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It’s Ludum Dare this weekend, a regular competition to make a game from scratch in a weekend. I don’t have two days spare, but I do have two hours and a cup of coffee, so I’ll pitch you the game I would make if I could. The theme is decided by a vote, and ‘Alone’ won. However, ‘Kitten’ was also in the final round. It got more down-votes than any other theme, but I can’t help wanting to combine the two. Here’s my idea: RED SNOWTop down view of snowy tundra. You are a badly drawn TINY KITTEN that scampers towards the mouse cursor, kicking up snow and leaving messy pawprints. It’s a zero button game: all you do is move the mouse.
If you stray far from where you start, you’ll run into a villager or two. They stop when they see you, and run to the north if you approach. They’re faster than you, so you can never catch up to them. The further north you go, the more villagers you’ll see. They all run away to a village to the north, but if you get close to the village itself, they’ll flee that too. If you chase them, you’ll reach a cliff edge. The villagers will stop at the threshold, but if you come close enough they’ll throw themselves over to get away from you. The other side of the ravine is a sheer wall of ice, in which you see blurry reflections of the villagers you’re chasing into the chasm. But your own reflection is wrong: far too big, dark and spiky. A rough silhouette of that more monstrous shape appears over your usual badly-drawn kitten avatar, and gets stronger the longer you spend in the presence of your reflection. Eventually, the kitten fades away entirely and you see yourself as the monster you are. After that, there’s a small chance you’ll encounter smaller villagers who can’t run as fast as you. If you get close to one, you automatically pounce on it and rip it to shreds in a spray of blood, and you’re unable to control yourself until you finish devouring its remains. After that, any time your cursor is directly over a villager, you’ll accelerate to chase it down and eat it. The more you eat, the faster your hunting speed. If you do kill a villager, there’s now a chance that the villagers you meet in future will throw rocks at you before running away. The more you kill, the more will try to fight you. The rocks knock you back very slightly, so if more than a couple are pelting you, you can’t catch up to them and have to run away. After the first few, rock hits will make you bleed steadily, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. The bleeding stops if you eat a villager. If you don’t stop the bleeding, your monstrous image starts to fade and the kitten returns, still bleeding.
If you leave the villagers alone, or you kill them all, you’ll end up alone in the snow. After a while alone, your beast appearance fades and you start to see yourself as a kitten again. The screen gets darker as night closes in, and the kitten starts to tremble and turn blue. Eventually, its scampering slows to an unsteady crawl, it lies down, goes still, and is lost in the dark blue snow as darkness closes in. “The feel-good game of the decade.” – IGN.com
More Amateur Hour, Ludum Dare
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Pattom: If you don't have the time, Tom, then someone needs to make this. And there is indeed a strong sense of The Outsider here; I feel like you could make a fantastic game using some of that story's cues, especially while taking a nod from an essay about Hitman: Blood Money in this site's archives. The one where Tom notes that games can use environmental detail to color their protagonists.
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Fact Friday: this was Morrisette’s original lyric until Warner Brothers demanded it be changed to spoons and knives because of “What.” | ||
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Zacmanman: It's better than having zero ropes and zero bombs.
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In the trailer I put up last night I said I’m open to suggestions for music for Gunpoint, then claimed there’d be a version of that trailer without my voice here on the site. There wasn’t! There is now!
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:
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.
More Gunpoint
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Nathan Dell-Vandenberg: Here is my submission for Gunpoint after about 4 hours of troubleshooting audio/video issues when posting to youtube. Gah! Done!
http://www.youtube.c... ...ZWpMFX0u3U reach me at Nathan@NathanDV.com | ||||
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It’s been eight months since the first Gunpoint video, and it looks rather different now, so I’ve made a new trailer. I’ll talk you through the basics and then some of the most complicated solutions I’ve come up with, just to give you an idea of the stupid stuff you can do when you mess around with Crosslinking.
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.
More Gunpoint Trailer
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Balls: Apply this equation:
p = unit price r = average recommended unit price (from comments above) e = average review of this game, out of 10, from 20 reputable sources written between 6-12 months from release date (may require time machine) p = (r^2)*(1/e) | ||||
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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. | ||
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Pentadact: H brings back the search box, but I do think that's one thing it could improve: there's room for it between the action buttons and the pageturners on that single navigation line.
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Regular commenter lack_26 “got a bit bored and ended up making the UCD-Pepper-spray Cop, so of course I eventually ended up putting it into a gunpoint screenshot”. It is amazing!
Luckily, Conway’s Teflon Hyperface renders him immune to lachrymatory agents.
More Gunpoint
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redn4x: Teflon Hyperface?
If your game gets popular, i can see some memes popping up. | ||||
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With a comical inevitability, I have to admit I can’t see Gunpoint being ready for Christmas. Lots of elements I think of as ‘done’ aren’t really ready, and finishing each of those seems to take about as long as coding them in the first place. Then there’s level design.
Level DesignI’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.
Alternate RoutesI 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.
The ProblemI tried it a few other ways and kept running into the same problem: If a puzzle has one solution, it’s only really fun to solve once.If a puzzle has more than one solution, one of those solutions will be easier or more obvious to the player.So, you just do that one. Even if you notice the others, they add nothing: it feels pointless to take a longer or harder route, even if it involves some interesting tricks. This really surprised me. I’ve always thought the opposite: that alternate routes are always valuable, even if you don’t take them, because you appreciate having options. Nope! Sometimes alternate routes are just noise. Sometimes having a lot of options just makes it feel like there isn’t really an obstacle at all, so getting past it feels more like a commute than a challenge. So why do I enjoy taking alternate routes in Deus Ex? Why don’t I always go for the first or easiest one? Honestly: because it sucks. In Deus Ex the shooting is intentionally bad, and even in Human Revolution, the cover shooting is nothing like as cool as the stealth. Deus Ex doesn’t offer you choice by presenting you with door A and door B. It presents you with a really difficult and awkward door A, then says “Oh no! I can’t believe you found a vent!”
ChoiceChoice, 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 twiceAll 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 incentivesI’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. GadgetsI’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 consumablesThese 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. UpgradesYou 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.
More Gunpoint
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C2: If you want people who played the game to revisit old levels and to solve it differently, what I suggest are "medals", which awards the player for doing certain things. Get all the medals and maybe the player gets some sort of reward? Btw, I would pay like $10-$20 american dollars for the game. Hope this helps!
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I ordered my elf mage to move somewhere, accidentally told her to attack my dog. This kills the dog.
More Skyrim
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Moogle: Saddest moment:
I needed to level enchanting, so I was out hunting with my soul trap bow. I'm about to fire the killing blow on a mob and Vigilance (dog bought from Markath), who was a little hurt from the mob, jumps up just in time to take the arrow to the back of the head. _Schluuup_ *cries over filled soul gem* | ||||
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