TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Gentlemen

When it looked like Valve’s next Team Fortress 2 update would be the Spy’s unlockable weapons back in September last year, I said the prospect filled me with dread. Now that they’ve ambushed us with info on two of his new tools, and the whole thing is much more imminent that anyone realised, I am filled with a dark and terrible glee.

I’m not usually a fan of feigning death in multiplayer games, except as an entertaining way to fuck with ragdoll physics in Unreal Tournament 3. But the Dead Ringer dodges the two problems I usually have with fake-outs like this: 1) Trying to time your phony death to convincingly coincide with an enemy shot, which is fiddly at best and impossible with any degree of lag, and b) Having to shoot every damn corpse to make sure it’s not just pining for the fjords.

Here, the timing is automatic: when you’re holding it (presumably) the first hit you take appears to have killed you. And corpses are never going to get up: the uncertainty is just “Should he really have gone down that easily? Is he cloaked somewhere around here now?” It still might lead to a tedious amount of speculative firing, but we’ll see.

The Cloak and Dagger is more exciting to me. Being able to remain invisible indefinitely, staying still to recharge, suits my style: I’ve tired of sprinting to the front line and sap-spamming sentries or hoping I slip through a crossfire by sheer luck. My most interesting lives as a Spy have involved taking impractically long routes around and stalking the enemy team from deep within their base, seeing how long I can prey on them uncaught rather than how rapidly I can score. Currently this is only viable on certain maps, like Well, that have high alternative routes and gloomy corners to recharge in. I’m hoping Cloak and Dagger will let me be this much of a dick in every match.

It’s safe to assume that a) the Sniper update is still coming at the same time, b) these two are mutually exclusive alternatives to the conventional Cloak, and c) the Dead Ringer provides some immunity to being revealed by stray shots, or it might not be terribly useful.

Generating Locks And Keys In Heat Signature’s Ships

My summary of where we are after the last ship-generation post would be:

• The Drunk Snake is probably the best algorithm so far, for generating the amount of branching and length of critical path we want while looking fairly pleasing.
• But! There’s a lot of room for improvement.
• But! Improvement is getting harder: we don’t have a huge amount of control with these types of algorithms, so we can’t fine-tune things precisely without a big rewrite.
• And! We don’t know enough about our requirements to get really fussy yet – maybe some things that seem bad now will be good when we have certain security devices or guard patrols in.

Continued

GDC Talk: How To Explain Your Game To An Asshole

I never went to the Game Developer’s Conference as a journalist, but this year I took a week off and flew out to San Francisco on my own dollar to attend it as a developer. I was mainly there to demo Gunpoint for the expo crowds at the IGF Finalists Pavilion, but I was also invited to give a five-minute talk as part of the closing talk of the Independent Games Summit: the Indie Soapbox Session. Continued

GDC Talk: How Reviewing Games For Nine Years Helped In Designing Gunpoint

My talk from GDC Europe is now online for free! It has slides so I don’t think I can embed it – I’ll just say the title again and you can click that.

How Reviewing Games For Nine Years Helped In Designing Gunpoint

Gamespot Finally Do The Logical Thing

And start marking games out of nineteen. Nineteen.

The scale still goes up to 10.0, the stupidest number in the world, but no game is permitted to score less than 1.0. Reviewers can still score to one decimal point, but only if they want to give it .5. And if they do, it can’t be a 0.5.

One of the many, many things I love about this announcement is editor Jeff’s thinly veiled astonishment and disgust at the surreal new system. “While I’ll personally miss the ability to give games a 6.8, I look forward to eliminating quibbles about the quality differences between games that are only a tenth of a point apart.”

I agree. I don’t know how we ever worked out which was better out of 7.9 and 8.0. It was baffling. And they were out of ten? What is this ‘ten’?

“You’re busy. You don’t have time to stare at one game that got a 5.2 and another that got a 5.3 and puzzle out what the big difference is.”

It was the ULTIMATE MYSTERY. There was no way of knowing. Nothing short of looking at the score could get you that information.

“We’ve been working on this update for quite some time now…” Here, this is your first tip-off that your planned scoring system is insane. If a way of rating something takes “some time” to work on, that is because it is not in fact mathematics but rather some sort of beat poetry with numbers.

In case I haven’t made this clear yet, I loathe everyone’s scoring system except ours and those identical to ours. This is because I am numerate.

7.5/10 is a decimal atop a fraction and never made a lick of sense, but this is a country mile further from Sanesville Tennessee. If Gamespot give something 7.5 now, that’s not 7.5 out of 10. It doesn’t translate to 75%. This, honest-to-god, is the equation you now have to put Gamespot scores through: (G – 1) * 10 / 9 = S, where G is the Gamespot score and S is any kind of rational system.

I once came across a website that marked out of twenty, but allowed quarter-points. They come close – close – to being as dumb as this, but it’s that fatal 1.0 minimum that just can’t be beat. This is, officially, the stupidest scoring system on the internet. And I say that as a man who gave a film “Bat out of bat.”

Oh wait, it’s cool. Now they’ve got a medal for “Xtreme Baditude.”

I leave you with a Daily Show-style moment of zen that is at once beyond, beneath and beside parody.

“With fewer scores to choose from, our review team will be able to speak more definitively about games. By eliminating scores like 7.9, we’re no longer able to say “this game is almost great, but not quite. Now our choices will be to say “yes, this is a great game” and give it an 8.0, or say “this game is good, but not great” and go with a 7.5.”

Score: (1.0 – 1) * 10 / 9

Games Vs Story 2

I was away in London at the weekend, with my laptop but no internet, so I took a break from coding to think about how story might work in my next game. Continued

Games Successfully Developed At Stugan 2016 So Far

I’m in a cabin in the woods in Sweden for seven weeks, with 20ish other game developers, all working on our own games. This is Stugan. None of us have finished yet, but we have successfully developed the following non-digital games along the way, and I release them to you now: Continued

Games I Plan To Make #1: The Randomised Strategy Game

Hey Tom, why are you always cooking noisily when you make videos? Because I am finishing my videogame, so vidbloggiovlogging kinda has to cram into any downtime I get. Hope the noise isn’t too annoying.

Games I Don’t Plan To Make: Relativity Paramedic

I forgot part of the plan for this: your near-lightspeed space ambulance would also be indestructible and have perfect inertial dampening. So to decelerate, you just try to crash into all the debris you were trying to avoid as you picked up speed. So it’d go:

• Accelerate away from planet – dodge debris!
• When you’ve gone far enough fast enough, decelerate – hit debris!
• Turn around.
• Accelerate towards planet – dodge debris!
• Crash into planet!

Game Of Thrones, The Shadow Line, The Killing, Running Wilde

Chris’s blog is reminding me I haven’t talked about what’s on in ages. Here’s what I’m watching and why. Continued

Game Idea: Slumber

The theme for this weekend’s game-making competition is evolution. As usual, I’m gonna stick to working on Gunpoint but write up the idea I’d do if I had time to get distracted.

I think if you’re going to make an evolution game, you’ve got to actually model evolution. God knows gaming misuses that word enough – we need to repay science for every time a game has claimed some magical goo caused our character to ‘rapidly evolve’ into a superhuman. Continued

Game Design: The Non-Stick Plan

Thought I’d take a break from programming talk to get into game design, and how I approach it. I am aware my mug is ridiculous – it’s an old GTA III promo one.

I’m bad at shutting up once I get talking about this stuff, so I’ll also summarise the basic points in this post. Not all of this stuff is in the video and not all of the video is in this – good summary Tom. Continued

Gamasutra Interview

I am interviewed on Gamasutra! Here is a question from that interview!

How did you come up with the concept?

I feel like a lot of games are designed on the assumption that the player is stupid: a tester doesn’t have the intended experience, so I guess we’ve gotta force him to look at that spaceship crash, lock him in the room until the enemies are dead.

I wanted to make a game with the idea that the player might be smarter than me. Let him think of solutions that never occurred to me in hours of playtesting, and give him the tools to be more creative than I was when I designed this level.

I don’t think that testers are being stupid, I think they’re being defiant. And they’re defiant because the game isn’t letting them be creative or smart or funny, it’s trying to make them have a packaged experience.

So the Crosslink gadget, which lets you rewire any of the electrical things in a level, is my way of giving you some of the designer’s power. It’s almost like a level editor: I restrict some things to make sure it’s a challenge to complete, then I let you design how you want the level to work to achieve your objective. You can be clever, efficient, complicated, funny or cruel.

GalCiv2: Still Genius

Galactic Zoom In Heat Signature

Heat Signature’s universe has been infinite since day 2 or 3, but until now you’ve only been able to see a meager 35,000 x 35,000 pixels of it at once. I knew at some point I wanted to let you see an overview of the part of space you’re in, a collection of vast gas clouds that I think is going to be called The Grove. But I wasn’t sure if this would have be a map mode or if we could zoom smoothly from one to the other. I’m still not sure if the latter is viable performance-wise, or even if it’s the right way to go, and the galaxy is ugly at the moment, but for what it’s worth I made it and here it is: (CPU warning, mega-GFY!) Continued