TOM FRANCIS
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The Gunpoint Soundtrack, And Upgrading Editions

There are three different editions of Gunpoint, the two fancier ones coming with proportionately more bonus stuff. Lots of people have asked if it’s possible to upgrade from one to the other, after purchasing. It will be! I don’t know yet if the system will be ready for launch, but I want to allow it and both Steam and Humble Store say they can and will support it.

One of the extras in the Special Edition is all the music used in the game in MP3 format.

One of the extras in the Exclusive Edition is that, plus a huge load of bonus tracks Gunpoint’s three composers have put together. In some, they remix each others’ tracks from the game; others are all new.

If you’re not going to get the Exclusive Edition, or you want the tracks in fancy audiophile FLAC format, or you just want to support the composers specifically, you can also buy this full version of the soundtrack from Bandcamp!

There’s a tracklist and samples there, you can pre-order now, and it’ll be released at the same time as the game.

Everyone who worked on Gunpoint gets a percentage of Gunpoint’s revenue, but I also made sure our contracts let everyone keep the rights to their own work – including the right to sell it themselves, independently of me. So if you buy the soundtrack separately, all of your money goes to the composers.

The Gunpoint FAQ

People ask me more questions about Gunpoint than I have time to individually answer, and my silence is starting to feel like metaphorically pushing their faces wordlessly away with the palm of my hand, slightly muffling the latter part of their question. Continued

The Greatest Team Fortress 2 Update

The Greatest Spy In Team Fortress 2

This is the closest I’ve come to actually feeling sorry for a Spy’s victim. But also the hardest I’ve ever laughed at one.

Until today I honestly thought I was the biggest asshole playing this class. I see now that I have been thoroughly out-assholed, and I doff my balaclava to, er, MrCuddles100. He’s kindly uploaded the spray here so you can try it yourself. Even if using it just gets you killed, it’s still comedy gold like no other game. This sort of stuff is exactly why I love TF2 and The Spy so much.

The Grappling Hook Game, Dev Log 6: The Accomplice

I’ve decided to let people play this prototype of my Grappling Hook Game at IndieCade East in New York next month, partly to force me to focus on what it really needs to be a playable game. After a week and a bit, here’s what I’ve got. Continued

The Grappling Hook Game, Dev Log 5: Wrapping And Slacking

I’m working on the grappling hook game again now, and I’ve got the rope wrapping nicely around things, going slack when it should, and even making sounds. In this video I show you how that looks, then – with fair warning – get into how the code works.

Sounds from freesound.org
Retract noise: eelke
Grapple impact noise: taylorsyoung

The Good And The Bad Bits Of The Newsroom

Aaron Sorkin’s current show about a TV news show was panned by reviewers, but I quite liked its first episode and thought its problems were fixable. The reviewers had seen the first four. I now see what they were talking about.

It’s such an extraordinary mix of exciting potential and staggeringly clumsy writing that I’ve had trouble stringing together a sentence about it that uses the word ‘but’ fewer than five times. So I’ll give up on a coherent overview and just list the things I like and don’t like. Continued

The Giant Issue Of PC Gamer

The latest PC Gamer UK is about 50% bigger than usual, has the coolest subscriber’s cover I think I’ve ever seen, and is probably the best issue we’ve done in years. Also you get a free Team Fortress 2 hat with it.

We finally got to the point where the perceived value of the coverdisc was less than the value of the extra pages we could make with the money it costs, and dropped it. As a former disc editor of PC Gamer, I will say this: thank fuck.

We’ve done lots of new stuff with the extra space, but I’m particularly happy that this issue is packed with diary-type stuff. It’s my favourite kind of writing both to read and write, and I got to do loads of it this issue, and read loads more by better people.

My main thing was a 10-page Skyrim diary – I got a nice long session with it, so I just wrote up the whole weird story of my experiences with it. It’s awesome. Properly fresh, huge and new. And like Oblivion, rough, crazy and over-ambitious. In the 2-page interview that follows, Todd Howard tells me what happened on his wedding night.

The other big diary feature is about Artemis, a multiplayer game where each person mans one station on a Star Trek style bridge. I was the engineer, O’Francis, and it was honestly the nerdiest thrill of my life. Tim asked me how long repairs would take, I estimated half an hour, then got it done in five minutes. It doesn’t get more authentic than that.

Then there are 8 Now Playing pieces, our shorter diary bits about whatever we’re up to. Great pieces from a few less common faces in there this issue, including Chris Impossibly Nice Donlan on Super Crate Box, Duncan I Also Work For Wired Geere on Universe Sandbox, and Phil Octaeder Savage on Frozen Synapse.

Normally I’d suggest you grab it from our online shop, but rather embarrassingly we’ve already run out of stock for individual issue sales. It was a bit of an experiment, and it went better than expected. You can still subscribe, though I don’t know which issue it’ll start with.

We’ve just launched with this issue on iTunes’ new Newsstand, and we’re already on Zinio. I’m not totally sure if and how the hat comes with the various digital options – in the physical mag, it’s a printed code. And in the UK at least, shops still exist.

The Game I’m Not Making This Weekend: Red Snow

It’s Ludum Dare this weekend, a regular competition to make a game from scratch in a weekend. I don’t have two days spare, but I do have two hours and a cup of coffee, so I’ll pitch you the game I would make if I could.

The theme is decided by a vote, and ‘Alone’ won. However, ‘Kitten’ was also in the final round. It got more down-votes than any other theme, but I can’t help wanting to combine the two. Here’s my idea:

Top down view of snowy tundra. You are a badly drawn TINY KITTEN that scampers towards the mouse cursor, kicking up snow and leaving messy pawprints. It’s a zero button game: all you do is move the mouse.

If you stray far from where you start, you’ll run into a villager or two. They stop when they see you, and run to the north if you approach. They’re faster than you, so you can never catch up to them.

The further north you go, the more villagers you’ll see. They all run away to a village to the north, but if you get close to the village itself, they’ll flee that too. If you chase them, you’ll reach a cliff edge. The villagers will stop at the threshold, but if you come close enough they’ll throw themselves over to get away from you.

The other side of the ravine is a sheer wall of ice, in which you see blurry reflections of the villagers you’re chasing into the chasm. But your own reflection is wrong: far too big, dark and spiky. A rough silhouette of that more monstrous shape appears over your usual badly-drawn kitten avatar, and gets stronger the longer you spend in the presence of your reflection. Eventually, the kitten fades away entirely and you see yourself as the monster you are.

After that, there’s a small chance you’ll encounter smaller villagers who can’t run as fast as you. If you get close to one, you automatically pounce on it and rip it to shreds in a spray of blood, and you’re unable to control yourself until you finish devouring its remains. After that, any time your cursor is directly over a villager, you’ll accelerate to chase it down and eat it. The more you eat, the faster your hunting speed.

If you do kill a villager, there’s now a chance that the villagers you meet in future will throw rocks at you before running away. The more you kill, the more will try to fight you. The rocks knock you back very slightly, so if more than a couple are pelting you, you can’t catch up to them and have to run away.

After the first few, rock hits will make you bleed steadily, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. The bleeding stops if you eat a villager. If you don’t stop the bleeding, your monstrous image starts to fade and the kitten returns, still bleeding.

If you leave the villagers alone, or you kill them all, you’ll end up alone in the snow. After a while alone, your beast appearance fades and you start to see yourself as a kitten again. The screen gets darker as night closes in, and the kitten starts to tremble and turn blue. Eventually, its scampering slows to an unsteady crawl, it lies down, goes still, and is lost in the dark blue snow as darkness closes in.

The Formula For An Episode Of Murder, She Wrote

My life has changed in many ways since working for my own company, but perhaps the biggest is that I can now watch Murder, She Wrote over breakfast and/or lunch. This is great, but it’s also ingrained the show’s weirdly specific formula in my brain, and now I feel I must write it down. The following is how about 70% of its episodes go – the exceptions are kind of nuts. Continued

The First-Person Observer

I don’t often write a whole post just to link a site – since Twitter, anyway – but Chris Livingston’s new venture deserves special treatment. The First-Person Observer is an online paper covering the issues that matter to today’s gruff, laconic videogame protagonists. It’s:

Relevant!
Health Pack Reform Divides Nation
 

Classic!
Desperate, Marooned Astronaut Tries To Use Every Item With Every Other Item
 

Scientific!
Report: One in Four Children Born With Ability To Slow Down Time
 

Touching!
Hostages Rescued by Courageous Racist

 
And it’s some of the funniest games writing I’ve read all year. It’s pretty easy to come up with the idea of an Onion for gaming, but it’s harder than you’d think to flesh it out, keep it varied, and avoid driving the joke into the ground. Hardcasual exists, but it’s pretty hit-and-miss and focuses more on gaming news rather than news from within games.

The stories above are just my favourites: impressively there’s masses more to read already. I don’t know how regularly he plans on updating it, but I don’t think it needs to be frequent to work. It just needs to stay this good.

The Finale Post

I’ve been delaying this because I couldn’t get the Javascript needed to make spoilers togglable work. I’ve now got to the stage where the code is exactly right except insofar as it doesn’t do anything, so I’ve given up. So I’m afraid you’re just going to have to do it the old fashioned way, and not read them if you don’t want to read them. It goes Lost, Heroes, 24, in case you need to skip.

Lost: quite good
I seem to be alone in this, but I rather liked the end to this series. The complaints I’ve heard are all things I’ve long since come to expect from every episode of Lost – we all know it’s no longer Good, right? Given that, and pretty low expectations from everyone telling me how much it sucked, I thought this was one of the only really fun episodes in season three.

It was even semi-clever: episodes always begin and end with the present-day bits, and dip into the flashbacks in between. This one does too: it’s just that the series has essentially moved several years into the future, and is tying up the existing plotlines in flashbacks to the island. I think this may actually be the format from now on, which would mean a long-overdue end to the flashback stories that tell you nothing and make you like the characters even less.

Resolution: pretty good
Finding out for sure that they get rescued is a pretty big deal, even if the moment itself hasn’t featured. Recent hints at some of the more supernatural theories like hell, ghosts, and near-death hallucinations are all out: they’re just on an island, it exists, they get off it. Future Jack’s sifting of maps suggests that they escape the island themselves rather than being found by helicopters or boats, since it implies that the island’s location is still a mystery. More importantly, Charlie died. Ha!

Plot holes: moderate
Plenty of minor “Why?”s, but the only really irritating one was future Jack’s reference to his father as alive. It was obvious from the start of the first episode that it was a flash-forward and not a flashback, and this was a pretty pathetic ploy to try to throw idiots off the trail by flat-out lying to them. It’s an indictment of how predictable and cheap the writing has become that I thought it more likely they were lying to me than that I was mistaken about the twist the flashback was leading up to.

Excitement: none
It didn’t bother me, but yeah, no tension or intensity at all. War with the others? Don’t care. Mikhail gone? Don’t care. Dynamite detonators killed? Don’t care. iPhone girl evil? Don’t care. The excitement of Lost was always the bizarre mysteries, the polar bears and four-toed statues. The politics of The Others and the capture of major characters is mundane and tired. If there had been any exciting scenes, they would have been diffused by the endless cutbacks to the tedious Jack plotline, the only payoff for which was wasted by being too obvious too far ahead of time.

Irritations: moderate
Interminable Jack screentime accounting for almost all of that. Didn’t mind about Mikhail coming back to life, because I didn’t really care whether he lived or died, and we already knew Charlie would, so it only achieved the inevitable. Ben facing the survivors alone was dumb, and Jack not killing him was dumb, but again, don’t care enough to care.

Highlights: about six?
Survivors commit mass murder! Brilliant! Hurley runs some dudes over! Brilliant! Charlie drowns! Brilliant! Hurley brags about saving everyone! Brilliant! Evil new high-tech faction maybe! Brilliant! Jack is pathetic and doesn’t end up with Kate! Brilliant!

Cliffhanger: er
I watched it last night, and honestly couldn’t tell you how it ended. We didn’t find out who was in that coffin in the future (I thought Juliet, but Graham says it’s referred to as a ‘he’), but ‘someone dies in future’ is not exactly a revelation we’ll all be holding our breath for. What happens about the iPhone is about the only thing I’m waiting to find out, but I could die happy not knowing.

Heroes: fun but frustrating
The climax couldn’t help but be enjoyable, but the series really lost its nerve, heart and brain at the critical moment. I feel about this almost exactly the way people seem to feel about the Lost finale – I enjoyed it at the time, but the more I think about it the more angry it makes me. It was an utterly gutless and nonsensical finalé, and they’d spent so long building to a smart and spectacular one. At least Lost only ever promised a gutless and nonsensical one.

Resolution: fucking none!
What the hell have I been doing for these twenty hours of my life? At the end of it, both people who can cause the explosion are still alive. Nothing happened.

Plot holes: numerous, enormous
DL gets shot! Why didn’t he use his power? Sylar gets run through by a slow, screaming Japanese businessman. Why didn’t he use his powers? Peter needs to be airlifted into the sky by his non-invincible brother, even though Claire had a better solution. Why didn’t he use his powers? Sylar lies down after one stab, everyone walks away. Did they forget he had powers? Guys, if you’re going to make a show about superpowers, you should occasionally remember that your characters have them.

Excitement: high
But that’s a testament to the build up rather than the finalé itself. We knew, or thought we knew, exactly what would get resolved here, and we’d been waiting for it for a long time. Then it didn’t get resolved.

Irritations: vast
All others pale in comparison to how pathetically gutless, tiresome and moronic it is to have the main villain not really be dead after all the heroes assume he is. I literally couldn’t believe they were doing it. If I didn’t have a little faith that they’ll try to move onto a new plotline for the second series, I would have stopped watching for good then and there.

It’s not just that it makes the characters stupid, it balances a huge plot twist on the absurdly precarious notion that the characters within this world have no concept of how it works. You don’t just get frustrated with them for being so stupid, you cease to understand them as characters. Their actions are inconceivable. There’s no longer any way to comprehend this universe.

Highlights: three tiny ones
It sad to say, but the biggest revelation and best moment in the finalé of an extraordinary 23-episode series was finding out Mr Bennet’s first name.

Cliffhanger: kind of
The chapter two teaser was a pleasantly clean break, but I’m not sure what it was trying to tell us. Do they have to stop an eclipse in this one?

24: good
This season a nuclear bomb went off in California in the fourth episode, so it’s been a bit of a low-key second-half by comparison. They’re trying to avoid a diplomatic faux-pas with Russia by preventing their defense secrets being handed over to the Chinese. Even that’s resolved very near the start of this finale, and the rest of the episode is about trying to rescue a single, rather unpleasant person from becoming collateral damage in the military resolution of the larger issue. But it was more about the people you like doing unexpected and pleasing things, and for that it was probably the most enjoyable of these three.

Resolution: near-total, as ever
It even ties up a plotline started three seasons ago, in which one of Jack’s many screw-the-rules operations actually has enormously grave consequences.

Plot holes: just the one
So the Russians, whose insistence on absolute proof of the destruction of The Component has been the driving force for this entire plotline, are delighted with the Vice President’s proposed plan of just bombing the oil rig it might be on and assuming it’s destroyed? Even if you can believe that, it’s impossible to believe that the VP would even have suggested it, so far is it from the result they’ve been pressuring him for all along. I don’t mind them doing the whole “You can’t call in an airstrike, X is still in there!” plotline again, but contorting the logic of the premise so horrifically to support it is sad.

Excitement: dangerously low
I think most of us are hoping Josh, Jack’s 16 year-old nephew with the awful fringe, will die. But even then we don’t really care either way. Those are the only stakes here, and 24 is supposed to be all about stakes. After a nuke on American soil the writers didn’t seem to know how to keep upping the ante, and ended up doing the opposite. It’s become steadily more downbeat and less intense as the series has gone on. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it’s a shame; the reason I fell in love with the series in the first place was the relentlessly escalating horror of what they were prepared to inflict on the country and their potagonist.

Irritations: none
24 established its flaws very early on in its life, so everyone still watching them has long come to terms with every silly thing it can do. I actually enjoy waiting for Jack to go rogue again (as he does three separate times in this episode alone). The only irritating recurring theme was his family being repeatedly kidnapped, and they’ve mostly learned to avoid that one these days. Technically Josh is family, but he wasn’t kidnapped to get at Jack – the villain’s entire plan revolved around him, the grand kidnapping failed, and in the end the government simply handed him over.

Highlights: several, but one in particular
This was the second episode of the season to feature some really brilliant writing. The first being an exchange early on between ex-president Logan and his much-maligned ex-wife, long since mad.

“Martha, the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you.”
“You always managed to get to that last thing, though, didn’t you?”

Here it was the fantastic clash between Jack and Defence Secretary Heller, whose life he’s saved around four hundred times at this point. (And who we saw die, I seem to recall, but whatever.) Heller’s forbidding Jack to see his mentally ill daughter, his long-term girlfriend, on the quite reasonable basis that everyone Jack knows dies. Jack, also quite reasonably but incredibly uncharacteristically, flips out.

“How dare you? How dare you? All I did, all I have ever done, is what you and people like you told me to.”

All the best moments in 24 are when Jack’s had enough. He takes more than anyone reasonably could, but the writers just keep throwing the trauma and tragedy at him until he snaps. He goes the entire series expressing nothing but grim determination, so when he finally does flare up it’s spectacular and genuinely emotional.

In season three this also came in the finale: after hacking his own partner’s hand off with a fire axe, on top of everything else, he excuses himself to his car for a moment and just sobs. In season four it came earlier on, when he was forced to threaten a doctor at gunpoint to abandon critical surgery on his girlfriend’s ex-husband, shortly after said ex-husband had saved his life, and does so with a look of utter panic.

Here it’s that line, when he can no longer take the callousness with which he’s discarded by his superiors when his task is complete. For the most part they can be civil about it, and cite official guidelines about plausible deniability that explain why they have to fire him, credit his success to someone else, arrest him, sacrifice him to terrorists or hand him over to the Chinese.

But this time it’s literally personal: he’s lost so much to them and the job that he can’t be allowed near the only personal life he has left, as broken as it is. And he ends up saying more or less what I said about him the last time I wrote about 24: that he’s barely a person, just a grimly logical tool who methodically achieves the objectives set for him. Ironically, it’s his most human moment yet.

Cliffhanger: none

The Far Cry 2 Team

I guess I knew devs teams were this big these days, but still: wow. Next time I pan a major game, I’m going to imagine that many people simultaneously bursting into tears. I’ll still to do it, I’m just going to feel bad.

The Escape Game I’m Not Going To Make This Weekend

The 48-hour game-making competition Ludum Dare is back on this weekend, and the theme is Escape. This is the 21st compo – I entered the 19th with Scanno Domini, and regretted not entering the 20th.

Gunpoint’s at too exciting a stage right now to take time off from it. If I was making a game about Escape this weekend, though, here’s what it’d be.

You’re a small escape pod with a single thruster, jetting around an infinite randomly generated space. Planets of randomly generated size attract you with their gravitational pull. If you land on one, you’ll find your thruster isn’t powerful enough to let you escape.

You can, however, press down to burrow through the crust of the planet into its gooey core. Your pod automatically sucks up the molten minerals in the centre of the planet to use as fuel. The bigger the planet, the more intensely its fuel burns, and therefore the more powerful your thruster can get if you suck up its whole core. It’s just enough power to escape the gravitational pull of a planet this size, so from now on you can escape any planet that isn’t bigger than this one without boring to its core.

As soon as you start sucking up a planet’s core, though, it becomes unstable and will soon explode. It also gets lighter, reducing its gravitational pull. You have to judge how long you can afford to keep sucking up its core before you need to start escaping. The longer you suck, the more powerful your thruster and the weaker the gravitation pull it has to overcome, but the closer you get to the planet’s detonation.

You have to leave the crust through the hole you made on your way in, or take a second to drill a new one. Provided you get outside the fatal radius in time, you can ride the blast wave of the explosion for a speed boost that’ll last till you next hit a planet, or thrust in a different direction.

You’re trying to get to the galactic core, a direction indicated on-screen, by progressively increasing your thruster power and armour to increase speed and skip more and more planets on the way. You want to get there to suck the whole thing up and use it as fuel to escape spacetime or whatever THE END.

The Decline Of Mr Sad

Finally had to throw out my Halloween pumpkin yesterday – he was not in a good state.