In Gunpoint, you click and hold the mouse to charge a jump, move the mouse to adjust the predicted arc of where you’ll go, and release the button to launch yourself. The further away you move the mouse, the stronger the jump. But when I watched people play, they’d often click quite close to the character and never discover their full jump strength potential.

I thought about adding a ring showing how far to move the mouse from your character to reach maximum jump strength, or a gauge to show how much of your maximum strength you were using. But in the end I found a way to do it without adding any new visual elements:

However far away the cursor is when you start holding the button, that becomes the game’s new standard cursor distance for a maximum strength jump. So whatever the player’s expecting, the game’s maths silently recalibrates to match it. It changes again every time you click, so you don’t need to be consistent. And you can still do a smaller jump by moving the mouse closer after you’ve started holding it.

From what I saw of people playing after that change, it worked: everyone still had different ideas of how far away to click, but now they all resulted in the same range of power and control.

• Gunpoint, I just said that
• Gone fucking Home
• Papers fucking Please
• Prison fucking Architect!
• Luftrausers!
• Hammerwatch!
• SteamWorld Dig!
• What!

What is not a game, this is just an alarming selection of stuff. And for the first time ever, there’s also a $65 special edition that comes with a load of physical goods like:

• A T-shirt featuring all these games!
• A vinyl record with a song from each of these games – in Gunpoint’s case, The Five-Floor Goodbye.
• A floppy disk! I don’t know what’s on that!
• A manual! I don’t know what it says!
• Some badges, or pins if you’re American!
• It comes in an actual box!

This has been in the works for a loooooooong time, and it’s only thanks to the hard work of the guys at Abstraction that we have Mac and Linux versions of Gunpoint to make us eligible to be in one. I’m particularly delighted to be in this one, with such extraordinary company (two BAFTA winners!), because the biggest upside for me is the sheer number of people who’ll hopefully get to try our game. And when Gunpoint is nowhere near the headliner, lots of those will be people who might never have tried it otherwise.

The game is now out on Mac and Linux!

Old post:

The fine folks at Abstraction have finally got Gunpoint working well enough on OSX and Linux that we’re ready for you guys to give it a try and see what breaks.

If you already own Gunpoint, right-click it in your Steam list and go to Properties. Under the ‘Betas’ tab, choose ‘maclinuxbeta’ and ‘OK’. The game should update.

If you don’t already own the game but would like to help test it on Mac or Linux, add yourself to this mailing list: if I can, I’ll get some time-limited beta keys to let you guys in too.

If you find any problems, post in the Mac or Linux support forums to tell us about them! Tell us as much as you can about your system, what you were doing, and what happened.

Caution! The Mac and Linux versions are in beta, so I don’t recommend buying the game yet if that’s what you’ll be playing on!

To make sure everyone has the latest fixes, the beta is Steam-only. When they’re ready, the Mac and Linux versions will of course be available DRM-free for people who bought here or on the Humble Store. And buying it from anywhere at any time on any of these three platforms means you own it on all three.

• New engine, implemented by Abstraction Games. Should fix many technical issues and make the game run faster for everyone, and it’ll enable us to develop Mac and Linux versions next.
• Steam Workshop added, for browsing and sharing user-made levels. Yes, we listened to the 1,779 post petition you guys started even after we’d already announced we would do it.
• Option to turn off swearing. Up to you whether this makes “Grow a ####ing #### and shove it up your ###” kid-safe.
• Reconfigurable keyboard controls.
• Vertical sync option. I didn’t know we needed this, but the folks at Abstraction added it and now the animation is at least 23% more beautiful.
• Level editor. The level editor has been in there since launch, but some people still ask for one so I’m just going to keep announcing I’ve added it until everyone knows it’s there.
• You can now place multiple elevators in a level without it crashing. That’s more than I could do when I was making the game, so I expect your levels to be at least twice as good as mine.
• If you have any technical troubles with the new version, you can still use the old one by going to Properties > Betas and selecting ‘oldversion’. Post your issue on the forums too, so we can fix it.

It’s also 75% off for 48 hours! That’ll end 10am Pacific Time on 19/06/2014. That discount applies to all editions, too, so you can upgrade for $2.50 or £1.50. And we reduced the UK and EU prices from the Steam defaults to better match their USD equivalents.

Get it here!

Header image is a screenshot of Breakin 1.2, by [NL] Omgertje.

Short version

We’re nearly ready to release an update for Gunpoint that’ll add Steam Workshop support to let you share your custom levels, and hopefully fix any remaining technical issues people are having with the old build.

Before we send it out to everyone, it’d be helpful if you guys could give it a try and see if you encounter any issues. Here’s how:

1. Right click Gunpoint in your Steam menu and click Properties.
2. Go to the Betas tab, and under ‘Enter access code’ type: workshopbeta
3. You should now be able to choose the Steam Workshop Beta from the list there.
4. Click close, and Gunpoint should update. Might take a second before the download starts.
5. While you wait, join this Steam group.

You need to be a member of that group for Steam Workshop to work in this beta, but it won’t be necessary once the update goes public.

If it fixes anything or breaks anything for you, or just to tell us how it works out, post in this thread!

More info

This version of Gunpoint has been converted by Abstraction Games into their own engine. Previously it was made by me in Game Maker 8, a very old framework that still has a few compatibility issues with some modern machines, and doesn’t support Steam Workshop, Mac or Linux.

This first update will be the Windows version, with Steam Workshop support. If that all works, they’ll start work on the Mac and Linux versions next. Here are the tentative patch notes:

– New engine. Should run faster for everyone and resolve a few compatibility issues, including that charmingly satirical one where it would pretend to run really slowly on really fast machines.
– Steam Workshop support for sharing user-made levels. Yes, we listened to the 1,779 post petition you guys confusingly started some time after we’d already announced we would do it.
– Option to turn off swearing. Up to you whether this makes “Grow a ####ing #### and shove it up your ###” kid-safe.
– Reconfigurable keyboard controls. To be honest, this is late is partly because one of the people who asked was such a jerk about it that I lost my eagerness to get it done.
– Vertical sync option. I didn’t know we needed this, but the folks at Abstraction added it and now the animation is at least 23% more beautiful.
– Level editor. The level editor has been in there since launch, but some people still ask for one so I’m just going to keep announcing I’ve added it until everyone knows it’s there.
– You can now place multiple elevators in a level without it crashing. That’s more than I could do when I was making the game, so I expect your levels to be at least twice as good as mine.

As ever, no ETA on Mac or Linux versions – you never really know with these things until they’re basically done.

Cheers!

I have a question about Gunpoint’s development.

I have a breakdown of Gunpoint’s development.

About monetising YouTube videos, or copyright claims on YouTube…

You’re welcome to, and no-one should stop you. Here’s the full permission bit.

I want to make a game, should I use Unity or Game Maker?

If you’re a complete beginner and your idea would work in 2D, I suggest Game Maker because it’s so much quicker to learn.

If you have some programming knowledge, or your idea needs to be in 3D and you’re patient, I suggest Unity: it’s more flexible, it’ll probably be easier to work with other people, and the asset store is really cool. Unity can do 2D games, but I haven’t tried it for that.

What tutorials do you recommend for Game Maker or Unity?

For Game Maker, mine! For Unity, I’m mostly just using the stuff on their official site.

I need to contact you privately about something.

OK! I’m pentadact@gmail.com – but bear in mind I’m bad at this and don’t reply to everything.

Sale: starts 10am Tuesday 17th, ends 4pm Thursday, Pacific Time. In the UK that’s 6pm Tuesday to midnight Thursday.

Link:
Get Gunpoint half-price, or upgrade to a different edition, on its Steam page

Edition upgrades:

We did something a bit different with Gunpoint’s pricing: we offered $10, $20 and $30 editions to keep the game cheap while letting people support it more if they wanted.

What we found was that lots of people bought the game as cheaply as possible, then discovered they liked it a lot: they’d e-mail or tweet to ask if there’s a way to support the game and get all the behind-the-scenes extras that came with the other editions.

So we’re now letting players upgrade to another edition for the difference in price: the extras are now technically DLC. They include the game’s soundtrack, developer commentary that adds us as killable characters in-game, a making-of feature, and 9 playable prototypes from different stages of the game’s development.

Trading cards:

I still have basically no idea how these really work, but I was surprised by how much I ended up wanting all the little reward things our artist John Roberts created. The ability to emote Conway face-palming just seems really important somehow. Steam forced me to write descriptions for each one, so I’ll post them here:

:conwayshrug: Richard Conway, an icon of not really knowing or caring what’s going on, now available as an icon for not really knowing or caring what’s going on.

:conwayheadscratch: Intended to express that sense that you can sort of tell this is possible but you’re not sure you can be bothered to figure it out.

:conwayfacepalm: To be used after you’ve seen someone do something stupid, but before you remember that you’re wearing adhesive climbing gloves.

:conwaypunch: Ends any internet argument, provided you also leave the argument and never look at it again.

:hammerheadsnark: Used to indicate that yes, you know you’re being snarky, and yes, you know this will derail the discussion, and yes, you know this isn’t even in your own interests at this point, but you’ve typed it now and here we are.

1. Fix the last few Gunpoint compatibility problems

I fixed a lot of bugs pretty quickly in the first four patches, but the last ones left are tougher. Most of them aren’t mistakes in my scripting, they’re fundamental incompatibilities between the engine I used and certain PC configurations. So fixing them means porting Gunpoint to a new engine, and exactly how we do that is a big, complex, important decision for the future of the game.

I have three different ways I could get it done, so I’m investigating two of them while trying to do the third one myself. If doing it myself works, that’s handy. If not, I’ll know how hard it is and how much I should be paying to get it done.

Whichever method we use, it should fix those compatibility problems, make the game run much faster for everyone, and pave the way to port it to Mac and Linux.

2. Steam Workshop integration for custom levels

This has always been the plan, but obviously it doesn’t make sense to do it just before switching engines – it would have to be re-done immediately after. My first priority is to fix the game for the few people who still can’t play, and helping people share levels will be my next job after that.

3. Mac and Linux

How I do these ports depends heavily on which method I use for 1, as will the time frame. These two are my main priorities, though – if we ever do any other ports, they’d be handled externally so I can stay focused on PC platforms.

If you want some idea of the kind of fun I’m having, the shot above is from the fourth try at getting Gunpoint working in Game Maker Studio. The first three just crashed outright, and in number four Conway is distorted (?), all floors are transparent (!), the screen is being rescaled from 1024×600 with the wrong aspect ratio (!?), and the Rooke logo is now misspelled (!?!).

Fixed all those, with some help from the kind folks at YoYoGames, so now I probably only have a few thousand more crazy issues to go!

About 1 minute and 4 seconds after Gunpoint became available for pre-order on the evening of Monday the 27th of May, it had recouped its development costs. This was not entirely crazy, since the only actual development cost was buying Game Maker 8 for $30 three years ago.

Edit: This caused some confusion – sorry. I should have clarified that:

• By ‘development costs’ I mean money spent on development, as opposed to promotion (one trip to GDC) and legal (getting some contracts drawn up). If you add those, it took a few hours.
• I’m talking about the money needed to make it. Spending my spare time on this didn’t increase my living costs or decrease what I was earning from my day job, so didn’t add to the “How much money did I need to make Gunpoint?” figure.

The surprising bit happened next.

That’s pre-order week, when the free demo was out but the game was not. This was beyond all my estimates – we were on course to sell enough for me to become a developer before it was even out! But would launch see a surge like those first two days of pre-orders? How fast would it slope off after that? Would we even-

Jesus Christ.

So, I quit my job.

In fact, I think I have quit jobs, as a concept. I started Gunpoint as an audition piece to get myself a position at a developer, but designing it has been so creatively satisfying that I no longer want one, and so commercially successful that I no longer need one.

The upshot is:

I can now make games full-time for the foreseeable future.

More amazingly, I can do it with total creative freedom. There’s really no pressure for my next thing to make a lot of money in a hurry, so I can do whatever I think will be most exciting.

It also means I can afford to keep being nice. I didn’t let anyone pay for Gunpoint until I was ready to put a free demo out, so everyone would have a way to make sure it ran OK on their system and that they liked it before giving me any money.

I was informed by lots of people with industry experience that this is commercial idiocy: you want to hold it back so that excited fans buy without trying, then you can release the demo later to tempt those who weren’t convinced. And with some (not all), you get weird responses if you bring up non-money factors in a business conversation.

“You’ll lose sales this way!”
“From people who don’t really like it? I think I want to lose those sales.”
“No, you don’t understand. You’ll have less sales.”

I’m sure they’re right, and as a noob I appreciate the advice. In fact I got so much skepticism that I started to think the lost sales might actually be the difference between being able to become a developer or not. But even if that had been the case, I wasn’t going to quit my job for a career in tricking people into giving me money and regretting it.

I have no idea if and how much the pre-release demo hurt Gunpoint’s sales, but it doesn’t matter now – that’s how I want to treat people, and the amazing support for Gunpoint means I can afford to.

So, my deep, deep thanks to everyone who bought it. In return, as well as continuing to develop Gunpoint, I will make new things for you!

Update: Call for help removed – I’m now working with people to add Steam Workshop support and to port Gunpoint to Mac and Linux.

This’ll free me up to manage how Gunpoint evolves, and to start working on a new game as well. Lord knows I have plans.

Update! Now live on Humble Store too.

Bug fixes

• You can’t change the past. At least, you can’t change more than the first 11 missions of the past. At least, you can’t if you don’t have a scroll wheel on your mouse. At least, you couldn’t until this patch, which fixes that. The Up and Down keys (W/S) now work to scroll through the Previous Missions menu.
• With apologies to Mad Men fans, knocking the final boss through his own office window no longer causes him to fall in extreme slow motion.
• If you bought so many batteries that you can no longer afford the Gatecrashers needed for the final mission, a) wow, and b) you can now sell batteries at that point. Unless your battery fixation prevents you from parting with them, in which case your adventure ends here.
• Due to new breakthroughs in microphone technology, Sound Detectors are now so sensitive they can even pick up gunshots. (They previously only triggered if the player was the one who fired).
• Did you know you can patch a soundtrack? We patched the soundtrack so that the track numbering makes more sense for the Special Edition.
• You can no longer teleport backwards through left-facing windows by pressing Down. Sorry speedrunners.

New features

• If you’re having music problems, I feel bad for you son. So I’m working hard to fix them, and in the meantime I’ve added a button to restart the music: press M if you’re not hearing music and should be.

Future plans

Note: ‘plans’ is short for ‘things I hope to do if possible’ – don’t buy the game on the assumption any of these will happen.

• Steam Workshop support for custom levels: looking for someone to write a plugin for this, details shortly.
• Level editor improvements: people are like, “It crashes if you put two elevators in!” and I’m like, “I know, why do you think the levels only ever have one elevator?” But I’ll have a go at fixing stuff like that.
• Customisable controls: I realise not having these is annoying, it’s just gonna take a while to do.
• Conversion to Game Maker Studio: should fix some otherwise unfixable compatibility problems like the slowdown bug, and improve performance for everyone. Need help to do it, though.
• Mac version.
• Linux version.

Reminder! If you have a serious problem I haven’t fixed yet, I’d rather not have your money! See the tail end of this post for how to request a refund. Short version: I can definitely do it if you bought via Humble, otherwise it’s up to Steam but I’ll back you up if needed.

As promised, I just made a second patch live that should address most resolution/screen related issues. Here are the notes! If you bought from this site, I’ll update this post when the new version is available to download.

New features:

• Added a more visible and obvious way to abort a mission and change your screen settings if they turn out to look weird.
• The first time you play after this patch, you’ll be asked to choose your resolution. This is a one-time thing for the benefit of anyone who’s stuck in one that doesn’t work.
• Added a ‘Safe mode’ resolution that should work for everyone, and which you can get to using only the keyboard if necessary (in case the current setting is so bad you can’t even click on the right buttons).
• Added a ‘Native mode’ resolution option that’ll detect and match your screen’s native res. Be aware, though, that anything over 1920×1200 is always going to look odd, because Gunpoint’s levels don’t actually *have* that many pixels. Something around 1280×720 usually looks better and runs smoother.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a thing the resolution menu was doing when switching between two non-native resolutions that I thought was clever but then turned out not to be clever and, in fact, confusing and annoying for all.
• Tweaked the way manual savegames work to prevent a) loading savegames from older versions and causing a crash (my fault), and b) accidentally loading a savegame from several missions ago and regretting it (your fault, but I wasn’t helping).
• An achievement misconfiguration caused the game to believe all players had found all laptops and defeated the final enemy in all possible ways. Understandably impressed, the game unlocked these achievements for almost everyone. Since it no longer knows your real laptop/takedown counts, I think we’ll just call this part of Conway’s backstory and remove those achievements. Each way of dealing with the final enemy still has its own achievement.

Progress on future fixes:

The .dll crash and music cutting out: I’m increasingly convinced these are to do with the middleware I used for music, or how I implemented it, so my next job is to put together a music-free beta that affected players can switch to. If that works, it might be time to look for a new way of handling music.

Slowdown: I now learn that this is a common problem for Game Maker 8.0 and Game Maker 8.1 games – Hotline Miami and Stealth Bastard both encountered it. So it’s probably not a scripting thing I can fix quickly. I have a few possible avenues to pursue in the short-term, but the good news is, when we ultimately switch to Game Maker Studio, that will almost certainly fix it.

An update on refunds: as I said previously, if you bought from this site and want a refund, I can do that for you absolutely no problem. If you bought on Steam, I don’t have the authority to make them give you a refund. But for the few the game still isn’t working for, if you raise a ticket with Steam support and tell them you’ve exhausted all tech support options with the developer (that’s me, I’ll back you up on this if necessary), they may refund you with Steam wallet credit. I won’t say “will” or “should” because as I say, it’s not totally in my power so it’d be wrong to make any promises. I’ll always do what I can to make it happen, though, and I’m always on your side.

Thanks to everyone who’s having issues for their patience! Gonna keep crunching to fix everything I can!

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug preventing the game from rightly chastising you for excessively punching the same guard.
• No longer possible to upgrade your trousers so much that they break the concept of linear time (divide by zero error).
• Ryan Ike is now more talkative on Mission 5.
• Fixed a bug that rendered the game unable to cope with how cool you look walking backwards into a subway with your gun drawn, leading to a crash.
• Fixed an interesting bug that caused problems if you played on two different PCs that have the same desktop resolution but different install drives. Well, not that interesting.

New features:

• Press F4 to toggle windowed mode anytime. This was already there, but we forgot to tell anyone.

But Tom, the fix I need isn’t any of those! Why do you hate me?

I don’t! I just haven’t had time to fix everything yet. This is my first game, and it’s reached an awful lot of people, and PCs are weird and different. We tested Gunpoint with over 5,000 people, but now it’s reached rather more, and it’s hard to catch everything.

I have made a list of steps you can try for any problem that may fix it.

This isn’t going to be a release-and-forget kind of thing, though. I’m working full-time to keep making it better now, and here are my top priorities:

1. Making it easier to change resolution
You can already change resolution any time between missions, but I realise the game doesn’t communicate that during a mission. So if you try a resolution on the first menu, then confirm it, then realise it’s wrong, then don’t see an option to change it mid-mission, it’s easy to panic.

Changing res mid-mission would reset the mission, which is why I left it out, but I think now it might be better to let you do that if you’re sure – or at least communicate how to.

I may also add a shortcut key to jump back to the resolution select menu in windowed mode, in case you get stuck in one that doesn’t let you click on the necessary things to do that.

2. Looking into a slowdown thing
Some people with fast machines are finding it runs slowly.

I have no earthly idea why this would be the case, but what I’ll do is put together a special demo that includes some options for changing the way the game handles the flow of time, the cursor, and the frame rate. If anyone affected finds one of these works, we’ll be on our way to fixing it.

In the meantime, it helps a lot if you can tell me your machine’s operating system and specs here.

3. A crash about ‘trigger deleted’
This is something Game Maker games have been known to throw up if they’re huge, or the system doesn’t have enough memory. Apparently it gets mixed up and starts looking for things that aren’t there – Gunpoint doesn’t actually use any triggers.

Again, I’ll try to put together a special test demo with a few things ripped out to see if we can at least determine a culprit. In the meantime, it helps a lot if you can tell me your machine’s operating system and specs here.

Beyond that
In order to bring Gunpoint to Mac and Linux – which is my intention but not yet guaranteed – it needs to be converted to Game Maker: Studio. This isn’t trivial, but once it’s done, it may solve a bunch of problems just from being a better suite. It may also run much faster on lower spec machines, which’d be awesome.

However
I’d much rather have your trust than your money, so if anyone has a game-stopping problem and would rather have a refund than wait for a fix, I’m checking with Valve to see if we can do that and find out how it works.

If you bought on Humble, I can do it for you right now – just write to me at pentadact+refunds@gmail.com and tell me the e-mail you supplied when you bought it. Absolutely no trouble, no questions asked, and if I ever fix the issue, I’ll release a new demo so you can check if it works.

It’s only a tiny percentage of people reporting these issues, but that’s zero help if you’re one of them, so I wanna do everything I can to make it OK with you.

After three years of working in my weekends, Gunpoint is out! Try it first, then if it works OK and you like it, buy it below!

What are these fancy editions?

They’re fancy! You can get all three from Steam or from here, and you can upgrade to any of them later. Here are the details!

Gunpoint: Special Edition

• Gunpoint: a 2D stealth game about rewiring things and punching people.
• The Soundtrack: includes all of the game’s noir-inspired spy music in high quality MP3 format.
• Developer Commentary:
  when enabled, you’ll find little sprites of Gunpoint’s developers on
  every mission. Talk to us to hear a little about our thinking behind the
  design (Tom), the art (John), and the music (Ryan). Caution: shooting a
  developer while he’s talking ends his current commentary track. This
  kills the developer.

Gunpoint: Exclusive Edition

• Gunpoint: a 2D stealth game about rewiring things and punching people.
• The Soundtrack: includes all of the game’s noir-inspired spy music in high quality MP3 format.
• Developer Commentary:
  when enabled, you’ll find little sprites of Gunpoint’s developers on
  every mission. Talk to us to hear a little about our thinking behind the
  design (Tom), the art (John), and the music (Ryan). Caution: shooting a
  developer while he’s talking ends his current commentary track. This
  kills the developer.
• The Making Of Gunpoint: a
  40-minute video feature taking you through how Gunpoint developed from a
  one-room test game to what you play today. Featuring Gunpoint’s
  designer playing his earliest prototypes for the first time since they
  were made, to great personal embarrassment and shame.
• The Prototype Pack (Windows only): play
  snapshots of Gunpoint’s development at 9 different stages, including
  cartoony programmer art, the first conception of the hacking system,
  many scrapped levels, and overpowered gadgets we later cut. For
  hopefully obvious reasons, we can’t give technical support for these.
• 4 Exclusive Tracks: bonus
  pieces produced specially by Gunpoint’s composers for this edition,
  mixing the game’s noir style with electronic influences. Since they’re
  not used as background music in the game, our composers took the chance
  to be more adventurous with these tracks.
• The Secret Beta Access List (Windows only):
  adds an option in the game menu to sign up to our Secret Beta Access
  List. If and when future Suspicious Developments games are developed,
  we’ll sometimes give secret beta versions only to the members of this
  list.

Special Edition Extras

If you already have the base game, you can buy the extras from these editions separately:

Exclusive Edition Extras

Note! The Exclusive Extras don’t include the Special Extras, they’re separate.

Have some facts!

• The main story takes most people about 3 hours to play through once.
• You can replay any mission you’ve already completed with whatever
  gadgets you currently have, to try to earn different ratings for
  avoiding violence, kills, noise, witnesses, etc.
• All editions come with the level editor, which is now integrated with the Steam Workshop if you’re playing on Steam.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s already bought it. I have been hurled across the room by your generosity, crushed against the wall by your enthusiasm, and stamped into a broken heap by your support. It’s the good kind of heap.

One of the extras in the Special Edition is all the music used in the game in MP3 format.

One of the extras in the Exclusive Edition is that, plus a huge load of bonus tracks Gunpoint’s three composers have put together. In some, they remix each others’ tracks from the game; others are all new.

If you’re not going to get the Exclusive Edition, or you want the tracks in fancy audiophile FLAC format, or you just want to support the composers specifically, you can also buy this full version of the soundtrack from Bandcamp!

There’s a tracklist and samples there, you can pre-order now, and it’ll be released at the same time as the game.

Everyone who worked on Gunpoint gets a percentage of Gunpoint’s revenue, but I also made sure our contracts let everyone keep the rights to their own work – including the right to sell it themselves, independently of me. So if you buy the soundtrack separately, all of your money goes to the composers.

If you’re up for it, here’s what to do!

Get the demo on Steam, if you haven’t already! (I haven’t patched the non-Steam version yet)

If you have already played the demo on Steam:

• Find your Gunpoint Demo folder (right click it in your Steam list, go to Properties > Local Files > Browse local files).
• Rename your ‘Savegames’ folder to something else, maybe ‘Savegames backup’.
• Delete your ‘Settings’ folder – it only stores your screen res.
• Start the demo.

You should see a resolution select screen. And if you’re running a high resolution, like 1920xsomething or more, it’ll probably mark one of the lower resolutions as ‘suggested’. Let me know if that one looks OK.

The game should also not crash if you hold down ‘a’ or ‘d’ while a level is loading, which it did before.

Have a play around and let me know in the comments here if anything else has broken!

Note: If you don’t have admin privileges, choose a different folder than the default ‘Program Files’. Sorry, I’ll get a new version up with a different default.

Like it? Pre-order it! Really like it? Get a fancy edition!

When’s it out?

Unbelievably, Gunpoint is out next Monday, the 3rd of June.

Why are there fancy editions?

I’ve been working on Gunpoint for three years, and it could be a turning point in my life. If it does well enough, I will quit my job to become a full time game developer. I could make more games like this, hopefully better and more quickly. This would be amazing.

Gunpoint is not really a mass-market thing, but I’ve noticed that it just clicks with some people. If those people are happy to support it in exchange for a few extras, Gunpoint could succeed because of passionate players, rather than just a very large number of players. This would be amazing.

I’ve tried to design the extra goodies so that if this was an indie game I was excited about, like FTL, I’d buy the $30 edition no question. But I know everyone’s circumstances are different, so I’ve made sure the base game is the same for everyone – no exclusive missions or bullshit bonus items.

If you can’t afford to go fancy, you can still do me a huge favour by spreading the word and pointing it out to people who do Let’s Plays and the like. Speaking of which, anyone who does game videos to a decent following (say 1,000 subs or followers), get in touch.

So, what fancy editions? What fancy editions!

Gunpoint – $10 – $9

• Both a DRM-free download of Gunpoint.
• And a Steam key to own Gunpoint on Steam.

Gunpoint: Special Edition – $20 – $15

• Both a DRM-free download of Gunpoint.
• And a Steam key to own Gunpoint on Steam.
• The Soundtrack: includes all of the game’s noir-inspired spy music in high quality MP3 format.
• Developer Commentary:
  when enabled, you’ll find little sprites of Gunpoint’s developers on
  every mission. Talk to us to hear a little about our thinking behind the
  design (Tom), the art (John), and the music (Ryan). Caution: shooting a
  developer while he’s talking ends his current commentary track. This
  kills the developer.

Gunpoint: Exclusive Edition – $30 – $27

• Both a DRM-free download of Gunpoint.
• And a Steam key to own Gunpoint on Steam.
• The Soundtrack: includes all of the game’s noir-inspired spy music in high quality MP3 format.
• Developer Commentary:
  when enabled, you’ll find little sprites of Gunpoint’s developers on
  every mission. Talk to us to hear a little about our thinking behind the
  design (Tom), the art (John), and the music (Ryan). Caution: shooting a
  developer while he’s talking ends his current commentary track. This
  kills the developer.
• The Making Of Gunpoint: a
  40-minute video feature taking you through how Gunpoint developed from a
  one-room test game to what you play today. Featuring Gunpoint’s
  designer playing his earliest prototypes for the first time since they
  were made, to great personal embarrassment and shame.
• The Prototype Pack: play
  snapshots of Gunpoint’s development at 9 different stages, including
  cartoony programmer art, the first conception of the hacking system,
  many scrapped levels, and overpowered gadgets we later cut. For
  hopefully obvious reasons, we can’t give technical support for these.
• 4 Exclusive Tracks: bonus
  pieces produced specially by Gunpoint’s composers for this edition,
  mixing the game’s noir style with electronic influences. Since they’re
  not used as background music in the game, our composers took the chance
  to be more adventurous with these tracks.
• The Secret Beta Access List:
  adds an option in the game menu to sign up to our Secret Beta Access
  List. If and when future Suspicious Developments games are developed,
  we’ll sometimes give secret beta versions only to the members of this
  list.

Have some facts!

• Gunpoint is for Windows only right now. Hope to do Mac and Linux versions next.
• The main story takes most people about 3 hours to play through once.
• You can replay any mission you’ve already completed with whatever
  gadgets you currently have, to try to earn different ratings for
  avoiding violence, kills, noise, witnesses, etc.
• There’s a level editor. The levels it makes are saved as simple text files so they’re easy to share.
• You can also buy it from Steam if you prefer. We get a bit less of your money that way.

Thanks so much to those who helped Gunpoint by expressing excitement
or telling people about it. It would have been much harder without that.

I am now a useless ball of nerves, so I’ll stop here and let you know how it goes. Cheers!

I will be announcing Gunpoint’s release date here tomorrow, Monday the 27th of May.

To be clear, this is not an announcement of Gunpoint’s release date. As promised in our hit post Gunpoint’s Release Date’s Release Date’s Release Date, this is an announcement of Gunpoint’s release date’s release date.

Gunpoint’s release date remains unannounced, until tomorrow.

I will be announcing the release date of Gunpoint’s release date here tomorrow, Sunday the 26th of May.

To be clear, this is not an announcement of Gunpoint’s release date, nor is it an announcement of Gunpoint’s release date’s release date. It is an announcement of Gunpoint’s release date’s release date’s release date.

Update: We have been delighted with the community’s empassioned reaction to this announcement. These are just some of the high user-engagement social media interactions we have already logged:

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.

The rest are a mix of acknowledging very distinct playstyles, encouraging you to try new gadgets, recognising insane, obsessive or impressive decisions, letting you know certain feats are possible, and in one case helping you understand what just happened (some testers don’t realise what’s happening when they make an infinite loop in Crosslink).

A few are secret to surprise you, and a few are secret to avoid plot spoilers. These are the rest, with their magnificent icons by our artist John Roberts:

Gentleman
Use no violence at all on a mission that has guards.

Ghost
Leave no living witnesses to your presence on a mission that has guards.

Perfect Gentleman
Complete a mission that has guards with no violence, witnesses or loud noises.

I Am Better At This Than Tom Francis
Complete a mission faster than I can.

I’ll Aim When I’m Dead
Upgrade your Bullfrog Hypertrousers to pounce instantly.

I Taste Battery Acid
Upgrade your battery capacity to the non-figurative max.

I May Be Some Time
Upgrade your Bullfrog Hypertrousers to maximum jump strength.

Open Door Policy
Knock a guard out by opening a door into him.

So This Is Why People Don’t Like Me
Get knocked down by an opening door.

Necessary Force
Jump into an Enforcer to knock him through a window.

Ding
Wire an elevator button to trigger something when the elevator arrives.

Cat Burglar
Use the Dropshot to land silently from a great height.

Not Really A Prank, Man
Use the Prankspasm to knock out someone who isn’t standing near a power socket (outside of the test lab).

Crossfire
Use the Longshot to make a guard unintentionally shoot another (outside of the test lab).

On The QT
Use the Hushcracker to jump through a window silently (outside of the test lab).

Breaking And Entering
Use the Gatecrashers to kick a door off its hinges.

Low Flying Doors
Use the Gatecrashers to kick a door into a guard.

Might As Well Have An Achievement For That Too
Use the Gatecrashers to kick a door through a window.

Privacy Is Dead
Hack every laptop in the game, for no compelling reason.

Short Circuit
Use the Crosslink to create an infinite loop that burns itself out.

Mission Architect
Create a custom mission with at least one objective.

Clean Record
Complete the police chief’s missions without incriminating yourself.

Hammerhead Snark
Mock the chief of police at a critical moment.

Title Finally Relevant
Help justify my early, not entirely wise choice of game name by holding someone at gunpoint with the Resolver.

Acknowledged Ludonarrative Dissonance
Notice the story doesn’t necessarily gel with the mechanics. Become qualified games journalist.

Open Ended Grudge
Take your final enemy out in each of 8 known ways.

Case Closed
Complete the game.

Case Filed
Publish your personalised epilogue.

It’s funny how much more like a ‘real game’ it feels with these in, and all the other Steam UI icons and polish.

I don’t usually care about achievements in games, but I like it when my crazy behaviour is acknowledged, so I saw them more as another channel for you and I to have a conversation, as player and designer. When it doesn’t make sense to have an in-game character know or acknowledge your actions, I still have a way to say “I can’t believe you did that,” or “Jesus, well done.”

Who do you play?

You’re a freelance spy, and your clients hire you to steal sensitive data or technology.

What do you do?

You break into high security buildings by rewiring the electronics. You can use a Crosslink gadget to see how all the lights, switches, cameras and doors are wired up, then drag a connection from one to another to make them work however you want.

Example?

• You come to a security camera and a locked door.
• Switch to Crosslink mode, and you can see the camera is wired to an alarm – if it sees you, the alarm will bring a guard running.
• So you drag a connection from the camera to the door.
• Now when you walk in front of it, the door swings open instead of the alarm going off, and you’re in.

Say I’m vaguely intrigued. What do I do now?

Join the mailing list! I’ll update you when I have a release date, a new trailer, demo, etc. If you’re also interested in behind the scenes stuff and obtuse jokes about programming, follow it on Twitter.

As ever, I don’t have a release date, but you can to be told when it’s out.

I mention the gender of the main villain in Gunpoint in this, but it won’t tell you much.

I AM SO SORRY I LEFT AUTOFOCUS ON! I will remember to disable it next time. My camera is great at everything except detecting how far away an almost stationary human in the center of the frame is.

I have to get to those stairs. The guard will shoot me if he sees me. I can’t open the building’s other entrance from the outside.

But if I Crosslink this lightswitch to the door, and I can get to it fast enough, I might be able to shut it before the guard shoots me.

A ground-level jump won’t do it: I have to hit the ground under the door going so fast that the momentum lets me skid all the way to the lightswitch faster than I could run. But from up here…

I jump. I skid. The guard draws his gun. I hit the switch. The door slams shut. I’m a genius!

The guard runs towards the door. I can’t take the stairs yet – there’s a guard up there watching the exit. I did not think this through.

I switch to Crosslink mode in a panic, and try to disconnect the handscanner he’s going to use to open the door. In my frantic rush, though, I manage to wire the door to the other handscanner – the wrong connection, the wrong way round, created instead of cut.

The guard’s at the door. I hear the handscanner check his identity. I do the only thing I can think of: hit the light switch again.

The door opened. The guard shot me just as I hit the lightswitch. The lightswitch shut the door. The door triggered the handscanner on my side. The handscanner opened the door. The door swung into the guard and knocked him out.

What I’m Working On

On my Gunpoint development to-do list, my current task is: “Do a quick run through to establish par times for levels.” Instead, in a fairly typical example of why finishing a game takes a long time, I’ve spent three solid days fixing all the things that have fundamentally broken in the first four levels since I last played them. Still, only 16 more to check!

Oi, aren’t you making a game?

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

I’m also giving a talk on the Sunday, about what I’ve learnt as a critic making my first game. That’s at 10.30 AM Sunday, in the Indie Theater, which is in the New York Convention Centre. That’s just a name, it’s in Paris like the rest of it.

If you won’t be there, my talk should be going online afterwards.

Kickstarter is awesome and I may need it some day for something, but not Gunpoint. Here’s my thinking.

1. Gunpoint will get made.

Kickstarter is meant to enable the production of things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Gunpoint is possible! I’m making it right now! I’m sure if a pile of money dropped on me, I could find some development use for it, but fundamentally the game does not need money to be completed. Asking for it on a funding site would be dishonest.

2. I’m not comfortable selling something I haven’t made yet.

Gunpoint will be made, but will it be good? I hope so! I’m pretty confident. But that’s not a certainty. And if I start selling it now, I’m gambling with money that isn’t mine. The people giving it to me are obviously fine with that, but that’s not enough. It’s my responsibility to make sure any deal I offer is a good one for you.

I think about this a lot, now that I’ve started a company and I’m working on something I will eventually sell. Covering the games industry right now gives you a deluge of ridiculous stats about ridiculous pricing concepts that make ridiculous money. Here’s an incredible quote from senior game designer at Amazon.com, Nik Davidson.

“We like to think that the ones spending vast sums on these [free-to-play] games are sons of Dubai oligarchs, but we have the data to prove that they’re not, and that they probably can’t afford to spend what they’re spending. We’re saying our market is suckers — we’re going to cast a net that catches as many mentally ill people as we can.”

Source: Gamasutra

This was a puzzle solution using a circuit linking mechanic I, uh, decided against.

The questions of “what will people pay for?” and “how much?” consume people. They’re turning up some surprising answers, and the answers are becoming the new rulebook for how to sell games.

If those are your only two questions, you’re primarily a businessperson. I’m not really interested in that. I want to be able to answer the other questions: “what would I pay for this?” and “would I be glad I did, a month later?” I need to be certain of the answers to those before I take anyone’s money.

It’s great that I already have some people’s trust, but I won’t use that until I’ve earned it. I don’t believe in just taking people’s money any time they’re willing to give it, or in charging whatever people are willing to pay. It’s my ethical imperative to make sure what I offer justifies what I’m asking for it, and I can’t be sure of that until it’s done.

3. I can’t quit my job yet.

It has been pointed out that I could make Gunpoint faster if I quit my job, and Kickstarter money could enable that. The first part is definitely true. The second part isn’t.

I can’t quit my job unless I have another one to go to. One day indie game development might become that, but a successful Kickstarter isn’t a career. Getting a lot of people excited enough to give you money is not the same thing as being a good game developer. I have to actually become that before I’ll give myself a job doing it. If I’m going to employ myself, I need to become someone I’d hire.

(If I ever do go into development full time, by the way, I won’t stop my games writing.)

4. Alright, whatever. I just wanted to throw some money at something.

Then you are a useful and attractive person to know! Please come back! Right now, you can make Gunpoint’s main artist John Roberts very happy by ensuring the next thing he gets to work on for his day job is the next goddamn Elite!

And you can make my friends Jim and James very happy by backing their robot Stalker-like, set in a gorgeously gloomy countryside generated by the clever algorithms of Tom Betts.

And you can fight drunk skeletons in Sui Generis! Back that! I badly want this kind of physical combat to take off.

This is by far the most requested feature both from people who’ve played it and people who haven’t. I always planned to add one after release, but when I came to see if it was feasible, it turned out to be easier than I thought. It’s working nicely enough now that I can have it in for release. Which will be… in the future.

Here are some cool things about the level editor:

• It’s actually a lot nicer to use than the built-in Game Maker one I’ve been using to make Gunpoint’s levels until now.
• Electronics stuff all gets wired up automatically – it knows a lightswitch should be connected to the nearest light on this floor, and cameras should be connected to the nearest alarm.
• It’s pretty much instant to switch between edit and play mode.
• The levels it creates are typically about 1 kilobyte in file size.
• It autosaves every time you place, move or delete anything, so you’d have to try really hard to lose your work.

Reminder: you can sign up to be e-mailed when Gunpoint is done. I won’t know when it’ll be done until it’s done.

If anyone else does video stuff with games and wants to feature Gunpoint, mail pentadact+guntube@gmail.com and link me your channel!

This was for an intro video to the Global Stealth Jam, an event organised by the Sneaky Bastards last weekend, a blog entirely about stealth games. The full thing features lots of cool people, like Nels Ormensch, Andy Schatz, Harvey Smith and Patrick Redding (who looks like he could be in Ocean’s 11).

Can you give me permission to publish videos from Gunpoint and make money from them in a really formal-sounding and unnatural way that will appease YouTube?

I, Tom Francis, hereby grant permission for anyone to make videos of Gunpoint and to monetise them. All of the music and art for the game was created for the game at my commission, I have full rights to grant this permission, and no-one else has any copyright claim to any of the game’s content that could supersede this permission.

I didn’t get a test build! Did you miss me out?

Nope, there hasn’t been one in a long time!

Can I have the last one?

I’ve got all the feedback I need on that one, thanks!

When will the next one be?

I have no idea! I never do! Until the actual moment I send it out, any one of a million things could go wrong.

The new problem is: I can’t process 5,500 people’s feedback. And with each new version, I’d like to get lots of fresh testers’ opinions – people who haven’t played before. So it doesn’t make much sense to send every version out to everyone.

There’s no particularly great way to split up the testing list, so I’ll go with the most logical: the people who signed up first get the first build, the next batch the second, and so on. Let me clear up any possible confusion with another edifying FAQ:

Which batch am I in?

I don’t know!

When will I get a build?

I don’t know!

Will people who get one build also get future ones?

I don’t know!

I would like to stress that testing Gunpoint is really a way for you to do me a favour, by giving your input and helping to make the game better. If you don’t want to do me a favour, that’s OK! Don’t sign up! Or unsubscribe! If you do, thanks, and sorry for the copious uncertainty.

And this will probably be the last time I whine about how screen settings stuff is harder than relativity, because I think I’ve done it.

The reason it’s so brain-meltingly complicated is that resolution is tied into so many other systems in ways that are really fiddly to unpick, and I needed to completely restructure all of those systems and come up with a final design for them before it even made sense to spend time on the res menu. It’s been the second most complicated of the very few truly boring things to figure out – the winner, as ever, being collision.

I decided to reward myself with Quantum Conundrum if I got this sorted today, and I did. Quantum Conundrum launches in the wrong resolution, and its resolution select menu is staggeringly, unforgivably bad. To the point where I just had to give up trying to use it, and will now search the Steam forums for some way to hack my res into the game files.

As a gamer, this is super frustrating. As a coder, I get a new, dark and terrible thrill from seeing other people fail at the thing I just solved.

Gunpoint will be playable at both Rezzed in Brighton on the 6th-7th of July, and Games Britannia in Sheffield on the 7th-8th. I can’t make it – I’ll go to all these things once I’ve actually released a game, but until then I should really focus on finishing one.

I can’t really figure out a way to use this as the prediction visual that isn’t super intrusive and surreal, but I rather like it.

This is even dumber than it sounds. The single biggest advantage of being completely indie is that you have no external influences dictating how and when the game gets made. Even you guys aren’t particularly pressuring me: whenever I do announce a delay, the comments are calm and wise: Fair enough / Take your time / Do it right.

But I don’t believe you. I work in fear of an imaginary community in my head, one that’s always on the verge of losing patience with me and interest in the game.

I took a week off work recently to work on Gunpoint full time, working 6am to midnight most days, and getting a crazy amount done. But the first time something took longer than I’d scheduled for, I panicked.

It soured everything. I felt stressed, disillusioned about the virtue of what I was adding, and it got harder to focus. I started to get that feeling I sometimes had when I started on Gunpoint: “What if it turns out I’m just not smart enough to do this?”

The ETA was actually damaging the game, and that was the last straw for ETAs.

Estimating how long something will take to code is like estimating how long it’ll take to crack a combination padlock. If it’s the first code I try? No time at all. If it’s none of the first 999? It’s going to take a while. You don’t know how long unless you know which attempt will succeed, and if you knew that the problem would already be solved.

My only objectives are to make an exciting game, and make it efficiently – using testing feedback to focus on what it really needs, and re-evaluating what I’m working on, how long it’s taking, and whether it’s the best use of that time. I got that part down fairly early on, and it’s part of what makes Gunpoint fun to work on: I can see it rapidly getting better in both my own playtests and other people’s feedback. I’m just going to stop adding arbitrary pressures to that cycle.

Thanks to everyone who’s been so cool about it so far. I’ll still be blogging a lot about the process and progress here, and if you like, I can just e-mail you when it’s out.

There’s loads more to this tileset than shown here, too – you could make a massive level where each floor has its own colour motif, like some of the offices in Mirror’s Edge. I like any time the art for our game naturally makes me mention Mirror’s Edge. Long story short, I’m now trying to find excuses to set more levels in labs.

By the way, I’ve started properly updating the Gunpoint Facebook page the same way I do with the Twitter account, so follow whichever you prefer up in the top right if you want to keep tabs on it.

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

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 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.

I get to go to GDC for the first time this year, to cover it, give a talk, demo my game, and lose an award! I thought I might need some classy-ass business cards to give to all the classy-ass people I’m sure to meet there, so I did these via Moo.com. Details are on the back, on the same scene in Crosslink mode.

From what I understand of business, the quality of your card stock and matte laminate are the primary traits by which companies attract a mate, and beyond that your actual work has little bearing.

I’m almost ready to send out a new test version of Gunpoint to anyone who’s around and able to give me some brief feedback. There’s no selection process, just sign up on the mailing list here and you’ll get it in the next day or two:

Also, Gunpoint was just previewed on BoingBoing! Brian Easton played an early build and seemed to really dig it!

Link.

Remember, you’re free to vote for any game, unless it isn’t Gunpoint, in which case you are asked to ignore your own preference and throw us a pity vote. Look how small your character is on-screen! That makes us literally the little guy. Also I’m new at this lol *falls over*.

“The interface is uncluttered and intuitive – you just drag beams of light from the object you want to act as a trigger towards the object you want that trigger to activate – and the whole system’s bristling with opportunities, especially when you start to factor in enemy AI.”

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.

What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole are dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?

Big companies move slowly, particularly public ones who keep having to point to the past to justify their strategy. To anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s been obvious for a long time that the customer isn’t just king anymore – he’s God. He can do whatever the hell he likes. No-one has the technology to stop him from taking whatever he wants.

Developers that are quick to adapt have focused on making the player want to support them, rather than pissing him off with increasingly intrusive attempts to restrict his access. Slower companies are still trying to get back to a time when people were forced to pay for software, and however safe that might seem, plans that involve angering a God usually aren’t sustainable.

Link.

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.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/29664976″]

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.

As for b), I don’t want to get too specific about genre or style, because the great thing about this process is that people are always surprising me with things I wouldn’t have thought would work, or just hadn’t considered at all. I will say that you need to put it over the gameplay video, and if your music doesn’t ever change in response to what’s happening in the game, it’ll probably lose out to something that does.

When you’re done, uploading it to YouTube and posting a link in the comments here seems to be the best way to get it out there. E-mailing me a download link is fine too though. I’ll see it either way so you don’t need to do both.

To help out as much as I can, I want to pick out some to he submissions that have come in so far and point out specific things that are awesome about them. This isn’t a best-of list, I won’t decide stuff like that till all the submissions are in. There are some great ones I haven’t included here because they’re just generally good, or because the thing they do well is already covered here.

C418 worked on something called a Minecraft? I am stunned and immensely flattered that he made a sample for Gunpoint, and stunned and immensely excited by how good it is. A few people on Twitter said things to the effect of “Contest over!” – that’s not true. I’m serious about the open submissions idea – if John Williams, Jeremy Seoule and Jesper Kyd sent in samples too, I’d still listen carefully to every submission anyone put their time and effort into, and give them all a fair chance.

The two things I love most about C418’s take are a) the clever transitions between indoors and outdoors – not only adding an extra layer when you go inside, but muffling the music when you leave again. And b) the beautiful crosslink music, and the natural way it builds onto the existing track – I get excited thinking about how switching in and out of crosslink could feel like composing your own music on the fly.

HyperDuck’s take is a great example of subtle game music, focused entirely on atmosphere and tone. There’s a fantastic heartbeat pulse when you pounce a guy, which fades after just the right amount of time. And the tinny muzak in the elevators is hilarious.

A really stylish old-school take, gorgeous upright bass. There’s a huge upkick when you’ve completed your objectives – it might be too dramatic for some levels, but it’s a really cool idea to give the player a “Let’s get out of here!” vibe without actually imposing a hard time limit. It’d also be great for when a gun goes off – at which point there really is a time limit.

This is just one track at the moment, but I love the mood of it, and the way it can turn from an anticipatory, suspenseful tone to an exciting action one smoothly.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/29664976″]

John also made a video, but it’s the full version of this song he wrote for the menus that I want to highlight. It’s a gorgeous, lonely piece of brass, the kind of sad, sinister track you’d hear in one of LA Confidential’s darker moments. If this started playing when you died, I’d probably sit and listen to it before reloading.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/30169493″]

As Ben says himself this piece isn’t really a soundtrack, I’m just including it here because wow, what a great track.

Apologies if I haven’t mentioned yours – it doesn’t mean it wasn’t awesome, because that list would be very long. Thanks again for all your hard work, and sorry if you asked for a reply and I haven’t sent one – my backlog is so huge that I may just have to come to terms with seeming rude to some people. I’ll try to keep up with posts like these to give as much feedback and detail as I can.

So if you’re interested in doing music for it, I’d love it if you could add what you think is appropriate to this version of the trailer.

I’m mostly open-minded about what the music should be like, but here are a few thoughts I have on it:

• You’re a spy, and it’s a stealth game. It needs to be quiet most of the time – possibly silent. I don’t think constant music is necessary, certainly nothing too busy or active.
   
• Music can be triggered by in-game events, but obviously you need to know what specifically it should respond to – it can’t just be “Action” without a clear idea of what defines that.
   
• Gunpoint’s set in the near future, with some silly gadgets, but also tries to be noir-inspired wherever possible. So electronic stuff is cool, and lonely sax is cool, but by no means compulsory.
   
• A light touch is good. I’d rather people not notice the music than notice when it doesn’t fit.
   
• I’m personally not wild about chiptunes. I’m open to it, of course, but I’ve never heard anything chiptuney that feels like a good fit for this style, to me.
   
• The flow of the game will probably go:

  Mission: leaping around a building, looking for a way in, avoiding detection.
  Mission: Pouncing on a guard or two – sudden bursts of violence that’ll usually be contained and go back to quiet sneaking.
  Mission: reaching your objective, getting what you want.
  Mission: escaping – not usually to a time limit, but there’s generally a quick way out.

  Dialogue: debrief with a client, they react to your missions, you choose dialogue options.

  Menus: buying new gadgets, upgrading gadgets, reading briefings and choosing your next mission.

  Dialogue: briefing with a client, you choose dialogue options, ask questions.

  Then back to a mission.

If Gunpoint ends up being free, I can’t pay you anything. Sweet deal, I know! If we do end up charging for it, and you end up doing the music, you will get a share of it. I should warn, though, that it’ll be a very small share – I have to prioritise the stuff the game wouldn’t work without. Basically, for God’s sake don’t do this for the money.

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.

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.

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, 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.