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I am interviewed on Gamasutra! Here is a question from that interview! 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.
More Gunpoint Press
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True PC Gaming interviewed me about a bunch of things – both development and general opinions. Here’s one! 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.
More Gunpoint Press
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Diego: Hey there,
Nice interview. This answer in particular is very good. I'm really liking this project, by the way! I hope to see more of it soon. | ||||
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BATH, UNITED KINGDOM – January 21, 2012 - The headquarters of UK game developer Suspicious Developments were broken into last night by the company’s own director, Tom Francis. The break-in is said to have occured when Francis attempted to enter the building, which is also his house, and found one of its two locks unresponsive to key-based opening techniques. No local locksmiths were available, so an emergency meeting of the board of director was held. By a unanimous vote of one to no-one else was there, the board elected to not be outside anymore. The board then climbed a nearby railing to achieve the necessary height to strike at the non-functioning lock, and extended its foot with force. The lock, which was not available for comment, detached from the internal door frame after six strikes. “Fuck,” the board announced. The developer’s headquarters are now secured with the remaining functional lock. The board then poured itself a glass of wine and fell asleep watching Justified. | ||
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Erik: Thanks for the smile!
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After spending more than a week listening to more than 45 submissions for Gunpoint’s music, I’ve decided to go with Ryan Ike’s cool, moody upright-bass style for Gunpoint’s missions. There were also two particular songs among the submissions that just clicked perfectly with different parts of the game: for the shop and upgrade interfaces you access on your phone, Francisco Cerda’s gorgeous smooth jazz was exactly what I wanted. And for the game’s more sombre moments, John Robert Matz’s mournful and sinister theme tune was magnificent. So Gunpoint has sort of ended up with three musicians. Coming to a decision was harder and much more time consuming than I expected. I got more submissions for this than for the game’s artwork, and listening to a full music sample takes 1,833 times longer than looking at a sprite. The more I listened and played, the more I liked less prominent tracks that supported the game’s existing atmosphere. Thanks again to everyone who did such awesome work, and sorry to everyone I couldn’t use. I was amazed by the calibre of what came in. Obviously I feel terrible turning anything good down, but I still believe in the open submissions process because I’ve been on the other side of it a few times. Both times I wrote short stories for the Machine of Death collection, it was with no expectation they’d get in – I just did it because I enjoyed doing it. I hope that’s the feeling among everyone who’s submitted stuff for Gunpoint, music and art. You might remember I also did the same thing for the Crosslink noise, and got some awesome stuff. I’ve decided to use Jeremy Watssman’s smooth warbly sound, which you can actually hear in his music submission video here. I’d also like to use the sound Ben Royle submitted for a different purpose, if he’s OK with that: it makes a great satisfying thunk when spending points upgrading your gadgets. Update: he says, quote, “Fuck yeah!”  Gunpoint in 2010, before it had a title. The filename was just ‘grey’, after the background.Lastly, I talked a bit about how far Gunpoint has come on and asked you guys if you thought I should charge money for the game when it comes out. I was expecting around 90% of you to say I should keep it free, and if it was as low as 80% I’d start to believe it might be worth something. The figure was around 1%. Over a thousand comments, the vast majority of people said “No! Don’t give us a free thing! Charge us money!” That’s an amazing and confusing response for me, but you don’t have to tell me twice. Well, you don’t have to tell me more than a thousand times. I will obey your command to charge you money for Gunpoint, though I plan to keep it low and provide a substantial free version. I won’t claim anything specific yet since I’d like to confirm how and through whom I’ll be selling it first, in case they have advice or rules that affect it. I’ve talked with all my awesome art and music collaborators and we’ve agreed on a split we think is fair. Exciting times! Although the music selection process and Christmas took up a lot of the break, I also managed to build a dynamic system for context sensitive music layers and overhaul the way your gadgets are powered and upgraded. I still have a few levels left to make, and a fair few more I’m not happy with variety- and fun-wise, so I’ve used some of the time away from my PC to plan out new puzzle ideas, come up with some new gadgets and devices, and figure out which ones will be easy to code and add a lot of fun possibilities.
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MUZBOZ: Haha, the upright bass is awesome, and mixed in with some more techy sounds occasionally.
A bit TWIN PEAKS too, which is ALWAYS welcome. :) | ||||
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Boss is the evil West Wing: a political drama about a powerful figure concealing a degenerative illness, but one in which no-one is likeable or trying to do the right thing. It’s still about smart people working hard to do their job well, they’re just terrible, terrible people with horrible, horrible jobs.
I love it. Usually not liking anyone is a problem for me, but here they’re all such Machiavellian jerks that it’s great fun to watch them try to outscrew each other. Kelsey Grammer plays the mayor, the main character, which is the main reason I checked it out. A quick calculation reveals I have watched at least 80 hours of Frasier. Impressively, given that, I saw him as that character for about 3 seconds – after that, he is unmistakably the seething, deranged, furious Tom Kane. As it goes on, Boss is getting brutal to the point of brilliant absurdity. Kane seems hopelessly screwed at every turn, but there’s always a new depth to sink to, one more sacred thing to sacrifice. The director thinks he’s being a bit more artful than he really is, and we see rather more of the sex than we strictly need to, but neither gets to be a huge problem. It’s clever, surprising and horrible. | ||
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TooNu: 1997 - 1998. Friday nights, channel 4, 2200. I think Friends was on before it.
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Thank you so much to everyone who’s sent in samples for Gunpoint’s music! It’s been exciting to sit here listening to all this awesome work. Some people have asked for a) a deadline and b) a bit more guidance. I mentioned Monday on Twitter – I’d like to extend that to Friday the 23rd of December, since I won’t have time to go through everything thoroughly on a weeknight anyway. 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. C418C418 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. HyperDuckHyperDuck’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. Ryan IkeA 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. RAEVThis 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. John Robert MatzJohn 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. Ben SchwartzAs 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.
More Gunpoint Music
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Robbie: not bad
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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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All the best! Can't wait to play it. And yes, you probably should charge $1 or $2 for it. :)