TOM FRANCIS
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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

What It’s Like Showing Heat Signature To The Press

I used to be press! Now I’m a developer. So I’m showing them my game, and trying to figure out if what I’m showing is exciting. Here’s what that’s like. I would like it known that I really am saying ‘Alec’ when I refer to Alec but it sounds a bit like Alex because of a mouth thing. A similar mouth thing to when I appear to say ‘intereted’ right after.

What I’m Working On And What I’ve Done

This is a list of games I’ve worked on or am working on and the things people usually ask me about them. Continued

What I Like About Guild Wars 2

As I mentioned on the last PC Gamer podcast, I’m really getting into Guild Wars 2. It’s the first MMO to do anything for me since World of Warcraft, and the best since City of Heroes. And it’s mostly because of one attitude behind it:

“Yikes, that sounds like a lot of design work. Oh well, let’s do it.” Continued

What I Learned From Gunpoint, And How To Make A Game

I wrote a feature for PC Gamer in which I look at each of the easiest tools you can use to make a game, and interview indies who’ve made great things with them. It’s the Indies’ Guide To Game Making, and I’ve just updated it with some more detailed answers we didn’t have room for in the magazine.

Oi, aren’t you making a game?

I am, but I haven’t finished it yet. I’ve learnt a lot so far, though, and at Minecon in November, I gave a talk about what I’ve learned so far, and what I’d do differently if I was making my first game today. Here it is! Continued

What A Shame

People being a chaotic, belligerent, vicious lot, it’s rare for anything publicly defacable to remain pure. But the comments section for this video is just such an oasis of uniform brilliance, some 238 random people all being genuinely funny rather than trying to stand out or one-up each other. What little rebellion there is among the commenters – the few that add smileys or add incorrect punctuation – is quickly Thumbs-Downed by dilligent voters, and will soon fall below the default viewing threshold.

If you’re signed in to your YouTube account when you click this, by the way, I’d love it if you could help preserve this rare and beautiful social event by contributing, or showing the Smiley Rebels the business end of your virtual thumb. They are a dangerous and subversive splinter faction that must be stopped.

Update: God damn it! I hope the dribbling hicks who just broke this didn’t come from here. Jesus, has that meme ever been funny? Since, like, the nineties? What a shame. We need two more people to thumb the dunces down and they’ll disappear from public view. Can you help?

I just discovered today that the User Reviews for a gallon of Tuscan milk sold by Amazon.com is a similarly superb collaborative work of a straight-faced communal sense of humour. I hope there are loads of these Everyone’s In On It havens dotted around the net. And I hope that some day Andy Baio bags and tags the phenomenon like the Attenboroughesque social-tech naturalist he has become. I leave you a milk review by Buster Foyt:

“This milk worked well when I first got it, but within a few days it wouldn’t hold a charge. I called their customer service department and, I don’t know if it’s in Bangalor or Ireland, but I couldn’t understand a word that they said and they began to scream at me.

“It’s a bit heavy, too, to wear on your belt. The good news is that it keeps your hip cool during this sultry summer weather – for a while.”

Werewolf And The Logic Of Lies

I played Werewolf for the first time tonight, a game you play with just a few scraps of paper. I’ll explain what it is and the specific setup we played at the same time:

There were eight of us, seven played and Kim ran the game. She hands all seven of us a folded piece of paper that we look at and keep to ourselves. Written on it is our role, which will be one of the following – numbers in brackets are how many people are assigned that role. Continued

Weltpolizei

Fluxblog’s just totally saved my ass for slacking on Music Week by posting the exact same Alphabeat song I was going to write about tomorrow. His write-up is also better than I was planning to make mine. I was just going to phone it in.

James commenter Dave McLeod – who’s probably done other stuff in his life, but that’s the highest possible accolade here – was sat next to me in the office the other week when Alphabeat came up on a Muxtape I was listening to.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met another male Alphabeat fan.”
“At least not a straight one, I guess?”

Since I realised they were saying “Weltpolizei” and not “The bullets fly” (the next line is “Twenty-four seven”), all I can picture when I listen to it is an episode of Thunderbirds where they all have moustaches and perpetuate German stereotypes.

In other news, I’m bored of Music Week now and I’ve got lots of other stuff I want to talk about, so James will return to normal programming shortly.

Welcome To Site Six

I seem to redesign this place at the start of every year – boredom with the old design peaks just as the winter break hits with the spare time to fix it. This new design is mostly just a visual jiggle, but I’m counting it as site number six because it’s no longer called James. I’m not good with titles, obviously, so it doesn’t really have one anymore – it’s just my blog, or Pentadact.com if you need something more unique.

I’ve sort of decapitated the old design:

It felt flabby and basic, and those black bars bothered me for no good reason. The new one fits more on the screen, and is a bit smoother. You’ll notice I’ve brought it bang up to date with the hottest web trend of 2003 – very slight gradients. A few other things are new:

• Infinite scroll: it loads the next bunch of posts when you scroll to the bottom. It doesn’t currently tell you it’s doing this.
• Like button: fucking Zuckerberg. That ugly little thing is so goddamn hard to put on any non-white page without making it hideous. I can’t resist them, though – they’ve been awesome on the PC Gamer site for letting us know the difference between pieces that people want to respond to, and piece people just… like. Without something filling that role, you never really know when you’ve done something right.
• Category tabs: browsing by category was a little obfuscated in the last design. I wanted to put them front and center for the sake of people who don’t care about games, since that topic often dominates this place a bit. Of course, which category link do the vast, vast majority of people click on? Games. They look at my site about games and think “Goddamn it, this isn’t enough about games! ONLY GAMES!”

As ever, please let me know what you think and if anything isn’t displaying right for you. I have some tweaking to do and presumably a lot of bug fixing, though it doesn’t look too disastrous so far.

Welcome To Site 7

Look, I changed everything! I usually redesign my blog a bit at the start of every year, but this one is the first time I’ve built a completely new one from scratch in more than eight years. As is now tradition, I’ll give you a song to listen to while you snoop around. Continued

Weirdly, You’ve Been Tanned – Suspicious For The Winter

This is mostly about the new Architecture in Helsinki, so I’ll get the other new albums out of the way quickly:

Rilo Kiley – Under The Blacklight: Okay, well this album has a statutory rape apologist song on it, so that’s hardly fair to the others in this round-up. It’s called 15, and you can pretty much take it from there. The trouble is, like all Rilo Kiley songs with slightly unpalettable lyrics, it’s incredibly good. It makes me worry about what Jenny Lewis could convince me of if she sang it well enough, because the “only, only, only fifteen” refrain here is so sweetly intoned that you find yourself thinking “Yeah, how could he have known?” Next up: The Manslaughter Blues.

There’s masses to love about Blacklight, and somehow its biggest appeal is that much of it doesn’t sound like Rilo Kiley. More like a Rilo Kiley inflection on a few of their favourite bands. I’m not well-listened enough to name any, but Give A Little Love sounds like nothing else on this or any other of their albums. And Silver Lining has a soulfulness that is at once theirs and also teasingly someone else’s.

The Go! Team – Proof of Youth: Now that I’ve given it a fighting chance, their second album has stopped irritating me and switched to just being slightly weak and noxious and flat, like week-old coke. The title’s unfortunate – they sound more tired and strained than on Thunder, and there’s just less life in the output. This album’s Bottle Rocket is clearly the jubilant Wrath of Marcie, and Universal Speech has the same electrified schoolyard chant feel of The Power Is On. But neither really recapture the velocity or glee of the first album for me. Grip Like A Vice and Flashlight Fight are just trash; dour self-aggrandising recited with no hint of irony or fun.

Architecture in Helsinki – Places Like This: I haven’t listened to an album on such a relentless repeat since Come On Feel The Illinoise. This has nothing to do with that, and it’s a terrible point of comparison, but I was attempting to illustrate the point that this is awesome. It’s what happens when the geeky indie kids try to be cool, when a huge band forget to bench anyone, and a group with more styles than songs forget to pick one. And like Lister’s triple fried-egg butty with chilli sauce and chutney, the wrongness of the ingredients is what makes it so right.

Like It Or Not explodes into what feels suspiciously like ska, Feather in a Baseball Cap’s descending synth-beep intro is almost seek, and Hold Music is outright sexy. These are (mostly) the same guys who did the chocolate-sweet What’s In Store and the kitten-soft Like A Call, but something’s happened to them. But if you’ve never subconsciously wanted the sweet-voiced girl from Architecture in Helsinki to do a song that calls for her to sing “Give it to me, baby give it to me,” a lot, you’re a better or less imaginative man than I.

The shift does feel like the logical combination of the opposite directions Frenchy I’m Faking and Do The Whirlwind hinted at, and in fact Heart It Races pulls a strand directly from the latter and writes a new song around it. That would be a problem if it wasn’t so much better: electric with force, bristling with hooks and almost offensively quirky. I’ve heard people say the exact opposite, and I just can’t work out what these people are doing with their ears. It doesn’t seem like this sound could possibly fail to tingle the brain if it gets there.

They can’t even manage every album’s Obligatory Three Boring Tracks, screwing it up each time by adding a ridiculous twist like the “Ay yah yah, woo woo!” chant toward the end of Lazy (Lazy), and livening it up irreparably.

Their demented frontman has always let his vocal affectations get the better of him at their songs’ most energetic twists, but here it’s easier to look at it the other way around: in Places’ quietest moments, he sometimes slips back into what could almost pass for a normal human voice. By the spastic climax of album highlight Debbie, the sounds he’s making seem like they wouldn’t fit through a mouth. It irritated me at first, but now I can’t see why I ever liked them without it. Getting carried away and sounding silly is what Architecture in Helsinki is.

Oh, scores? B, C, A; 8, 5, 9.

We’re Looking For Someone To Make A Tactical Breach Wizards Trailer

Update: the position’s been filled, thanks everyone!

We’re looking for someone to make a roughly 2 minute trailer of Tactical Breach Wizards, preferably by the 9th of May.

We have a new chapter of the game to show off, but we don’t want to do our usual in-depth talkthroughs because it would start to get spoilery.

The game has pause, slowmo, level select and camera controls built in, and we’ll also provide you with the Unity project if you’re able to make use of that.

We have a composer and some tracks already in, you’d work with them directly to figure out the music needs.

Our game is a fairly straight-faced parody of a modern military action thriller, borrowing superficial tropes and critiquing or inverting some of the deeper ones. You can get a sense of it from our last talkthrough vid:

And you can get a sense of our sense of humour from the Gunpoint and Heat Signature trailers:

War Were Declared

So the Demoman and Solider are getting three unlockables each next week, and there’s a seventh weapon that will go to whoever kills the other one more. They racked up 2.7 million kills of each other in the first sixteen hours of this competition, and currently the Soldier’s in the lead. I was trying to remember what I hoped the Demoman and Soldier unlockables might be, a year and a half ago, so I dug it out of the archive.

Both my suggestions for replacement melee weapons encourage and reward mid-air whacking after propelling yourself at the enemy with your explosives. I strongly suspect this seventh unlockable weapon, the one that could go to either class, is a melee weapon that critical-hits if used during or shortly after a rocket- or sticky-jump: it’s niche enough not to give the class it goes to a large advantage, and it’s one of the few areas of common ground between them.

My only suggestion for the Grenade Launcher at the time was its complete and permanent removal. I still hate it, but if I had to take a guess at a viable replacement, it’d be kind of cool to have one whose charges stuck to players and walls, detonating after a short delay regardless of enemy contact. Less useful for direct hits, but more useful for injuring pursuers while retreating. Here’s the others:

Wee Creepers: sticky-bombs that roll slowly towards nearby enemies, faster the closer they are. If an enemy’s close enough, they’ll follow him at Demoman walking-speed (very slightly slower than most classes). He can only lay four at a time, and they stop for a while if shot.

Why? Almost every situation involving these conjours an entertaining mental image.

Why not? This would allow players on your own team to screw you over by luring stickies towards you. It’s hard to say how much of a problem that would be, because to an extent it would require the enemy Demoman’s co-operation. If you’re close enough to them to lead them at walking speed, he’s probably just going to blow you up straight away.

The Good Stuff: alternate whiskey bottle which, if not yet smashed, temporarily adds 50 health when doing the drinking taunt – even if it takes him above his usual maximum. The boost decays over fifteen seconds, during which time the Demoman is also immune to fall-damage. The bottle always crits while the Demoman has been airbourne for more than a second.

Why? Bracing yourself for a good sticky-jump, whacking people at the end of it.

Why not… that swingy dynamite he had in the first trailer! I’m only guessing, but I would think that made it too easy to take out an Engy, all his kit and everyone defending him without actually entering line-of-sight. The swinging charge-up animation was interesting, though – I wonder if you had to stay still during that.

Last Ditch Digger: broken trench-shovel whose damage and attack-rate are proportional to the amount of health the Soldier has lost.

Why? Apart from encouraging unlikely comebacks, it makes rocket-jumping spade-attacks more effective. And fun things should always be made more effective.

Imploder: rocket launcher whose blasts suck people in rather than knocking them away. The actual damage radius is smaller than a standard rocket, but the ‘suck’ radius is larger than either.

Why? Lets the Soldier cluster large groups of people into a tight space for maximum damage, but sacrifices his ability to juggle enemies, keep them at bay or rocket-jump – though some wall-climbing and ceiling-sucking is doable by firing the rockets above you.

Skeet Shooter: shotgun which only and always crits on airbourne opponents. Can be drawn, fired and holstered by pressing Right Mouse, whichever weapon the Soldier is currently holding.

Why? If you manage that, you deserve a crit.

Why not… grenades! Hey, good idea! It looks like Valve completely forgot to put these in TF2, despite how fun it is to get killed by speculatively flung munitions bouncing arbitrarily around corners by trigger-spamming morons! Thank God we reminded them!

Why not… heat-seeking rockets! Because aiming highly explosive projectiles to hit within a few meters of a target is still too hard! Not only should the modicum of skill required to play a Soldier successfully be removed, but it should be removed by an unlockable weapon that only the most skillful players will earn. Perfect!

Why not… a rocket-launcher that’s more powerful but has to be reloaded more often? Reloading all the damn time is the least fun part about playing as a Soldier, and dying in one hit is the least fun part about fighting one. Let’s not exacerbate either.

The rest of that post was here. War Were Declared is from, apologies for shakeycam, this.

Wanking ‘Not Inappropriate’ To Government Commerce

The British Office of Government Commerce have finally discovered what webcomic author Ryan North has long known: if you put the letters OGC on their side, it looks a bit like a seated man clutching his own erect penis. Unfortunately it cost them £14,000 to commission the logo which edified the resemblance, and remarkably they’re not scrapping it. The Telegraph story on the matter doesn’t name the spokesperson defending it, but he’s my new favourite nameless spokesperson:

“On consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC – and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”

Or, a penis.

Waa?

I don’t recall where I was when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, but I think I’ll always remember that I was sitting right here in the office when Nintendo renamed the Revolution.