TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Detpacks

Today I added Detpacks to Heat Signature. Here is a Detpack:

Continued

DESPAIR Review

You’re a doctor, and six unconscious patients come in with a mysterious condition. Their Machine of Death predictions all read: TESTS. What do you do?

A great story, and a great premise. All the stories hinge on the machine in some way, but it’s the sign of a great one when it feels like it’d be worth making up the machine just to tell it.

It’s also cool to have a story that’s serious and urgent, rather than chin-strokey. From 800 submissions that must have been tediously similar at times, you can see why a medical drama would stand out to Malki and co.

If I had to criticise, I’d say the thing with the security guard, which I won’t spoil, felt jammed in for character development. Not enough room in a short story to make it feel natural. And like any story that ends on a question, it’d be better if it didn’t.

Neither bothered me much, and I’m expecting this to remain one of my favourites.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

Desktop Tower Defense

A perfect Saturday-morning, still-slightly-drunk game. Like the Warcraft maps, you can only set up defensive structures, and your objective is to stop the influx of enemies from getting to the other side of your territory. They come from both sides at once, but they can neither pass through nor harm your defenses, so you can force them round a little maze to ensure maximum exposure to your turrets before they reach the exit.

This was my first attempt at a maze, in its early stages of upgrading. The choice of turrets – even once it was fully developed – was pretty guileless, but I think the maze layout is fairly efficient. I’d be interested to know what the most efficient one is. You can view the efforts of everyone in the high-score table, but the winners don’t shed much light on the combinatorial mathematics of the situation. They tend to be small mazes with two routes, and their creators presumably exploited the AI deficiency which allows you to fool them in to changing their mind about which route to take by repeatedly selling and re-building a turret that blocks the shorter route. Tricky to do effectively once they pour in en masse, but a less interesting challenge.

If you try it, submit your score afterwards and add it to the Pentadact group so you can see how profoundly you beat me.

Designing Floating Point

My game about swinging through randomly generated spaces has spilled out from a game jam entry, to a four-day game, to a week-long game. This is a series of three video blogs talking about interesting things that happened in its design.

Here’s my previous video showing the game itself.

Update: it actually took five weeks, but now it’s done and out and on Steam and free and half a million people played it! More info on the tag.

Der Uberdoktor

Medic Unlockables announced! Discussed! Condemned? Perhaps!

Incredibly Important Update: The second unlockable weapon for the Medic is called the KritzKrieg, not the Critzcrieg as it’s spelt in the screenshots and, like, every website ever. See the end of this post.

Chris Livingston‘s been inadvertantly sappin’ my TF2 posts from this blog, by posting interesting stuff about the game regularly enough on his own that I invariably end up composing a 500 word comment over there and then feel like I’ve said my piece.

Chris’s blog’s ad banner: too awesome not to use.

But there’s lots to say about the latest torrent of news. The first batch of unlockable items have finally been detailed in full, and those long-leaked Achievements you’ll need to earn to get them are now concrete and specific. If you already know all the juicy details, skip the next three paragraphs – I’m just going to run through them quickly.

About a third of the achievements are easy: they’re things we’ve all done if we’ve played Medic for any length of time, like building an Ubercharge before the gates open during the Setup time. And after achieving a third of them, you’ll be able to switch out your regular Syringe Gun for the Blutsauger – a Syringe Gun that drinks enemy blood to give you 3 health for each hit, but which never scores critical hits.

A further third of the achievements are tough, but worthwhile pursuits. I don’t think I’ve ever used my Ubercharge at the same time as two other Medics, and I probably never will accumulate ten million healing points. Once you have done two thirds of the achievements, though, you get the KritzKrieg: a healing ray that whose Ubercharge gives the patient 100% critical hits instead of invulnerability.

The other third of the achievements are silly things, jokes – some sound like they were made up specifically to fit the name. Consultation, for example, is the award for healing another Medic while he kills five enemies in a single life. There’s one for building up an Ubercharge and not using it, instead attacking the enemies and managing to kill five of them without dying. When you rack up all the Medic-specific acheivements, you can has the Ubersaw: a Bonesaw that gives you 25% Ubercharge every time you hit, but hits 20% slower.

So, there are a lot of awesome ideas in there, but also a lot of obvious concerns. Like:

Once you’ve got the Ubersaw, why would you bother healing chumps anymore?

This doesn’t worry me much. To get the Ubersaw, you need all the achievements. One of them is to heal 10,000,000 health. Others are so hard that you’ll probably end up doing that just in the course of trying to get them. Valve reckon the ten-mill-heal alone is three months of playing nothing but medic, doing nothing but healing. My point is that if you’ve got all these, a) you’ve earned the right to take a break from healing, b) you probably understand the fundamentals of the class by now, and realise that injured people sure appreciate a bit of beam love, and c) I’m just guessing, I don’t know you, but I’m thinking you like healing.

If one Medic Ubers someone, and another Kritzes them, don’t they become an unstoppable killing machine?

I don’t see it. It’s not like when an Uber comes in, currently we all just stand there thinking “Eh, he’s not critting, I’ll probably survive.” We run. An Uber already is an unstoppable lethal force. I don’t know about you, but when my Uber wears off, the only people left alive are the ones I couldn’t get to. To me, Ubers are mainly for breaking otherwise impenetrable nests of Sentries, and crits do exactly the same damage as normal shots against Engy kit. If you’ve got an Uber and a Kritz ready to go, the strategy I’m scared of is sending in an Ubered Heavy with a Kritzed Soldier pumping in fire support.

Doesn’t tying practical benefits to achievements encourage – almost mandate – the worst kind of achievement whoring?

Yeah, but where the achievements are good, that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if a dozen people pile on a private server somewhere and try and game the system instead of playing properly. That’s never going to be the mainstream, and so long as your achievements are for things that class should be doing, the net effect is going to be a bunch of people doing what they should be doing.

Should you really be incentivising bad tactics like Ubering a Scout?

This is a problem. I’m not a fan of panning a change before it goes live, but in this case not much prediction is needed. I want the KritzKrieg, I’m going to be Ubering Scouts. I’m going to be asking friends to go Heavy and punch people while I Uber, instead of actually doing something useful for our team. I’m going to set up a tit-for-tat with another Medic so we can both get our Consultation on instead of tending to the dying around us. I’m guessing a lot of other people will too, but I don’t have to rely on that prediction – this system bribes me to screw it up for my team. Most of these things sound like fun, but that’s probably no consolation to the eleven people who just lost because of me.

I could write whole essays on the genius of TF2’s lighting. I won’t.

The only mitigating factor is that, since one class is getting three new weapons and thirty-six achievements while the others remain unchanged, we’re going to have enough Medics on each team for the first time ever. So losing a few to stupid japes half the time isn’t always going to be crippling. It’s just going to be, you know, stupid.

Unlocks aren’t always going to be tied to achievements, but to me that’s not really the problem. Achievements are fine, but the silly ones shouldn’t be compulsory – they shouldn’t even be incentivised. Call them something else, or hide them from the interface so people don’t know to try them, but get recognition if they stumble upon the idea themselves. Just make the useful, informative, beneficial majority of the achievements the only ones that count toward the useful, desirable, beneficial unlocks.

Still, I’m not half as anxious about this now that the Overhealer‘s out. I’m actually not going to play Medic for long after the update – I want to exploit the inevitable glut of doc-jockeys to a) get some serious Heavy on while the healin’s good – he’s one of my favourite classes but for some reason among my least-played, and the least played among all TF2 players. b) get some serious dressing-up-as-a-Heavy on while the healin’s stupid. I’m assuming the many, many healing-related achievements will outweigh the few Spy-killing ones to manufacture a net gullibility boon that I can exploit for maximum backstabbery. Which brings me to c) be standing right behind them, knife glinting, when they finally activate their first KritzKrieg. I don’t need an unlock to crit, nurse.

P.S. Does anyone know enough German to figure out why they’re spelling it ‘Critzcrieg’ when it’s presumably a pun on ‘Blitzkrieg’? Is there some convention I’m missing? Critzkrieg looks so right.

Incredibly Important Update: After two actual Germans testified in the comments that this spelling made no sense, I could bear the confusion and mental anguish no longer, and e-mailed Robin. He writes back to say that there was a miscommunication with the guy putting together the info that got given to these sites, and the real name is in fact The KritzKrieg.

That precise spelling and capitalisation is pulled directly from the game’s source code a mere 17 minutes ago, so it’s pretty much gospel – and at least 300% righter than everyone else on the internet. This post has been changed. The world has been changed.

Deckard: Blade Runner, Moron

Update: found a new source for the stills that broke and added some clarification from the comments to the intro.

I rewatched Blade Runner recently, because it came up a lot when I asked for visual inspiration for my game. Almost everything about it is still brilliant, except the main character. I’m not sure how I’ve never noticed this before, but Deckard is an idiot.

He’s given all the information he needs on a plate, nothing bad happens unexpectedly, and every lead falls into his lap. He has photo ID of everyone he has to kill, he’s told about their physical strength, he has a gun, they’re all unarmed, and he’s legally allowed to shoot them dead in public. Yet in every case, he lets them get into a hand-to-hand fight with him that he can’t win, and the only way the film can even keep him alive is for his targets to suddenly stop fighting or get killed by someone else.

Here’s a summary of his encounters with all of the replicants he’s apparently the only one good enough to kill. Stills from FilmGrab. Continued

Death Note

Almost anything that features a master criminal fancies itself as a battle of wits between him and the star detective. In practice, all that usually means is the bad guy leaves no evidence, then blunders into an obvious trap by the cop. Death Note actually is a battle of wits, though: the entire series revolves around two people desperate to eliminate each other, but prevented from doing so directly by the complicated mathematics of suspicion, guilt and uncertainty. Continued

Death is Canceled for Space Halloween

For the duration of Space Halloween (27th of Space October to the 1st of Space November), life and death in the Drift will be a little different: Continued

Dear Sir

Ever since it got popular, Spore players have got a little squabbly over getting their stuff into our Sporecast. I have to delete most of the comments I get on my own creations because they’re just people begging.

I’ve also started getting mail from people who’ve found a knock-off of one of their creations in there. Usually I’m happy to add the original and – if I can find it – remove the copy. But somehow one message I got yesterday wasn’t entirely convincing:

“I am requesting that you please remove the mysterious blue box from your sporecast.

This is a blatant theft of my original tardis created 9/5/08 (blue box create date is 9/8/08)… original can be found:”

Deadly Toads Of Death

Planet Diablo’s hands-on with Diablo 3. On the plus side:

On the down side:

Jesus Christ, really? Why even have stats? This, and the fact that you could just buy all possible skills at every level, were the most despiritingly grindy things about World of Warcraft.

Meanwhile, back on the plus side:

Unrelatedly: This popped up last night, but I’m still not seeing a lot of linkage this morning – Eurogamer have reviewed Little Big Planet. Not quite the score I was expecting. Oli has an interesting thing to say about how it compares to Spore towards the end.

Updatedly: I no longer care about the stat stuff. The Skill Runes sound like they’re a much more meaningful way to customise your character.

You can slot skills with runes, the way you slot items with gems. There are just five or so different types, but any can be slotted into any skill, and they genuinely seem to subvert the skill’s effect rather than just altering its stats.

Dead Space: The Right-Hand Side Of A Good Game

In it, you play a man who is unable to see anything to the left of his nose. Dead Space doesn’t make monsters appear behind you as often as Doom 3 did, but it doesn’t have to: the half who happen to be on your left are just as much of a shock. I have no idea how this camera angle was ever supposed to work.

It’s also obsessed with avoiding any kind of fixed HUD, which means you can’t see your health if you’re near a wall, you can’t see your total ammo in combat, you can’t see part of the map because your own head is in the way, and you have to take your gun out to jump – so that the game can use its LCD screen to tell you whether you’re looking at a surface you’re allowed to jump to. Given that none of these are problems you would face in reality, and assuming the point of avoiding a fixed HUD is to enhance immersion, I’m prepared to call this one a failure.

I used to be fiercely anti-HUD, but now that a few developers have done their best to do away with them, I’m a convert. I still think they can be eradicated eventually, but you’ve made your point guys: none of you are anywhere near figuring out how to do it without profoundly irritating the player. Now for God’s sake have some shame and put your HUDs back. Make them skimpy, see-through and revealing, but please put something on.

The reason it’s not the right-hand side of a bad or boring game has a lot to do with the monsters. Their concept is only a whisker away from the Generosaurus Meh – I seem to recall we’ve seen badly mutated humans once or twice before – but their more delerious design takes it to uneasy new lows. One of the most common enemies has what look like a child’s forearms protruding below its main claws.

They’d be even more unsettling if this was, as it always should have been, first-person; but you can see just about enough from your ParrotCam to powerfully want these things away from you.

But it’s not so much their look that makes them interesting or fun to fight, it’s what you can do to them. That’s always what gives enemies their ‘feel’ – we can’t really touch the stuff we fight in games, but we quickly acquire near-total knowledge of how they react to almost anything you can do to them, and that’s the way in which we come to know their consistency, resilience and structure.

In Dead Space the primary form of interaction is dismemberment: cutting, blasting or burning whole limbs off at a time, while your enemy is still alive, and then trying to figure out if it has enough functioning fleshsticks left to drag its way towards you and gnash off your own. There’s even a type of zombie that can never die, so the only consideration is how you want to prune it before you turn and run.

Oh, well here’s where this place went wrong. Gold is enormously conductive.

That makes it satisfying and grisly, and the availability of a remotely guided circular sawblade weapon makes it more so. There’s a very potent and expensive upgrade system that works well, slowmo and a Gravity Gun are thrown in almost as afterthoughts, and stepping out into the vacuum every now and then is a blast of fresh no-air – even if your movement isn’t interestingly different.

The interface and camera angle keep finding new ways to screw you over, but Dead Space scores positively on the simplest metric: I’m glad I bought it, even at a time when Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead are still new.

Day Off

Built twenty Darkenoid saucers to create a laser embargo around the AI while I stole everything they built with a Loyalty Cannon.

Dad And The Egg Controller

After dad died, trying to be useful, we looked through his office. ‘Office’ is underselling it – there was so much equipment that it could equally qualify as a workshop or even a lab. It had the special kind of ordely chaos of a place filled with a thousand incredibly specific things, meticulously organised by type, when you don’t know any of the types.

I opened a tiny drawer. Ah yes, this is where he kept things that were brass, cylindrical, and slightly ridged. I closed the drawer, my task complete.

On his desk, though, I saw something I did recognise. Something I knew it would be my responsibility to adopt, decipher, and operate. I don’t know if he ever gave it a name, so I will now: it’s the Egg Controller. Continued

Cutting Verses Down To Size

Photo by Bleak!

This is an odd one for Ladytron – they’re not usually this atmospheric, and the warbling male vocal is a new one on me. But it has a curious feel to it that I can’t shake, so it’s the one I keep coming back to on the new album. Even though I have no idea what the hell it’s about. Kitten versus rain?

Ladytron are one of those bands that produce a thick, inimitable texture of sound, to the extent that they don’t really need to do anything new. It’s enough just to hear that satisfying stream of smooth booming noise again, with a few different inflections.

I mention I have no idea what Versus is about because the other track I was thinking about posting is one of the few comprehensible Ladytron tracks: Burning Up. I’ve uploaded it anyway to make up for missing yesterday.

Cube In Memoriam

Multiwinia pays tribute.