TOM FRANCIS
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Vote Tom Francis In The Games Media Awards

Holy shit, apparently I’m a finalist in the Games Media Award for Best Specialist Games Writer – Print. The winner’s decided solely by votes, and “Voting is open to all MCV readers”, so just by reading that sentence I quoted from MCV, you qualify. If you want to be extra-qualified, go and read www.mcvuk.com for a sec, then vote (gma@intentmedia.com).

You can also vote for PC Gamer for Best Games Magazine, and a bunch of PC Gamer contributors who apparently call themselves Rock Paper Shotgun these days, for Best Games Website. In fact, you could vote for the whole of Team Awesome, as we’re called when we fight crime together on the streets of Bath at night.

If you actually want to read something I wrote for PC Gamer, I reported on those virtual assassins, kept a war diary, failed monumentally at Football Manager, and investigated the effectiveness of awkward flirting in MMORPGs. The SWAT 4 movie script I wrote here was also used in the mag.

The other finalists in my category are Rick Porter, who has long hair and one of those not-quite-a-moustache moustaches, Joel Snape who must work right next to me but I can’t remember which one he is, Jon Blyth, who once killed a seventy-two year-old man right in front of me for no reason, Ben Talbot who I don’t know at all, and Alex Wiltshire, who is lovely but works anonymously for the Edge collective, so it’s impossible to actually know what he wrote. Except when you’re both reviewing the same game and he WILDLY OVER-RATES IT and you don’t.

Also, they all just e-mailed me to say they think you’re a jive sucker. They told me not to tell you they said that, but I thought you should know.

Vortessence Hangover

Searching for something else entirely on Flickr threw this up.

Void Bastards Vs Heat Signature: A Completely Objective Analysis

Note: this was written around the time Void Bastards was released, but languished in my Drafts for years because I’d planned to make it longer. What’s there all still makes sense to me though, so I’m just gonna make it about the 3 things I did cover and throw it out there:

Void Bastards is a roguelike first-person shooter about boarding randomly generated spaceships. I designed a top-down roguelike about boarding randomly generated spaceships, so it’s interesting to see how the two games tackled the same issues differently, and how well their solutions worked out! I picked three: Continued

Villainy Like It Oughta Be

That is a Ben And Jerry’s joke.

I’m playing City Of Villains more than anything else lately, and I hate it. Well, no, I just resent it a lot. I don’t know why my fellow Heroes-lovers rate it so highly. After Heroes, I thought Cryptic were prepared to do brave, liberal things to make sure their games captured their themes gloriously. Then when their next theme was, excitingly, the polar opposite of their first, they refused to change anything at all. They just did a search-and-replace operation on the word ‘hero’ for ‘villain’ and charged full-game price for it. It’s not that I didn’t love Heroes, it’s that I still love Heroes, and I can still play it, so what the hell is the point of this new thing?

I’m talking in degrees, of course – there are some small token additions in Villains, there’s one new class, one half-new class and three recycled classes. But it’s not nearly enough, and when Heroes’ instanced missions were already absurdly repetitive, to give you utterly indistinguishable ones in Villains – usually against the exact same villain groups you were fighting in CoH – is criminal. But I’m not here to bitch, I want to explain why this is so disappointing by describing what would have been great.

Classes

The new class in Villains is the Mastermind, who has minions to do his dirty work. Ace. I’m not playing as a Mastermind, though, because the power sets are absurdly limited. In their bizarre attempt to cram the whole rationale of villainy into a single class, they’ve had to make your primary weapon and your minion type part of one power set. In other words, if you want ninjas, you have to use a bow. What the hell? Couldn’t it at least be a ninja-y weapon, like throwing stars? Anyway, clearly all classes should have minions of some type, and clearly you should be able to choose your weapon separately from your minion type, and clearly you should be able to customise your minions’ appearence with the costume editor. In fact, let’s separate minions from class completely – you choose a primary power set similar to the existing ones, then your next choice is what type of minions to have, and all classes can have any type. Here’s what the options would be:

Mob: A steadily increasing gang of lackeys, dumb cannon fodder but nevertheless an intimidating presence. They don’t increase in power by as much as you per level. Each new power is a new lackey, and each lackey has somewhat different abilities, but not necessarily better ones than the last. If one dies, you can res him by activating that ‘power’, but it has a longish recharge time. By max level you could have nine of them. Each time you get one, you get to design his appearence. The default is the same as the last lackey, so you can just make few or no alterations if you like.

Posse: Right from the start, you’ve got three loyal servants. They’re weak to begin with, but every new power is an upgrade to all of them, giving them all a new ability or resistance. You never get more than three, and their abilities are always identical to one another. You design their appearence, but it’s a uniform for all three. You can res one at a time, but the power has a long recharge time.

Henchmen: You have two bodyguards, potentially with different abilities and appearence. Each new power you get is an upgrade to one or the other, alternatingly.

Lieutenant: You just have one trusted right-hand man, but he’s every bit as powerful as you. You even choose a class for him from the same options you had, so he can be designed to compliment your own abilities. Each new power is just a new power in that set.

Twin: You’re one of a pair, so your associate is identical to you in appearence and abilities. Each new power you get for yourself, he gets too. The actual ‘Twin’ powers are ways to help each other out: the ability to resurrect him, for him to resurrect you, synchronised attacks that do more damage than the sum of their parts, linked health, and eventually the ability to switch which one of the two you control. These make up for the fact that, unlike a lieutenant, your twin’s powers don’t compliment your own.

Missions

Again, they had one nice idea and didn’t use it much. Getting missions from the newspaper – carrying out personal vendettas, responding to false stories about yourself, building your rep as a bad guy – is all great. But so futile since none of these missions have any continuity, and the thing they build toward – a bank robbery – is the same each time. So you end up doing Contact missions most of the time, just like Heroes.

Paper missions should be the only ones. You’re not working for anyone, you’re a super-villain, not a grunt. The ability to rob a bank should stay, but you should – and I know this is going to sound a little extreme – get some money for it. As it is, you get a ‘clue’ saying “I scored half a million from that job – not bad for a days work!” No you didn’t. There is no money in Villains. There’s a currency called Infamy, of which you received a tiny amount, but the rest is all in your head.

You should have actual money. Infamy is an equivalent of Heroes’ Influence, which made sense because heroes don’t work for money. Villains do. I should be getting money, especially if I steal a load from a bank. I should also be able to mug innocents by hitting them a few times (I understand if I’m not allowed to properly kill them – it’s a kid-friendly game). Beating up heroes too low level to give me XP should get me money, too. I should want to beat the hell out of more or less everyone I see.

The instances themselves only really need two improvements: a logical random level generator and no missions against villains. At all. Currently ninety percent of all the missions I’ve done have been against villains – many of them against the very villain faction I work for. Which doesn’t feel like betrayal, since most of them attack me on sight in the streets anyway, even on my way back to their boss to be trained to the next level. Idiotic.

Missions against heroes should be a case of beating up cops to get to something to steal it, fending off small groups of powerful (NPC) heroes who enter the instance to stop you, or beating up innocent people to make a scene, baiting a specific hero to come out and be ambushed. Villainous things. Defeating the evil snakes because someone asked me to is a god damn service to society, not a nefarious caper.

That’s why it disappoints me. The reason I’m playing it anyway is that the Always Black forum has a supergroup, and I was never really in one of those for Heroes. And it’s fun, in so far as it resembles Heroes.

Video Tutorial: Make A Game With No Experience

I’m doing a series of video tutorials to show you how to make your first game, using the free version of Game Maker: Studio. I’m doing about 1-2 hours a week, aimed at absolute beginners with no experience with writing code. I’m not a good programmer myself, so we keep things as simple, quick and easy as possible, cutting all sorts of corners that would make real programmers who work in teams cringe. But, that’s basically how I made Gunpoint, and that worked well enough, so here goes!

At time of posting the first week of episodes is up – three parts, totalling about an hour and a half. I’m also giving people leeway to experiment with what they’ve learnt, and if they like, they can send in what they’ve created and I can see which bits might fit into the project.

Veronica Mars

I’ve been meaning to write properly about why Veronica Mars is so awesome at some point before it kicks off again on the third of October, but for now I’m just messing around with clips. This is my first embed, so wish me luck. It’s one of my favourite moments from the second series:

Vapour Trail Experiments

It’s Sunday, so I’m allowed to work on things that aren’t important. This started as a test for an idea I have of how to create a ‘wake’ that expands behind you, something I ultimately want to use to cut through some layers of cloud as you fly. But I accidentally made a cooler version of the existing contrail, so I tried randomly colouring it, and here we are.

Not sure what to do with it from here. I like everything about it except the end, it has what I call ‘fat tail’ problem: no matter how gently I tell the alpha to fade out, the final, big chunk of vapour always looks like it ends rather suddenly, like your ship just has this big fat tail following it.

I like the idea that breacher ships of different factions would have different contrail colours, though. And I think engine upgrades will probably affect this too.

Here are a million shots: Continued

Valve Steal Third And Fourth James Weapon Ideas

Not really, of course: the newly announced Wrangler is a more intricate beast than my Laser Pointer or Shield Spanner suggestions. It sounds ridiculous: not only do you get to direct your Sentry’s fire, but it’s also nigh-impervious to harm and twice as powerful. But of course, if you’re using the Wrangler, you’re not using your Wrench. So your Sentry isn’t getting healed, and it has to shut down for three seconds if you whip out your spanner.

I won’t pretend to know how this will play out, but I actually think this is how Sentries should always have been. There should be no auto mode. Having the AI spot and shoot human players robs the Engy of the satisfaction of doing it himself, and the victim the knowledge that they were caught out by a real opponent. Instead, a computer has all the fun, and the players it kills don’t learn much: the computer simply out-damaged them. Most of the time I die to a Sentry, my only other option was to hang back and do nothing.

So I’m glad the Wrangler sounds crazy powerful, because I’d like everyone to use it, all the time. I’d rather have a tougher but fallible opponent, and one that doesn’t rapidly self-heal, than the alternative.

I’m taking some time off at the moment (which will hopefully translate to some progress with Private Dick), but Jaz and the guys have been running an amazingly good days-long liveblog of every snippet of information that’s come out about the Engineer update.

Valve Steal Sixth James Weapon Idea, Sell It

You can now buy stuff for real money in Team Fortress 2. First thoughts:

• The world has ended. No further world can be built.
• Oh wait, you can still get everything for free.
• This is fine, so long as they don’t make the free route slower.
• Hey, they made the free route slower!
• Man, now they won’t even want to make a drop system that doesn’t suck – one that lets me work towards what I want, or ever gives me a hat.
• I’m glad crafting the new stuff is pretty easy, though.
• Wait a minute: finding a load of stuff I don’t want, plus easy crafting and trading, wavy-equals working towards what I want?
• Yes – very, very slowly, and with no hope of getting a hat.

So it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been. But I think it’s been mishandled: if the point really is to channel money to community contributors, only sell community items. Add your own when players demand it. And if you don’t want to make non-purchasers feel left out, launch with a few Valve-made weapons unlockable with achievements, and make them the focus.

Because that’s how I feel, as someone who doesn’t want to burn through a lot of cash on this. TF2 isn’t a game for me anymore – the only people who get to play it all are the ones prepared to pay. It’s nice that there’s a lot to unlock, but in practise, even the much lower crafting requirements are way too high for someone like me. It takes seven items I don’t want to make one that I do, and that’s more than I find in a month.

Even after months of play, I won’t have the +25 health that Scouts who pay do. The chances of finding all the items required for a set bonus, particularly the hat, are negligible.

I do really like the Black Box, though – a vampiric rocket launcher with a smaller clip. It limits your aggressive capacity, but suits the calculating way I play Soldier: safe distance, medkit near, Equaliser ready, Buff Banner steadily charging.

The item that’s closest to one of my suggestions, the knife that rapidly steals your victim’s identity, is a total bust. The ability itself is a satisfyingly stylish flourish, but they’ve paired it with a wildly disproportionate drawback: the inability to disguise at will.

That’s such a massive, constant pain in the arse for an advantage that’s really only useful when facing exactly two people, both of whom are looking the wrong way, and even then only if the second of them looks round less than a second but more than half a second after your kill. And doesn’t spy check.

They should have actually stolen my idea, rather than independently coming up with their own that has just enough in common for me to make false accusations about it on my blog. My knife had some trivial drawback that would rarely hinder anyone – it’d sell even better.

Valve Steal Most Of Tom’s Evening

Engineer night was horrific. I haven’t seen this many stalemates since Hydro. Everyone’s desperate for the new unlocks, but the achievements that unlock them either require the unlocks, or are based around Engineering in the context of a normal game. Stuff like supporting a Heavy while he mows people down. When your friends and opponents are all just static installations of angry metal gun, there’s not a lot of scope for that.

For the lucky few who got them, the new unlocks looked amazing. You can Wrangle a Gunslung Combat Sentry, so your damage boost negates its reduced damage output, your shield negates its level 1 hitpoints, and your beam gives it seemingly infinite range. It’s as ridiculous as that collection of words.

In the end, none of the individual unlocks matched the specs of any of my suggestions closely enough to justify my mock accusations of plagiarism. But the set of abilities these give you – deploy small sentries quickly, move them, shield instead of repair, and direct their fire manually – is just what I wanted from mine. If I ever actually earn the damn things, I’ll be extremely happy.

Valve Steal Fifth James Weapon Idea

Valve Decided Against The Overhealer

Damn, I was in the middle of composing an eloquent post that phrased with restraint and reason why I found it hard to imagine this having a positive net effect on the game. Now it’s not going to look like I’m prescient.

Valve Completely Out Of Weapon Ideas, Beg For Help

In a thinly disguised plea for inspiration, Robin Walker’s new post over at the official TF2 blog I carefully avoided mentioning here so you don’t leave and never come back sets out the criteria for a good unlockable weapon for the Heavy – whose achievement/weapon pack is next, by the way. We are then encouraged to put forward our own ideas, although since the official TF2 blog doesn’t actually allow comments, you’re pretty much stuck with James, 1Fort and the Steam forums to vent those.

Update: Heavy to get “balancing additions” as well as his unlockables, suggests a new post by Jakob Jungles at the TF2 blog. Also, alternative idea added below.

I summarise the rules here because Robin phrases them as an onslaught of questions, and on first reading I wasn’t always sure if “Yes!” or “N- no?” was the right answer. Also, the Steam thread on this misquotes one of the rules.

• The goal is to “Make the Heavy more viable when he has no Medic to pair with.”
• Don’t make him more effective when he does.
• Don’t change the role so that it encroaches on another class.
• Don’t make it hard to tell what’s going on when you use it or it’s used on you.
• Things that take a lot of models and sounds to implement are generally bad.
• Things that are easy to use but hard to perfect are generally good.
• Things that are better for some situations but worse for others are generally good.
• Things that make the player think differently a lot of the time are good.
• Things that have wide-ranging knock-on effects on other elements of the game are generally good.

And they only want one from you. I suspect they have several goals for the class, and try to come up with one unlockable to achieve each.

Obviously, the difficulty a Medicless Heavy has relative to a Medicked one is a lack of healing. He’s most effective against a group of opponents at close range, where the damage he can’t avoid wears him down quickly. So the simplest suggestions revolve around some form of health regen, health-stealing or, in one case, a really big sandwich to replace the shotgun. But I think any self-heal steps on the Medic’s toes: restoring hitpoints should be exclusively his domain. And, sandwich excluded, most of these don’t gel well with his personality or concept.

Like everyone asked to come up with one idea, I have two. I’d like a Minigun that sacrifices its crit chance for an absorb chance: your crit probability while firing instead becomes the chance that the next shot that hits you will trigger a second of Uber-like invulnerability. Only while firing. For those who don’t know, your crit chance is a factor of how much damage you’ve done in the last twenty seconds: 5% if you’ve done none, 20% if you’ve done over 800.

The essence of the Heavy, for me, is that “GRAAAHAAHAAAHAAAAA!” moment, when you’re just… killing… everything… This intends to prolong it, reward it and improve survivability. For the Heavy, the primary use of crits is to own at range: you already own close-up. So this unlock is great for close-range work like most parts of 2Fort, which is also where you take the most damage, but hurts your flexibility in big open areas like most parts of Dustbowl.

As for not letting it combine with a Medic’s healing, a doctor’s healing beam would visibly falter once the Heavy starts firing, and healing is suspended until he stops. But it doesn’t break the beam, and the Medic still builds Uber while it’s active. I don’t believe in these suggestions where the Medic is punished or discouraged from trying to help the Heavy: the rule is to stop the pair becoming overpowered, not to file for divorce.

By my count, this has a decent stab at the goal, stays within the three constraints (it’s not reliable enough to be used for any of the things the Medic’s Uber is good for), but doesn’t fare well in three of the five bonus considerations. Its main strengths are that its cheap, simple and easy to understand: the uber-sheen is already in there, and everyone knows what it means. So that’s what I’d be suggesting if I was sensible.

But of course, what I really want is expensive to implement, difficult to understand and stupid. It’s a Quick-Release Bandolier. I guess it would be an unlock for the Fists slot, so you’d switch to Fists, hit alt-fire and you’d drop everything: Sasha, shotgun, ammo. In return, you can run at the speed of a Demoman.

It’d solve a recurring problem I have as a solo Heavy: I can often accurately guess how long I’ve got before I’ll be dead, but I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to escape. I’m at the whim and determination of whomsoever chooses to pursue. Obviously messing with the Heavy’s speed is a big deal, but since he can’t do anything but punch until he gets his weapons back, it doesn’t really change his role. He can only get Sasha and co back by fetching them from where he dropped them, or returning to a storage locker.

The point, of course, is only partly tactical: there’s also the humour value of pummeling a Heavy so hard that he eventually drops his gun, turns tail and runs. An exaggerated jogging animation for a ‘naked’ Heavy would communicate the fact that he’s vulnerable and fleeing, but would of course be a silly amount of work for such a ridiculous concept. But it would be a shame, at the suggestions stage, to limit ourselves to things that are actually a good idea.

Moar: I have an alternative version of this idea that solves a few of the conceptual problems I have with the Bandolier (primarily, why do I need an unlock to be able to drop my gun?), but is a bit more far-reaching.

It’s an unlockable minigun that’s really a big cluster of shotguns taped together. It fires about two blasts a second, the same maximum damage per second as Sasha, but you hit everything in its cone of fire with every shot. Kind of a rapid BOOMBOOMBOOM rather than constant DAKADAKADAKA. The spread makes it even less effective than Sasha at medium-long range.

It’s much the same shape as Sasha, but when it’s out of ammo, it’s light enough to hold by the barrel and use as a club (left mouse) or throw at your enemy (right mouse). The Heavy automatically switches to club/throw mode when you run out of shells. It’s slow to swing, naturally, but does a hefty amount of damage: 90 points or so. When thrown, it goes about as far as a Sticky fired parallel to the ground, and does about half that.

Polite note idea courtesy of commenter SlowShootinPete

It crackles with electricity while it’s lying on the ground, and mildly zaps anyone running over it. As with the Bandolier idea, you run at the speed of a Demoman once you’ve chucked your gun, and you can either grab it from the ground where you left it, or get a new one from a Supply Closet – whereupon your old one vanishes. Because it uses shotgun shells and is only throwable when you’re out of them, you’re always left with just your fists after you’ve tossed it.

Part of the idea is to encourage the Heavy to just keep blasting until he runs dry – because that gives him a weapon and an escape method, rather than just leaving him screwed. That’s always fun for the Heavy and dramatic for his enemies, and the running-dry CLICKCLICKCLICK is invariably entertaining. When followed by having the big fellow simply chuck his firearm at you, turn tail and run, even more so.

Update On Heat Signature Applications

Just a quick update to say I am still going through the Heat Signature applications. Sorry it’s taking a while – if you didn’t see on Twitter, I got 81 applications for the artist position and 232 for composer. So I am endlessly listening to and re-listening to samples, rigging up makeshift dynamic music systems in-game to see what kind of things work, burying myself in reams of notes, and making impossible choices. Pretty soon I should be able to let applicants know individually where we’re at, and a while after that I’ll be able to announce a decision. The standard of submissions is amazing – the final game is going to be a thing of beauty.

Unity’s Trap

Update: Unity have since walked back the worst part of this threat: those of us using older versions won’t be subject to the new terms unless we upgrade. As far as I understand, there aren’t new terms that would prevent them from pulling this same trick in future, but the fact that the outcry turned them around to this extent is a big relief for me. It suggests we at least have time to finish our current game, and do any essential patching, before they get desperate enough to try something like this again.

Unless there’s a legal guarantee of being able to stick with the terms that came with the version of Unity you use, though, this attempt at a scumbag pressure tactic leaves Unity a very risky prospect for future projects.

Original post:

Last week, Unity announced that they will soon start charging developers $0.20 each time their games are installed, past certain (high) thresholds. This came as a surprise to me and a few thousand other developers who chose Unity, invested in it, and paid for it in large part because they told us they wouldn’t take any of our revenue.

The reaction has been huge, but it’s not clear yet if Unity will make it right. The hasty, vague, conflicting clarifications they’ve offered all seemed aimed at reassuring people “No no, we’re not gonna steal much of your money, because you won’t be successful. Our plan is to steal that guy’s money.”

That’s not my issue, so I just wanna spell out exactly what my issue is. Continued