Portal 2′s beautiful and fun level editor just came out, and already there are 1,787 player-built puzzles for it, and already the simple rating system has lifted some incredible ones to the top. My favourite is Gate: very focused, only a few elements, but genuinely baffling for just the right amount of time. And unlike a few of the other tricky ones I’ve tried, you have to ‘get it’ to solve it, giving rise to the familiar “I’m a genius!” moment.

Let PCG’s Chris Thursten talk you through how to make a needlessly complex level for it.

Top-down, space. You control a vast mothership, bigger than any sun, drifting through a dense system of planets and stars. Hovering your cursor over tiny planets scans them, and after a short delay, reports whether any of your people are captive there or not.

As you pass, the tiny planets launch even tinier capital ships at you, zapping at you with tiny weapons but doing no actual damage. You can destroy these with your giant main laser, but it’ll also obliterate any planet in its path, so you have to be a bit careful.

Once you’ve found a planet with some captives on it, you’ve got to wipe out all the capital ships, then you can right click on it to “Launch Craft”.

A tiny pixel of black leaves the body of your ship and flies towards the planet. When it gets there, cut to:

Top down, globe view. You control a vast black disc of a ship as whole nations drift beneath you, their cities and roads sparkling orange at night. (It’s night because you attacked from the opposite side to the sun.)

The cities launch squadrons of fighter jets against you, which do a little damage to your craft if not destroyed with your main laser. Holding the cursor over a city scans it for captives. When you find some, and you’ve cleared the skies, you can right click on that city to “Launch Craft”.

A tiny pixel of black leaves the body of your ship and flies towards the city. When it gets there, cut to:

Side-on, cityscape view. You control a large black dropship zooming above the rooftops. (The sunset’s orange because that’s the colour of the nearest star.)

Soldiers shoot homing missiles at you from their rooftops, which do significant damage if they hit. You can fry them with your main laser, and burn missiles out of the air, but the beam soon destroys any buildings behind. Hovering the cursor over a building slows your ship for a moment to scan it for captives. If you find some, and the soldiers are all dead, you can right click on it to “Launch Craft”.

A black missile shoots from your ship, slamming into the wall of the building. Cut to:

Side-on, building cross-section. You control a small, flying, baby-squid-like alien, hovering through the building’s floors. (The building is purple. That is random.)

Security personnel fire automatic weapons at you, which kill if they hit. You can fry them with your brain laser, and burn holes through the floors of the building.

On one floor, you see the Captives: others of your species kept in glass jars for military experiments. Once you get to them, you have to destroy their tanks with your laser, then blast your way through the wall to get out.

If you die at any point up to here, we cut back to the previous stage and another craft is launched. If you die after this point, we cut back to the mothership and the captives on this planet are lost.

Assuming you get out, we cut to:

Cityscape. The dropship picks you up from the building, but now the streets are crawling with soldiers. You have to shoot down incoming missiles from all directions while you lift off to the top of the screen. Cut to:

Globe. Fighters have scrambled from all over the planet to intercept you, and their combined fire is lethal if you don’t cut their numbers down with your laser. As long as you survive, the disc of your ship grows larger and larger until it fills the screen and we cut to:

Space. No sound but the quiet hum of the mothership. The planet launches more capital ships if you don’t destroy it, but they can’t scratch you. You drift on, scanning for more captives.

A bunch of people asked if they or someone else could make this – yes! I hereby waive all rights to this thing and chuck it into the public domain, anyone can do anything with it.

“We’re going to make a lot more money this way”, says morally bankrupt CEO.

Played Proteus yesterday, then again last night, and finished it. An extraordinary experience. It’s half game and half song, and the feeling of crafting music through the way you explore a shifting and beautiful world is wonderful, totally unlike anything else I’ve played.

But watching people play at GDC revealed a weird problem. Many people would get a long way through the level, die, and restart it completely. If they want to do that it’s fine, of course, but some of them seemed pretty frustrated. I’d tell them, “You can just press L and it’ll put you back much closer to where you were,” and they’d say “Ah!” and use that from then on.

Obtuse hotkeys are not how the final system will work, of course, but here’s why it’s weird: the message that tells you to press L to load the last autosave is the same one that tells you to press R to restart. If these players hadn’t seen that, how did they know to press R to restart the level?

I discovered they knew the key, they just didn’t know what it would do. Last save? When was that? I’m not gonna hit a button that might take me back three levels.

I could have an on-screen notification every time it saves – maybe a big sign that says “Saving content – please don’t turn off your PC, because apparently there’s some kind of epidemic of people randomly doing that in the middle of a game.” Much as I love patronising bullshit, Gunpoint saves a lot – any notification would be a constant distraction.

I already knew what I wanted, I just hadn’t built it yet: a small menu showing the last few autosaves and how old they are:

I wanted that just because it’s nice, but the GDC problem made it an actual priority. Hurray!

It gets tricky when you think about where to store that data. If you store it as a variable in-game, then how does the game know which one is the most recent when you start it up again? It won’t have that data until it loads one of the autosaves, and each of them thought they were the latest one when they saved.

I tried messing around with renaming savegames so the latest one always had the same name, but it got awkward fast. So did the times themselves. Even seemingly simple systems get complicated to think about and test when you’re dealing with savegames, because loading a savegame is essentially time travel. You’re going back in time, then creating a new parallel timeline from there.

I was handling it, keeping it all straight in my head, until this happened:

Minus what. What.

I had a savegame created 47 seconds in the future. I tried loading it. It was the past – about 15 seconds in the past. And now it claimed the last two autosaves were made at the same time.

I ended up drawing a pen and paper diagram that started to look like the plot of Primer in an attempt to understand how repeated and overlapping backward time travel could create a paradox like this.

It couldn’t.

Sure enough, I eventually found a bug in Game Maker’s time-keeping code that causes the number of seconds since the game started to occasionally reset. I made my own clock, but that behaved strangely for savegames too. It’s just super hard to keep track of time when the player is time-travelling, and the filenames he’s creating and loading can mean different things in different contexts.

The system I settled on picks a new filename for each successive save, so it’s easy for both the code and me to see which one is newest at any given time. And if it has trouble figuring out the save times, it can just look at the numbers – if the save interval is 10 seconds and this one’s 2 saves ago, it’s 20 seconds plus the time since the last autosave.

The last change it needed was one I didn’t expect to have to make. I’d had this great idea, throughout all these systems, to avoid Groundhog Death: the problem where an autosave happens just before you die, so when you load it you instantly re-die. It’s less of a problem with multiple autosaves anyway, but I thought I had a clever way to avoid it completely.

The game would save every 5 seconds, but assume the most recent save was ‘bad’. Only once the player has survived more than five seconds since the last autosave does it become a valid one to load. So with a 10 second save interval, the latest autosave will still be 10-15 seconds ago, but it’s guaranteed to be at least 5 seconds before you died.

Once the rest of the issues were ironed out, I discovered this system sucks. It’s possible, and actually pretty common, to load a point in your game when you did survive beyond five seconds, but you didn’t this time. Maybe you had a guy at gunpoint, or were in the middle of a tense situation, and when it loads you’re disoriented and screw it up.

My instinct as a gamer is not to think “This save sucks, take me further back!” It’s “Let’s go again, I can do this!” But now that we’ve time-travelled, that savegame is the latest one. And the latest one is always left off the load menu to be sure it’s not gonna screw you.

Instead, you feel extremely screwed. You deleted my savegame? The one I just loaded? I get one chance at this, with no knowledge of what I’m getting into, and then you take it away? Fuck you, Tom Francis. You are a shitty, shitty designer.

So I backed out of that: now you can load any save you like, and I give you three just to make sure you’re not screwed in all of them. You can even hammer the ’1′ key to repeatedly retry the same tricky situation if you want to.

Saves are tiny, take no time to create, and load instantly too. I’ve noticed that Gunpoint’s incredibly sudden, sometimes shocking deaths are often a positive thing – a lot of players at GDC would laugh when they got shot. So I never want that buzz to be dampened by the pain of having to repeat stuff you don’t want to, or being screwed by the save system.

It’s a rapid fire sequence of ten indie devs giving quick talks about what’s getting them fired up at the moment – rants, new ideas or advocacy. I was honoured to be asked, then completely terrified when I saw the room I’d be speaking to, then totally calm milling around on stage beforehand, then debilitatingly nervous when I actually had to speak.

The GDC photographer also managed to capture three extraordinary and bizarre pictures of me on stage.

I’m told it went well, by several nice people who ran into me later in the week, and a few others have asked for the slides. I can actually do one better than that – correctly predicting that I’d be unable to form sentences on stage, I wrote my notes for the talk as a full script. Here it is, updated slightly to reflect what I think I actually said, and with a few notes on context and how people reacted.

My day job is to write about games, but I’m also making one in my spare time called Gunpoint. It’s in the IGF, actually, so I feel good about that now.

It’s my first game, and it’s not finished yet, so I don’t feel qualified to lecture anyone about development.

I want to talk instead about explaining games. It’s easy to screw that up when it’s a game you’re close to, but it’s also really important to get right if you want anyone else to play it. And I had a headstart with this, because I’ve been explaining other people’s games for eight years.

When you’re trying to describe your game – for its website, in an interview, or in a trailer – you can’t assume the reader is a reasonable, interested, intelligent human being. Because in the worst case scenario, your reader might be me. And I’m an asshole.

The current methods of explaining games don’t work for assholes, and I’ll explain why. Then I want to show you how I’ve used my first hand experience of being an asshole to explain games in a way that even an asshole can understand.

The first bad way to explain your game is to not explain it at all. People often put out some raw footage or a screenshot and let it speak for itself.

The trouble is that doesn’t. It probably speaks for itself if you know what it says, but you have no way of imagining how little sense it makes to other people. Sometimes we can’t even tell which thing you’re controlling.

 
Mistake number two is thinking that to explain your game, you should explain your artistic intent.

So you might describe it as “a game about loss.”

OK, but what the fuck does that mean? For all I know Off-Road Velociraptor Safari might be about loss. I think Minotaur in a China Shop actually is.

But your message, your theme, and your artistic intent don’t tell me anything about how I play the game or what I can do in it that’s interesting or different.

 
Mistake number three is thinking that explaining your story explains your game. “The people of Darksun are under threat from the elder Gods…”

If you ever catch yourself writing something like that as an explanation of your game, just stop and delete it. No-one gives a shit about the people of Darksun except the person who made up the word ‘Darksun’. And in this case, he doesn’t either.

I’m sure your story’s good, and I’m sure it’s important to your game, but it’s not going to be good in ten words. And if you write any more than ten words, no-one’s going to read it.

 
Mistake number four: stating that your game is good, as if this will persuade us that it is.

No-one has ever read a developer describing their game as “innovative” and thought “Wow, that sounds innovative.”

We have read developers describing their game as innovative and thought, “Wow, he sounds like a tool.”

Those are the ways that don’t work. So how do you explain something nuanced and cool to an impatient asshole like me?

You have to get to the point, incredibly quickly, in plain and simple language.

In fact, you have to get to four points, in about three sentences, or we just stop reading.

 
Point number one is to tell us what type of game it is.

You don’t have to stick to traditional genres, but try to use a word that reflects what you actually do in the game. Maybe it’s not a platformer, but it’s a “2D exploration game.”

 
Point number two, before you even finish your first sentence, is to tell us the coolest unique thing about it.

And you can summarise drastically. We don’t need to know how it works, but we want to know why it’s cool.

The main mechanic in my game is hard to explain in eight words, but if I say “you can rewire its levels to trick people,” you get an idea.

 
Point number three is to give us some context: who am I, where am I, what am I trying to do?

The plot will never sound good in ten words, but the fantasy might. You’re a spy? You’re a god? You’re saving kittens? You’re a kitten-god saving spies? All those things are cool.

 
By that point we should have an overview, but it might be a bit dry. So point number four is to give us an example of how it plays.

Describe a moment the player can experience that’s typical of the game, and illustrates the best of what you’ve just told us.

If you say it’s a game about possessing your enemies, I’m interested. But if you tell me I can possess an enemy, throw him into a friend, and knock them both into a landmine before I switch back to my own body and watch them blow up… at that point I’m throwing money at the screen.

If you can do that, you’re done.

And when you read it back to yourself, it doesn’t actually sound like it was written for an asshole. It just sounds like it was written with a respect for the reader’s attention.

And the truth is that most of your readers aren’t assholes like me, they’re intelligent, reasonable people. But reasonable people still respond better to writing that values their time, and doesn’t waste it to gratify the writer’s pretensions.

This isn’t really about indie versus mainstream, or arthouse versus commercial. It’s just about communicating efficiently enough that everyone who would like your game ends up playing it. I think it’s a shame when that doesn’t happen.

Thanks!

It’s aimed at anyone who makes or writes about games they need to explain.

Also, you can play Gunpoint at GDC! All the IGF finalists are playable in the IGF Pavilion on the main show floor, Wednesday to Friday. You can play Gunpoint there any time during show hours, and if you’d like me to talk you through it or ask me anything, these are the best times:

Wednesday:   10:00-11:00   12:00-14:00   15:00-17:00
Thursday:   10:00-11:00   14:00-16:00   17:00-18:00
Friday:   12:00-14:00

If you see me around anywhere, say hello! I look like this:

I’ve been prepping frantically, and now that I’m almost ready, I have time to think about what’s about to happen. I can’t believe you can just half-make a game for nothing, in your spare time, and end up on stage with your heroes. The talk I’m giving, I’m alongside Raigan Burns who co-created N. The Gunpoint kiosk I’m staffing, I’ll be next to Terry Cavanagh and Mode 7. The award I’m up for, I’m against Spelunky, the game that inspired me to make games.

I feel like I skipped about ten years of hard work, failure and frustration and got straight to the bit where all your dreams suddenly happen at once. Six years of analysis and a few strokes of luck have done something freakish to this trajectory, and it feels incredible. Thanks, everyone. I’ll try to make this good.

Thanks to all who suggested this, I haven’t seen many games do it without wanting to spam you in the meantime, but it’s a great idea for both of us.

Here’s an incredibly misleading shot of a story sequence I got working last weekend:

At this point, you might wonder why I even bother to guess when Gunpoint will be done. Plenty of developers have a “When it’s done” policy, which always makes me want to say “I know, I was asking when that will be.”

What they really mean, of course, is “We have no idea when it will be done,” a position I have a newfound sympathy for. But it’s still annoying. It still feels like secrecy. You’re the developer! You must know more than we do about when it’s likely to be. We’re not asking for a contract, we just want an idea.

For Gunpoint, I can give you an idea! I can even tell you what’s left to do, how long I think it’ll take, and how much free time I have to do it in. Between now and the start of August, I have about 38 free days – i.e. most weekends. And if this to-do list is comprehensive, I have about 39 days work left to do on Gunpoint.

This calculation assumes I’ll get nothing done in the evenings, that nothing will run massively over or under its estimated time, that I’ll be free every weekend and that there’ll be no business stuff to take care of. None of these things are true, but they might all cancel each other out.

Scripted sequence test – done

Made a scripted scene last weekend, and it looks great. These are no harder than I thought they’d be, so the other few should be relatively smooth sailing.

Rating system – 1 day

Giving you feedback on impressive aspects of your performance on a mission. I have a sense this is going to add a lot, so it’s high priority.

Laptop data – 1 day

How you read the data you steal from laptops, which are optional objectives in each mission.

Dynamic music working – 1 day

I have Ryan Ike’s multi-layered music mostly working, but it vanishes if you load a savegame and it doesn’t support a few more tricks we want to try. It needs a proper system.

Actual script – GDC Plane Journey

Yes, I’m going to write the whole game on the plane. It’ll be fine.

New gadgets and devices – 2 days

This probably sounds like feature bloat, but some really strong patterns are emerging in feedback. One gadget people find almost completely useless, and I have an easy idea to redesign that. And another idea I can easily add will build on your ability to manipulate guards, which is one of the most common key positives people list. A couple of simple new devices (crosslinkable electronics) are needed to support more puzzle ideas, which’ll help with the next step.

Gadget Tutorials – 2 days

It’s really hard to train a gadget without knowing what level the player will be playing after they first buy it. I have a dynamic prioritised system in there that queues up all the info you don’t have yet and trains it at the earliest chance. It’s not working. Everyone’s still baffled. So I’m gonna make little controlled test environments for you to try a new gadget before you take it into the field, if you want to.

Make worst levels good – 4 days

Man I really hate some of the levels right now. Not worth redesigning them until I’m a) less burnt out on level design, and b) have these new elements in.

[Classified] – 4 days

An idea I won’t talk about yet, because I’ll cut it if it doesn’t work or is going to take too long. It’s targeted very specifically at people finding the game too short or too easy.

Final art integration – 4 days

There are still a few more tile sets, animations and backgrounds to come from John and Fabian – putting those in takes time, and that’s something I’ve failed to account for in the past.

Scripted sequences – 2 days

Only two or three of these to do, and I know how to do them now.

Conversation and shop interface tweaks – 2 days

I’d like to make all the menus look better and make conversations feel nicer to navigate. It’s all a bit amateur hour right now.

Guard dialogue – 2 days

I want guards to have speech bubbles to articulate what they’re doing sometimes, particularly when a gunshot goes off. If one of them fired it, the police aren’t summoned – there’s a reason for that and I want it to be clear. There’s also a lot of fun to be had with this in less critical situations, so if it’s easy, I will.

Esc menu – 2 days

Mostly a basic options menu, but I also want a plot recap on there and will need to figure out how the mission skip option works.

More sounds – 1 day

So much more to do here, and it’s going to add so much to the feel of the game. Luckily it’s generally very quick to find a good sound and put it in.

Tweaks/performance – 4 days

So many tiny usability tweaks need making, controls need revising, mechanics need altering.

Bug fixing – 4 days

Haha, 4 days? Here’s where the game will slip again.

[Classified] – 2 days

[Classified] – 3 days

[Classified] – 2 days

More things I won’t talk about in case they don’t work out.

In terms of knowing when to stop, my rule is that anything I add to my to-do list has to be more efficient than the last thing I got done. It has to be likely to add more fun to the game and take less development time. If I’m always getting more efficient, any delay is worth it. At the point of diminishing returns, I’ll lock it down, polish it up and release it.

There were also two particular songs among the submissions that just clicked perfectly with different parts of the game: for the shop and upgrade interfaces you access on your phone, Francisco Cerda’s gorgeous smooth jazz was exactly what I wanted. And for the game’s more sombre moments, John Robert Matz’s mournful and sinister theme tune was magnificent. So Gunpoint has sort of ended up with three musicians.

Coming to a decision was harder and much more time consuming than I expected. I got more submissions for this than for the game’s artwork, and listening to a full music sample takes 1,833 times longer than looking at a sprite. The more I listened and played, the more I liked less prominent tracks that supported the game’s existing atmosphere.

Thanks again to everyone who did such awesome work, and sorry to everyone I couldn’t use. I was amazed by the calibre of what came in. Obviously I feel terrible turning anything good down, but I still believe in the open submissions process because I’ve been on the other side of it a few times. Both times I wrote short stories for the Machine of Death collection, it was with no expectation they’d get in – I just did it because I enjoyed doing it. I hope that’s the feeling among everyone who’s submitted stuff for Gunpoint, music and art.

You might remember I also did the same thing for the Crosslink noise, and got some awesome stuff. I’ve decided to use Jeremy Watssman’s smooth warbly sound, which you can actually hear in his music submission video here. I’d also like to use the sound Ben Royle submitted for a different purpose, if he’s OK with that: it makes a great satisfying thunk when spending points upgrading your gadgets. Update: he says, quote, “Fuck yeah!”

Gunpoint in 2010, before it had a title. The filename was just ‘grey’, after the background.

Lastly, I talked a bit about how far Gunpoint has come on and asked you guys if you thought I should charge money for the game when it comes out. I was expecting around 90% of you to say I should keep it free, and if it was as low as 80% I’d start to believe it might be worth something. The figure was around 1%. Over a thousand comments, the vast majority of people said “No! Don’t give us a free thing! Charge us money!”

That’s an amazing and confusing response for me, but you don’t have to tell me twice. Well, you don’t have to tell me more than a thousand times. I will obey your command to charge you money for Gunpoint, though I plan to keep it low and provide a substantial free version. I won’t claim anything specific yet since I’d like to confirm how and through whom I’ll be selling it first, in case they have advice or rules that affect it. I’ve talked with all my awesome art and music collaborators and we’ve agreed on a split we think is fair.

Exciting times! Although the music selection process and Christmas took up a lot of the break, I also managed to build a dynamic system for context sensitive music layers and overhaul the way your gadgets are powered and upgraded.

I still have a few levels left to make, and a fair few more I’m not happy with variety- and fun-wise, so I’ve used some of the time away from my PC to plan out new puzzle ideas, come up with some new gadgets and devices, and figure out which ones will be easy to code and add a lot of fun possibilities.

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.

Fact Friday: this was Morrisette’s original lyric until Warner Brothers demanded it be changed to spoons and knives because of “What.”

Something I forgot to mention in the blurb at the end: if you write about games and want to write about Gunpoint, please do get in touch and I can send you a playable build next time I have one ready for previewing. It should be pretty soon now. Also always up for answering any questions and stuff. People who write about games are probably the best people on Earth.

In the video I ask if you think Gunpoint seems like it’s worth money. If you have an opinion, let me know in the comments here! I am trying to figure out the right balance between being a) nice b) fair and c) not an idiot.

Luckily, Conway’s Teflon Hyperface renders him immune to lachrymatory agents.

I’ve been mentally filing levels under ‘content’, stuff I already know how to produce and which just needs a little grunt work to churn it out. I’m now discovering that it’s really more like the game systems: something that shapes the experience so fundamentally that you need to get it in early and keep tweaking and revising it as you go along.

I’ve also learnt a lot about the difference between a puzzle game and something more open ended like Deus Ex, and some of it really surprised me.

In the first prototype that included the Crosslink device, you could literally link any device to any other. It was fun to mess around with, but there was no game there really – as I think all testers noticed, you could stand by one light switch and just wire it to everything else you wanted to change.

It was never going to stay that way, I knew how to shape it: I put some devices on different coloured circuits, ones you can’t rewire until you reach the right circuit box and tap into it. That let me design puzzles: proper obstacles to your progress that you have to think your way around, tapping into the right circuit and finding ways to get to the next one.

I guess I just assumed that was level design, because when I sent out the last build I realised I’d pretty much ended up with a straight puzzle game. Sometimes it works, other times it feels like it’s just keeping you busy: you have to get to this circuit box to progress, and there’s really only one way to do it. If figuring out that method isn’t interesting, the only fun is in the basic interactions: pouncing, punching, executing chain reactions, knocking people off rooftops and through windows.

I should probably be happy with that. I asked testers what they’d give the game if they were reviewing it, and the overwhelming majority said 8/10. Even accounting for a large positive bias in the selection process, that’s way better than I was hoping for.

But I still want it to be more than a puzzle game with punching. The point of the Crosslink mechanic is to let the player be creative, and I feel like I must be able to do a better job of that.

So I tried designing a new level with a completely different philosophy: make a building, not a level. Just make sure there are at least two routes to every objective and sub-objective.

It was terrible. It might be the worst level I’ve ever made. It felt like the game was just broken – you keep asking yourself “What’s this room for? Why would I want to go there? Wait, I’ve completed it? Did I cheat?” It wasn’t easier than the other levels, it just felt like most of it was misleading or irrelevant.

I tried it a few other ways and kept running into the same problem:

If a puzzle has one solution, it’s only really fun to solve once.

If a puzzle has more than one solution, one of those solutions will be easier or more obvious to the player.

So, you just do that one. Even if you notice the others, they add nothing: it feels pointless to take a longer or harder route, even if it involves some interesting tricks.

This really surprised me. I’ve always thought the opposite: that alternate routes are always valuable, even if you don’t take them, because you appreciate having options. Nope! Sometimes alternate routes are just noise. Sometimes having a lot of options just makes it feel like there isn’t really an obstacle at all, so getting past it feels more like a commute than a challenge.

So why do I enjoy taking alternate routes in Deus Ex? Why don’t I always go for the first or easiest one?

Honestly: because it sucks. In Deus Ex the shooting is intentionally bad, and even in Human Revolution, the cover shooting is nothing like as cool as the stealth. Deus Ex doesn’t offer you choice by presenting you with door A and door B. It presents you with a really difficult and awkward door A, then says “Oh no! I can’t believe you found a vent!”

Choice

Choice, I think, needs to be a fuck-you from the player to the designer.

You have to see and understand what you’re expected to do, and make a personal decision to reject it. Either because you just don’t like it, or because it doesn’t fit with the play style you’ve chosen.

In Gunpoint, that means I actually do want one clear solution to each puzzle. I just need to give you the power to override it and do things your own way if you want to.

I haven’t finished figuring out my full solution to that yet, but here’s what’s working well so far:

1. Reworking levels at least twice

All my favourites are old ones that I’ve changed bit by bit, adding sneakier possibilities as they occur to me, and encouraging fun situations I found myself in when testing. Pretty much by accident, these have one clear solution and a bunch of ways to bypass it.

2. Play style incentives

I’d already planned for clients to have optional requests – “There’s an extra $200 in it for you if you don’t hurt anyone.” Now that I’ve put these in, they add complex, tricky and ever-changing routes through the levels that I don’t even have to design. Avoiding guards is almost always possible just because you’re so mobile, but it’s much harder than taking them out. It’s not a fuck-you to the client, but it’s a fuck-you to the conventional design of the level.

3. Gadgets

I’ve added some tools you can buy which can let you shortcut certain types of puzzles, and set up more elaborate chain reactions and traps. The Transfuser, for example, lets you connect two things that are on different circuits, with a pretty blended wire that shades between their different colours.

4. Persistent consumables

These gadgets have charges, and your total carries over to future missions. So sometimes the shorter route has a cost associated with it, and it’s up to you when you think it’s worth it.

5. Upgrades

You can upgrade lots of different aspects of your kit to suit different playstyles. If you go for one heavily, you can sometimes get past obstacles with the method they’re designed to stop. The Deathfluke, for example, repels a percentage of the least accurate shots fired at you. Upgrade that and your jumping speed enough and enemies have a hard time hitting you, letting you get past them in some situations you’re not meant to.

So that’s partly why it’s taking longer. I’ve got five or six levels that need designing from the ground up, and six or seven more that need a few more iterations to make them more flexible and fun. Then there’s the little stuff, like creating a scripting engine for story events and writing the entire game.

Truthfully, I have no idea how long that stuff will take me. Lyingly, let’s say March and I’ll let you know when that seems impossible too. If you’ve mailed me about testing, I should have a version for you in December.

]]> http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-20-gunpoint-is-delayed-level-design-is-hard-choice-is-weird/feed/ 39 http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-14-the-saddest-goddamn-thing/ http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-14-the-saddest-goddamn-thing/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:07:17 +0000 Pentadact http://www.pentadact.com/?p=3691

I ordered my elf mage to move somewhere, accidentally told her to attack my dog. This kills the dog.

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I ordered my elf mage to move somewhere, accidentally told her to attack my dog. This kills the dog.

]]> http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-14-the-saddest-goddamn-thing/feed/ 14 http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-13-here-are-some-of-the-crosslink-sounds-people-sent-in/ http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-13-here-are-some-of-the-crosslink-sounds-people-sent-in/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:09:37 +0000 Pentadact http://www.pentadact.com/?p=3644 I asked if people wanted to make the sound effect for when you switch into Crosslink mode in Gunpoint, the view from which you can rewire how everything works. People did! Thanks, those people! I’ve made a video of me listening to some of your sounds, and reacting with a mixture of delight, horror and confusion.

Read more on Here Are Some Of The Crosslink Sounds People Sent In…

]]> I asked if people wanted to make the sound effect for when you switch into Crosslink mode in Gunpoint, the view from which you can rewire how everything works. People did! Thanks, those people! I’ve made a video of me listening to some of your sounds, and reacting with a mixture of delight, horror and confusion.

Sorry that this isn’t all of them, by a long shot – they came in faster than I could keep up with, and I had to trim this video to stop it getting ridiculously long. If I end up using any of the ones that aren’t shown in this video, I’ll put them up here too.

]]> http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-13-here-are-some-of-the-crosslink-sounds-people-sent-in/feed/ 29 http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-13-the-perils-of-being-a-melee-companion-to-an-archery-character/ http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-13-the-perils-of-being-a-melee-companion-to-an-archery-character/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 15:58:00 +0000 Pentadact http://www.pentadact.com/?p=3668

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]]> http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-13-the-perils-of-being-a-melee-companion-to-an-archery-character/feed/ 2 http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-11-skyrim-review/ http://www.pentadact.com/2011-11-11-skyrim-review/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 23:33:43 +0000 Pentadact http://www.pentadact.com/?p=3660 “Hey Greg, why didn’t the skeleton go to the party?”
“Because he’s a fucking skeleton, Jen, we’ve talked about this.”

Skyrim is out, my review is up, and it’s spoiler free.

Read more on Skyrim Review…

“Hey Greg, why didn’t the skeleton go to the party?”
“Because he’s a fucking skeleton, Jen, we’ve talked about this.”

Skyrim is out, my review is up, and it’s spoiler free.

Although I was hugely privileged to get to play this early, there is a special kind of agony to being this excited about a game and believing you’re just about to get hold of it, every day for nine days.

I was out for my parents’ anniversary dinner the night the mail finally came in, and the code was waiting when I got home late. It was going to take seven hours to download, so I set my alarm for six and went to bed.

I haven’t woken up early for Christmas since I was about 12, but for Skyrim I woke up at 4, then 4.30, then 5, then 6, then 6.30, then 7. Every time the download had about two hours to go, and it seemed to get slower as it went.

I made breakfast, tidied my room, exercised, showered, brewed coffee, did laundry, cleaned my kitchen, fretted, and then finally saw it finish. It would definitely crash. It would be encrypted. It would work, then be removed from Steam the next day.

But it worked, I had time to play it thoroughly enough to review before the embargo, and it was this good.

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You slip into a mindset where you expect things to work, which makes you angry rather than confused when they don’t. I’ve had to start spotting this mindset when it crops up, and taking a long, relaxing break before I go any further.

When I come back, I have to change gear. And the most useful way I’ve found to think of it is this:

It is a mental patient. It has completely lost its mind, and to make it behave in any kind of reasonable way, you have to be expecting every sensible instruction to be met with screaming, preposterous bullshit.

Programmer: Hello Game, how are you feeling? I’d like to make this object stop when it hits a wall, if that’s OK with you.

Game: GRAVITY NO LONGER EXISTS!

Programmer: What?

Game: Every lightswitch in the world will fire a single red laser at one man’s head, and that man is… HIM!

Progammer: OK – I’m not sure how that’s related, but I’ll look into-

Game: I DON’T KNOW WHAT SPACE IS!

Programmer: The key, or…

Game: SPACE! SPACE! HORIZONTAL CO-ORDINATES! I have over five thousand references to ‘x’ and I’ve NEVER HEARD OF X.

Programmer: That’s… that’s how far right things are, Game. It’s the first thing we learned.

Game: NO! It’s a room! A room with a box, and a photocopier, and a lighting error, off the corner of Baker and 45th.

Programmer: …

Game: X IS A ROOM!

Programmer: Ohh, I actually did change the name of an old test level to that for a moment, I guess that’s what’s getting you confused – I’ll fix it.

Game: PRANKSPASM IS UNDEFINED!

Programmer: That one I’ll give you.

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.