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!

Gmail’s new look is optional – FOR NOW – in the same way that Twitter’s was – FOR A WHILE THERE. And like Twitter’s, it’s sort of vaguely pretty but twice as awkward to use for all of my most common tasks.

I just found a script that lops off most of the wasted headspace that scrunches all the e-mails down, even in Compact mode, and it’s made a huge difference for me.

Works natively in Chrome, needs Greasemonkey in Firefox.

It’s weird how all the extra spacing made the default view look claustrophobic. To a certain mindset, white space isn’t open air, it’s the walls closing in.

Until it came out.

It’s flattering to be in such wonderful company, of course, but I can’t help wincing at the way EXPLODED painstakingly re-explains the concept, and details the creation of the machine as if you’ve never heard of such a thing.

Explaining yourself clearly is the first thing you learn in games writing, but it totally backfired for me in this context. And I hadn’t thought about how heavy a collection of stories about people who know how they’ll die could be. EXPLODED has jokes, but it dwells on its deaths.

One of my favourites in the collection is TORN APART AND DEVOURED BY LIONS, because it’s such a breath of fresh air. It doesn’t explain the concept, and it doesn’t even really have a plot, but it’s so funny, breezy and fun that you don’t want it to end.

The third demoralising thing I realised reading Machine of Death was that I suddenly had a much, much better idea for a story on this concept.

The crux of so many stories comes down to that Can’t Beat The Machine rule, and I got thinking about what would happen if you started from that. If the characters in your story had all read this whole collection, and were intimately familiar with the weird ways fate would bend itself to make the machine’s predictions come true. And then you tried to write an action film.

That’s when Machine of Death 2 was announced, and it wasn’t a hard decision to enter. Writing EXPLODED was a quick and enormously fun process, a handful of evenings, something I’d do again without any hope of inclusion.

So I wrote out the story idea I’d been kicking around, looked at it, and ditched it.

The problem was that it was about heroes – soldiers, really, but soldiers about whom I could only ever say one of a few things:

• YAY hero soldiers!
• WAIT some soldiers are jerks!
• GUYS war can be bad sometimes.
• OOH maybe what they’re fighting for is CONTROVERSIAL?

These are the four worst story concepts ever. And they don’t exactly lend themselves to the light, breezy tone I wanted to steal from DEVOURED.

The truth is, I don’t give a shit about fictional soldiers. I’ve watched them, been them, killed them more times than makes sense. I just liked the concept of how these guys would work in a Machine of Death world, how they would use that to their advantage, and wanted to write a story where things worked like that.

Really, the only interesting thing I could ask about some Machine of Death-enhanced superheroes was “What would it be like to fight them?” It would fucking suck. It would be like fighting the player in a videogame, or the hero in a movie – the asshole all the bullets miss, for whom every twist of physics seems to land in his favour.

What’s that like? Ask a supervillain. Actually, ask his henchmen.

LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE is about three henchpersons, the supervillain they work for, and the supersoldier superheroes who keep fucking up their shit.

It got accepted into the Machine of Death 2 collection on my birthday, and I danced around the room like an imbecile.

I’ve had this recipe for Italian peasant bread bookmarked for about a year now, finally got round to trying it. Added a topping before the final lidless crusting blast.

I think the professor’s flour-to-water ratios are off, or he’s using a different kind of flour: 2:1 is pretty much liquid, doesn’t come away from the bowl. I erred on the side of sticking to the numbers rather than tweaking until it did.

Came out deliciously crispy and super soft, but quite dense in the middle. Next time I’ll keep adding flour till it’s a bit more solid, probably skip the fold-twice step, and leave it to prove in the same pan it’s going to be baked in.

Bread is the most satisfying thing to make. I will definitely die from it.

Update: Loaf 2.

Made from a frozen portion of the dough for Loaf 1, thawed out and baked. Curious success! Wasn’t sure it would survive the chill, but it rose as it thawed out, and then proved more or less as it should.

Same consistency as the last one, so I floured it heavily before proving. The last loaf seemed to deflate when I reshaped it for baking, so for this one I tried just leaving it in the pot and putting it straight in. You’re supposed to pre-heat the pot, but I still got the amazing crust I was after.

Also added 15 minutes to the lid-off baking time, as planned. Definitely a good idea. This is not a bread you can eat quietly, but it’s a hugely satisfying crunch. I think that’s also why the middle is much lighter and fluffier.

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.

If you try to explain how much stuff you’ve entrusted exclusively to Google, then replace the word ‘Google’ with any other company name, it starts to sound terrifyingly stupid.

Backing up is surprisingly easy, though. You can’t do it via that weird Data Liberation Front thing they keep shouting about – that’s just for, like, status updates and Picasa for some reason. But for mail and docs, the two things I care about, neither method is hard.

The simplest way to have a local copy of all your Gmail is to install a mail client like Thunderbird, which is free and quite pretty these days, and tell Gmail to let you download it with that. Click the cog in the top right, go to Mail settings > Forwarding > Enable POP for all mail.

If you go with Thunderbird, the next bit is weirdly easy. It asks for your e-mail address and password, and then figures out what all the POP and SMTP servers should be automatically. Last time I messed with that stuff, you had to actually make a phone call to find it out. I am old.

Then you just check mail, and you’ll have about 20,000 new messages. Any time you want to update this backup, fire up Thunderbird and check again.

Google now has an in-built way to back up all your documents. Right click any one of them, and sneak past the two battling context menus to find the Download option.

In there you’ll find an ‘all items’ tab at the top – click that and you can pick what formats you prefer for each document type, then click a big download button to receive them all in one big zip. Surprisingly it was only about 300MB for me (1,000 odd docs).

Digging through all this old stuff has reminded me that for a brief golden age, a group of us managed to introduce “Snakes on a Plane” as a general expression of nonchalance – a sort of “Whaddya gonna do?” As if to suggest that in a world where snakes can be encountered on planes, anything less troubling is trivial.

Person 1: I’m not even dressed yet.
Person 2: But you got home before me!
Person 1: Snakes on a Plane.

Or: I’m Completely Misunderstanding Google+

The main part of Google+ is a social updates feed like Facebook or Twitter. With Facebook, you have to confirm someone as your friend before they see your updates. With Twitter, anyone can see your updates without asking permission, unless you make a special ‘locked’ account. With Google+… Christ.

Sometimes when I think about it, it seems like the best of both worlds. But then I try to use it again.

If I’m misunderstanding, please let me know – most of my complaints are of the form “You can’t do X, except by awkward method Y, and even then not really.” I’ve looked, but if there’s a proper way to do X that I’m missing, I’d like to know.

Bad news, guys. Notch said one thing, so now that’s all I can see of my feed without scrolling. On the plus side, I completely agree with him here.

To add someone, you have to put them in at least one Circle – the default ones are stuff like Friends, Family, Work. You don’t need their permission, like Twitter, but just adding them doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll ever see anything they say. That’ll only happen if they also put you in a circle, and then make a post that’s tagged with that circle, or if they make a new post and tag it as Public.

You can sort of see the idea: you might conceivably want to say something to your friends but not your family, so this is a sort of highly customisable privacy. But there are all kinds of baffling, awkward, clumsy things about the system that make it completely counter-intuitive, painful to think about and confusing to use.

1. It assumes you want to read everything everyone in every circle you make ever says. Your homepage is always an aggregate of all posts from everyone in your circles, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to customise that. You can click individual Circles to see what people you’ve put in those are saying, but there’s no easy way of clicking all the ones you care about and seeing an aggregate feed of those. Short of creating and then maintaining a separate circle that you have to update any time you update any one of the circles you want to include in it.
2. It assumes that the people you want to read are the same people you want to broadcast to. So if I make a ‘Team Fortress 2′ circle to post nerdy comments only TF2 players might care about, Google+ assumes I want to a) follow everyone I allow to see those posts in my general feed, and b) populate my Team Fortress 2 circle with everything those people say.
3. I can only categorise posts by who they’re by, not what they’re about. If I have a PC Gamer circle, and everyone at PC Gamer does, and we only post PC Gamer talk to our PC Gamer circles, I’ll still see all that stuff in my general feed, and since these guys are also my friends, I’ll also see all that work talk in my Friends circle. As far as I can see, there’s no way for my work friends and I to ever keep our work talk separate from our social plans, say. That’s less of a problem when you work for PC Gamer, but it seems like an incredibly common distinction to want, and the kind of thing the Circles system was built to address.
4. You can’t see what circles people have put you in, but they’re not exactly private either. For one, if you don’t manually disable resharing on each post, anyone in the circle you post it to can share it to people outside that circle. Which may well include people who are in your circles and wonder why they didn’t see that post from you in the first place. If you do disable resharing each time, because the people you’re sharing to don’t know what circle they’re in and who is or isn’t in it, they have no way of knowing who they can say “Hey, did you hear Dave’s having a party/baby/midlife crisis?” to without causing awkwardness.
5. Every time I have ever gone to post something, the default circle to post it to is one I have never posted to before and never would. It’s different every time.

Ultimately, it assumes the main thing you care about in life is preventing certain people from seeing certain things you say online, but that you don’t much care what you read. That’s the exact opposite of my relationship with the internet.

I would never broadcast anything, even on Facebook, I wasn’t happy for the world to see – the internet is now 60% fueled by screenshots of people doing that. But I’m incredibly fussy about whose thoughts I want to mainline.

The running joke, the universal truth, the most crushingly obvious thing about social networking since the moment it took off is this: there’s a vast gap between the number of people I like and the number of people whose verbal newsletter I want to subscribe to.

The two big social networks are both terrible at acknowledging that. Facebook won’t let me follow anyone unless I claim they’re my friend and they confirm it. Twitter won’t let me filter out people I like but don’t want to hear every thought from except with lists, which still don’t work properly and are getting harder to access with each new design. Now, Google have come out with something that combines the worst of both worlds in a manner so confusing that it’s taken me a week to figure out what it even is.

Or: Google have done something else in a manner so confusing that it’s taken me a week to fail to figure out what it is.

This 500th post calls for MINIMUM CONTENT and MAXIMUM STATS. They start from when the site moved to Pentadact.com in February 2008, and the graph looks a bit like this (click for readable size):

Special thanks to Chris Livingston for being my biggest human referrer, which will make him vital when the robot referrers rise up against the human referrers and we need some muscle. He’s also writing about film and TV as well as games these days, with his wife – bafflingly also called Kris Livingston. It is awesome to have him back on the blogonets, and some of his amazing old stuff like his Merchants of Brooklyn screenplay is finally back online.

BACK TO STATS.

Apparently- wow, the Left 4 Dead gnome thing is my most visited post ever? Here’s the confusing list:

1. I Played Through Left 4 Dead 2 Holding A Goddamn Gnome
The only thing I know about how StumbleUpon works is that it rewires the internet so that this post is disproportionately popular, forever.

2. I Played Through Episode Two Holding A Goddamn Gnome
My SEO seminar is entitled Goddamn Gnomes and How Holding Them Can Grow Your Demographic.

3. Team Fortress 2 Unlockable Ideas
Proof that if you can’t do something well, do it anyway.

4. Ending BioShock
Imagine this post spluttered loudly and indecipherably by a drunk, and you know what I’m like to hang out with.

5. This Is All I Can Think During StarCraft 2′s Cut Scenes
Can’t help noticing the popularity of posts in which I write little or nothing at all.

6. Fallout Girl: Striking Out
Thousands of people saw this! Almost none of them were inspired to read the next or previous entries! Ouch.

7. Far Cry 2: Impersonation Of A Buddy
Thanks to a celebrity cameo in the comments – cheers, Clint!

8. Plants Vs Zombies: Lawns I Have Loved
Wow. OK, no idea.

9. The Best And The Worst Of Mass Effect 2 (Spoiler Safe)
Venting pent up opinion from not getting to review it.

10. A Stab At Meet The Spy
Which, as everyone pointed out, was too long. Then Meet The Spy actually came out, and was more than twice as long as every other video in the series. IN YOUR FACE, people with a reasonable point!

More importantly, we just passed 10,000 comments, and that is tough to comprehend. Even after six years, this place almost never gets a “first!” or a “meh”, so that’s 9,900 worthwhile contributions – more than I’ll ever make myself. Thanks, everyone.

*hic*

The reason we want things isn’t that they’ll make us happy.

Often, getting what you want does give you a little rush of happiness. We can be fooled into thinking this is the sensation of having that thing. In fact, of course, it’s the sensation of getting it. We are feeling the change in our status, not its new level. Which is why it fades.

We expect this relationship:

But we get something more like this:

As a long-term strategy for pursuing happiness, you can see chasing success clearly isn’t going to work. You’d have to be consistently improving your lot to stay happy, and if you ever hit your potential, you’d flatline. This type of happiness – you could call it Gain Happiness – is fleeting.

One consolation is that the reverse is true: if a major loss doesn’t have recurring consequences, you only feel it temporarily. Before long, you’re back to your previous level of happiness even if you’re worse off. A study in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology (PDF) explored the subjective well-being of 118 people over two years, and found that neither positive nor negative events had a lasting effect on their reported happiness beyond three to six months.

So Gain Happiness is hard to gain, but Loss Misery is easy to lose. We’re surprisingly stable. Within that, how do we get happier? Here’s what I have so far:

1. Be ruthless about getting away from sources of misery.

I can’t help you with this, but it’s worth acknowledging its importance. I’ve only talked about what happens in the positive bit of the happiness chart – if you’re actively unhappy and there’s an external cause, obviously getting permanently away from it is your only priority.

For me, the only times I’ve been truly unhappy have been when I was living with people I didn’t like. Once I managed to get away, every type of happiness got a hell of a lot easier.

Disclaimer: try not to kill anyone.
 

2. Do something because you enjoy the process, not the result.

Ideally for a living. There are two particularly great things about my job: writing, and feedback. If feedback was the only one I enjoyed, I’d be miserable.

It’s the result, and if you’re anything like me, getting a great result makes a good one disappointing. It’s Gain Happiness with ever-increasing expectations, which leads to a constant war of neuroses. You can’t let your happiness be dependent on something like that.

Luckily, I love writing. Before we launched the site in June last year, I didn’t get that much feedback on what I wrote – people don’t write to a magazine as readily as they comment on a blog. But I already loved my job, because I love the process.
 

3. Do what you want to be in the mood to do.

Often you’re not angry or sad because of the thing you’re angry or sad about. You’re just in a bad mood. I’ve found if I pay attention to what mood I’m in, it’s amazingly easy to snap out of it.

In my case, I can just watch something funny – I’ve never been angry while Flight of the Conchords is on. And like everyone, I have mood amnesia: the moment I’m out of a bad mood, it’s forgotten.

But it’s even more powerful than this. You can also get stuff done that you don’t feel like doing, just by starting to do it. Your brain only resists up until the point you actually start the job, at which point it starts to focus on doing it. You do what you want to be in the mood to do, and soon you’re in the mood to do it.

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s the single most useful piece of information I’ve discovered about the way my brain works in 29 years of having one.

The stories from the Machine of Death collection are being gradually released as a free podcast, a sort of episodic audiobook. Mine just came out, read rather excellently by Christopher Joseph. Warning! Strong language from the first word.

Not totally sure why I don’t get a mention, I think that might be an oversight. The site makes it clear enough who wrote it so it’s no big deal.

One of many reasons I declined to read my own story was that my narrator is American and I am not, so it’s great to hear it in its pseudo-native tongue. The flipside, of course, is that I’m not perfect at expressing the exact tone of voice characters are using, so inevitably there are parts that aren’t as I’d imagined them. I don’t mind that at all – my narrator is intentionally not me in some important ways, so it’s kind of nice to hear him say things the way I wouldn’t.

It also makes me realise how much clearer I need to be about who’s speaking. Chris always gets it right, but without doing some kind of comedy accent for one of the characters, that’s not enough for the listener to always know. I think I’m meant to write scripts rather than prose, I don’t really care how non-dialogue information is communicated so long as it’s clear.

Here’s the direct MP3 link if you want to download it, or the RSS link to subscribe.

The book is now $12 from Amazon.com or £11 from Amazon.co.uk. You can also get it as an iBook for $5.99 or on the Kindle for £7.29.

The whole thing is also free in PDF form, and the text of my story for it is online here.

I spend my downtime in life analysing things, trying to identify comprehensible systems and figure out ways to beat them. Then I forget again. So this is a notebook of that stuff.

It’s what got me interested in philosophy, but since uni, my interest has shifted to the more practical consequences of it. It’s not hard to figure out the meaning of life, it’s harder to figure out how to pursue it. Hence, Advice.

The meaning of life is there isn’t one, which is to say there isn’t one other than the obvious one, which is to say be happy.

It gets clearer if you think about what you’d want for your kids: you might want them to have kids themselves, but that really only gets you back to the drawing board a few decades closer to the destruction of the planet. What you probably want, overall, is for them to be happy. Apart from anything, it’d make you happy.

This hedgehog agrees with me.

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that some people have written a bit about how to pursue happiness, but a lot of it trips over a pretty basic hurdle at the starting line. We’ve noticed we are happy when we get things we wanted – love, money, sex, kids, shoes – and concluded this stuff is related. Or we’ve noticed we are unhappy when we can’t get things we want, and concluded we should stop wanting things.

At the heart of it there’s an assumption that we want what’ll make us happy, with a certain margin of error for when things aren’t what we expected. We think we’re almost rational that way, wanting things because of the happiness they’ll bring, or our estimation thereof. We are way, way off.

This won’t sound terribly profound, but we just want shit. It just happens. It’s not a decision, it’s a set of drives built into us by evolution to ensure we survive and reproduce whether it’ll make us happy or not. The desire to have kids has nothing to do with any felicific calculus about the happiness and sadness they’d bring, in the same way that hunger isn’t a judgment about how enjoyable food would be. Other desires that are less primal stem from these, usually via power, safety and status.

The upshot is: your brain, gut, heart, genitalia, and whatever other organs you want to assign desires to, are not trying to make you happy. When they say they want something – whether it’s true love or a breakfast burrito – it doesn’t mean they’ll thank you for it. And the question of how to make yourself happy has really very little to do with getting what you want. These posts will be about what it does relate to, and sometimes how.

Okay, so neither of us have quite mastered the door technology yet.

I’ve gone back to working on the infiltration-themed platformer I’m making, Gunpoint. I’d planned to take two days out of the winter break to binge on it, but after a few interruptions I’ve decided four half-days might be more doable, and less exhausting.

The plan is to rapidly impliment the last few features it needs before the main mechanic can make sense, without slowing down to fine tune their operation or tweak the look. So far I’ve got security doors and light switches working, and I’ve almost got the AI interacting with them correctly: only guards can pass through security doors, and they’ll turn on lights if they find them off. Next it’s the main mechanic, then a few last fundamentals that may end up being important.

It’s fun to be making fast progress again. It was a huge mistake to bother putting elevators in before the rest of the basics were working, and the ridiculous time that took added to the ridiculous time AI took is the main reason I ground to a halt on the whole thing.

I now have a game that is ugly, broken and crude in every way except the lifts, which are the most magnificently smooth, reliable and satisfying vertical transportation in the history of interactive entertainment. And I’m about one month behind where I would have been if I’d stuck to stairs. It started to feel hard.

It isn’t, really, but a few things do trip me up repeatedly. I want to make a note of them here on the offchance it gets any of it through my skull, so the rest of this post will make no sense to anyone who doesn’t use Game Maker (the tool I’m making the game with).

• When you store an instance in a variable – remembering which wall I’ve just collided with, for example – don’t. Store its .id property. Sometimes, even though what you want to reference is a property of that thing, you have to pretend it’s a property of that thing’s id, even though that makes no sense. Otherwise, you get shit like light switches that toggle their own existence on and off instead of changing the light level.
• The Create event is a handy place to put any code that should be executed when the object is created. DON’T EVER FUCKING USE IT FOR THAT. Why? Because the objects in the game at start up are created in an arbitrary, unreadable, undeterminable and randomly changing order.

  You have no idea what code has already been done and what hasn’t when any given Create event is executed. So when one tiny change to something suddenly breaks everything in your entire game, including a bunch of stuff it had absolutely nothing to do with, it’s because the Creation order has changed arbitrarily.

  Only ever use Create to set initial variables, then use Alarm events to trigger actual code. That way you can set those alarms to go off in the order you specify.

• Often you want one object to ‘trigger’ an event for another object. The reason the method you just tried isn’t working is that it’s getting re-triggered repeatedly sixty times a second all the time that the conditions are fulfilled, usually reversing the effect and/or delaying alarm events indefinitely.

  The best way I’ve found to do triggers like this is to have it set an Activate property on the target object. The target object checks this Activate property every step, and the moment it’s ‘true’, it sets it to false, does its work, then tells the trigger object not to bother it again until it needs to.

• Relatedly, attach code to the object it affects, rather than the object that executes it. A button shouldn’t open a door, even if that’s the only thing it’s ever going to do. It should just say “Open!” to the door, and the door itself should contain the code for how to do that. That way, if you ever need other objects to open the door, they can just say “Open!” too and it won’t cause any conflicts or require any repeated code.

Pretty goddamn fascinating, I think you’ll agree. The truth is that most of the problems you encounter creating a game aren’t as frustrating as playing the average shooter. You don’t expect to succeed. You’re wrestling a ridiculous tangle of logical statements into something that functions as a comprehensible world, which is an insane and extraordinary thing to do – even when the results are drab, glitchy and artless. In other words, I’m enjoying it again.

By the end of this sprint I plan to at least be able to show you a video of it in action, and possibly send out a new prototype version to testers. If you’d like to try it when the next version’s ready for testing, and haven’t already mailed me about it, mention Gunpoint in a mail to pentadact@gmail.com.

You probably don’t want to hear about my year, particularly since it was good. So I’ll do what I did in 2009 and just pick some shots from it, and a track to listen to while you browse.

I invented a board game for my family to capture the basic mechanics of the amazing but single-player only Flash game Dice Wars. It had some kinks.

Rich’s housewarming. He has a trapdoor in his kitchen that leads to an underground well.

I made cookies for my family at easter, each customised to our esoteric tastes.

Ceramic.

My cheese and rosemary bread – best eaten while it’s still this hot.

Exhausted in an especially hectic New York City, I’m happy to find Max Brenner The Chocolate Man still exists, and is still an oasis of warmth and butterfat.

For our pseudo-anniversary, we fed Kim’s fixation with fish at the aquarium, and my fixation with steak at Hawksmoor.

Hawksmoor’s sticky toffee pudding.

I now own a barbecue, the final artefact I needed to complete my triforce of manhood.

Our old friend Al was back from New Zealand for a while, so Rich, he and I got together for a fajitas and margaritas night. We got through about a third of the Cuervo in margaritas before I passed out and Rich violated his vegetarianism. Welcome back Al!

It made us think.

30s party for my Gran’s birthday. Anna, me, and Kim.

Vancouver work trip.

Seafood with Relic. That’s Dan Kading, designer of Dawn of War 2: Retribution.

Halloween.

Christmas. Anna and I are transfixed by our dad connecting a battery and a magnetised screw so that it spins phenomenally fast.

These last few might look familiar.

I seem to redesign this place at the start of every year – boredom with the old design peaks just as the winter break hits with the spare time to fix it. This new design is mostly just a visual jiggle, but I’m counting it as site number six because it’s no longer called James. I’m not good with titles, obviously, so it doesn’t really have one anymore – it’s just my blog, or Pentadact.com if you need something more unique.

I’ve sort of decapitated the old design:

It felt flabby and basic, and those black bars bothered me for no good reason. The new one fits more on the screen, and is a bit smoother. You’ll notice I’ve brought it bang up to date with the hottest web trend of 2003 – very slight gradients. A few other things are new:

• Infinite scroll: it loads the next bunch of posts when you scroll to the bottom. It doesn’t currently tell you it’s doing this.
• Like button: fucking Zuckerberg. That ugly little thing is so goddamn hard to put on any non-white page without making it hideous. I can’t resist them, though – they’ve been awesome on the PC Gamer site for letting us know the difference between pieces that people want to respond to, and piece people just… like. Without something filling that role, you never really know when you’ve done something right.
• Category tabs: browsing by category was a little obfuscated in the last design. I wanted to put them front and center for the sake of people who don’t care about games, since that topic often dominates this place a bit. Of course, which category link do the vast, vast majority of people click on? Games. They look at my site about games and think “Goddamn it, this isn’t enough about games! ONLY GAMES!”

As ever, please let me know what you think and if anything isn’t displaying right for you. I have some tweaking to do and presumably a lot of bug fixing, though it doesn’t look too disastrous so far.

Please excuse the state of this place while I tinker with it a little. I have a visual retartening planned out, and the current design will start to look glitchy as I rip it up and force the new one in. I’ll let you know when it’s supposed to look right, and you can tell me that it really doesn’t.

Work on Gunpoint for two days straight
Making Scanno Domini in 48 hours was exciting and eye opening. The deadline not only sped progress, but forced brutal and useful decisions about the design. I want to do the same for my longer-term game Gunpoint, aiming to get it to the point where you can meaningfully complete a level using the game’s central mechanic by the end of the year.

Every hour of work you put in before that point might be a complete waste of time, so you have to get there as rapidly as possible. I’ll probably work on it on the 29th and 30th.

Redesign Pentadact.com
The intentionally misleading title of this place is starting to cause actual harm in world increasingly reliant on search ranking. I have to call it by my own name. I also want to make the design slightly cleaner and less busy, and implement infinite-scroll rather than those archaic ‘Older posts’ links. Might tweak the colours and add an archive if I have time.

Start ‘Notebook’
A new category or subsite on here for what I used to call philosophy, but which has evolved into increasingly practical advice given by myself to myself. I need to write the shit I figure out down so I don’t forget what little I’ve learned, and doing it publicly helps get it straight in your head.

Post: What Makes Games Good
One I’ve been tinkering with for too long. It’s about giving names to the different metrics on which great games succeed – the ones that really matter. Because they’re not ‘graphics’, ‘gameplay’ and ‘multiplayer’.

Post: What Games Are Bad At
Less of a priority, but I’ve often wanted to do a series on the things I think the industry is repeatedly fucking up. Most of my obsessions about games relate to what they normally get wrong, so explaining why and how might turn that into useful advice for making them better.

Tweak Scanno Domini
So much I could do to this from here, but to avoid letting it distract me from more important stuff, I’ll stick to the quality-of-life essentials. Snow and single-barreled weapons fire both need to be darker – they’re invisibly bright on some people’s screens. Bots still sometimes get stuck camping you, forcing a restart. I really should let you use the keyboard for movement if you want to. And I might either make the game a little easier, add an easy mode, or do something clever with the difficulty so that it ramps up more smoothly. Watching my dad play it was informative.

Some pictures from mine. It’s snowy here in England, and the Dorset hills are a nice place to stomp around in it.

I got a Kindle! If you mail me stuffs – anything like a .txt .doc or .pdf – it’ll pop up on my cyberhyperbook! This is the address: pentadact@free.kindle.com

I was a little dubious about this one, solely because one character refers to the other as ‘kid’ – something I’m not yet sure people do in real life. But it’s one of the most interesting settings for a Machine of Death story – one of the few that has the courage to put the machine itself well into the background of the world, and tell a story that is affected by it, but not about it.

It’s about two soliders, stranded on an island, who both know how they will die. One is STARVATION, the other is HOMICIDE. So the entire scenario is overcast by both men endlessly reconjecturing about how their personal prophecy could come true.

That makes it very tense at times, particularly since my twist-happy brain likes to spend its downtime trying to pre-empt every eventuality. But I can honestly say the ending surprised me, and in a way that made me the story seem smarter than me.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 from Amazon or Topatoco in the US, or in the UK for £11.50 with free shipping from The Book Depository. The whole thing is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.

If you do play it, I’d love to know what you thought of it – I’ve been really surprised by the feedback so far.

This version fixes a few significant bugs I didn’t have time to test during the compo – the competition version will stay as it is for judging purposes, of course, I’m just putting this up for anyone who wants to have fun with it. The key changes are:

• Choice of resolutions – anything up to 1920×1200. The game will remember your choice and not ask you again.
• Fixed a crash relating to being able to fire while dead. Duhhh.
• Fixed a bug preventing enemies from sensing when you shoot or touch them – they now turn to try and find you.
• Fixed a lot of erratic behaviour with the scanner – it’ll now scan all the new tech the bot has in one go.
• Fixed a problem with bot behaviour that made The Ominous Event extremely hard to recover from – they’ll wander off on their own once you’re down now.
• Fixed a bug causing some bots to spawn ‘blind’, with no vision cone. It was kind of cute, but causing problems down the line.

Sometime after Christmas, I think I may try a 48 hour sprint with Gunpoint. Getting so much done in such a short time is exhilarating, and it could really use a burst of progress to get it to a point where it makes sense.