of super-spy suave and silliness. Here’s one of my favourite animations for him so far:

All the basic movements are already done for the player character, so all I really need is for one guard type to be jumpable-on and punchable-in-the-face. That’ll be enough to make actual levels that work, even if a lot of the poses and sprites are placeholder. As before, I really have no clue how long that part will take.

Meanwhile Fabian has been creating a gorgeous logo concept – one that combines an elegantly simple icon I can’t believe I didn’t think of, but in the context of a sumptuous image that gets across the rainy city atmosphere. I’m not quite ready to show that yet.

80% of development takes 10% of the time you think it will, and 20% takes 800%. It’s much easier and nicer working without fixed deadlines, so I’m not worried about how long it takes. There’s no feature-creep: my idea of what the finished game will be has been fixed for a long time now, and we’re getting significantly closer to it all the time.

So let’s say Christmas, and I’ll tell you why it isn’t Christmas this Christmas. Sorry it’s been a while, by the way – follow @GunpointGame on Twitter for more regular updates and face-palming.

My Duke Nukem Forever Video Review

What Makes Games Good

A few times lately, non-gaming friends and relatives have asked me: what’s the appeal of games? Good question! The people who don’t ask it seem to assume it’s something terrible, like bloodlust, or it’s some unknowable new drug they will never understand. Continued

Supreme Commander All Czars

Sometimes winning isn’t enough. Sometimes 50 of the largest unit in the game, the Czar, is not enough. Those times, 51 Czars will generally do it.

Death beams are cool, but Czars are so huge that they can do even more damage by just falling on you. And you can manually suicide them to make that happen.

Deus Ex 3 Is Amazing

At 4pm today the embargo for talking about hands-on experience with the first ten hours of Deus Ex: Human Revolution passed, so you’ve probably seen a bunch of stuff about how good it is.

It’s very good.

Here is my coverage of how good it is:

1. Exactly how good it is and why
This is what I’ve wanted from every game in the eleven years since Deus Ex.

2. Diary of a psychopath playthrough
“Pritchard,” Jensen radios in, as he stabs both fist-chisels through a woman’s ribcage. “I’ve found the hostages.”

3. Podcast: The Deus Ex special
Release the pheromones!

Good Story In Games

Sounds like I’m going to preach at you, but actually I want your opinion: which games have good stories, and why do they work?

I’m asking because I’m in the early stages of writing stuff for Gunpoint, but I’m also interested in general. I’m incredibly impatient with stories that don’t engage me right away: Dragon Age 2 is dead to me, just because it introduced too many people I didn’t care about and didn’t make them do anything interesting in the first hour or so. The other eighty hours of the game might as well not exist.

Cared.

Mass Effect, on the other hand, is my gold standard: I saw Saren’s betrayal in the first mission (even though my character didn’t), and it was genuinely maddening that he got away with it.

The rest of the game isn’t even that well written – I didn’t really understand why I needed the Thorian or Benezia or Liara or the vision or what the Conduit was until I read the wiki afterwards, but it didn’t matter because the Saren thread hooked me so early.

Did not care.

What’s yours? I’m interested in games that hooked you quickly, immediately made you want to know what happens next, and why you think they worked. I’m also interested in characters you immediately liked, hated or just cared about on any level.

Most games can do that if you’re willing to read or listen to 3,000 words of dialogue, so really I’m interested in the ones that didn’t take ten hours of investment to make you give a shit. CoughJadeEmpire.

If the answer’s Portal 2, by the way, it would be nice if you could avoid spoilers. Cheers!

Gunpoint Now Has Artists, Will Be Art

A million things to say about Gunpoint, but most importantly: please welcome John Roberts aboard as the game’s main artist, and Fabian van Dommelen (Beldak in the comments here) as captain backgrounds and probably additional environment art.

This means the people in Gunpoint are going to look a bit like this:

We’re going to have a chat about it, try some things out, and tweak all this until it fits together nicely, looks clear and readable, and makes you really want to play it. At that point I’ll try to pull it all together into a first proper screenshot so you guys can see what the game’s going to look like.

I’m not kicking into proper “Woo, look at my game!” mode yet, but I have set up a Twitter account: @GunpointGame, to talk about the development, make programming jokes, link other indie dudes I think are cool, and ask you guys for opinions on how some things should work. I’ll also be putting out future calls for testers on there – not sure when the next prototype will be yet.

As you’ll see from the first tweet there, I’ve now got every feature I want in Gunpoint working. This is the fundamental stuff, like:

• Branching conversation trees with player choice
• Mission select menu where new jobs unlock depending on your performance and experience so far
• A shop system where you can buy upgrades and equipment
• Stats that track your performance in a mission so the client can react to how you dealt with it

It doesn’t mean I have the pause menu done or anything looking good, but the full skeleton of the game is there now. The plan for those elements has stayed steady for a long time, but it feels a lot more concrete now I know they all work.

Once we know what we’re doing for the art, my next job is making all the levels. Which means knowing what the missions are about, which means knowing the objectives, which means knowing the clients, which means knowing the key players and their conflicts and characters, which means basically coming up with the story. I’ll put up another post about that probably tomorrow, because I’d like your advice on how to make it not suck.

Lastly, I was interviewed over at Laser Romance, about stuff like why Gunpoint is no longer about a murderous space robot.

As mentioned there, Gunpoint now has a proper URL if you want to link it anywhere: gunpointgame.com. It currently just shows you all the posts here tagged with Gunpoint, but I’ll eventually make it a bespoke site. Incidentally, if anyone knows how to make only posts in the Gunpoint category appear at https://www.pentadact.com/gunpoint with WordPress, I’m having a hard time figuring it out.

Let Me Mumble You Through An Early Version Of Gunpoint

The game I’m making, Gunpoint, is an infiltration game that lets you rewire its levels to mess with your enemies. It is ugly and has no animation.

I’ve learnt to do a lot of new things while making this, but art always takes me ten times as long as it should, and ends up… well, look at it. So I’d like to find someone who’s willing to help out with the visual side, particularly with animating the characters. There are only a few, it’s pretty simple.

In case anyone is interested, I thought I should talk you through what the game’s actually about so you can see if it’s something you’d want to be involved in. And for everyone else, I’d just like to give a better idea of what it does. I will probably regret this.

Here’s me, talking you through a very early prototype of the game as I play it. This is also my first stab at making a video, which is why it’s barely visible at anything less than 720p, everything’s tiny, I’m really quiet and the game sound drowns me out a few times. Enjoy!

YouTube (HD) – Direct Download (80MB .avi)

The e-mail address is pentadact@gmail.com. Let me know what you think in the comments, and fling the link around if you found it interesting. This is a lot more than I’ve shown publicly before, so I’m interested in whether it seems appealing.

The catch is I can’t pay you – I’m making this in a small portion of my free time, it’ll be free when it’s done, and my budget is zero. So I’m looking for someone who wants to help out for fun, practice and experience.

I’d love to see what you want it to look like. You don’t have to have any experience or qualifications, but if you could do a mockup of one character and their walking animation, that would be awesome. You can post it in the comments here or e-mail me.

Characters are about 24 pixels tall currently, but you can stray from that if you want to give the whole game a makeover – all the level objects and stuff.

There’s a pretty good chance no-one’s going to be up for this, in which case I’ll just do it myself once the rest of the game’s done, but it’s worth asking. I’ll still finish it, it’ll just be later and uglier.

The art that’s in there right now is a vague guide at best: I want the main character to have a long coat and a hat, but everything else is up to someone with actual ideas in their brain. The guards aren’t supposed to be grey – this guy was originally a deranged civilian but I cut that role.

To be clear, here’s what’ll ultimately need doing:

• Walking, climbing and ceiling-climbing animations for the main character.
• Walking and running animations for guards, armoured guards, and professional killers.
• Walking and running animations for some kind of civilian dude, and slight variations of him.
• A few miscellaneous combat interactions.
• A bunch of stuff I’ve forgotten.
• Optionally, any environment and character art you can improve on. Lord knows it sucks right now.

The very loose time frame is about two to three months. The game may end up taking longer than that – I’d like to have it out by the end of July, but even that’s not a hard deadline. Yay development!

On PC Gamer Lately

The PC Gamer site moves pretty fast these days, so I might occasionally recap what I’ve done there recently. Here’s some of my stuff from the last month:
 

Finally finished my Minecraft diary about playing in hardcore mode. Response to its end was amazing, for a story about a man trying to eat a cake while falling to his death on fire. Definitely looking to do another in a different game.

Relapsed on both the previous games lately – the differences are extraordinary. Mass Effect is by far the most compelling main story of any BioWare game I’ve played, it’s so weird that Mass Effect 2 is narratively bankrupt when it improves so much else. This list is how I want to see the best bits combined.

I put up a collection of awesome art/games mashup images by artist Drew Northcott. We used them in our mag a few years back, but few seemed to get the references. Wanted to see them get a bigger exposure.
 

It’s brutal, and should be illegal on a gamepad.

One of the most sublime announcements I can remember, a game whose very name is both setup and punchline, and an indulgently batshit trailer. Starting to really like the Magicka guys.

Got to talk to the Minecraft guys about why their next game is a turn-based strategy based on collectible card games.
 

Loved it. Relic are now the best RPG developer never to have made an RPG.

Old but still astonishing, even next to Crysis 2.

Realised the restrictive tropes that frustrate me about modern games are probably my fault. Bulletstorm’s creative director responds to explain why his game is made that way, which starts an interesting discussion.
 

Megaton hypernews of the millennium. So goddamn excited. Also, a little on why the days of XBLA as the ‘big time’ for indies may be over.

Not all me this time, since Bad Company split office opinion somewhat and we wanted to get a good selection of views. My main one is for a return to the emergent camaraderie of leading a squad of strangers in Battlefield 2.

I go back to the cold metal corridors of the Von Braun, and remember how personal stories kept me going in this place.

No revelations, just my overview of what we know so far and which bits are exciting.

PC Gamer Podcast 51: Mine, Part Mine

Oh yeah, we pod a cast. I get to talk about what playing Deus Ex 3 was like, Rich gets to talk about what reviewing Dragon Age 2 was like, we discuss Bulletstorm’s stupidity, Shogun 2’s cleverity, and Battlefield 3 possibilities.

In which game can you part-own a mine? How hard can you throw something at someone’s head before they react? Are mages getting magier or less mageful? Would Team Fortress 2 work with 3,000 players?

All these answers and no more, for the special person who Downloads/subscribes.