You can see the launch trailer and all the details on the store page, but for some reason what I feel like sharing here is the very quickly knocked together trailer I made for the developer commentary, which comes with the Special Edition of the game. It just feels like the sort of thing long time blog followers might jibe with.

Oh, and I’m really proud of these quotes, so I’ll put them here for posterity!

TomsTimer5.exe
(v5, Windows, installer)

Here’s what it already did:

• Click Work or Break to start tracking time
• App’s name in the taskbar shows how long you’ve been at it

These days I mainly use it to track how long I worked each day, partly to keep an eye on productivity but mostly cos logging that work in my spreadsheet triggers a little dopamine hit of accomplishment I don’t get otherwise.

But I hit two issues I wanted to fix: firstly, I’d sometimes need to rush off while the work timer is going. I don’t have time to note down how long I’ve worked, so I don’t click the break button cos that’ll wipe the data. But if I’m away a while, now the data is wrong.

Secondly, sometimes I just forget to officially stop a work session, and the timer is ticking away while I’m not at my desk. Obviously I realise this has happened, but how long was I away?

Just generally, the timer wasn’t great if you ever failed to use it perfectly, and I saw a few ways it could be more helpful with that. So I added:

• Keeps a running total of all work sessions: means you can end a session without losing any data, and you can just log total time at the end of the day.
• Detects when you’re idle: if the mouse and keyboard haven’t done anything in more than 5 minutes, when they next move, the log notes how long you were idle. It doesn’t subtract this time or do anything with it, since it could be wrong, but it’s just useful info for you to have if you know you were away.
• Keeps a timestamped log of each time you start a session: useful for back-solving if you lose track of something, and generally good for clarity / not losing info.
• Optional stretch reminder pings every hour: I ought to be doing this, I don’t. There are other apps for this, but since I already have one that now has a sense of whether I’m at my computer, fits nicely here. It won’t ping if you’ve been idle for 30+ minutes, assumes you’re out of the room.

Last year I was diagnosed with ADHD, and it’s made a certain sense of my timer, my spreadsheet, and various other coping mechanisms I’ve developed. It puts in a bracket with folks who have much more serious struggles than I do, and many symptoms I have no trace of. I tend to think diagnosis buckets like this aren’t worth bickering about, they’re just a means to finding treatment and strategies that work. I was having some memory and attention lapses, and I got some meds that help with that.

The timer helps too, as does the spreadsheet, and researching ADHD has helped me understand how to lean into that with other tools. It’s a wide family of symptoms, but a lot of it stems from the brain failing to provide enough of a reward for just doing the shit you need to do. A year ago I would have told you these tools were just about tracking my time and keeping an eye on productivity. Now I realise they’re also about helping to turn ‘I did what I was supposed to’ into ‘I feel good’.

I’ve since made myself a Trello-based to-do list that is obsessively focused on the aesthetics of hiding any daunting backlogs, making what’s on my plate look manageable, and keeping my accomplished tasks everpresent and cumulative. The aforementioned spreadsheet now turns daily chores into satifying box-checks, keeps running tallies of how I’m doing on many different metrics, and has a two-tiered system of weekly achievements to aim for. Nothing more I can share yet, but I’ll keep tinkering and report back if anything postable serves me as well as this timer has.

Here’s the original Timer post.

And I just noticed my tweets about each version aaalmost work as a version history, except the very first one isn’t in the thread. So for posterity: version 1, then versions 2 onwards.

The board: littered with precious items and horsies. Units start with limited range, grab a horse to boost it to max.

Rules sidenote: The limited range is to ease the mental load of having to consider every piece on the board when deciding where to move, which I find tedious in Chess (see: being exhaustive). So each piece has an attack range of 2, and can also move 1 in any direction if there’s no unit there. So a Rook’s attack/move options look like this:

The move rule makes Bishops less rigid, and makes it much less awkward to grab items. Although it adds move options, I find it doesn’t add much cognitive load because a) it doesn’t change threats, and b) it’s universal, same for every piece type.

The Dark Horse also lets you trample (move options may be used as attacks), the Pale Horse is more nimble (move to any unoccupied space in range 2).

Board setup is random with some attempt at balance, plus a balancing rule:

One player chooses which corner to start in, then the other player takes the first turn. So each gets a different advantage.

Each player starts with a Queen, a Bishop, a Rook and a Pawn. I may do some kind of army budget idea eventually, but I tried that with a previous iteration and it made it hard to judge item balance, since army misbalance colours the results.

Rules sidenote: Pawns act like a King, but die when they take a piece (because the pawn is a shitshow).

Black chose the corner with Skull and the Pale Horse, white chose the one with the Crown (gain a King) and Frost (freeze enemies for 1 turn).

White grabbed Frost with their Bishop, Black’s own Bishop skipped the Skull to grab the Pale Horse early, then White spent a turn to level their Frost Bishop up to 2.

• Lvl 1: freeze the enemy that kills you
• Lvl 2: freeze adjacent enemies when you kill
• Lvl 3: freeze adjacent enemies after every move

Black’s queen grabs the Skull:

• Lvl 1: Create a skeleton (functionally, a pawn) on death
• Lvl 2: Create a skeleton on kill
• Lvl 3: Create a skeleton with each move

And their mounted Bishop grabs the Flame: like Frost, but ignites tiles: units on burning tiles must move or die at the end of their turn.

White swoops in with their Level 3 Frost Bishop, freezing the Bone Queen for a turn, with the hope of safely grabbing the Bugle of Command next turn.

He gets it: white can now move 2 pieces per turn as long as this Frost Bishop lives to toot the bugle. But it gives black time to grab the Dark Horse with their now Level 2 Bone Queen, leaving black with the only long range units for the rest of the game!

The Bugle is strong, though. White has grabbed the Crown, for a free King, and the extra Bugle move opens up a pincer move: threatening the Bone Queen from one side while freezing her in place with the Frost Bishop.

Parping disrespectfully in her frozen bony face! Rude!!

The Bone Queen spawns a skeleton as she dies, to take on white’s King, while their Fire Bishop retreats out of the killzone.

But fatal mistake! Their rook and Fire Bishop are now adjacent, and white’s maxed out Frost Bishop can freeze them both with one move!

In fact, he has them stun locked. Since he also has the Bugle, he can keep freezing them while their Rook grabs the Stone element and levels up to 3, creating rocky fortifications as it stomps towards the helpless Bishop.

Rules sidenote: Enemies can move onto (but not through) empty fortified tiles to clear them, but they can’t enter occupied fortified tiles. Friends can move freely through them. (Maybe they should be sentient vines, to make sense of this?)

Black’s last ditch effort is to sneak a pawn out and grab the Poison element, so at least whatever takes it will die. But by then, white’s Stone Rook has killed the Frost Bishop and black’s Rook is boxed in. White cleans up, sacrificing the Stone Rook to take the Poison Pawn. It’s over, white wins.

This felt really juicy and fun to play, and I love the goofy maximalist language of it: “Your Bugle Frost Bishop is no match for my level 3 Bone Queen!” Could not say which way it was going until the pincer movement, which was prob a blunder by black. Having both the Horsies vs Bugle might be winnable for either side?

A playtest of the previous version of Scavenger Chess also saw each side secure powerful but very different items, I’d love it if that became a signature of this game. I think the random board layout has the potential to stop those matchups being foregone conclusions where certain items are always best – ideally, it should depend on what else you have access to and what units you can grab it with.

A few issues, though – here’s what I’ll focus on for the next iteration:

• Frost stunlock is boring, need to rethink what Frost does. Maybe it freezes the tile, and a unit on an Ice tile can move but not attack, and can be killed by other units’ ‘moves’ (all units can move 1 in any dir in Scavenger Chess if no unit is there)
• You tend to move the same piece a lot, leaving others on the bench – might let you move 2 per turn by default, 3 with Bugle.
• Skipping a move to level up is dull, I’ll add creeps to kill instead.

And boy is all of that gonna be easier to change in my brain and plasticine than reworking code. Some of this stuff won’t be easy to add to my digital prototype (which doesn’t even have items), but the more stuff I rule out and rethink in a physical prototype, the more coding time I’ve saved.

If you’re following closely, you might notice I slip up and fail to kill the king of clubs when he should have died, but I re-kill him with the next play so it’s fine. I was tired.

Update: Since making the video I’ve tweaked the rules a bit, so I’ll lay out the rules for the revised version here. If you’re curious about the evolution, I’ll also include the old post and its update below that.

Version 2

Setup

1. Start with a shuffled deck, including jokers.
2. With the deck face-down, draw cards from the top and lay them out face-up in a 3×3 grid. If you draw any royals, aces or jokers during this, put them on a separate pile and keep drawing til you’ve made the grid of just number cards.
3. If you did draw some royals, you now place them the same way we will when playing: put it outside the grid, adjacent to the grid card it’s most similar to. ‘Most similar’ means:
   1. Highest value card of the same suit
   2. If none, highest value card of the same colour
   3. If none, highest value card
   4. If there’s a tie, or most similar card is on a corner, you can choose between the equally valid positions
4. Any aces and jokers you drew during set up, keep them face-up to one side. These are Ploys you can play whenever you like, rules below.
5. Once you have a 3×3 grid of number cards, you may choose one to replace if you like: put it on the bottom of the draw pile and draw a new card to replace it.

The Goal

Find and kill all the royals.

Play

Draw the top card from the deck.

• If it’s a royal: use placement rule above.
• If it has value 2-10: you must place it on the grid. It can go on any card with the same or lower value, regardless of suit.
• If it’s an ace or joker: keep it to one side, see Ploys.

Killing royals: if you’re able to place a card on the grid opposite a royal – so there are two cards between – those two cards Attack the royal. The sum of their values must be at least as much as health of the royal to kill them: if it’s not, you can still place the card, but the royal is unaffected. The value of the card you just placed is not part of the Attack, only the two between.

• Jacks: 11 health. The cards Attacking can be any suit.
• Queens: 12 health. The cards Attacking must match the colour of the queen to count.
• Kings: 13 health. The cards Attacking must match the suit of the king to count.

If you killed the royal, turn it face down but don’t remove it – new royals you draw still can’t be placed in that spot. Once every spot around the grid has a dead royal in it (12 total) you’ve won.

Ploys:

• Aces are Extractions: at any time you can use up one of the aces you’ve drawn to pick up one stack of cards from the grid and put them face-down at the bottom of your draw pile. You can do this even after drawing a card and before placing it. Turn the ace face-down to remember you’ve used it.
• Jokers are Reassignments: at any time you can use up one you’ve drawn to move the top card of one stack on the grid to another position. The place you move it to must be a valid spot to play the card, and placing it can trigger an Attack the same way a normal play can. Turn the joker face-down to remember you’ve used it.

If you cannot place a card: and you have no Ploys to use, you must add the card as Armour to the royal it’s most similar to (lowest value royal of same suit, failing that lowest of same colour, etc). It increases their health by the value of the card. So a King with a 3 as armour now has 13 + 3 = 16 health. You can add armour to a royal that already has armour – it stacks. If a royal ends up with 20+ health (or 19+ for a King), that’s a natural loss as there’s no longer any way to kill them. (Credit to Chris Thursten for the armour idea!)

If there are no living royals on the table: if every spot around the grid has a dead royal on it – all 12 – you’ve won! If not, just keep drawing cards until you find a royal, placing the cards in a face-up pile as you go. Once you find a royal, place it, then add the cards you cycled through to the bottom of your deck.

If the draw pile runs out: and you haven’t killed all the royals, use any ploys you have left to fix the situation if you can. If you’re out of both cards and ploys and not all royals are dead, you’ve lost.

Scoring

If you’ve killed all the royals without running out of cards, your score is how many Ploys you have left unspent. So the maximum score is 6.

If you play it, let me know how it goes in the replies to this tweet!

–

If you’d like to make/release/sell a game based on this

Please do! I’d suggest saying “Based on Gridcannon by Tom Francis” somewhere in the credits – a link to this post would be cool if possible.

I’d also suggest not calling it just ‘Gridcannon’, but it’s fine to use that word in the title.

If you’re going to charge for it, maybe think about if there’s something you’d like to add to the game. Could just be theme/art/flash, or perhaps a mechanics change? Do you have a better idea for scoring it? Should Jokers do something different? This is just a quick prototype, it has lots room for improvement. And digital versions let you do things I couldn’t with cards – prevent bad deals, know which stacks have resets, start with a more specific grid setup, reward achievements…

Update: there’s now a browser version of Gridcannon, by Jonas Schill!

–

Show the old version

Gridcannon v1 (old)

Setup

1. Start with a shuffled deck, including jokers.
2. With the deck face-down, draw cards and lay out a 3×3 grid, skipping the center position. If you draw any royals during this, put them on a separate pile instead and keep drawing til you’ve made the grid without royals
3. If you did draw some royals, you now place them the same way we will when playing: put it outside the grid, adjacent to the grid card it’s most similar to. That means highest value card of the same suit. If none match suit, highest of same colour. If none match colour, highest value. If still tied, you can choose. If the card most like the royal is on a corner, you can choose which side to put it.

Goal: Find and kill all royals

Play

Draw a card from the deck.

• If it’s a royal: use placement rule above.
• If it has value 2-10: you must place it on the grid. It can go on any card with the same or lower value. Empty spots and jokers have value zero, aces have value 1.
• If it’s an ace or joker: these can be played on top of anything, and doing so ‘Resets’ that stack: pick up the stack and add it to the bottom of the deck. Now place your ace or joker where it was.

Killing royals: if you’re able to place a card on the grid opposite a royal – so there are two cards between – those two cards become a ‘payload’ that you are firing at the royal. The sum of their values is the power of the shot. The power of the shot must be as much or greater than the health of the royal to kill it – if it’s not, it does nothing.

• Jacks: 11 health. The cards in the payload can be any suit.
• Queens: 12 health. The cards in the payload must match the colour of the queen to count.
• Kings: 13 health. The cards in the payload must match the suit of the king to count.

If you cannot place a card: you have two options:

• Hard Reset: put the card in your ‘shame pile’, and Reset any stack of your choice (pick it up, the space becomes blank). Your shame pile is a negative score – your goal is to keep it as small as possible.
• Add Armour: the card you can’t play is added to the royal it’s most similar to (lowest value royal of same suit) and increases their health by that much. So a King with a 3 as armour now has 13 + 3 = 16 health.

In both cases, the card you can’t play never returns to the deck or the grid.

If you run out of cards in your deck: choose a stack. Put its top card on your Shame Pile, and take the rest as your new deck.

If there are no living royals in play: if all 12 are dead, you’ve won. If not, draw cards until you find a royal, placing these in a face-up pile as you go. Once you find a royal, place it, then add the cards you cycled through to the bottom of your deck.

–

The ‘Add Armour’ option was Chris’s idea, and if you’re curious, leaving the middle space blank is the one I added after the initial design – without that, you can get really screwed by unlucky deals.

Personally, I’m still tinkering with some of the rules for a possible next version, and my friend Mike Cook (different Mike) had a great idea for a possible different theme.

Revisions To Old Version

I’m testing out a new version of the rules to fix a few problems. Give it a try and tell me what you think!

Problem 1: Remembering resets. If you remember where you put your resets, you can get them back with your next reset and the deck lasts forever. If you can’t, it runs out, to great cost. This is fiddly and puts too much emphasis on memory – I don’t enjoy that kind of challenge and I don’t want the game to be inaccessible to those who can’t remember that stuff.

Problem 2: The Shame Pile. A lot of people have trouble understanding this concept or just don’t like it. A negative score system is unusual, and it also doesn’t feel great – ‘winning’ with shame is a bit of a mixed feeling.

Problem 3: Too easy. Some are finding it too easy to finish with no shame.

So the changes I’m leaning towards are:

Storing Aces: When you draw an ace, put it face-up to one side. At any time, you can spend any of your aces from this Stash to pick up any stack – including after you draw a card but before you place it. When you use an ace, just turn it face down to remember it’s used – it doesn’t go in your deck.

Jokers: When you draw a joker, also add it to your Stash. At any time, you can spend it to move a card that’s already on the grid. You can only move it to a valid place to play it. You only move the top card, not the whole stack. As with aces, you just turn the joker over, it stays in your stash.

Scoring: If you win, your unspent Jokers and Aces are your score. So a perfect game is 6, if you won without using any.

Failure: When the deck runs out, if you haven’t won and you don’t have any unspent aces to get more cards with, the game is over. If you draw a card you can’t play, and you can’t add it as armour without making a royal invincible, and you don’t have an ace or joker to get out of it, that’s also game over. I’ve never had that scenario yet.

Setup: You now lay out a full 3×3 grid, don’t skip the middle space, but after placing royals, you can take any 1 grid card, add it to the bottom of your deck, and draw a new card to replace it.

In my playtests this version feels like it gives you a lot more to think about, and more control over your success, which is why I’m ok with allowing a hard failure state. I’m not sure about overall difficulty yet – so far I’ve never come close to a perfect game, usually scraping through with 2, 1, or 0 special cards unspent. For me it’s been rare to fail, and always felt like my fault.

That setup change is a bit of a tangent, I just found it aesthetically messy that you start with this blank spot and I had to explain to people that it was a valid spot and what you could play there, etc. I think the new way still gives you decent bad-deal mitigation, and it gives you 2 more chances to draw an ace, joker, or royal early, all of which are advantageous in this version, but probably makes the game harder than the blank-spot system.

If you play, please let me know how you find it! Did you ever have a failure that didn’t feel like you could have avoided it? Are you getting perfect games too easily? Reply to this tweet or e-mail tom@pentadact.com.

I opened a tiny drawer. Ah yes, this is where he kept things that were brass, cylindrical, and slightly ridged. I closed the drawer, my task complete.

On his desk, though, I saw something I did recognise. Something I knew it would be my responsibility to adopt, decipher, and operate. I don’t know if he ever gave it a name, so I will now: it’s the Egg Controller.

–

Dad was an inventor. That’s the verdict. When you’re alive, people don’t often summarise you – I suppose it would be rude. I used to tell people he was an electrical engineer, a rather dry job description, but it didn’t sound wrong because I wasn’t trying to summarise him.

Once you die, though, everyone’s required to boil you down to a few words. And I think dad’s come out of that rather well. He was an inventor, and everyone seems to have known it. His creations have been impressing people from the garden shed of his childhood home in Woking, to the mayor of Frome, to a chicken farmer in France, to me, just outside this office, watching him barbecue.

–

To understand the Egg Controller, you must first understand the Egg. The Egg is the Big Green Egg, an enclosed barbecue that’s very good for slow-cooking and smoking things. Dad didn’t invent the Big Green Egg, but he did love to use it. He loved to cook, he loved science, and he loved to be able to provide people with something that was unusually good. Almost anything cooked in the Big Green Egg has a nice smoky flavour to it, and almost anyone who ate something he cooked in the Big Green Egg would remark, “Ooh, it’s got a nice smoky flavour to it!” I think he got a lot of pleasure out of that.

He even cooked our Christmas turkey in the Big Green Egg every year – every year except one. About three years ago, he was ill, and the task fell to me. And this is when I discovered what an enormous pain the arse it is to use.

In theory, it can keep its temperature perfectly stable for hours on end. In practice, you open the vents a bit to get the temperature up, then close them a bit, and it keeps going up. So you close them more, and now it’s going down. So you open them more, and now it’s going up. Leaving it in either state for six hours would result in either cold turkey or festive ash, so you end up having to check on it every fifteen minutes, for six hours.

This bothered me because it was exhausting, it was boring, and it was Christmas. Dad was a lot more devoted to creating good food than me, so I don’t think he minded that. But I think it bothered him for a different reason: it was solvable. This business of making small adjustments, observing their effect, and reacting accordingly was something computers are perfectly capable of. So he set about building one to do it.

–

I’ve inherited this gene, I think. I can’t build gadgets like dad could, so the set of problems I see as solvable is different, but if I feel a solution should exist I will bloody-mindedly create it.

At one point I wanted to get business cards made that would each have a free copy of my game on them. That meant each card needed a different code printed on it. I had 200 codes, and one image with a blank space for the code to be written. The card company would happily take 200 different images, but they couldn’t combine the images and text for me – I had to do that. A solution for this should exist.

It does, actually, there are dozens. But all of them would require me to learn some new scripting language or tool that was far more complex than what I needed. This was a programming problem, and the only programming language I knew was the one I made the game in: it’s called Game Maker.

So, technically, I made a game. It’s a game where the only level is a giant room that looks like my business card, the menu system writes a giant code across it, then it takes a screenshot. Thirty times a second. You win the game by waiting for 7 seconds. Then when you quit, you have a folder full of 200 images, each with a different code on them, which you can send straight to the printers.

This took about three hours to make. How long would it have taken to manually put 200 codes on 200 cards? Look, I’m not on trial here, this is about dad, let’s get back to that.

What dad built, in basic terms, was a tiny computer, programmed with custom software he wrote, hooked up to a thermometer and a fan. The computer gets the temperature from the thermometer, and turns the fan on or off to control the flow of air into the barbecue.

What dad built, in even more basic terms, was two green boxes with buttons and screens on, a black box with a light on it, a metal plate with another black thing in it that could be a fan, two wires that end in crocodile clips, and two wires that end in long metal spikes.

I understood the principles well, but I had a crucial question about the device itself. How do I turn it on?

The crocodile clips are attached to wires which are attached to a briefcase-sized device that I think is called an oscilloscope. I didn’t know much about it, but I was fairly sure you don’t bring an oscilloscope to a barbecue. They must attach to some other power source, but what?

–

As someone with a lot of experience with technology, I usually approach every technical challenge with a healthy acceptance that I may be completely unable to solve it. But the stakes felt higher for this. My last visit before he died, dad had wanted to give me a lesson in this, but we didn’t get to it. Should I have made sure it happened before I left?

He also hadn’t had much time to use this gadget before he died. If I couldn’t figure it out, it would be like all his hard work on this brilliant device was wasted, all because I couldn’t even take that trivial last step of figuring out how to work it. He wouldn’t have been disappointed in me, he never made me feel that was ever a possibility. But I’d be disappointed in myself.

I got excited when I found a likely-looking battery pack nearby, and hooked the clips onto it, but the screens stayed dark. Normal batteries were out – there’s nothing to clip on to. I looked around the room of a thousand unidentified objects, and didn’t like my chances of finding the right one.

Then I remembered – 9 volt batteries do have something to clip onto – those weird little cup things that tingle if you put your tongue on them. Not that I’ve tried that, I’m not on trial here, let’s get back to dad.

I dug one out and hooked it up. The screens… stayed dark.

Then I tried the clips the other way around. Brilliant green letters appeared on the screen. The Egg Controller worked.

I remember a car journey with dad, maybe two years ago, when he was working on the Egg Controller and I was working on my space game, Heat Signature. I was telling him about a programming problem I was having: I was trying to get my spaceships to slow down just in time to stop at a particular point in space, but they kept overshooting or falling short. Something was making the maths trickier than it should have been, so I was telling him how I planned to fix it. I was going to teach my spaceships to pay attention to what affect their brakes were having in practice, and ease off or brake harder based on that.

As it happened, dad had recently solved basically the same problem for the Egg Controller. If you just program it to turn the fan on when the temperature is too low, and off when it’s too high, it will endlessly overcompensate. It takes a while for the effect of its actions to be reflected in the temperature it reads from the thermometer, so it needs an intelligent system to know what kind of change to expect, and when.

He told me this is called a Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller. It’s how cruise control in your car manages to keep a steady speed when the slope of the road changes. I wanted a spaceship to stop exactly at a space station. He wanted a turkey to stop at exactly 72 degrees celsius. The principle is the same.

–

We didn’t have a funeral for dad, we had a memorial lunch instead. Ten meat eaters were coming, and I was tasked with using the Egg Controller to slow-cook a shoulder of pork for them. It was a fitting use for his brilliant gadget, and for all the same reasons it was fitting, it would be an especially crushing, deeply personal disaster if anything went wrong. On the plus side, I had managed to turn the thing on.

I decided I’d need a practice run. Just a couple of chicken breasts, only one guest. I figured out how to fit the Egg Controller’s fan into the bottom of the barbecue, rigged up both the thermometers, lit the barbecue and examined the screen. It has three columns: Time, Oven and Meat – the three certainties in life. You can set a desired value for each of these, and below it the actual value is reported.

My best guess at how it worked was this: it’ll keep heating up the barbecue until its internal temperature hits what you set under ‘Oven’, then keep it there until the thermometer you put in the meat reaches the tempereature you set under ‘Meat’. And you don’t touch the Time dial because you don’t know what it does.

I set Oven to 180 and Meat to 75. The Egg Controller told me the Big Green Egg was currently only 50 odd, so it had a way to go. Sure enough, the fan it was wired to was blowing away quietly to stoke the fires.

80 degrees.
120.
150.
180. Good!
190. Hmm. The fan’s still going.
195. Fan still going.
200. Fan still going. This doesn’t seem right.
210. OK, this is just never going to stop.

Maybe it just keeps going full blast until the meat gets up to temperature? I tried turning that number down to lower than the meat already was. Fan still going.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t set a time? Was zero time the same as saying ‘never stop’? I tried setting a short time, and waited until it expired. It beeped, but the fan kept going.

240 degrees now, and for the chicken’s sake it was time to intervene. I unhooked the Egg Controller’s fan and finished it off the old fashioned way, endlessly adjusting the vents. We ate the admittedly delicious chicken – it had this nice smoky taste – and I despondently accepted I could not decipher dad’s design.

–

I didn’t want to believe the interface was bad, and I didn’t want to believe I wasn’t clever enough to figure out a good one. I especially didn’t want to believe it was just broken. But there didn’t seem to be any other explanations.

Silly as it sounds, not being able to figure this out made dad feel more distant. I had thought of us as like minds, and it made the loss easier to accept. His brain wasn’t entirely gone, I still have a partial version of it in my own head. But either this gadget did nothing intelligent at all, which couldn’t be true, or he and I thought so differently that even with unlimited tries, I couldn’t deduce how his interface was ever supposed to work. It was an upsetting thought.

“I’d just like to see it ever stop, under any conditions.” I remember griping as I fiddled with the now un-Egged Controller after dinner, still vaguely hoping to find a trick to it. Fan still going.

That was when I saw the red light. I’d been looking at the screens, and the fans, and the thermometers, all of which seemed to be doing their jobs. But there’s one other component – just before the fan, there’s a black box. The black box had a bright red light on it. Aren’t red lights usually bad? I flicked a switch on the box. The light went blue. The fan stopped.

The fan stopped!

I tried turning the desired temperature up again. The fan started!

Near as I can tell, the black box is some kind of controller or regulator that cuts power to the fan when the computer tells it to. When it’s off, instead of cutting power to the fan, it never interrupts it. That’s why I’d never looked for another switch to turn on – if anything, it was too on.

The whole thing worked exactly as I’d first assumed, you just have to flick the mysterious switch on the black box first. Dad and I do think alike. Except on the subject of black boxes and what should happen when they’re off.

On the morning of the memorial lunch, I was up in good time and had the barbecue lit, the Egg Controller hooked up, and the pork on by 9am. I had Oven set to 110, Meat set to 87, and I didn’t touch Time because I didn’t want to jinx things, but I was allowing four hours til lunch.

50 degrees.
80.
100. Fan still going.
110. Fan still going. Come on…
111. Fan stopped!
110.
109. Fan starts!
110.
110.
110.

The spaceship has stopped at the station. The car is successfully cruising. The Egg has been Controlled.

It worked perfectly. The little fan would spin up and wind down every now and then, and the temperature was dead on nearly 100% of the time, only dipping or rising 1 degree for a moment now and then. Dad would have been proud. He might have even said it was “Quite neat, actually” – his strongest possible praise for a gadget.

I had half-hoped to do pulled pork, time permitting, but I’m new to the world of slow-cooking and it turns out 4 hours is rushing it. I had to cook it a little faster to make sure it was ready in time, but with the Egg Controller that was a simple turn of a dial, and the computer handled the rest.

The Egg Controller draws a graph of the meat’s internal temperature over time – of course it does, dad made it – and this rose from a gentle slope to the side of a mountain. The meat reached 87 degrees right before 1pm, the Egg Controller gave a satisfied beep, and I hauled the impressive-looking joint out to carve it up.

It needed slicing rather than pulling, but it was devoured in short order, and more than one person said “Ooh it has a nice smoky flavour!”

I think dad would have got a lot of pleasure out of that.

–

Part 1: The Fight

Almost immediately, they run into our first ever Sectopod – a giant, insanely tough walker. Everyone focused on it, and we got it down low.

It was near a Purifier, but no-one had an attack that would hit both.

The Purifier was behind a truck. Nathan could throw a grenade that would hit the Sectopod and the truck. So he did.

The grenade blew up the truck. The grenade blew up the Sectopod. The Sectopod blew up. The Sectopod blew up a different truck. The truck blew up Nathan.

The Purifier is scratched. Nathan is dead.

Chris and Pip were hiding nearby. The Purifier set fire to them both. A Priest mind-controlled Chris.

Pip couldn’t kill the Priest because she was on fire, so she spent her turn running as far from Chris as she could get.

Chris spent his turn running straight to her and stabbing her with a sword.

Meanwhile, the Purifier set fire to the van the VIP was in. It blew up, but the VIP survived!

The Priest shot him.

Mind Control wears off. Chris triumphantly sprints across the map to slash the 1-health Priest who enslaved him. He misses.

Asher does it for him.

The VIP is dead and the mission is lost, but we spend a turn cleaning up the enemies before Evacuating.

Except: I can’t place the Evac zone. The button’s not working.

You can’t place the Evac on VIP extractions. It’s pre-set. It’s miles away. And the ship leaves in 2 turns.

–

Part 2: The Escape

Everyone runs – ignoring cover, ignoring the risk of triggering enemies.

We make it to the base of the building. The evac zone is on the roof. We can’t see any route to the roof. No-one can path there.

Asher’s snake suit has a grappling hook, and he uses it to pull himself up to the evac zone. Instead of evacuating, he runs to the far side.

He can see two drainpipes back there, so everyone spents their moves getting to the back of the building. Asher returns to the evac zone.

Final turn. Anyone not in the evac zone at the end of this is lost. Asher’s already there, so I cycle through the rest of the team.

This is how far Pip can move:

This is how far Chris can move:

This is how far Peter can move:

This is how far Rosa can move:

Before I go any further, I should tell you that three people make it out of this mission – and Asher isn’t one of them.

–

Part 3: The Betrayal

Rosa has the plasma crossbow. We CANNOT lose the plasma crossbow.

Asher has the snake suit. We CANNOT lose the snake suit, but that’s fine, he’s already in the zone. Asher can get out, the question is, can anyone come with him?

No, right? No-one has actions to give, no-one else has grapples or extra moves. No sensible plan works here, so all that’s left are the crazy options.

Rosa can get NEXT TO the evac zone. And Asher can get to the edge of it. They can be adjacent.

You can’t pull another soldier. But you can pick them up. They just have to be dead.

I’m not trying to save Rosa, I’m trying to save her Crossbow. She can’t hand it over, but if she’s dead it’ll be on her body. So we’re going to kill her.

You can’t shoot your own troops, but explosions can damage them. Chris and Peter both have grenades, and between them they do more damage than Rosa has health.

I move Rosa to just outside the evac zone, and have Chris throw a grenade at her. It takes off half her health, but it also destroys the roof, and she goes plummeting to the ground.

I thought this might happen, but I have two possible ways to deal with it:

Firstly, we could kill her on the ground. Asher could hop down, pick her up, and hop back up. Sounds ridiculous, but I think picking up is free, and you actually move just as far carrying someone as unburdened.

I save and try this. I allow myself to save and load any time I want to check ‘how does X work?’ or ‘if I was there, could I do Y?’, but not to undo bad luck.

It doesn’t quite work – Asher can get down and pick her up with 1 move left, but it’s not enough to get up the drainpipe to the roof again.

So option 2: if I do this again and this time blow up part of the evac zone as well, Asher could drop down, pick her up, and technically still be IN the evac zone. If there’s no roof above his head, I reason, he should be able to extract.

I go back and redo Chris throwing the grenade at Rosa, one square further in, and what happens changes everything.

–

Part 4: The Turnaround

This is why I like my ‘load saves to test rules’ system – it might be less hardcore, but it lets you explore more of the possibility space and discover the craziest tricks.

The grenade goes off, Rosa is hit, the roof collapses and she drops to the ground as before. But then we get a radio call: “The evac zone is compromised, get to the new one!”

THE EVAC ZONE… MOVED.

THE NEW ONE IS RIGHT NEXT TO CHRIS.

Cancel Operation Kill Rosa, blowing up the evac zone is our new objective.

I reload – this is a Did Not Know How The Rule Works situation if ever there was one.

This time Chris throws his grenade to exactly the same place, but I don’t move Rosa there first. The evac zone moves again and to roughly the same spot, right next to Chris.

This is no fucking use to Chris, because he used his turn throwing a grenade.

But it’s great news for Pip, it’s great news for Peter, and it’s great news for Rosa – who’s an especially big fan of this plan of not murdering her. They can all make it now.

It’s pretty devastating for Asher, who is now standing uselessly on the roof that used to be the evac zone, in the rain, in his big blue snake suit, watching everyone else escape. It’s too far for him.

We will lose the snake suit. But this saves three lives instead of one, and most importantly of all, it saves a crossbow that fires plasma.

Our ride takes off, and Chris and Asher are left behind to be captured by Advent. We may get the chance to rescue them later – and if we do, I know exactly who to send.

Tag yourself I’m gravely wounded

And it’s great. It takes a bit of getting used to: the levels are much higher security than Blood Money’s, so you pretty much have to use the Opportunities provided to get your targets alone, but there’s still lots of scope to mix that in to your own evil plans, and the levels are so much bigger, richer, and more complex.

But each of the big systems I mentioned does have some shortcomings, and their strengths suggest an even better way to embrace what makes replaying Hitman missions so enduringly fun. So first off, here’s where I think they fall a little short:

Challenges

Yes, for all you know I did this all in one run.

These are like achievements, and completing them is how you earn XP to unlock new kit – the main form of progression. But they’re an odd mix: some are single actions for which you’re rewarded immediately (eg drop a chandelier on the target), and others are more like play styles you stick to for a whole mission (eg leave no bodies or evidence). Because they’re so vital for progression, it encourages you to do the single-action ones, then reload your save and do another. On one mission I drowned, poisoned and strangled each of two targets, in that order, reloading my save after each kill so I could finish on the stranglings, since that Challenge requires you to do both in the same run. Because it’s how you unlock stuff, it encourages a weird kind of save-scumming murder tourism.

The other curious thing about it is that because Challenges are only unlocked once, the playstyle ones are only acknowledged once. I don’t know if I got Silent Assassin on my last run, because I’ve already unlocked it. Now that rating is just gone from the roster, as are most of the rest at this point. Now all I get is…

Ratings

20,000 objectives in 35 minutes, not bad.

At the end of the mission, you’re given points for No Noticed Kills, No Bodies Found, Never Spotted, No Recordings, and for not killing anyone but the targets. This is all geared around one particular way to play the game, one that many of the Challenges require you to betray. But no matter what goals you set for yourself, or what playstyle you were going for, you’re always judged by how close it was to this One True Way of playing. Previous Hitman games also penalised you for not being subtle, but you’d at least get a phrase describing your playstyle: “Psychopath”, “Bagman”, “Thug”, “Silent Assassin”. In this one, you just get a score: 3 Hitman logos out of 5, for how Hitman you are. It seems completely at odds with a game that’s otherwise all about encouraging a variety of play styles.

Contracts

Recommending is all I can do, because the Contracts system doesn’t recognise falls as a valid cause of death.

Contracts mode lets you pick anyone in the whole level and mark them as a target. Then however you kill them, and whatever you were wearing, you can choose to make that the requirements for this Contract, and challenge other players to pull it off. It’s a very promising idea that is rendered completely useless by a few things:

1. You can never save your game when creating or playing a Contract. I have no idea why, but this alone completely kills the whole mode for me. I’d never play a Hitman game where you can’t experiment, or roll back from an unfair failure.
2. It only has certain, very conventional weapons that it recognises – most of the times I’ve tried to make a Contract to do something interesting, the way I killed my target is not one of the ones they have in their secret list, so it just says “Any Weapon” and I can’t challenge others to do what I did.
3. You also can’t specify anything other than the weapon and disguise. So it can never be part of your contract that the player has to do it undetected, or only in the suit, or only killing the targets, or avoiding certain weapons, etc. There’s not nearly enough here to actually specify a play style or a particularly interesting set of constraints.

My Idea

I’d break all of this down into two things: Stunts and Styles.

Stunts

These are the single-action Challenges – kill the target with a chandelier, dress as the target’s lover, etc. Having these as a big list is great for making the player aware of all the crazy possibilities, and the only change I’d make is that these are no longer the way you unlock new equipment. Completing them checks them off the list, so you have a tally of how many you’ve done and can try to complete that list if you like. But nothing practical is withheld from you if you don’t, so there’s not an extrinsic motive to save-scum these unless you enjoy doing so.

Styles

A Style is just a set of rules, and if you finish a mission having abided by all those rules, you successfully executed that Style. There’d be a bunch of Styles set by the developers, including stuff like Silent Assassin:

And on your end of mission report, you get a list of all the Styles you executed. These become your Rating – rather than a single term like previous Hitsman, or a numerical score in this one, it becomes a full description of every noteworthy aspect of your performance. On this run, you were a Silent Assassin and a Master Poisoner and a Ghost. And for every one of those you’d never earned before, you get an XP reward toward unlocking new gear. On future playthroughs, you’ll still be awarded these styles if you met the criteria, but you only get the XP the first time, to encourage people to explore the possibilities before they settle on one style.

Then, every rule that’s used in these is also available to the player, to concoct their own Styles. You can see a huge list of all of them, and just click a checkbox next to each one to say it’s part of your Style, then give it a name. You can do this just to challenge yourself – ‘tracking’ a style would tell the game to let you know if you break any of its rules as you play. But if you manage to fulfil it, you can then challenge your friends to do it too, and upload it publicly. Any time you meet all the conditions of a Style a friend has created, it appears on your report screen – even if you didn’t know about it before.

Playstyles are the soul of replaying Hitman, they’re why I’ve done every Blood Money mission at least 8 times. Hitman Episodes is a step towards a game built around replaying, but in a few big ways it fights against its own idea of you replaying in different ways – always judging you as if you were trying for Silent Assassin, forgetting about playstyles as soon as you’ve done them, and not letting you define your own with any of the interesting restrictions the developers built their own Challenges from.

To finish, here are some Styles I’d love to be able to make and challenge people to, that can’t be done with the Contracts system:

Silent Strangler
– No weapons other than the fiber wire
– No unarmed attacks
– Never spotted
– No bodies found
So you can kill as many people as you like, as long as you always use the fiber wire to do it. This gives you no nonlethal options, so it’s avoid or murder.

Tin Man
– Poison Silvio with a tin of expired spaghetti sauce
– No weapons except the tin of expired spaghetti sauce
– No unarmed attacks
Poisoning with sauce is understandably not lethal, nor is hitting people with the tin, so you’ve got to figure out a way to actually finish off your unconscious targets without using weapons.

Something in the Water
– Kill both targets
– Poison only
– No unarmed attacks
– Never spotted
– No recordings
Kill as many as you like, as long as there’s no trace that you were ever there to do so.

Loud And Gone
– Kill both targets with the shotgun (only found on certain guards)
– Never spotted
– No other kills
I set this as a challenge for myself and did it tonight, it was great fun figuring out how to a) get hold of a shotgun, b) get to the target with it, c) get the target alone in a position that you can get away when everyone comes running to investigate the shot.

Unfortunate Events
– Kill both targets
– Accidents only
– Never spotted
– No recordings
Again, no restrictions on killing, and doesn’t matter if the bodies are found, but everything has to look like an accident – and to sell it, no-one can know you were ever there.

* This was often made easier by a Cheat Engine script Duncan Harris made for it. If you know what that is or are prepared to Google, you can grab his script here.

If you’re finding the game easy, it gets easier. If you’re finding the game hard, it gets harder.

That’s bad. And it’s not just theory-crafting, that’s exactly how my XCOM 2 campaign played out: early on we got crushed repeatedly, then a few lucky missions got us off the ground, and after that my people became almost unstoppable for 35 missions straight – even after I upped the game difficulty.

Any game with persistent resources will have some snowbally tendencies: success has to get you something, or failure has to cost you something, otherwise it’s not really persistent. And some parts of XCOM’s snowballing are too good to lose: unlocking cool abilities for my favourite troops is why I play XCOM.

So you can’t scrap that, but what could you do? Here are some ideas.

Vary Squad Size By Mission

Stop getting more badass, you stupid badasses.

The number of soldiers you can take on a mission starts at 4 and can be upgraded to 6 if you’re doing well enough in the strategy part to afford the facility, and well enough in the tactics part to already have soldiers of high rank. That is snowball central. Even one more troop is a huge advantage to everyone’s survivability, and having a team 50% larger makes the game more than twice as easy. You don’t want to reserve that for the players who are already doing well.

I’d take squad size completely out of your hands, and make it a per-mission variable. The game does this once, and that mission was refreshingly brutal. I’d have every mission come with a squad size: “We can only get three people past the checkpoints leading to the mission area for this VIP extraction”, or “Security’s light here, we can drop six people in for this Retaliation mission.” That way it’s not snowballing, and it also adds more variety – I took the same six people on about 80% of my missions, which meant my tactics were pretty similar each time.

Level Out Soldier Health

That’s Bladestorm. You don’t want to tongue-snare Bladestorm, for reasons we’ll get into if you try it.

Currently this starts extremely low and increases fast as a soldier levels up: faster than than the enemy’s damage output. It makes the early missions of the game the least forgiving, and discourages you from mixing up your squad lineup later: every time I brought a rookie along to try to diversify my squad, they were insta-brained by a single shot.

I’d start it higher and not increase it at all, except for kit bonuses. That way new recruits get a fighting chance to last long enough to gain experience, and your best people aren’t unkillable when the enemies step their game up.

Health is not a particularly exciting upgrade anyway – I didn’t even notice it was increasing until the first time I fielded new troops next to old and looked at the healthbars. The idea of keeping your favourite people alive is appealing, but it’s also the problem: that’s what happened in my campaign, and it means I have very few interesting stories or desperate moments to recount. It’s one of those things players think they want but which subtly makes the game less interesting when you have it.

Low Profile Missions

These people have no idea who Nika Harper is or why she just railgunned their friend.

There’s a great little touch in some of the more urban levels: rotating holo-screens with portraits of your most veteran soldiers, presumably warning the public about these dangerous dissidents. That suggests a great way to stop you using the same unstoppable people every time: they’re too well known. Not just their faces, but their bio-signatures are on file or something. So for a new type of mission, in populated areas, you can’t bring any of your Most Wanted soldiers.

Injury recovery times do try to make you mix it up like this, but they’re not a great anti-snowball mechanic for obvious reasons: the better you do, the less injured you get, the less your recovery times, the more often you can field your best people. Only once did it really work for me: I stupidly took on a mission while a more time-sensitive one was still pending, so I had to do the second immediately afterwards with none of my best people. It was one of the most nutty and enjoyable missions in my campaign, and my team had that ‘motley crew of scrappy misfits’ feel that the game’s fiction obviously wants to inspire. But I never used them again, because the game severely punishes doing this any time you don’t have to.

These Low Profile Missions would both give you a reason to field those B-teams more, and give them a viable route to becoming part of your A-team. It’d reduce snowballing and, again, increase variety.

Conclusion

This was the first time our team met an Archon. It was also the first time an Archon met a Trin, which you can see in his face.

In conclusion: all those things I just said. It wasn’t that long a post.

It quickly became a bad situation. Trin sliced at a Codex she expected to kill, but it survived the hit and split, leaving her exposed to both copies. The powerful enemy that had been devastating the objective was something we’d never fought before, and it didn’t die when we expected it to either. This thing alone could kill Trin in one hit.

I had almost everyone try to unfuck Trin’s situation before the end of the turn, but my squad was scattered from the previous fight. No-one could get a hit in except Ranger Alexander, who could only soften up the big thing with a grenade. I had only one person left with any moves: my best Sniper and coolest character of any kind: Captain Jen Martin.

But even she can’t kill three things in one turn. Unless it’s not her turn. She’s just unlocked an ability called Kill Zone, which restricts her reaction fire in Overwatch to a narrow cone, but lets her fire at everything that moves within it. The cone was wide enough to place over all three threats to Trin, but it meant doing nothing at all to help her this turn. All the targets would have to move for her to shoot at them, she’d have to hit every shot, and the damage would have to be enough to kill them.

She had three shots in the mag. Here’s what happened:

XCOM randomly assigns your soldiers a class-appropriate nickname when they hit a certain rank, and in XCOM 2 you can also change it. Previously I’d always left them as they came: I quite liked the strangeness of some of the ones it picked. But this time there’s no contest: we’re calling her Kill Zone.

Bladestorm

Trin was safe. But we also had to hunt down the remaining enemies, since apparently there were some. I wasn’t too worried, but I wanted to at least find them pretty soon, since it’s almost impossible to cover every angle they could take to attack the objective, and it was on low health. I had Grenadier Sanusi fire a vision bomb (I can’t remember what they’re really called) behind the petrol station, and glimpsed a soldier hiding in the garage. In my eagerness to finish, I let Ranger Alexander go into Concealment and use her whole turn to get there, even though it would leave her without Overwatch and no-one was really in a position to support. The best I could do was have Specialist White run in as close as she could, because she gets a free Overwatch shot if she spends her whole turn moving.

Alexander was Concealed, but White wasn’t, and apparently had strayed close enough to alert the soldier. And it wasn’t just one. Alexander’s already used her Concealment, so all she’s really got left is Bladestorm – a passive thing that lets her defend herself if someone closes to melee. But these guys weren’t melee troops. Here’s what happened:

So, we’re calling her Bladestorm.

• For ‘best audio’, it’s not clear whether jurors should a) prioritise audio alone, or b) take into account the quality of the rest of the game and how important audio is to it.
• Currently jurors usually go with b), which “leads to games that are very well designed making it into multiple categories”, reducing the number of distinct games recognised.
• Medium-length single player games also get disproportionately recognised because they’re easier to judge than huge or multiplayer games, and feel more significant than tiny mobile games.

Generally I think b) is fine, but I do agree that over-celebrating single games is needless, and I think the categories themselves are a pretty rigid and inadequate way of capturing what’s worth celebrating in games.

Zach’s suggestion is to change the categories to reflect game length/type, and have developers choose one category to submit for. I’m not wild about this because a) the categories are still rigid and don’t capture gaming’s diversity of form, and b) a developer could screw themselves by miscategorising their game, which is not the skill we are trying to evaluate or award.

As it happens I’ve been thinking about a different kind of award ceremony I’d like to see ever since the BAFTAs in 2013, and I think it would address a lot of this.

Gone Home and The Stanley Parable were both nominated for the narrative category, and I thought: “This is ridiculous. Here are two games that did different things brilliantly, and we’ve invented a system where we have to say ‘You two are competing at the same thing’ and then, worse, point to one and say ‘You lose!'”

Also Gunpoint lost to GTA V, so clearly the system is deeply broken.

I think the solution to the rigidness of categories, the judging problems therein, and the artificial pitting of specific games against each other, is all the same thing: make the categories freeform.

Here’s the awards system I’d like to see:

1. At the time the nominees are normally announced online, instead a similar number of winners are announced. But what they’ve won is unannounced.
2. On the night, every game wins a unique award. Gone Home wins Best Emotional Drama. Stanley Parable wins Best Introspective Comedy. Some categories are invented to recognise this specific game, but they don’t have to be: you can still give a Best Audio award if you like, or you can give one for Best Use of Audio if that’s closer to what you mean.
3. The only rule is that the one fixed category is ‘Grand Prize’ or similar.

This way:

• The fact that games are so diverse, unique and ever-changing becomes a strength rather than a problem.
• It’s a purely positive thing, no game loses to another except for grand prize.
• Tiny games can be acknowledged for brilliance at being tiny games.
• Games can be recognised for excellence at something we didn’t know you could be excellent at until we played that game.
• It’s fun to find out what weird and new categories are being awarded on the night. Currently awards shows are actually pretty dull: list of nominees, winner. No insight to why.
• Since it’s X games that are recognised rather than 5 slots per X categories, one game can win multiple awards without reducing the number of games recognised.
• It’s also a stronger recommendation for every individual game. Best Audio honestly tells me little about whether I should buy it. “Best Aural Hellscape” would have me intrigued.

I don’t know if this is for the IGF, it’s just how I’d do it. It doesn’t solve the ‘multiplayer and huge games are hard to judge’ problem, and I’m sure it’d give jurors its own set of challenges – though hopefully more interesting ones.

Update: this is pretty close to what Rock Paper Shotgun do for their end-of-year Advent Calendar, though the categories there are more genre-focused than I had in mind for this.

I’ve been mostly playing Human Revolution so far, but I’ll also use some examples for DX1 since there’s so much overlap.

The basic ingredients

We’re talking about ‘ways to achieve your objective’. The objective itself is not optional, or different depending on your play style. Heat Signature does have an element of that, but it’s not what’s interesting about Deus Ex – most of the time, especially in 1 and 3, you have no say in what your objective is. The interesting part is in how you get to it. That generally breaks down into:

Routes: the various paths you can take. Some are easily visible, some might be hidden.

Obstacles: any elements that need to be overcome or avoided on a route – enemies, high walls, locked doors, toxic gas.

Methods: anything that lets you get past an obstacle, including basic skills like sneaking, conventional means like guns, environmental things like a switch, and specialised tools like a hacking upgrade.

Routes require different Methods

This is not interesting:

Multiple routes, but who cares? They’re all the same.

This is more interesting but still pretty trivial:

Multiple routes, but one is clearly more trouble than the others, so the choice isn’t interesting.

This is getting Deus Exy:

Multiple routes, obstacles on all, and each requires a different Method. Do you have a Method for clearing debris? Do you have a Method for dealing with enemies? Do you have a Method for dealing with locked doors? Which brings us to:

The player chooses which Methods to invest in

This is one area DXHR massively improved over DX1. In Deus Ex 1 a single cheap hacking upgrade got you into every computer in the game, and the aug options were binary choices: A or B, where B is often useless. DXHR makes everything Augs, and both unlocking and upgrading them take the same, painfully rare currency. That gives you enormous power to specialise, and also puts enormous weight on those early decisions. The first few Methods you unlock with this system will be all you have, for a time.

I used to think the virtue of lots of routes was that the player always has a big decision to make as they approach each objective. But replaying the Deus Ex games and really examining the situations I find myself in, that’s not it. Most of the time the choice is already made for me by a previous decision about either the playstyle I want to use or the upgrades I’ve picked. If I’ve got the strength upgrade and I’m playing stealthy, when I see a vent blocked by a drinks machine, I’m moving the drinks machine and getting in the vent. I don’t even need to see the other options.

And that’s OK! The actual deciding process is not the sole pleasure of playing a game. A lot of the fun comes in living out your decision, and seeing it rewarded by Routes that it lets you exploit. You got the strength upgrade? Good choice! Now you get to move this heavy thing and access this special route, which is gonna get you close to your objective with minimal resistance. That makes your playthrough feel personal, it makes your choices feel relevant, and it makes you feel clever.

Methods have different Costs

If every obstacle was solved for free by some particular Method, and impassable otherwise, that would probably be OK for a while. But pretty soon your choices would either feel irrelevant (if every Method unlocked a Route) or unfair (if your chosen Methods left you with no Route).

Methods need to have different costs, otherwise unlocking new ones wouldn’t be appealing. Basic sneaking is a Method, but it gets harder and more time consuming to use alone as the game progresses. The kinds of costs Methods can have are things like:

• Resources: blowing up this weak wall uses up a grenade, whereas punching through it with an Aug only takes one rechargable power cell.
• Risk/Skill: you can use this pistol to take out these three guards, but it’s going to be tricky and you’ll die if it fails. If you have a gas grenade, it’s easy and safe.
• Time: if you want to get up to that vent, you’re going to need to scrounge around to find another box you can stack on this one. If you had the jump Aug, it’d be quick.
• Playstyle conflict: yeah, you can probably solve this by just throwing a frag grenade in there. But that’s not who you want to be this time, it’s not how you want to play. You want to do it silently and nonlethally with a tazer and a fridge.

Combat requires a combination of Methods

Combat is special. While it’s technically an avoidable obstacle like the others, almost every playstyle and route involves it at some point, and as players we expect it to be ten times richer and more interesting than any other type. We’re a lot less forgiving of a game that only has one type of weapon than a game that only has one type of lockpick.

This is true for me as much as anyone – every one of my favourite Deus Ex anecdotes involves violence either by or against me. In fact, the first moment that sold me on Deus Ex was getting stuck on a bit with two guards – I couldn’t take them both out before one killed me. Then I realised I could round the corner, spray a fire extinguisher at them both, and shoot them while they choke. It felt like I was fighting against unfair odds, improvising a desperate and clever way to overcome them.

In DXHR it’s less about improvisation, but my favourite thing to do is very similar. Lots of situations involve three guards – I like to stand near two of them, shoot the third in the head with the silenced pistol, then immediately hit the takedown key to use my upgraded close combat move on both the others. It feels like a spectacular explosion of violence, too sudden for anyone to stop and yet almost perfectly silent.

So combat needs:

• The odds stacked against you
• Multiple Methods
• Each Method insufficient alone
• Methods with different strengths

The fire extinguisher can’t hurt anyone, but it can immobilise two people very suddenly without much skill. The pistol can kill in one shot, but only if it’s to the head, and it’s hard to hit a moving head.

If combat tools each have different strengths – range, damage, stun, area, delay – you’re encouraged to come up with some way to combine them to solve the situation at hand, which feels inventive, improvisational and clever.

That’s what I have so far. As with any analysis, it’s not the only way to break it down, and it doesn’t cover everything. I have one more element I want to write up, but I think FTL may be a better example of it, so it feels like a separate post. And if replaying DX1 throws up anything big that this doesn’t cover, that’ll be its own post too.

It turns out this one doesn’t even treat angina – darkened effects are deactivated ones.

Soon a company name presented itself:

Eventually we fixed the sleepiness side effect:

Slightly miscalculated this one:

And lastly, what turned out to be the most profitable drug of the decade:

My lab was a mess.

But I was super proud of myself for figuring out a neat way to fit two Cryogenic Condensers in parallel in this small space – they take twice as long to process things, but they’re big and awkward to run dual conveyor belts around:

This was the final layout of my factory. Blue is anxiety meds, brown is bronchitis, red is bipolar, green is strokes. Some of the same coloured lines are different methods of making the same drug, faster or to a better standard depending on how much floor space I had to work with.

The goal was to make $1,000,000, which I did pretty quick, but the ‘Master’ level goal is to make $10,000,000 before the deadline. After the ten years were up, the pink bar here shows how close I was to that:

God damn it.

Programming is like having a conversation with a robot who screams at you if you pause in the wrong place, electrocutes you if you change your mind, and explodes if you ever use the future tense.

Hope it’s of use! Here’s the game we made:

Spoiler-free

The Game: Her Story

You play someone who’s been given access to a database of video clips, all of the same woman being interviewed by the police about the disappearance of her husband. You can only find the clips by searching for words or phrases you think might be in their transcripts, and you only get to see the first five results of that search. The clips are extremely short – most are about 20 seconds – but there are hundreds. The more you watch and discover, the better an idea you get of what to search for, and slowly you piece together the truth of what happened.

What Works: Nonlinear Storytelling

You’re free to search for anything you like, and the game cannot hide or lock off any clips that mention that term. The only restriction is that five-clip limit, and that’s sorted in chronological order, so it also can’t cheat by keeping a particular clip out of the top five artificially. That means it’s entirely possible to find the deepest secrets of the story with your first search.

But that’s not what happened for me, or anyone else I’ve talked to. In fact, it seems to almost always play out like a brilliantly paced thriller: mysterious hints leading to confusing contradictions, leading to revelations, then to further curiosities, then to even bigger revelations.

It was about an hour before I felt I had a handle on what happened, and an hour later it was all turned on its head. By then I was so fascinated that I spent another hour scouring for more, fleshing out the details, and investigating side-leads. I expect it would be two more to find everything.

Why:

Having to type in search terms means the way you explore and discover the plot is driven by your own intelligence. You can search for general terms if you’re stumped, but more often something she says will spark an idea in your head, you type it in, and see what you get.

When an idea like that fills the results box with 5 undiscovered clips, you get to feel what it’s like to make a breakthrough in a murder case – to solve something with a flash of inspiration. And because nothing in Her Story is straightforward, there’s a delight to delving into that fresh treasure trove of new information – new questions as much as new answers.

Letting the player potentially find any part of your story in any order is a counter-intuitive idea for an entirely story-driven game.

Without that five clip limit, I don’t think it would work – a generic search would become a playlist of all the videos.

Without the search results being in chronological order, I don’t think it would work – you could keep trying different generic words until the juicy stuff came up by chance.

And with a simpler plot, I don’t think it would work – the ‘truth’ of Her Story’s plot is so elaborate and complex that even watching the game’s most revealing clip would only give you one piece of the puzzle.

That last point is what really made it special, for me. I took 700+ words of notes while playing, meticulously organised by date of interview, and repeatedly had to revise or correct assumptions I’d made about the meaning of earlier clips.

My first big revelation was a substantial clip that seemed to describe the whole crux of the thing, and sent me on a frenzied series of searches to investigate its most remarkable info. An hour later, after discovering much more, I went back and watched that clip again to check something. As I did, everything about it flipped round. Almost every word changed meaning, mysterious references clicked into new facts, and previously vague motives suddenly became frighteningly clear. It was the same clip that had told me what happened, but only with a headful of new information did it also tell me why.

What To Learn:

Search is a great interface for natural language input

It’s interesting to compare Her Story to a text adventure: you do type in text, freely, in the hope of getting a pre-written response back. And like a text-adventure, a lot of what you type does not have a response. But here that system is never frustrating, because the logic of what will and won’t get a response is made clear to you, there’s a natural reason for it, and that lets it become the game.

The implicit promise of a text adventure is “Type whatever you want to do, I’ll tell you if it works!” But if you’re not conversant in the standard commands, what you type will more often fail because the game doesn’t understand it or doesn’t have a response ready.

The promise of Her Story is “Type what you think she might have said, I’ll show you if she said it.” When nothing comes back, it’s because you failed at that job.

The interface, the thing that limits what you can and can’t do, is natural: it matches the limitations your character in this world also faces. And so the challenge of overcoming it feels like a game, rather than a frustration.

If you split a sufficiently complex plot into sufficiently small pieces, it works out of order

Plenty of stories work out of order, but they had to be pre-written that way. Her Story doesn’t know the order you’ll discover it in, yet it seems to almost always work as a well-paced thriller. Because as in my example, even a crucial piece of information, in isolation, doesn’t tell you everything you want to know.

It’s worth noting, though, that Her Story’s delivery system does influence the order, by sorting results chronologically. If what you search for has more than 5 results, the 5 you get will be the earliest of those, which tend to be less revealing than later clips.

If you can tell something out of order, let the player drive the order

If every clip in Her Story was an audio log littered randomly around BioShock, it would lose part of its appeal. What made the game exciting was driving that discovery process with my own insights. They didn’t always work, and often I found something I wasn’t looking for, but I was still driving the process and sometimes hitting the jackpot, and that’s what made it so engrossing.

I don’t know what the ‘littered around BioShock’ equivalent of that is yet, but that’s what I’m thinking about now.

What is it?

A turn-based stealth game with randomly generated levels and no savegames. You have two secret agents with different special abilities, and you choose from offices of varying difficulties and rewards to break into and steal money, equipment and abilities. You break in by carefully peering round corners and doors, ambushing unwitting guards with your tazers, and hacking security devices from a special vision mode.

If you want a better idea of how it plays, I recorded myself going through one mission, and talked through my thinking and how the game works.

What works and why?

Turn-Based Stealth

As in XCOM, there are lots of interesting considerations to precisely where you should move each team member each turn. But instead of optimising accuracy percentages, you’re trying to avoid being seen at all – and usually succeeding. This makes it feel much cleaner and more satisfying than turn-based gunfights, but no less tense or eventful. Being directly seen is a rare, crisis-level event, but lots can happen between ‘perfect stealth’ and ‘caught at gunpoint’.

The edge of a guard’s vision will cause you to be ‘noticed’, causing the guard to come closer on his next turn. Being seen by a camera will raise the alarm level and bring guards running, but not fail or damage you. Your tazer only knocks guards out temporarily, and needs time to recharge, leaving you vulnerable. These tensions and trade-offs are what you’re worrying about on a moment-to-moment basis.

It says something that the last horrifying, gasp-out-loud moment I had in Invisible Inc was when one of my agents shot and killed someone. I’d set them in overwatch to hopefully take out a drone, but a human guard walked in front of them. I was distraught at a) wasting my only shot on a guard who could have been tazed, and b) raising the alarm level by tripping his heatbeat sensor. Not at the loss of life, obvs.

Hard Intel

I think every stealth game I like gives you an unrealistic intel advantage. Deus Ex makes your enemies short sighted. Human Revolution lets you switch to third person to see round corners. Far Cry 4 lets you tag people to see them through walls. I decided to go all the way in Gunpoint and let you see everything at all times.

Invisible Inc’s is subtle but extremely powerful. You can only see areas your agents and hacked cameras can see, but: you can see if those areas are being watched. The vision of enemies, even enemies you don’t know about, shows up as if it were bright red light. That doesn’t always tell you exactly where these unknown enemies are, but it gives you perfect, reliable, hard-and-fast intel about the most crucial thing you could want to know: if I move there, will I be seen? Having that intel, and being able to rely on it, makes Invisible Inc a game of strategy rather than one of guesswork and risk management.

Failure Spectrum

When you can fail at something but still carry on playing, I call the range of states between perfect success and total failure a ‘failure spectrum’: there’s a spectrum of possible outcomes, and screw-ups can move you towards the failure end and recoveries can (sometimes) move you back up towards success. In Invisible Inc, there are a few different failure spectrums that you could break down something like this:

Equipment:

• Leave with all of the money and equipment in the level without losing any
• Leave with more money and equipment than you spent
• Leave with some of your money and equipment left
• Lose it all somehow?!

Evasion:

• Get what you want without being noticed
• Get noticed, but not directly seen
• Get seen, but slip away before anyone is hurt
• Someone gets knocked out but not injured
• Someone gets injured but the other agent revives them
• Someone gets injured and you can’t revive them, but you drag them to the exit (thanks, Skeed in the comments!)
• Someone gets injured and you have to leave them behind, losing them forever
• The whole team gets injured and therefore everyone dies, game over

Style:

• Get what you want without killing anyone
• Get what you want without hurting anyone
• Get what you want without using the ‘Rewind’ function

How much you care about each of those things is subjective in some cases, but together they form a huge range of possible outcomes. Every encounter and decision you make as you play is moving you up or down on that spectrum, so you care about them all.

A big failure spectrum is good because a lot of the most emotional moments in a game happen on the cusp of failure. If you were this close to being seen, your escape is exhilarating. But if failure is a ‘game over’ screen, spending a lot of time on the cusp of failure means a lot of ‘game over’ screens. Each one interrupts your immersion and ends your investment in this current run. It pulls you out of the game, and you find yourself in a menu, then at a checkpoint or a savegame. Mentally acclimatising to how much of your story has been lost forces you to disengage from it, and you have to build up all that immersion again from scratch.

If failure isn’t game over, it’s still nail-biting when to come close to it. And when you do slip over the threshold, it’s just another development in the story you’re creating and living through. The challenge switches to one about recovering from your screw-up, which can be tense and exciting in itself. Each level of a failure spectrum ultimately means the game can make you spend more of your time at that exhilarating cusp of failure without introducing frustrating interruptions.

Systems Interplay

This one’s harder to define precisely because the best moments it creates are always unique to the situation. But basically I mean: all these cool systems link into each other, so that problems in one can be solved with another.

My favourite example is when I was trying to ambush a guard with triple power armour. One layer of armour means you need a weapon with one level of piercing to harm them. Triple means you need three. I have none. But power armour is a device, and devices can be hacked.

I spent three turns using my Parasite program to break down each layer of his power armour, and one more getting Deckard in position to take him out. At last he’s in range, so I have him run out of cover, stand directly behind the guard, and- nothing. The tazer icon is disabled. I check the guard’s info: 1 layer of armour. It must have regenerated.

This is bad. I used all of Deckard’s movement points to get him right up to the unsuspecting guard, so now he’s stranded there. The guard is facing a wall, he will absolutely turn around on his turn. And Deckard’s cloaking device is nowhere near being ready again. I have the hacking power to put another parasite on his armour, but it wouldn’t eat through even one layer until the start of our next turn, by which point it would be too late. I don’t have any other hacking tools, not even the basic Lockpick that breaks 1 firewall.

But hang on – didn’t I see that for sale? We’re on this mission to buy new hacking upgrades, and my other agent Internationale reached the terminal last turn – she found nothing good we could afford. The Lockpick isn’t good, really, but right now it would be a life saver. And if we sold one of my less useful hacking programs, I think we could afford it.

Internationale is miles from the terminal, but if she sprints full pelt, she could just make it to the console this turn – alerting everyone on the way. She sprints, everyone hears the footsteps, but she makes it. Selling our Hunter tool gets us enough for the Lockpick, and she buys it. I switch to hacking mode, use the Lockpick on the guard’s power armour, and it shuts down. At last, Deckard’s tazer icon lights up, and I click it.

Grab, zap, whomp – he’s down.

That was the guard AI, feeding into the item system, feeding into the penetration system, feeding into the hacking system, feeding into the shopping system, feeding into the noise and movement system.

On another level, I might have been able to have Internationale buy her own cloaking unit and sneak up to the guard with a Mark II Buster Chip to over-ride his armour by hand.

Or if she’d been Xu, he could use an EMP fist-needle to reboot it.

Or Internationale could have Buster Chipped a drone with a penetrating gun mount to just blow through it.

Or if the Safe Alarm Daemon had been active, she could have intentionally opened a safe to trip one and cause the guard to investigate that next instead of turning around.

I’ve even heard of someone intentionally knocking out their own agent for two turns just because guards don’t notice prone bodies: if I’d had a flash grenade, I could have KO’d Deckard myself to save him.

More Info

It’s in Early Access at the moment. Obviously I like it already, but I would pretty much always advise waiting until the developer calls a game done – I’m only playing now because I need to judge it for the IGF.

Not least because of fucking cocking shit like this shitting shit:

Episode 5 just came out tonight, and it’s me and artist/designer Liselore Goedhart making SimAntics: Realistic Anteater Simulator. We were given the theme of ‘Simulation’ by previous jammers Cactus and Grapefrukt, and told not to make SimAnt. So we simulated an anteater instead.

You can grab it from Steam here, where there’s also a trailer. Stills below, and thoughts on the episode at the end!

My first stab at generating ant tunnels, and letting the mouse steer a tongue down them.

Lizzy draws on paper and then traces over photos of her sketches in Illustrator with a mouse.

Late night coding, beer and a carrot.

Recording sound-effects: my anteater’s munching noise is me eating an apple, Lizzy’s is her eating a cracker.

First multiplayer test. Game is suddenly fun!

And has Lizzy’s art, so 100x cuter.

Debriefing.

I was super nervous to watch this back, because I didn’t see it at all until it was publicly released on Steam. And watching yourself on video is always hard. But it wasn’t as painful as I thought! Mostly I just laugh a lot, which gives the accurate impression that the whole thing was just a lot of fun.

In some of the earlier episodes of the series, I sometimes struggled to get an idea of what the game was from the episode itself. Blossom, for example, turned out to have way more elements and ideas than I’d guessed from what Dominik and Christoffer were talking about as they made it.

Watching ours back, I feel like it gives a fairly good idea of what we’re making? But then I know everything about what we were making, so I can’t really judge. If you get it, I’d be interested to hear if it was followable.

Update: we don’t have a trailer for the game, but here’s a short clip of me playing in single-player just to give you an idea of what it looks like moving.

Third-person open world action and stealth game, with Assassin’s Creed free-running and Arkham Asylum combat. You’re in Mordor, it’s full of orc-like Uruks, and for reasons that were probably explained in all the cut-scenes I skipped, you have to use them to get to the Black Dark Lord Hand – who I gather is a ruffian.

What Works?

A menu of minibosses called Sauron’s Army. They’re Uruk captains with randomly generated looks, names, strengths and weaknesses. You select one from the lineup, interrogate lesser Uruks to find out which of your many modes of attack they’re weak to, then track them down in the open world and decide how to go about taking them out.

Why?

Well, that’s cool for starters. It’s cool having to find a source who’ll have information on your target, extracting that from them in a telepathic way that looks frightening but does not appear to be harmful, memorising these secret weaknesses, hunting your mark through the open world, and looking for a way to combine what you know with their situation. Weak to explosions, but nothing flammable around. Weak to stealth, but can I get past his lackeys? Maybe if I distract them over there…

In most cases, this secret info lets you take them out swiftly. And having intel inform your strategy and pay off so decisively in a non-scripted scenario makes this more satisfying than any of my kills in Assassin’s Creed.

But Sauron’s Army gets much more interesting when, in the second half of the game, you upgrade your telepathy to a sort of mind-control. The result seems to be that they see you as their Warchief: they don’t attack you, but nor do they attack their fellow Uruks unless you order them to. And they even mutter about looking for ‘the ranger’ – you.

With low-ranking Uruks this is just a cooler version of every game’s ‘Charm’ spell: it’s permanent, and they work like sleeper agents, waiting for your go-word when you’ve covertly turned enough of a stronghold’s guards to take it over.

But when you flip a captain in Sauron’s Army, you’re essentially becoming part of it. Now you have commanders. They’ll raise their own armies, they’ll fight with other captains, and they’ll try to become Warchiefs. You can step in at any time and send them after a particular target, and whether you micromanage them or not, you can show up to each of the important events in their lives to make sure they go well.

My man Blorg the Poet has been captured by a bigger captain and is about to be executed. The bigger captain is vulnerable to ranged. A spectral arrow whizzes from the bushes and thuds into his cranium.

His men run, Blorg runs, all the other prisoners run. Blorg is promoted into the power vacuum.

In the first half of the game you study their weaknesses, in the second, you suddenly care about their strengths. Not because they matter that much, but because these are your guys. I find myself selecting them for their quirks, cultivating an Uruk sub-faction of freaks and weirdos. Blorg speaks in rhyme. Glabkuk has a claw for a hand. Ukbuk just has a really fancy red-feather headdress I like. This is my team.

All this links into the dynamic, unpredictable business of the captain encounters themselves, which can sometimes run into each other as your fights lurch around Mordor. The first time I faced Ukbuk, I lost control of the situation. I’d stealth-flipped most of his henchmen to make the fight swing my way, but then one of my own captains blundered into the fracas and joined in.

Ukbuk was already weak enough for me to turn him, but I was caught up fighting his remaining loyal subjects as my captain closed in to finish him off. I’d never much liked the guy, so I did the only thing I could to save Ukbuk and his fancy headdress: Dispatch. This detonates the heads of all my mind-controlled soldiers, captain included, rather dramatically ending the fight.

Their bodies dropped, I finished off Ukbuk’s henchmen, and… he killed me. Or rather, he downed me. You get one last chance to come back from the brink of death by completing a quicktime event. But I’d just upgraded that ability to also kill my assailant if I succeed. Saving myself would kill Ukbuk. In easily one of the dumbest things I’ve done for a hat in a videogame, I let myself die.

Ukbuk got promoted for that. But that just made him a more valuable asset when I eventually turned him to my side.

So that’s what’s cool about it. The game has just added a screenshot composition tool that’s so good I almost wish I still worked in magazines. It really shows off how characterful and distinctive the Uruks are – they’re all generated by the same system, footsoldiers and captains alike. Not least because any of the former can be promoted to the latter for killing you.

Here are some other shots I took tonight:

First night in Austin, met up with fellow Brit and Sokobond co-creator Alan Hazelden for a drink at CU29, appropriately named for the atomic number of copper (Sokobond is about atoms). This is a ‘Mexican Coffee’, which involves setting fire to orange peel. It was goddamn great.

This was the rather different setup for my rather similar presentation at Fantastic Arcade, in a bar. This trip was my first time doing something on stage with no preparation or script, in a randomised game, so it was nice to do it in a more relaxed atmosphere at Fantastic before going up in front of a larger and more captive audience at EGX. Pic by Brandon Boyer.

Typically if the screen is indistinguishably white they’re playing SimAntics, and if it’s indistinguishably black they’re playing Heat Signature.

Half of Fantastic Arcade happens in an Alamo Drafthouse theatre, where they bring food and drink to your seat. Me and a new friend who works at Blizzard drank boozy milkshakes and watched the N++ tournament, which is one of the best spectator sports.

Robin Arnott and Alexander Bruce play SimAntics, the game Liselore Goedhart and I made for the Super Game Jam. Our SGJ episode was meant to screen in the giant theatre, but unfortunately wasn’t ready in time.

Luftrauser’s composer and Life on a Mountain creator Jukio Kallio and I. Jukio and I worked with Natalie Hanke on Distance.

Jukio DJ’ing the Fantastic Arcade closing party as Kozilek, with Fernando Ramallo on visuals.

Instead of rushing back to get home for 1 day before having to go to EGX, I stayed in Austin to watch the new Ghibli film (pretty good) and The Stranger (awful), and join some friends for a trip to the Salt Lick (pictured), which had sent at least one of them into surgery previously.

Bacon and maple donut at Gourdoughs, a thing I was determined to try before leaving Austin. It was soft and crispy and a massive mistake.

EGX.

I patched Heat Signature while I watched people play, trying to address usability issues quickly enough to see whether my fixes worked on the next players. I made 12 versions in 4 days, and the game improved hugely.

I think I’ll do this at events any time I can, rather than standing around and explaining my game to onlookers as I did at PAX. It’s less sociable, but much easier on the legs and voicebox, and so satisfying and energising to get so much work done – then to see its value immediately.

Each new version took progressively less pointing at things. Thanks again to Natalie Hanke for designing the awesome poster. Pic by Ben Borthwick.

Matt Lees and Steve Hogarty tried it. I tried, and failed, not to ask journalists “What did you think?”, because I hated it when devs did that to me when I was a writer.

This fellow boarded a ship, saw a horde of guards coming his way, fired wildly, shot an explosive barrel, and blew this chunk clean off the ship: spinning through space, suddenly alone.

Gunpoint and Heat Signature artist John Roberts manned the station for a while so I could see a little of the show.

The random gas clouds keeps producing gorgeous combinations I’ve never seen before.

Quite a nice layout on a big ship. I think this is the balance of rooms to corridors I’d like to see more of, more rooms than this and it starts to look like grid paper.

Pic sneakily taken by my friend Rossi while I was being interviewed by Chris Bratt for VideoGamer.com. EGX was better for press exposure than any other event I’ve been to.

Lots of nice tweets during and after my talk. This pic by Gareth Williams.

Sneakily taken by Pip while I nervously watch Heat Signature being played in not the exact way I would play it – always scary.

Now that I’m back, there’s lots of boring business stuff to catch up on, including officially forming our team. But then there’s the wonderful job of revising my priorities and ideas for the game’s grand plan based on the truckload of new self-awareness I’ve gained from watching people play and talking to them about what works.

The response was hugely positive, but the blanks in the current prototype are not the type a new player can fill in for themselves. With Gunpoint, it was “This, but more levels.” Heat Signature’s already infinitely big, so it’ll increase in definition and systemic richness rather than in size. That’s something I could inject in any of a million places, so the current build doesn’t definitively show where it’s going. But the upside of that breadth is that I can also adapt my focus as I learn more about where the most exciting possibilities are.

As ever, join the mailing list if you want to be involved in testing when we do that, or just to be told when it’s out.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Turn-based game where you control a small team of wizards in tactical gear, breaching into rooms full of armed gangsters and the like.

Role: designer, writer, programmer, level designer, sound designer
Working with: John Roberts (art), John Winder (programming), Robert Arzola (music), Steve Lee (level design)
Made in: Unity
Get it: $20 on Steam

Heat Signature

A space game where you can actually go inside the spaceships and beat up the crew and steal things and get shot.

Role: designer, programmer, writer, sound designer
Working with: John Roberts (art), John Winder (programming), Ivan Semidolin (music)
Made in: Game Maker Studio
Platform: Windows (2017)
More info: dev log videos, development blog
Get it: $15 on Steam

Morphblade

A turn-based game where each hex you move to turns you into a different kind of weapon. Inspired by Michael Brough’s iOS game Imbroglio, but I ended up moving it to a hex grid, letting you build the grid as you play, getting rid of enemy health, and letting you upgrade weapons by crossbreeding them with each other, each pair having a unique result.

It’s out now!

Role: everything
Made in: Game Maker Studio
Platform: Windows (2017)
More info: blog posts
Get it: $5 on Steam

Floating Point

A peaceful game about maintaining speed and grace by swinging yourself around randomly generated spaces with a rope. Built in three weeks from the rope physics I developed for the Grappling Hook Game.

Role: designer, programmer, sound designer
Working with: Form & Shape (music)
Made in: Unity
Out on: Windows, Mac and Linux (2014)
More info: trailer, dev log videos, development breakdown
Get it: free on Steam

SimAntics

Competitive multiplayer game about steering anteater tongues down randomly generated ant tunnels. Made in two days with Liselore Goedhart when we were on the Super Game Jam documentary.

Role: co-designer, programmer, writer, co-sound-designer
Working with: Liselore Goedhart (design, art)
Made in: Game Maker Studio
Out on: Windows (2014)
More info: my post with some thoughts on the episode and stills thereof
Get it: with the documentary series on Steam, which is $20 for 5 episodes and the 5 games made during them

Gunpoint

A noir-themed creative infiltration game that lets you rewire its levels to get the jump on people and punch them endlessly in the face.

Role: designer, programmer, writer, sound designer
Working with: John Roberts (art), Fabian van Dommelen (art), Ryan Ike (music), John Robert Matz (music), Francisco Cerda (music), Abstraction Games (Mac & Linux port, ongoing support)
Made in: Game Maker 8.1
Out on: Windows (2013), Mac and Linux (2014)
More info: trailer, development breakdown, dev log videos, the whole development blog in chronological order, how its launch went, in-game commentary and a making-of feature are included in the Exclusive Edition,
Get it: free demo, full game $10 from us, comes with a Steam key

On Hold

Things I didn’t finish, and probably won’t.

Crushed & Bungled

This was an idea for a choose your own adventure style game where every skill check would have an outlandish outcome if you rolled a critical success or a critical failure. The idea was to make content extremely cheap to make, usually just text, but even so 4 outcomes for every skill check ballooned in workload too fast for it to really ever make sense.

Made in: Unity
Prospects: not gonna finish

Civ-Style Experiment

I thought it was a shame that Civ: Beyond Earth didn’t change the very messy and complicated formula Civ has built up over the years. So I decided to spend all the time I would be playing Civ on making my own Civ-style game, to see if some of my theories about how it could be simplified work out. Taking it off my plate for now, might come back to it the next time I’m annoyed about complexity in 4x games.

Made in: Unity
Prospects: not gonna finish
More info: videos

The Grappling Hook Game

A game about a team of thieves using grappling hooks to help each other break into banks, hotels, casinos. Took a long time to get rope physics right as a Unity novice, ultimately decided Heat Signature was more viable with my skills at the time – and just as exciting.

Made in: Unity
Prospects: might revisit some day, needs a rethink
More info: dev log videos

Game Jam Games

I’ve made three or four smaller games for other game jams, and written up ideas for a bunch more. You can see all that on the Game Jams tag.

Office, day

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
Your company is garbage, Desperate! Once I buy it despite hating it, I will change everything you like about it!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
Go to hell, Needlessly! The merger’s off!

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
Without me your company is nothing (but I still want to acquire it)!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
That’s for me to tearfully acknowledge later and for you to shut up!

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
I’m a jerk in my personal life too! (Leaves)

Office, day

REASONABLE SUBORDINATE:
Dammit Desperate, we need this merger or we’re done for!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
Shut up, closest friend with my best interests at heart! Besides, soon we won’t need Needlessly Dickish OR his money.

REASONABLE SUBORDINATE:
Dammit Desperate, don’t do anything desperate!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I don’t have a CHOICE except the one you just mentioned!!

Car, day

JESSICA:
I’m so glad you invited me to Place Where You Live.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
It’s so lovely to see you Jessica! How’s your book tour going?

JESSICA:
Very well, thank you. I am a literary titan known to most of humanity and my work is to everyone’s taste.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
That’s great. I just hope you don’t get wrapped up in the FLASHPOINT OF LOCAL TENSIONS going on while you’re here.

JESSICA:
(Raises quizzical eyebrow)

Apartment, day

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE BUT IS OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
I love you PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE.

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE BUT OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
Oh, but it’s no use HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE! In some obtuse way this business merger makes our love impossible!

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE BUT IS OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
Ugh, you’re right somehow!

Docks, night

SHADY CONTACT:
I got the stuff, where’s the money?

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I didn’t think this through.

SHADY CONTACT:
Hey, you’d BETTER have my money!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I didn’t think this through.

SHADY CONTACT:
You messed with the wrong Shady Contact, Desperate! I will definitely and literally kill you! Not a figure of speech! If you’re murdered soon, it was me! You hear that, witnesses who heard the victim arguing with someone around this time?

Docks, day

POLICE IDIOT stands over DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN’S BODY. JESSICA arrives immediately somehow.

POLICE IDIOT:
Looks like an open-and-shut case, Mrs F. Witnesses heard Shady Contact threatening to kill him, and as a police officer I don’t like to look for further evidence or consider any other possibilities.

JESSICA:
I’m not so sure, Idiot! Can you get me his phone records?

POLICE IDIOT:
OK, for some reason it’s fine for me to share that private data. But I’m telling you Mrs F, this time you’re wrong. I know I have a 0% success rate and you solve all of the 22 murders that happen near you every year, but

Office, day

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
With Desperate out of the way, this merger will definitely go through! Yes, I had a motive to kill him alright.

IRRELEVANT CHARACTER WHO LOOKS CONFUSINGLY FAMILIAR:
I reply, but say nothing of substance and never become relevant to the plot, although I look enough like someone who is that you’re no longer completely sure of what’s happening.

Lovely house, day

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
What’s that?

JESSICA:
Hm? Oh, just Desperate’s phone records from the night he died. Do you know, he didn’t make a single call to his wife that night? Don’t you think that’s odd?

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
I like you but no.

JESSICA:
All the same, I’m going to keep looking through these records.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
Well, this isn’t at all the right context for this phrase, but a rolling stone gathers no moss.

JESSICA:
Moss… that’s it!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
That’s what?

JESSICA:
The missing piece of the puzzle!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
What puzzle?

JESSICA:
The puzzle of who killed Desperate Businessman!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
Please just say out loud the thing you’ve realised.

JESSICA:
I have to get to the police station immediately! (leaves)

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
For fuck’s sake, Jessica!

Docks, night

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE is rummaging through a bin at the crime scene.

JESSICA:
Looking for this? (She holds up an earring)

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Jessica! No, I was just… I thought I heard a dog, in the bin.

JESSICA:
I’m afraid it’s over, Someone’s Wife. You killed Desperate for basically the same mundane, practical reason as one of the male suspects, but you didn’t get much screen time so it still seems like a surprise. I found your earring at the crime scene, and when I give it to the police I’m sure they’ll prove it was yours.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Not if I happen to have a gun on me and draw it now, honestly planning to kill an old lady over some fairly flimsy evidence but for some reason wanting to warn her first!

POLICE IDIOT:
(Emerging from the shadows) Drop it, Someone’s Wife!

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Oh for God’s sake. Why do you let her do these things as a weird piece of theatre?

POLICE IDIOT:
Her chain of evidence is always hopelessly weak, so we just have to hope you’ll either kill her or confess.

JESSICA:
It’s true. I have no reason to mention this beyond simple smarm now, but I never found any earring.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Then how?!

JESSICA:
Oh, it was quite simple, really. The moss. When I saw you at the funeral earlier, the camera focused weirdly on a piece of moss on your shoe. I happened to remember that this moss only grows in one place in the world, the crime scene, and it only sticks to murderers.

But I had to wait for someone to mention the word ‘moss’ in a different context before I made this trivial extra step as if it was a moment of serendipitous inspiration, which for some reason is how we want crimes to be solved.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Well I’d do it again! In moss-proof shoes, and undroppable earrings!

JESSICA:
Again, I never found an earring.

Always an elevator for some reason, day

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE:
Jessica, we wanted you to be the first to know: we’ve set a date!

JESSICA:
Oh, that’s wonderful!

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE:
I hope you’ll come to the ceremony!

JESSICA:
Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Just so long as you don’t expect ALL of your guests to survive!

(All laugh)

JESSICA:
Hundreds of people have died around me.

(Freeze frame)

But the slapdash way I built it has the following problems:

• All collision checks, including guards checking whether they can see the player, are being done on a per-pixel basis. That means the game slows down a lot if there are many guards.
• Pathfinding is done ahead of time, meaning each ship calculates all possible routes within it every time its floorplan changes. For very large ships, that causes slowdown when a missile takes a chunk out of it.
• When things on a ship move or are created, they don’t have a good way of making sure they end up fixed in the right position on the ship, leading to lots of very tricky to diagnose bugs where airlocks appear in the wrong place and won’t let you inside.

The Rewrite

All of these systems need a total rewrite, and I know how to make each one massively faster and more reliable now that I’ve had some experience with how they’ll be used. I’ve been working with the bad code for so long that I’m actually really excited to rip this awful shit out and make it all clean, fast and efficient.

But I’m also aware that this means it will look like exactly the same game until I finish all three rewrites, which might be a while. So while I’m at it, I’m making some of the more superficial tweaks I’ve been planning, just to make the game feel fresh on the outside too. And the first of these are tweaks to the way ships randomly generate their interior floorplans.

The Old Floor Plan Generator

I talked about how I built that system at the time, and it’s really simple:

1. All modules in a row have doors leading to each other
2. If there’s a row behind this one, one module in this row has a door leading to it
3. If a module has exactly two doors and they’re in a straight line, it’s a corridor. Otherwise, it’s a room.

That generates interiors that look like this:

I was pretty pleased with this! From only three rules, it makes sure every module is used, every corridor leads to a room, and there’s a path from every module to every other, but it’s usually not trivial. Despite being simple, the pattern didn’t seem to be obvious – to me or others. I posted a shot on Twitter and asked people to figure out the rules – no-one got them right.

Its main shortcomings were:

• There are a lot of rooms, as opposed to corridors. Rooms obfuscate connections: it’s harder to see at a glance which ones are connected and which are blocked, which can make the layout visually boring even when it’s mechanically interesting.
• It’s usually not mechanically interesting either. The fact that there’s only one logical route between any two rooms will probably be too boring and restrictive once we have more of the on-board game elements in, like sealed doors and hacking.

The New Floor Plan Generator

So I made a few tweaks, and the new system generates stuff like this:

How much you get out of this image might depend on how much you care about corridors, but I am fascinated by it. It’s so much more intricate, organic and complex than the rules I added seemed – I look at it and think “Wait, I didn’t tell you how to do that!” But evidently I did. Again, I think it has good Rule Stealth: the rules are right there on display, but I don’t think you’d guess what they were, right? If you want to try, do so before clicking this:

Click to show the new rules

The Interesting Bit

The bits that surprise me are bits like this:

How did it know to build a corridor branching off from a lengthwise passageway to lead to this out-of-the-way room?! My algorithm builds the ship one lateral row at a time, and each one has no idea what was in the last one. This makes it look like whoever built the ship planned ahead to make sure there was a corridor leading to this otherwise isolated room.

The Explanation

I get it, of course: three modules in a row all decided to make a door to the previous row, which meant all of them could block themselves off from each other laterally. And in the row it made afterwards, the middle module failed the chance to create a door leading back, so the room behind it was left with only one connection. And being a dead end, it became a room rather than a corridor.

The fact that it’s reachable is not luck, it’s a result of some logic I intentionally put into rule 3: we’re only allowed to block ourselves off from the rest of the row if we know the rest of the row also has a back-door. That way we can still get to them by going back one row.

But what if there’s a lateral block there too? Well, they’ll only create one if they, too, have doors on either side of the block leading backwards. What about the row behind that? Same rule, all the way to the very back row of the ship, which will never create a lateral block because it’ll never have two back-doors – it won’t have any.

Imaginary Intentions

But it’s so interesting how much intentionality I can read in to the result of these rules. It looks so much like they isolated this room for a reason, and built that corner corridor to lead to it. And that adds meaning and character to whatever we put there.

Once the room types are in, that might end up being a cargo hold with a locked door and valuable loot in it. Clearly, it’s isolated by these thick sturdy walls for security reasons.

But random is random, so it could just as easily end up being living quarters. Now the isolation looks like privacy: maybe they don’t want to be kept up by ship noises. Or it could be a bathroom, and they don’t want sound to travel for other reasons.

That’s why this new system fascinates me. It seems to create intentionality out of algorithms, and the more stuff I put into the game for it to combine with, the more unexpected combinations will come out.

The trouble was, the Sky Bastard was across a large gap, and I can’t fly. I can trap the various creatures scuttling around this land, and when they’re trapped I can edit their behaviour. But behaviours are like inventory items: if you’ve only found one creature with ‘fly’ as a behaviour, you can take that out, but you can still only put it in one other thing to make it fly.

That was a shame, because I had a small army of dogs. I’d been editing pretty much every one I found. My first, and favourite, I have programmed to hate corpses, so every now and then he scampers furiously off and I know there’s a dead body somewhere nearby.

Luckily, though, I’ve also found a ‘hive mind’ behaviour. This makes one creature copy all his other behaviours to every other creature of his type. So if I change Corpsehater’s movement type to flying, then give him hive mind, all dogs will fly.

That would be cool. But I still don’t know if they’ll win against the Sky Bastard. So I also give Corpsehater a trait called Last Word, which poisons whoever kills him. Since he also has Hive Mind, now I have an army of dogs, killing any one of whom fatally poisons you.

But wait: now they don’t need their bite! They’re gonna kill him anyway. So I can replace Corpsehater’s bite attack with a tractor beam, and then I’d have an army of flying tractor beam dogs, which is, as the saying goes, its own reward.

The last thing I have to do is motivate them: you can’t control your AI allies directly, so I have to program them to hate the Sky Bastard. I do so.

White datastreams erupt from Corpsehater’s head and arc over to each of his seven dog friends, copying his traits to them. All eight dogs sprout helicopter rotors and lift into the air. All eight dogs turn to face the Sky Bastard, and all eight dogs float off towards him. Once they’re in range, all eight dogs emit tractor beams at him, pulling him off his platform to fight them in the air. And he can fight them fine, but alas, all eight dogs are made of poison.

To be honest, I couldn’t entirely parse the aerial fracas as it happened – but at the end of it, the Sky Bastard was definitely ghosted.

It’s a peaceful game about swinging gracefully around randomly generated levels. It’s played entirely with the mouse, it’s easy to play, you can have fun with it in five minutes, and it has relaxing digital music by the excellent Form & Shape.

Here’s a trailer, and some info on why it’s free.

Why is it free?

When I announced this yesterday, it was met with enthusiastic response:

@Pentadact what!

— Steve Gaynor (@fullbright) June 5, 2014

@Pentadact what in the shit

— kate (@shegeekshow) June 5, 2014

@Pentadact Wha..? Why's it free??

— Tap to Win (@TapToWin) June 5, 2014

When Gunpoint came out, and did well, I thanked those who bought it for putting me in a position where I didn’t have to actively chase money with everything I do. In return, I promised to “make new things for you!”

I started Floating Point for the Ludum Dare game jam two months ago, but when it started to feel like it could be something more, I let myself pursue it. I just added what it seemed to need at each stage, and worked on it for as long as I felt it needed work. It was a fantastic experience, I’m really proud of the final thing, and I could never have done that if I was struggling to feed myself.

Floating Point probably could make money – if I was a publicly traded company, it would probably have to. But because I’m just a person, I’d rather just give it away as a thank-you. And because you’ve let me become completely independent, I can.

Thanks again.

• Get it on Steam.
• Watch the development log.

One effect I fancied but considered low priority was some kind of trail: maybe particles or sparks or something. So I had a quick look to see how hard this would be in Unity, and discovered something called a Trail Renderer. I tried it, and it looked like this:

That looks fucking great! And its length is defined by a ‘time’ property, which I could scale with some measure of your flow. As well as being a reward, this turned out to have a great kind of selective memory: when you’re doing well, a huge length of your beautiful arcing movements still hangs glowing in the air. When you’re screwing up, your trail is short and fades quickly so the ugly evidence doesn’t stick around long.

It leads to all kinds of lovely patterns.

And it means each screenshot tells a little story of what was going on when you took it. So I added a screenshot key that removes the hud and saves a PNG at double your current resolution (good for thin trails when you’re zoomed out).

When I showed this to my friend Owen, he liked it, and suggested that at the end of the level it could show you your whole path from start to finish. That’s not easy with a single trail renderer, because when your trail fades out its positions are forgotten, but I managed to do it by adding a second one that’s hidden until you complete the level.

It was… a little hard to read. So I thought about giving it heat vision colours: you know, where it fades from dark purple to bright yellow to show different heat levels. That was less successful.

The original red was cool, but I just wanted it to feel different: the level’s over now, and you’re just swinging around to paint the air and create cool patterns. It’s a shift of tone that seemed to need a shift in colour, so I tried the only other colour in Floating Point’s palette.

That was just what I wanted – it’s still insane, and gets more so if you keep swinging around after it’s over, but it feels cooler, more relaxed, kind of reflective. It’s still bright and clear, which makes it really satisfying to describe these smooth arcs through empty space, but hopefully not as cluttered. And a little brightness near the player helps you distinguish which bits of it are most recent.

I’ve got some more exciting news about Floating Point to share, but I want to wait till I have a release date, which shouldn’t be long now. I’m still asking on Twitter for small batches of testers sometimes, so follow me there if you want to get in on that.

In the meantime, here are some more traily screenshots.

Your faults are not ‘your fault’ if you’re born with them, if they’re forced on you, if you didn’t know about them, or a whole variety of other conditions. Language forms organically and messily, and it only makes sense to talk about it in generalisations. But the most prevalent trend I can see in the types of faults that are not ‘your fault’ is this: they’re the ones you can’t reasonably change.

Back to the coffee: if I knew you had shaky hands, I might go one step further and say “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have given you one so full!” I could have prevented this problem, whereas you can’t really do anything about your shaky hands, at least not right now. If we really care about this coffee getting spilled, I’m the one who should change: I should remind myself to be more mindful of other people’s physical quirks. Or I should put less coffee in cups. Either way, the reason I give myself the blame is that there’s something I can do about it.

So far, the way we naturally behave is pretty logical. It makes sense that we have this urge to assign blame, because our feelings about where it should lie match up with who should take action to prevent the same problem from happening again. Not only is it not nice to yell at someone for being born with shaky hands, it also doesn’t get you anywhere: the problem won’t get solved.

So this is an effective way for social creatures to work: when a problem occurs, figure out who can do something to prevent it in future. Blame is an inbuilt tool to direct our energies towards the most effective course of correcting action.

The Self-Conscious Killer

But the question of who ‘can’ do something about a problem gets tricky, particularly as we start to understand more about the brain. This article starts with the story of a man who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 more, but left a suicide note requesting that his brain be autopsied after his death, because he felt something in him had changed and that was affecting his behaviour. The autopsy showed a tumour compressing his amygdala, which regulates fear and aggression. He’d even seen doctor for help, and while the note is vague, he evidently didn’t get it.

His fault? Could he have done something about it? Now that we know there was a physical cause for his urges, should we say he wasn’t to blame?

Irresistible Urges

You could claim that urges and emotions are just one input into the decision making process, and one always has the choice of whether to give in to them. I experience the hunger urge as the result of a biological cause, but I can choose to resist it. But what if I was at the point of starvation? I don’t know.

My one experience of an urge that feels completely beyond decision-making is vomiting. In mild illnesses sometimes you can repress it for a moment, but when you’re really ill, sometimes vomiting just happens. It’s an action, I’m still conscious, my body still moves as if under conscious control (I don’t collapse, for example), but I wouldn’t call it a choice, I wouldn’t say I could do anything about it, and I don’t really think it’s my fault.

Whether or not something feels like a choice gets us caught up in questions of free will, but my criteria for saying that vomiting was not a choice is that my intention not to do it had no effect on whether I did. I got to study this in great detail when I had 24-hour food poisoning once, and it happened exactly the same way whether I was in the most convenient and hygienic place to vomit, or in the middle of a full aeroplane. If someone had told me, “Throw up one more time and I’ll shoot your family,” I’d still have thrown up one more time. Nothing could affect the ‘choice’ to vomit, because it happened even when my intention not to do it was absolute. That’s my definition of not-a-choice.

A Blameless Society

In the case of the tumor sufferer, I think we have to say we don’t know what it was like to be him, or whether the urges were resistible or not. His note specifically refers to ‘deciding’ to commit these crimes ahead of time, but there’s good reason to believe a medical problem influenced those decisions.

As we start to understand more of the brain, maybe every instance of criminal behaviour will be traceable to physical trait of the brain that causes it. Is everything that we can explain that way ‘not your fault’? Could we get to a point where nothing is anyone’s fault? Would that even be a bad thing?

The reason we get in a tangle here is that we’re still focusing on where to put the blame. But as we’ve hopefully established, blame is just an emotional tool for guiding us towards who can take action to prevent future problems. In the tumor case, we don’t actually need to answer the question “Was he to blame?” because we already know what action should have been taken, and what action can be taken in future. (Also he’s dead.)

Pointless Punishment

So what about someone with a history of violence? Someone who’s repeatedly offended, even when they knew there’d be harsh punishment? Once we understand the brain well enough to point to a medical cause of this, are they still to blame? I don’t know. But the question of what to do about it is easier: it’s purely about preventing them from hurting more people.

‘Punishment’ as retribution no longer makes any sense: our urge for vengeance is an emotion that comes from a blame system too simple to apply coherently to our more nuanced understanding of human behaviour. Both in the justice system at large, and in our personal lives.

When you’re angry with someone for something they did, it’s worth remembering that the anger is just a tool to direct your attention to what needs to change. And it’s a crude one. It’s still worth rationally checking: what’s the best way to prevent this from being a problem again? It might be lashing out, but it usually isn’t.

The only thing that matters is prevention. And our greater understanding of the mind might influence how we do that.

Unsettling Cures

That will be our next ethical tangle. Once we know the medical causes of more types of criminal behaviour, we might also know the medical ‘cures’. Maybe that violent re-offender just has too much of one hormone, and we can give him an operation to produce less of it. Once we see behaviour as having a medical cause, when do our ‘cures’ become brainwashing?

It seems scary to start modifying people’s personalities to fit our norms, yet it would seem natural to cut out that shooter’s tumor if we’d found it before he died. In that case, he actually wanted to be cured. But what if his tumor-induced urges included the urge to stay the way he was? Clearly we can’t let him kill again, but can we still cut out the tumor? Can we modify someone’s desires when they don’t want us to?

The uncomfortable truth, of course, is that we already do this in some cases. But it’s going to get stranger, and stickier, and harder to agree on as more and more undesirable behaviour maps to physical things we can intentionally change.

Each level has a shrine that grants a choice of upgrades, letting you incrementally design a perfect build of complimentary abilities until depth 16, at which point they run out completely and you just see how far you can get with what you’ve built.

As the difficulty ramps up from there, the way your chosen abilities play off each other to let you overcome the endlessly increasing challenge becomes elegant, then balletic, then sublime. These calculated chains of sweeps, leaps and thrusts let you dance through a minefield with precision and grace, felling everything around you. It’s hard to fully explain how neat, clever and satisfying it feels – so I made a GIF.

If you’re interested in what’s actually going on here, I’ll go through it frame by frame.

First move. The purple wizards and green archers can shoot along any straight row of hexes (six directions), so I can’t go up (wizard on the right) or down (archer on the left). I head up-right, to get as close as I can without taking damage.

JC, a bomb! The red guys throw these, and they blow up next turn, hitting everything adjacent. This could be a tough spot: every adjacent square gets me hit by something next turn, and I certainly can’t stay where I am. But that’s what your upgrades are for – in this case, Shielding Bash.

Bash lets you knock anything away from you, including bombs, and in this case that lets me neatly blow up these two footmen. But it’s the Shielding Bash upgrade that really saves me here: every time I Bash, I’m invulnerable until my next turn. That protects me from the wizard above.

I’m missing a screenshot after this (I fudged it a bit in the GIF) but I manage to kill the closest wizard without taking damage, leading to this:

JC, a bomb! My shield bash is still on cooldown so I can’t bat it back at the red guys, but they’re low priority anyway – often they actually help. I’m much more interested in getting rid of these wizards.

I can’t Lunge at them directly, because the archer on the left would shoot me in the back, so I Leap right next to them. Leap costs a chunk of your slow-recharging energy, but I’ve also upgraded it to stun everyone near where I land, so it’s worth it to get close and stun the closest wizard.

The wizard I didn’t stun moved down, and another bomb rolls in. If I stay where I am, I’ll get hit by a wizard, an archer and a bomb – crazy damage. But I’m here to kill these wizards, and I can do it rather neatly.

As you move from one tile to another, you Slash any enemy who’s adjacent to both. In this case I Leap over their heads, letting me kill them both in one move, and stunning the red guy nearby.

Moving upward here would Slash the red guy and Lunge the archer, but I notice the archer in the middle would hit me. I don’t, however, notice the archer in the upper left.

Stupid mistake. I kill the red guy and stun the closest archer, but get hit by the one I forgot about across the river. Past level 16, though, it’s OK to take 1 point of damage on a level: the golden fleece you find there heals you by that much each time you descend.

JC, a bomb! Not hard to decide what to do here.

I Bash the bomb at the archer and two red guys, killing all three and protecting me from the top archer because of that shielding perk.

This is not as easy as it looks: you can’t attack an adjacent enemy by moving directly into their square, so no conventional moves are safe here. But as it happens, that last bomb bash was my third killing move in a row, and I have a killstreak perk. There are several to choose from, and I’ve picked the one that recharges your energy, returns your spear, and resets your cooldowns. That means Shielding Bash is ready to go, even though I only just used it.

The blackness is basically a wall, so Bashing someone into it crushes them instantly. It also shields me of course, so the archer across the river can’t hurt me again.

Easy move – leaping towards the archer lets me land into a Lunge, killing him with my spear.

This one’s trickier: if I Slash this guy by going up, the soldier on the right can stab me. If I Slash him by going down-left, killing him exposes me to the archer. I kind of want to kill him but stay where I am.

I guess I could throw my spear? It’s counter-intuitive at close range, and it’ll leave my spear in the archer’s line of fire, but! I’ve just done two consecutive killing moves, so as long as I kill something this’ll be my third, and my cooldowns, energy and spear will be returned.

I throw my spear into his face at point blank range, and it teleports right back into my hand. I love this game.

From here, it’s easy: Slash up…

Slash down…

Leap to chase the archer…

And throw my spear across the river.

It’s a risky move in combat, because without your spear you can’t do the super useful Lunge attack, and it’s awkward to get it back. But for the final enemy on a level, it feels like such a cool finish. Despite being turn-based and cutesy, what’s happening Hoplite’s fights has a spectacular and relentless brutality to it.

Once more from the top:

Hoplite is $2 on iOS and Android (free to try).

• How my dreams of a job in finance were dashed by the cruel machine of games journalism.
• How I learned review scores are great and you can trust them.
• Crusader: No Remorse was badass and we will both tell you why.
• Why enemies in The Punisher aren’t allowed to dislike torture.
• My thesis on the ethics of teleportation by replication.
• FEAR’s slide-kick does like 10,000 damage for some reason.
• I made a cave in Blood, Steve made a cave in Duke.
• Blood had voxel graves, excellent weapons.
• Why expressionless Half-Life 2 civilians jump for joy at the end of my mod BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA.
• Human & Sons: Carbon-Based Detective Agency and the game it became (Gunpoint).
• The emergent way to deal with the Intex agent in Gunpoint: embarass him.

What you won’t hear is anything about Heat Signature, because I hadn’t thought it up at the time.

You can subscribe to it there, or grab the MP3 directly, or click play below:

“Our main gunner, a Special Weapons guy with the Minigun I coveted, ran ahead and got himself infested. I had my medic gun out, but he panicked, ran away, bumped into a door and exploded in a shower of slithering facehuggers. We all just kind of looked at each other.”

To complete Spelunky, you just have to survive 15 randomly generated levels and then trick the final boss into killing itself. To get to hell, though, you have to perform a series of specific rituals in a specific order, using unique objects that crop up in different places each time, and then defeat the boss in a particularly audacious way to use his death as a stepping stone to the underworld.

• Somewhere in the mines there’ll be a Golden Key. Somewhere else in the mines there’s a Golden Chest. You have to pick one up and bring it to the other to unlock the chest and obtain the Udjat Eye.
• Somewhere in the jungle, there’s a door buried behind solid rock. The only way to know which bit of solid rock is by getting close enough to it for the Udjat Eye to blink, faster the closer you are. If you find it, and if you have enough explosives to blow it open, you reach The Black Market.
• The Black Market is full of shops selling a random selection of equipment, but in the very back, there’s a shop that sells something you can’t find anywhere else: The Ankh of Resurrection. It costs more than any other item in the game, an amount of money it’s hard to acquire this early, and all it does is give you one extra life. And if you want to get to Hell, you can’t use it.
• Until, somewhere in the ice caverns, you find the Moai Head. It’s an impenetrable stone statue, but the next item you need is inside it: the Hedjet. The Moai Head is inscribed with the symbol of the Ankh, a hint at the horrible secret: the only way in is to kill yourself. The Ankh resurrects you inside, but is lost forever.
• Beneath the ice caverns you’ll find the temple, and somewhere on the first level of the temple you’ll find Anubis, a flying god with a heat-seeking psionic death staff whose projectiles can pass through walls. Kill him. Take the Staff.
• Somewhere on the next level of the temple will be a Golden Door. Combining the Hedjet with the Staff creates the key, the key opens the door, and the door leads you to the City of Gold.
• The City of Gold used to be the secret, one of the most elaborate in gaming. I wrote a whole feature about it. But in this version of Spelunky, it’s just another step in the path to Hell. Somewhere in its solid gold walls is the Book of the Dead. Take it and Anubis II, the undead version of the god you just killed, will rise. He can fly through walls and summon infinite skeletons and follow you between levels.
• Kill Anubis II, make it to Olmec, the boss of the regular game, and the Book of the Dead will start… chomping. Find the place it chomps fastest. Find a way to make Olmec stomp there, until he sinks into the lava. Stand on Olmec’s head as he sinks, and walk through the Door to Hell just above the lava’s surface.

And that gets you to level 1. Of Hell, the most dangerous world of one of the most danger-obsessed games around. Hell isn’t just a secret level, it’s a secret world, as big as any of the main ones. And at the end is an even bigger boss. Only by completing it and defeating him do you actually escape, and that’s what I did for the first time last night.

The interesting thing about this insane process is that I never read a guide to it. I heard about each bit of the puzzle by word of mouth, a stray screenshot, an accidentally read spoiler, or a Let’s Play that revealed more than I thought it would.

It’s a weird modern equivalent of folklore, an elaborate story about secrets and artifacts that’s passed from person to person by excitement. And those of us who pursue it have memorised every illogical step of the improbable tale. Some of it we’ve tried for ourselves, some of it many times. But until you make it all the way through, part of it is still legend, and that’s tantalising.

So maybe I can take some advice from myself and share my experiences instead of my opinions.

Lately I’ve got to talk to a lot of developers at conferences and festivals, particularly ones who are working on their first indie game and have lots of specific questions about what we did with Gunpoint. So probably the most helpful thing I can do is give a kind of structured breakdown of Gunpoint’s conception, development, recruitment and promotion, then let people delve into whatever they’re curious about.

It’s not a guide to what you should do, it’s just a guide to what I did and how it worked out. Click a topic to expand it.

Conception

Tool

Process

Getting a team

Promotion

Thanks for reading. Here’s even more reading!

• My post about how it all worked out when we launched.
• The whole Gunpoint development blog in order.
• My video blogs about its development and design.
• The developer commentary and Making Of video feature are now available as DLC.
• I gave a talk at Minecon about what I’d learned from Gunpoint’s development.
• I gave a talk at GDC Europe about how my games journalism experience influenced Gunpoint’s design.
• Jesus I’ve talked a lot about the development of this game.
• I guess it is the biggest thing I’ve ever done and it did completely change my life.

But! Editor David Malki is also Kickstarting a card game based on the same concept, and since it’s blown its funding goal by over 1000%, they’re releasing a few stories from the anthology to say thanks.

One of them is mine! You can read it now! Here it is!

It’s about a supervillain’s henchman tasked with the job of having their enemies killed in a way that doesn’t contradict their predicted deaths. It is called: LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE!

If you can’t read it, go here.

But I spend a lot of time thinking about whether there’s a way to contribute to a discussion without derailing it. Whether there’s some way of knowing, in advance, that what you’re about to say will make you look like an asshole, start a fight, or be outright wrong.

I think there is.

The problem

There’s a common thread in a lot of the unhelpful and offensive things we say. I only started to spot it after I realised a few things:

1. We don’t know anything.

Most of the things we think and talk about are things we have no certain knowledge about. It’s scary and stupid how fiercely I’ll defend claims I have never verified for myself – I just heard them from sources I trust.

I trust my dad. I trust the consensus of the scientific community. I trust my gut, which is filled with 31 years of passively absorbed half-truths from television, the internet, and hearsay.

But all those things have been wrong, and worse, I’m often unaware that I’m even trusting them. I just think I know things. But beyond my own thoughts and immediate, specific experiences, I don’t.

2. People are different.

I don’t know how different yet, but every time I think I know how different, I meet someone even more different.

So almost anything I say about a group of people will be wrong. And even if it’s only about one person, my picture of them is 1% observed behaviour and 99% conjecture from my own experience. Anything based on the latter is liable to be offensively inaccurate.

3. We like to simplify.

I did it right there. We don’t all like to simplify, and we don’t like to simplify all the time. But I cut those qualifiers out because shorter and snappier sounds better in my head. Maybe it does in yours too. I don’t know, because I don’t know anything, people are different, and I shouldn’t simplify.

The instinct to simplify before you speak can convert a specific and true experience into something harmful, wrong, or both.

The process

Too often, we do something like this:

I’ve seen X be false, and people I trust say it’s false.
Becomes:
I don’t believe X, no-one in their right mind does.
Becomes:
If you think X, you’re a moron.

This process of assholification generally isn’t conscious, but too many of us have come out with that third line. We take specific experiences we can be reasonably sure of (1), conclude more than we could possibly know from them (2), extend that to presume things about other people (2), then simplify it into a neatly prickish generalisation (3).

Simple statements deal collateral damage. You insult people you didn’t mean to. You sound more hostile than you intended. And you seem to be claiming things you don’t actually believe. That’s often how an argument turns into a fight, and any chance of progress dies.

The solution

“Don’t do that” seems like a good solution. But it’s hard to just change the way your brain decides how to say something.

Luckily, most of the fights we waste our time and energy on happen in text, which we can check before we send. Do I know this first hand? Am I claiming something about someone else? Am I generalising for the sake of simplicity?

The way I’ve started to think of it is this:

Share your experiences, not your opinions

You’ll always form opinions, but they need to be flexible. They need to reflect the data, and the data available to us is always changing.

Experiences are the data. What you’ve seen, what you’ve felt. By sharing the data itself, rather than your conclusions from it, you give other people more data on which to base their opinions.

It seems meek. But experiences can be incredibly powerful in changing people’s minds. I’ve never had an “Oh shit, I was wrong” revelation from someone calling me an idiot – every one I can remember came from hearing a different perspective.

• I didn’t realise this thing affected you that much.
• I didn’t realise there were people in that situation.
• I’d never imagined how it would feel for someone who’d been through that.

And stating your opinion also makes you less receptive to that data. When I used to do it, I felt a neurotic urge to defend my position when new information seemed to threaten it. Saying it locked it in place. But an opinion you’ve never stated can be changed without damaging your pride.

My diary of an illusionist in Skyrim is now all online. Start from the first entry, or if you’re up to date, here’s the final one.

Hope you enjoy/enjoyed it. It totally reinvented the game for me, made the world feel dangerous in a way it hadn’t since I first started. And something about having no weapons or armour makes the experience more convincing – I found myself appreciating the scenery more, being happy to trudge through the sparkling snow on a sunny day.

It makes me really want a Skyrim Survival Mode. One where you remain realistically vulnerable at all times, and leaving a town is heart-thumpingly tense. You’d need to eat before you could sleep, and sleep once a day to stay sharp. The only impetus to risk the wilderness would be to hunt animals, gather ingredients, or hope to find something valuable enough to sell for food before you find something too fast to run from.

“The instant the first character speaks, I reflexively want them to shut up. If there’s text on screen, I’m not reading it. If there’s a cut-scene, I’m skipping it. If there are no enemies to shoot, I shoot my friends, and if I can’t shoot my friends, I shoot just next to my friends and then swing my crosshair onto them as quickly as possible in a lame attempt to glance them with a bullet I know won’t do anything. I thought that was normal.

Then, playing Bulletstorm the other night and hating every second of it, I had an awful realisation: this is my fault. I’m the reason games suck now. I’m the lazy, belligerent jerk every mainstream shooter seems to be designed for, and it’s because of gamers like me that they’re built this way.”

The creative director of Bulletstorm responded to me, which led to an interesting discussion.

When you look at them, you immediately want to see it. I wanted to see it so much I wrote it.

This is just a short script – I outline some conversations instead of filling them in, and it moves very fast. It’s not quite a traditional heist movie format: I liked the idea of a small lady-heavy team, so I kept it focused on those three, in five acts. James specifically likes the way heist movies trick both the characters and the audience, so I did aim for that.

James based the two women on Jackie Onassis and Emma Peel respectively, so I’ve nicked those first names for simplicity’s sake. I’m calling the fella Henry. The main thing I left out was Emma’s guns: I felt like if she shot anyone, some of the levity I love about this visual style would be lost.

All the images in this post are by James Lopez, including this sweet title card – left to right, that’s Emma, Henry, Jackie.

1. MUSEUM – NIGHT

A catsuited thief (EMMA) slips into view, deftly evading elaborate security.

She distracts a guard with a coin and slips past.

She arches and flips through a moving rows of lasers.

She cuts a hole in a bullet proof glass case with a fingernail gadget, and snatches the huge pink diamond inside.

As she turns to flee, she bumps into a towering security guard (BEN).

Behind him a man in a smart grey suit and glasses (HENRY) steps out.

Henry: Going somewhere?

Emma: Monaco, if possible.

He smiles.

Henry: I’m afraid it’s a fake. The real diamond doesn’t arrive today, I just wanted to see if our security was up to it.

Emma: Oh, I knew that. I’m here to test it! And boy, do you have some work to do.

Henry: Nice try. But you’re right – you came closer than I thought anyone could. What would you say to a job?

Emma smiles.

2. MANHATTAN RESTAURANT – DAY

Henry is sat at a table, sipping coffee across from an empty seat.

An expensively dressed woman (JACKIE) joins him to discuss arrangements for the display of her diamond over breakfast.

Henry is formal and deferential, thanking her repeatedly for her generosity in letting his museum exhibit the stone.

Jackie seems just as eager to please, almost flirtatious, and is thrilled by the high drama of his story about catching a thief.

They argue over the bill, both insisting on paying, and end up leaving the full amount each.

As they turn away from each other to get up, both wince at what they’ve just spent.

3. MUSEUM – DAY

Emma, dressed in an ill-fitting borrowed security guard uniform, explains her security ideas to a sceptical Ben.

Emma: See, guards are great, but they make your job too hard.

Ben raises an interested eyebrow. Emma’s obviously thought about this, and is getting enthusiastic despite herself.

Emma: I got past you with a coin. Now that only worked because the rest of the security was so lousy – if you put in some nice steel bars around that rock, no way I get through those before a sharp guy like you knows what’s up.

Ben nods, and is about to ask something when Henry and Jackie walk in.

Henry introduces Emma and Ben, and lets Jackie inspect their plans. Emma has drawn herself stumped by metal bars, being caught by Ben.

Jackie loves the deadly high-tech laser beams, and suggests more of them.

Jackie: Couldn’t we get rid of these ugly bars and give those poor guards the night off if we had enough electronic security?

Emma opens her mouth but seems unable to express how much she disagrees. Ben frowns.

Henry is torn – we can tell he prefers Emma’s idea, but wants to keep Jackie happy. He agrees to try it.

Emma: Oh please! I jumped through those lasers like a well-dressed gazelle!

Jackie: But that was because they were moving back and forth, wasn’t it?

Emma: Yes! So I ducked the first one and then-

Jackie: Well, if we had more, couldn’t they just cover the whole corridor at once?

Emma looks at her, mind blown.

Emma: Oh you monster.

4. JACKIE’S APARTMENT – NIGHT

Jackie enters her small apartment excited, twirling. She drops her bag and jumps on the bed, then winces at how hard it is.

She looks around, deflated. The place is tiny. She takes her wedding ring off, and goes to the closet. It’s empty.

Sighing, she goes to a laundry hamper. She picks something out, sniffs it, and wrinkles her nose.

5. LAUNDRETTE – NIGHT

Jackie, self-conscious in a nightie, loads a hamper of clothes into a washer.

She puts coins in the detergent machine, and comes up 5 cents short.

She reaches for her pockets, remembers what she’s wearing, then rummages among her clothes.

Rummages.

Comes back empty. Sits down on a dirty bench. Starts to cry.

1. MUSEUM – NIGHT Lasers everywhere. A shadow creeps up to them.

As she emerges into the glow, we see that it’s Jackie – wearing high heels and an expensive and restrictive black dress.

She walks up to the first set of lasers, touches the handprint scanner next to them, and the whole grid shuts down.

She walks nervously up to the glass case, heels echoing, and twists her wedding ring round to touch it to the glass.

Through the glass, we see a huge figure.

Ben clears his throat.

Jackie stands up straight, hides the ring, smiles innocently.

7. MUSEUM LOUNGE – NIGHT

The lights flick on to reveal Emma sleeping on the couch. She sits up and shields her eyes from the light.

Ben sits Jackie down next to her and waits. Emma is baffled. After an awkward amount of time, Henry comes in, gets right to it.

Henry: Why on Earth would you want to steal your own diamond?

Jackie explains. She’s getting divorced, and her husband will get everything. But the diamond’s insurance policy is in her name – if it’s stolen, she gets its full value.

Henry sympathises, and agrees not to press charges as long as she goes ahead with loaning his museum the diamond.

He shakes his head and goes to leave. Something occurs to Jackie.

Jackie: Did you put on aftershave to come out here and arrest me?

Henry: … Did you just try to rob a museum in that dress?

Jackie: It’s the only black thing I have!

Henry: Hm.

Jackie: Hmph.

He leaves. Ben leaves, locking the door.

Jackie and Emma sit side by side on the couch wordless for a while.

Emma sniffs.

Emma sniffs Jackie.

Emma crinkles her nose.

Jackie: I know.

8. MUSEUM LOUNGE – DAY

The TV is on, showing static, Emma and Jackie are sat slumped against each other on the floor. Henry walks in.

Henry: Right!

Emma springs into a combat pose, sending a technical manual for a safe flying across the room. Jackie starts, upending a bowl of snacks.

Henry pauses.

Henry: Right! Obviously we need to rethink security. Emma, we’re getting your cage.

Emma looks delighted.

Henry: Jackie, we’ll keep your lasers, but obviously we’ll have to take you off the security list – no offense.

Jackie brushes herself off.

Jackie: Oh, none taken.

Ben walks in.

Henry: Only Ben and I will be authorised to deactivate any security measures. And Ben, I’m doubling your budget – get new guards here for the last day of the show tomorrow.

Ben looks delighted.

Henry: No-one – no-one – is getting to this diamond.

9. MUSEUM – NIGHT

Lasers everywhere. A cage. No guards yet.

A shadow creeps in. As it steps into the light, we see it’s Henry.

He’s about to deactivate the laser grid when a white glove comes out of the shadows and taps him on the shoulder.

Emma: Going somewhere?

Henry: Oh! I wasn’t, er… wait, what are you doing here?

Emma: Following you. There’s no point, you know. You’d never get through my cage.

Henry: I was just…

Jackie steps out of the shadows.

Jackie: (Brightly:) I’m here too! What are we doing?

10. MUSEUM LOUNGE – NIGHT

Jackie: What?! Why were you trying to break into your museum to steal my diamond?

Henry’s about to answer, but Emma interrupts.

Emma: You know, don’t you? (Off Jackie’s blank look:) That it’s a conflict diamond?

Henry: A conflict diamond?

Emma: (Less sure:) Isn’t that why you’re stealing it? Because it was mined by child labour and sold to fund a criminal warlord?

Henry and Jackie look at each other.

Henry: Er, well yes, that’s obviously the main reason. But I was also doing it for Jackie.

Jackie: (melts) Awwww!

Henry smiles awkwardly. Emma looks sceptical.

Henry: And… (hardly worth mentioning but…) I might know a buyer.

He looks at them anxiously, gauging their reaction. Jackie’s hardly heard him, still beaming from the reason she likes.

Emma’s frown turns slowly into a wry smile.

11. MUSEUM – DAY

Emma: If we’re doing this, we’re doing it for the right reasons. We keep only what we need, everything else goes to charity. Agreed?

Henry and Jackie: Agreed.

Emma: Good, so the problem we’re going to have-

Ben walks in. Everyone goes quiet.

Emma: (failing to sound natural:) So you see, Jackie, bars are like lasers, but made of metal! Which means you can’t turn them off!

Jackie: (much better at faking it:) I see!

12. MUSEUM LOUNGE – DAY

Emma: So the problem we’re going to have is that we just spent three days installing security measures to stop every way in we could think of. Even if I could get past all of Ben’s new guards, Henry’s the only one who can deactivate Jackie’s laser grid.

Henry: And I’m as stealthy as a cow.

Jackie: Well, you don’t have to sneak, you’re the curator. You can just walk in and turn them off, can’t you? Say you’re testing.

As they talk, Emma sketches their ideas on a big blueprint of the museum – throwing the sheet away every time they reject an idea and drawing the next on a fresh one.

Emma: So then the question is, how do we distract the guards while the grid is down?

Henry: They’d be watching it like hawks – nothing’s more important to them than a potential security breach.

Jackie: So we give them another breach. I’ll sneak in just then, and get caught.

Henry: That’d work, but we can’t let you get caught. Insurance investigators are vultures – if they find out you tried to break in on the night the diamond vanished, they’ll never pay out. Ben wouldn’t tell them, but any of the new guys might.

Emma: I can. Afford to get caught, I mean. I’m on the first flight out of here when this job is done, so I don’t care if I’m wanted in the States.

Jackie: (seeing where it’s going) Oh! I can’t… I couldn’t actually do the stealing part. I’m as stealthy as a socialite!

Henry: Maybe you don’t have to. You two are the same height, the same build… Jackie, you’re a hairdye and a catsuit away from making a very convincing Emma.

Emma’s smiling at the idea. Jackie grabs her by the shoulders, eyes wide.

Jackie: Can I borrow a catsuit?

Emma: Oh, so you think my whole wardrobe is just a bunch of catsuits?

Jackie nods, still excited.

Emma: … Yes, you can borrow one of my catsuits.

Henry: So that just leaves the cage. Any chance you suggested that because you secretly have an easy way to bypass it?

Emma: (ashamed) No, sorry. It’s just what I’ve always thought museums should do. Even if we could get the keys, it’s a two man job to lift that thing, and cutting through it would take hours. I don’t know anyone who could get past that without raising the alarm.

The three of them just think for a while.

Cut to later, they’re still thinking. Emma starts to draw something, then scribbles it out. Henry holds his chin.

Cut to later. Jackie starts to say something, but stops. Henry hasn’t moved.

Cut to later. It’s getting dark. Henry hasn’t moved. At last:

Henry: … yes you do.

12. MUSEUM – NIGHT

Guards, lasers, cage. Henry walks in through the main entrance.

Henry: Good evening, gentlemen. This is a surprise inspection, carry on as normal.

He walks around the room, peering at each guard suspiciously, pretending to check their identities against a clipboard.

Back at the entrance, we see two Emmas slip in and hide in the shadows either side.

The one wearing earrings – Jackie – looks to the other. Emma gives her the nod, and they slink off in different directions.

Henry reaches the laser grid. We see Emma’s silhouette flipping expertly between light fittings above.

Henry turns off the laser grid. Jackie knocks over a display case.

At the almighty crash, every guard turns to see Jackie doing a rather slow roll into the shadows.

Emma slips through the grid as they move to arrest Jackie. Henry waits to see her make it through, then turns it back on and joins the guards.

Henry: I might have known! I’ll take care of her, guys, you get back to your patrols.

He marches Jackie off in cuffs.

13. HENRY’S OFFICE – NIGHT

Henry shuts the door and gets the handcuff keys from his drawer.

Henry: (mock dismay:) Oh no, how did she get hold of the keys to her handcuffs?

He uncuffs her. She rushes to the window and releases the catch.

Henry: She’s getting away somehow! This’ll certainly explain how she manages to steal the diamond later tonight!

He walks over and helps her open it all the way.

Jackie suddenly stops, turns, grabs him by the tie and pulls him into a kiss.

Then slips out and drops down to the grass.

We watch her running off over Henry’s shoulder. After a moment of stunned silence, he calls after her:

Henry: She used her feminine wiles!

Henry sits down, his expression confusion and happiness.

He picks up the phone and puts on his serious face.

Henry: Ben, it’s Henry. Emma got away, dammit. (We don’t hear Ben’s response) Yeah… hey, head down to the diamond room – I wouldn’t be surprised if she tries again tonight.

14. MUSEUM – NIGHT

Emma’s pressed against the wall on the diamond’s side of the reactivated laser grid.

In her hand, she’s clutching the huge, pink diamond itself.

The grid turns off, and she runs in – only to bump straight into Ben.

Emma: God dammit! How did you know?

Ben says nothing.

Emma: Alright, fine, here’s the diamond. I hope you appreciate the fake I left, it’s one of my best.

Ben looks at the cage, then back at Emma.

Emma just holds up a key and shrugs.

15. HENRY’S OFFICE – NIGHT

Henry’s on the phone.

Henry: You’re kidding. Alright, leave her with the guards, and put the rock back before you do anything else. Oh, and bring me the fake – I’d like to see if it’s as good as mine.

16. MUSEUM – NIGHT

Ben hangs up and hands Emma over to two waiting guards.

Another guard joins him to take the diamond back.

Ben unlocks the cage, and with great effort, the two of them lift it off.

Ben takes the fake off its velvet cushion, and puts the real one back.

He inspects the fake for a moment, gives it a dismissive sneer and pockets it.

Cut to the cage being locked in place.

Ben and the other guard walk off-screen, back to the guards holding Emma.

We hear a series of blows and grunts, then boots sprinting away.

17. HENRY’S OFFICE – NIGHT

Henry’s on the phone.

Henry: You’re kidding. Are you alright? … Thank God. But why on earth would she steal the fake?

18. MUSEUM – DAY

The diamond sits in its case, but now the museum is flooded with people. Jackie, dressed expensively again, strolls through them to inspect her diamond.

She looks at it for a long time, frowning.

Jackie: (loudly:) This is a fake!

Gasps. Muttering. Security descend.

Cut to an examiner, surrounded by police, inspecting the stone.

Examiner: Yup, that’s quartz.

Cut to insurance claim papers being filled out and signed.

Cut to insurance investigators interviewing Henry, Jackie, Ben.

Cut to insurance papers being stamped: APPROVED.

Cut to divorce papers being signed.

Cut to:

19. AIRPORT – DAY

Emma, barely recognisable in expensive clothes and sunglasses, is waiting.

Henry approaches. Emma pretends to check a clock, then walks towards him.

She passes him a small black velvet bag as they pass, neither saying a word.

She boards a flight.

Henry takes a seat on a bench, and a woman in white, sat behind him, speaks without turning round.

Jackie: Can I see?

Henry hands her the bag. She opens it. She gasps.

She hands it back immediately.

Henry looks inside. It’s a rock – literally just a rock.

There’s a note. He reads:

Henry: "Sorry, couldn’t be sure you’d do the right thing. We’ll find our own buyer. Love, Emma… and Ben?"

He finally looks round at Jackie.

Henry: BEN?

Henry at a payphone. Dials. Waits impatiently.

Henry: Ben? … Well when did he leave?

Henry back on the bench, sat next to Jackie now, shaking his head.

Jackie: Ben!

20. UNKNOWN BUILDING – DAY

Ben, in a smarter suit than usual, talking security with Emma.

They’re nerding out about ways to transport cash in local currency securely.

Cut to an exterior shot to show the front of their building: "Diamond Trust Children’s Refuge"

21. LAVISH CHARITY BALL – NIGHT

Jackie is finishing a speech on stage, about discovering her diamond’s awful history and using the insurance money to help with the problem.

The applause dies down as she returns to her seat, next to Henry.

He squeezes her hand and smiles. They both look perfectly happy for a moment.

Then Henry thinks of something, and frowns slightly and shakes his head.

Henry: Ben?

 
I don’t argue on the internet anymore, but I have some ideas on how to do it without defeating yourself and also human decency.

Update: This post now has a sort of sequel, suggesting ways to contribute to an argument without being an asshole.

It’s a network of shops where, if you haven’t angered any shopkeeps thus far, you can buy almost every item in the game, and one that’s available nowhere else: the Ankh. The Ankh gives you a second life, and costs $50,000. It’s hard to earn $50,000. I have $120,000.

Before I get it, I want all the other equipment I’ll need. Most of it’s on the middle floor, but there are enemies: two boomerang tribesmen watch over the entrance to the shops, and a snail blows acid bubbles up the ladder that could help me bypass them.

I buy a shotgun from the top floor, then drop down to blow all the tribesmen away in one shot. I miss. A boomerang knocks me out of the air, nailbitingly close to a fatal pitcher plant below, and onto the snail. The snail is crushed, but the tribesmen are wild: by the time I pick myself up, one has thrown himself to his death and the other has jumped into the shops. Now he prowls them slowly, looking for me.

This is tense. I’m dying to shoot him, but it’s madness to fire in the direction of a shopkeeper. I just have to tail him at a safe distance and buy the items I need as I pass them. I’m reasonably confident he won’t turn round – and even if he does, he dropped his boomerang outside.

There’s a boomerang on sale in this shop actually. The tribesman walks up to it. He picks it up.

For a split second, I am amused. He’s going to buy a new boomerang! Silly tribesman, you don’t own material wealth!

Then my internal simulation of Spelunky’s interacting systems kicks in, and I see the next few seconds flash before my eyes with pure horror.

I run.

I jump onto the ladder, scramble up, dive away from the top floor shops, duck behind a mound of earth and cling to the ground. Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Christ.

For a second, nothing happens.

Then the Black Market explodes.

All nine shopkeepers hurl themselves into the air and start firing their shotguns in random directions. They kill the tribesman. They kill two other tribesmen. They kill frogs, pitchers, snails. One kills the slave he was selling, another kills his own dog. Two of them throw themselves to their deaths in the fury. Four of them throw themselves into a pit, where their bursts of buckshot cut each other to ribbons.

What happened was: the Tribesman walked out of the shop. He walked out of the shop with the shopkeeper’s boomerang in his hand, and he walked out of the shop without paying for it.

Shopkeepers don’t know, much less understand, who stole from them or damaged their store. Any crime, of any kind, is cause for an indiscriminate rampage that kills everything in line of sight, and a lot more besides. When that happens in the Black Market, there’s a term for it. It’s the shopstorm.

When the blasts quiet down, I crawl slowly out of my hiding place and walk carefully through the empty shops, collecting everything for free.

I find one surviving shopkeeper hopping madly around the Ankh, bouncing on the bodies of the colleagues he’s killed. I throw one of the 35 sticky bombs I’ve shoplifted at him, and he detonates a second later. I take the Ankh and the heaps of gold the shopkeepers dropped.

In four levels’ time, I’ll use the climbing gloves I stole to cling to a wall in the ice caves, directly below a collapsing platform that will fall onto me and hit the jetpack I stole, causing it to explode and kill me, wasting the Ankh I stole. But all I’m thinking right now is wow, I’m still incredibly rich.

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).

I’m far enough through making my own game, Gunpoint, to get a feel for which of these things I can actually do. But I’m still new at this. A lot of them are things I figured out during development, and Gunpoint itself doesn’t reflect them all. So this is a mission statement: a way for me to be specific and public about what I’d like to do in games, and how I plan to do it.

1. I want to make games that generate cool experiences.

2. I want to make games that let the player be creative.

3. I want to make games with clear rules but surprising results.

4. I want to make games that are a bit different.

5. I want to make games that are fun to learn.

6. I want to make games that feel good but still use your brain.

7. I want to make games that value the player’s time.

8. I want to make games that let you choose how much challenge to take on.

9. I want to reward anyone who supports me, instead of pointlessly fucking them over.

10. I want to make exciting games.

Update

There’s now a free demo of my first game, Gunpoint, and if you like it, you can pre-order it from Steam or DRM-free from the game’s site.

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.

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.

–

My day job is to write about games, but I’m also making one in my spare time called Gunpoint. 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…”

No-one gives a shit about the people of Darksun except the person who made up the word ‘Darksun’. 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 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, they sound 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 – I’m sold.

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.

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!

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

In the comments, Johannes Spielmann said this:

Johannes: Great article!

For a more nuanced (and scientifically proven) view on the topic, have a look at this Google Tech Talk by David Rock.

The video he links, the one I’m about to embed, has changed the way I think. It’s like being given the owner’s manual to your brain after 29 years of muddling along with the default settings. It’s not only spectacularly improved my understanding of how people behave and why we feel what we feel, it’s actually made me more consistently happy.

It’s an hour long, which I know isn’t cool on the internet, but I promise you won’t regret watching it. If you don’t have time, I’ll summarise the most mind-blowing things in it below.
 

Concentrating makes it hard to have ideas

Our brains store a crazy amount of information. If you’ve had that nostalgic flood of memories on seeing a toy you had at 5 years old, you have some idea of just how much is kept in there. But logical thought, the kind we use when we’re focusing on a problem and trying to solve it intelligently, is all handled by the prefrontal cortex.

That’s a tiny area of the brain with an even tinier capacity for information – it can only hold a small amount at once. So we load the info about a problem into it, then crunch that information in a logical way.

When we do that, the rest of the brain isn’t doing much. All our activity is focused on logically processing that chunk of data we decided was relevant. Which is good if that really is everything relevant to the problem and the solution. For a problem like 8+12, it probably is.

But for more real-world problems, we can’t cram the vast amount of data that might be tangentially relevant into that tiny prefrontal cortex. We have to pick a small set of information and process just that. And while we do, all that other information goes unexamined, because the rest of the brain is being neglected.

This dog is trying to distract you from the fact that I have no relevant images for this post. Is it working?

When we stop concentrating on the problem, the rest of our brain wakes up, all that information is available to us, and we stop thinking in such a focused, rigorous way. So we’re not being totally logical, but we do suddenly have the capacity to notice weak connections between pieces of information stored in that vast databank in the rest of our brain – a capacity we didn’t have thirty seconds ago.

With what we’ve already figured out logically, often new bits of information light up in the rest of our brain as being relevant. And that, briefly, is why you have your best ideas in the bathroom.

It’s when you stop concentrating that non-obvious ideas can strike, and in complex problems these are often the really game-changing ones.

Even small worries and threats destroy your ability to think clearly or well

The big, powerful, illogical subconscious can’t do much when your prefrontal cortex is busy focusing on something. But both are completely crippled any time there is even the slightest possibility of harm coming to us. We have evolved to be ridiculously skittish, and at the smallest danger our limbic system completely takes over. Instinct, basically.

In modern life, it’s often useless or inappropriate. And while it’s engaged, we lose the ability to think rationally, we lose the ability to have inspired ideas, and we even lose basic functions like short term memory. We instantly and massively suck, and it lasts for ages.

Social threats have the same effect as physical threats

The traditional model of psychology says that survival concerns are ‘primary’ – deeper, stronger and more instinctive – and others, including social concerns, are secondary. Nice if we can get them.

The behaviour of the brain doesn’t correlate to that. Our reaction to social threats, like insults, is not only as strong as our reaction to physical threats, it’s the same.

If you can’t focus on your work because your leg hurts, you can take an asprin, the pain goes away and you can focus again. If you can’t focus on your work because someone called you incompetent yesterday, you can take an asprin, the pain goes away and you can focus again.

Our five main social concerns spell out SCARF

So we’re incredibly affected by social threats, but what’s a social threat? What do we need, socially, that we’re scared of losing?

Status: What other people think of us, and how they treat us. If people will think less of us for something, we are terrified of it.

Certainty: How sure are we that our current status will continue? If we hear some redundancies are coming, we haven’t lost any status yet, but suddenly Certainty takes a huge hit, and we feel a massive, instinctive threat.

Autonomy: Is my fate in my own hands? If you propose putting me in a position where I’m heavily dependent on someone else, I feel threatened.

Relatedness: Do I care about this person or thing? Friends and blood relatives have high ‘relatedness’, and we feel empathy for them and listen to what they say. Everyone else is perceived as an enemy by default: we don’t instinctively feel their pain, and we don’t even picture what they’re saying unless we consciously try to. The only exceptions are attractive people, babies, and everyone – when we’re drunk.

Fairness: Pretty self-explanatory. If you give a raise to the new guy, I get a Fairness threat even though my status hasn’t gone up or down.

Understanding threats makes them cripple your brain less

This panic effect, the way a threat consumes your brain and cripples your ability to think clearly, is partially avoidable.

I’ve often had a feeling of dread, or panic, or anger, without quite being able to articulate what my problem is. So that’s what my brain does, for the next hour. I don’t listen to anyone or get anything done, I just re-run the narrative of what’s going on in my head until I can sort of cobble together a whiny complaint about it that I could conceivable say out loud if I decide to speak up.

In an hour.

I write for a living, and I studied putting words to abstract things for three years at uni. What the hell is wrong with me?

What was wrong with me was I didn’t have names for the kinds of threats I feel when something potentially unpleasant happens socially. I didn’t understand why they occurred or what they wanted from me. That meant not only did they affect me more, the way they affected me also hindered my ability to give them names or start understanding them.

When you do have a quick, rough guide to the basic types, your brain is dramatically better at compartmentalising them and retaining the rest of its normal functions. All you need to think is “Eek – OK, that’s my certainty being threatened,” and you won’t revert to an angry, idiot animal state controlled by your limbic system. You have a sec to think “OK, I know why that is, let’s deal with it.” And that, too, dramatically reduces the brain-shrinking panic of the thing.

That’s why this talk went beyond interesting and all the way to life-improving, for me. Thanks, Johannes!

It’s also a useful one for anyone involved with games to ask. It’s one game critics like me should be able to answer reflexively. It’s one developers should answer before they start making something. And it’s one gamers should probably think about before writing a one-star Amazon review saying ‘lol ass’.

I’m sad to say that on the press side of things, we haven’t really got anywhere. Half of us apparently think games meaningfully break down into “Presentation, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay, and Lasting Appeal”. And the other half believe they’re unquantifiable pixie dust and anyone who wants even the faintest idea of their merits should have to read 3,000 words of waffle.

The former is confusing a game’s component parts with what the whole achieves. The latter is just giving up. It’s not that games can be captured in a few metrics, it’s that they still can’t in 3,000 words. So instead of abandoning analysis, let’s just be smarter about where analysis stops.

It can’t stop at words like ‘gameplay’, because those aren’t useful: tell me a game has good gameplay, and all I really know is that you like it. Are your actions in it satisfying on some tactile level? If so, great. We don’t really need to know why they’re satisfying, just to say ‘it feels good’ is far more specific and useful than what we had before.

That’s what I mean by being smarter about where analysis stops. Keep asking “Why is that good?” until you hit the primal, instinctive pleasure response you’re having. It’s not impossible to keep going, but it’s more neuroscience than critique past that point.

I’ll try to explain six things that can make a game great, for me. Games don’t need to do all of them well, sometimes one is enough. But the hope is to cover every kind of draw they can have. Every game I like, I like because it does one of these things well.

1. Challenge

How much you enjoy tackling what you’re being asked to do.

Challenge is about what a game asks your brain or fingers to do, and whether it’s something you enjoy struggling with. Personally, I don’t like struggling with anything that requires extreme precision or reactions, like Super Meat Boy. But I love struggling with mental problems, like the time-bending of Braid.

Obviously difficulty is part of it – either extreme makes it hard to engage with the challenge. But just as importantly, difficulty is a way of pacing rewards. It makes games enjoyable by spacing out the dopamine kicks of success, so that you never get bored of getting them, nor of waiting for them.

A game like Tetris has a simple challenge – SORT THESE SHAPES – but a well-paced one. Its mechanics naturally make satisfying successes frequent at first, then rarer and harder the longer you play. There’s never a time in Tetris when clearing a line isn’t satisfying.

2. Feel

Making individual interactions convincing and pleasurable

When you fire a virtual gun, feel is the sound of the shot, the muzzle flash, the recoil of the weapon model, whether it offsets my aim, the reaction of the target, and what all that suggests about the unseen parts of the interaction: the weight of the bullet, its hardness, where it hit, how that felt, what damage has been done.

But feel is just as important in non-violent games. Bejeweled is incredible at it: I know exactly how hard a topaz is despite the fact that it never touches anything, just from its sound and motion. The sound of four gems forming a super-gem, and the glow that gives it, makes the thing feel dense, pregnant – all reinforced by the cathartic boom when it goes off.

If you’re ever wondering why a PopCap game succeeded despite being suspiciously similar to an existing game that was only moderately popular, it’s because the first game got the challenge right and PopCap added the feel.

3. Freedom

The extent to which a game reacts to your choices with interesting results

A game that put you in an infinite empty field would have a lot of freedom in the ordinary sense of the word, but it’s not just about maximising options. Freedom is about how many different options the game has an interesting response to.

If the result is just “Your character moves a bit in that infinite field”, that’s not interesting. In Deus Ex, though, your choices about how to approach a wide-open level all lead to meaningfully different situations. The front door gets you into a dangerous dance with a patrolling bot, the side entrance exposes you to a lot of guards, the rear gets you a key to the building. Shooting attracts guards and results in a big gunfight, stealth keeps things under control but gives you more threats to think about in the long run.

There are more complex reasons why those choices are particularly compelling, and more complex ways that the sub-options within them interact. But basically, a big reason Deus Ex is great is that it gives you a lot of options, and has something different to offer you whichever one you pick.

4. Place

A world you want to be in

It’s funny how many people can’t see the point of games, but see traveling as one of the most enriching and exciting pleasures of life. I love both, often for the same reason and in the same way. Stepping off a zeppelin in Durotar is as clear and fond a memory getting off a plane in Zimbabwe.

Mirror’s Edge is a good case study, because place is the only thing it does perfectly. It shows how an urban environment can be as visually exciting and artistically inventive as a different planet. It had an incredible vision for its setting, and the tech was bent and boosted to show it dazzlingly. The place glows, and my desire to be there outweighs every problem with the game’s mechanics.

5. Promise

The temptation of further possibilities

You could claim this doesn’t count, that the mere promise of something interesting or better is not a pleasure in itself, just the anticipation of one. Nope!

On its most basic level, the promise of ever-better items and stats keeps RPGs interesting way beyond the sell-by date of their challenge and feel. But promise can also be the anticipation of story developments, new puzzle mechanics or unknown abilities.

Most of my time actually playing Dawn of War 2: Retribution was before I unlocked the particular abilities for my heroes that turned them into a perfectly co-ordinated killing machine. But long before I had them, they were making the game exciting just by sitting there, greyed out on the character sheet, promising.

6. Fantasy

The appeal of playing this role

This is different to story – I think Mass Effect 2’s story is outright bad, but I love being a badass lady space captain zooming around the galaxy punching robots and telling people to fuck themselves.

For some reason ‘fantasy’ has become a slightly shameful word, while ‘escapism’ – trying to get away from your life – is accepted as normal. I think discovering new places and ideas is healthier than vegetating in front of some glossy people making out on TV. I don’t play games to escape my life, I play them to explore new ones.

Why isn’t Story on there?

It’s a little personal, of course. But for me, the pleasure of a good story is in making this alternate life interesting (Fantasy), suggesting a rich world (Place), and keeping me wondering about what’s coming next (Promise). If it doesn’t do any of those things – even if it’s Of Mice and Men – it doesn’t make a good game. So it’s not a pleasure in itself.

How does this help?

An early version of Gunpoint’s plot was an attempt at a good story, rather than a good Fantasy. The player was involved, but his role wasn’t a very exciting one, and there was no hint of a world beyond this plot.

Deciding on this list made it dramatically easier to see and solve those problems in a total rewrite. I started with the Fantasy – being a spy for hire – and built everything around that. I’ll get a bunch of other stuff wrong, but that’s one less.

Has it also helped you understand why you love, hate or only like certain games?

It’s also helped me understand why I love, hate, or only like certain games.

Why isn’t Just Cause 2 my favourite game ever? Great Feel, amazing Place, but it doesn’t have Promise like the others do. There’s no sense that anything interestingly different will happen if I keep playing.

Why do I never stick with World of Warcraft? Amazing sense of Place, no Feel. Why don’t I like the Witcher games as much as people tell me I will? I hate the Fantasy, I don’t want to be this guy, in this world, doing this.

And why is Minecraft so popular? Under a traditional notion of challenge, it has none. But it does rarefy its rewards well, and that’s what Challenge is really about. Minecraft is great at Challenge, Feel, Place, Freedom and Promise, so it’s not surprising it appeals to a pretty broad audience.

This list is a first stab at something I’ll keep working on as I write about and try making games. I hate the feeble attitude that games are too complex, too new, or too arty to quantify their appeal in specific or useful ways. Because it’s hurting our ability to understand them, to explain them to people who don’t get them, and to make them better.

I get to travel for work sometimes, and it’s made me a little demented about checking in.

The first few times you get babied, or bathroomed, or fatmanned, you accept it. But after that, you start to scheme. Getting a good seat isn’t a hope for me, any more, it’s the objective of a five-part campaign. I’ve given miniature lectures to friends on the virtues of aisle versus window, and the risk/reward mathematics of the front row – where there’s legroom aplenty, but the cots may hide a grim payload.

So I check in as close to 24 hours ahead as humanly possible. I even rush the process, when I do it, as if other people are clicking through the wizard faster than me, swiftly dragging their round-headed icons to the precious blue seats I’m trying to secure myself.

If you’re anything like this, you’ll have discovered what I have: it doesn’t work.

You get to seat selection and there are precisely three left, sprinkled amid daunting blocks of what can only be families with children, drunk rugby players, or worst of all: people with something interesting to say. To each other.

And when you walk to this seat, twenty four hours later, you’ll have noticed the ninety year old, noticed the ball of knotted grey hair that might once have been a hippy, and the man whose vestments seem to mark him out as the pope of some unrecognisable religion – all in seats that were gone when you booked. And you’ll have thought this:

Really?

All of you? All of you checked in before me? You checked in twenty-three hours, fifty nine minutes and fifty nine seconds before departure? You there, dipping your dentures in the complimentary tonic water, what browser do you use? Which e-mail address did you have them send the booking code to? Tell me how you got that seat before me, you cheating slimy fuck! Stop crying and talk!

Perhaps you’re not like this.

The whole process makes no sense to me anymore. I thought the reason you had to check in for a flight, when you don’t for a bus, is that it’s important you show up. They’ll wait for you. So they’d appreciate it if you let them know an hour or two beforehand that you’re at the airport and ready to go.

Then they started letting you do it online.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the convenience. But what does checking in online actually tell you, beyond the fact that I still physically exist the day before I fly? That doesn’t seem to offer any greater assurance that I’ll actually show up for the flight in time than when I paid you crazy money for it in the first place. It just reduces the whole thing to a frantic and brutal seat race, one that has frankly cost me a chunk of my already fractured humanity.

Now I’ve learnt something even worse. The seats change. Book one 24 hours early, then try again five hours before departure. A paradise unfolds; a land of empty aisle seats, vacant blocks, even the front rows with infinite legroom. They exist, no-one’s reserved them, and they open up.

I don’t know when or by what dark magic, but it happens. Those people who couldn’t possibly have booked them before you? They didn’t. They just checked in after all the fake, placeholder people checked out.

So this time, I checked in three times.

Once way ahead of time: two seats available, both shit. Same for my return flight, almost a week later.

Then again, twenty four hours before. Nope: different seats are free, but nothing better. I can’t print my boarding pass at home anyway, though, so I just left it.

Then, the morning of departure, I check in online again. Three or four seats. In fucking Club World.

They’re even aisle seats, and why not? Club World is 50% aisle. You can’t move without bumping into an aisle, which is to say you can move without bumping into anything at all, because of all the aisles. There are seats in Club World that are both window and aisle at the same time – something modern science previously thought impossible. I took one by the lake, overlooking the valley, and confirmed.

Next: The Lounge.

I rewatched Blade Runner recently, because it came up a lot when I asked for visual inspiration for my game. Almost everything about it is still brilliant, except the main character. I’m not sure how I’ve never noticed this before, but Deckard is an idiot.

He’s given all the information he needs on a plate, nothing bad happens unexpectedly, and every lead falls into his lap. He has photo ID of everyone he has to kill, he’s told about their physical strength, he has a gun, they’re all unarmed, and he’s legally allowed to shoot them dead in public. Yet in every case, he lets them get into a hand-to-hand fight with him that he can’t win, and the only way the film can even keep him alive is for his targets to suddenly stop fighting or get killed by someone else.

Here’s a summary of his encounters with all of the replicants he’s apparently the only one good enough to kill. Stills from FilmGrab.

1. Snake Lady. He fails to convince her to let him check her dressing room, gets in a fight with her, loses and is nearly killed. The replicant stops short when she hears voices approaching, and runs away. Deckard shoots her.

2. Leon. He fails to recognise Leon until it’s too late, gets into a fight with him, loses and is nearly killed. Another replicant shoots Leon for him.

3. Rachel. He tells her she’s a replicant, forces her to kiss him, then helps her evade capture.

4. Pris. He fails to recognise Pris because she is sitting still, gets into a fight with her, loses and is nearly killed. Pris takes a break to do some acrobatics and he shoots her.

5. Roy. He fails to shoot Roy, loses his gun, gets into a fight with him, loses, runs away and nearly kills himself. Roy saves his life and then dies of his own accord.

So when I was heading out before dawn this morning, I put down my phone, picked up my MP3 player and left. Then I realised I was forgetting my phone and grabbed my phone, then I realised I couldn’t take my MP3 player and put back my MP3 player, then I realised I couldn’t take my phone and put back my phone, then my phone rang and I picked up my phone, put it down, picked it up, hung up, put it down and left.

I shut the door, locked the door, then armed my alarm with the electronic remote control that looks like nothing so much as a detonator.

I disarmed the alarm, unlocked the door, opened the door, armed the alarm, threw the remote indoors, shut the door, locked the door and left.

This was to be the beginning.

At the station, rummaging through my bag to make sure I had the nine bits of paper I’d need, I found the USB stick I keep in there. It’s a decent-sized one, and probably contains some personal stuff, so I wasn’t immediately sure what do to with it. I had ten minutes, and the office is five minutes from the station, so I decided I’d drop it off at work.

Five minutes later, I found the office wasn’t open yet.

I wasn’t ready to throw this thing away, but it wasn’t life-changingly vital. I thought for a second, then put it in the flowerbed outside the Future offices. Then, realising it looked like rain, grabbed a nearby paper cup to give it some shelter.

It was great. It was like a dead drop, but for myself, of incriminating evidence, only not incriminating or evidence, and with a paper cup hat. Real Spycatcher stuff.

I made my train, sat down and relaxed: electronics-free and above suspicion. It was around then that I started to look at the non-electronic items I had with me through US Embassy eyes. Amongst them:

• A home-burnt DVD labelled ‘Assassins’.
• A notepad containing detailed ideas for experimental nuclear payload delivery systems.
• A satellite image of the US Embassy.
• A stick-on Hitler moustache.

These were for a game review, a Supreme Commander blog post, navigation and from a Richard Herring gig last week, but I worried this might not be obvious. Still, I couldn’t really ditch them: I wanted everything except the satellite image, and there were no bins anywhere near the station or embassy for security reasons.

When I finally got in, this was my interview:

“Who do you work for?”
“Future Publishing.”
“Any particular magazine?”
“PC Gamer.”
“And how long have you worked there?”
“Just over five years.”
“Your application has been approved.”

Edit: Oh yeah, Epilogue! When I got back to the office that afternoon, I thought I’d just discreetly scoop up the USB stick on my way in. But I happened to arrive back at the start of lunch, so the lobby was swarming and there was a guy actually sitting on the flowerbed wall directly in front of where I’d stashed it.

For a moment I entertained the notion that he might have just stolen it, and was now scoping out the area to look for spies who might have been after this obviously sensitive dead drop. But either way, I couldn’t think of any sane way to explain why I needed to reach past him and overturn the paper cup in the mud behind. I just walked past, played a bit of StarCraft 2, then slipped out later to recover it.

It was safe and dry. Fine work, agent paper cup hat!

I had to pick a specific open world to talk about to prevent this from becoming hopelessly vague, so these are all ideas for how a game like Just Cause 2 could work. I chose that not because of any qualms with it, but because the first one was a classic example of a wonderful open world, gorgeous and fun to move around in, without much going on in it. The sequel’s even more inviting and even more fun to traverse, so it’s a great chassis to plug some cool ideas into.

This got long, so first I’ll summarise:

Give the player the option to set up camp in their favourite place, upgrade it with the features they want, and liberate other areas they like through a simple but high-level strategy game played out on the world map.

Split the main story into separate series of missions with a common theme – Sabotage, Assassination and Heroics. They have the appeal of categorised side-missions because you get to choose what kind of challenge you feel like taking on, but they’re unique and story-driven so they don’t wear thin.

Litter the world with obvious opportunities: a network of drug dealers with hugely varying prices that invite you to embark on your own travel missions, convoys carrying precious cargo that invite you to attack them, and rare assassination targets whose deaths will help you on the strategy map.

Thoughtfully place sets of collectibles that tell the story of long-dead agents like you as you collect them, encouraging you to explore, making the world feel like it has a history, and improving your character with the upgrades and unique weapons they left behind.

The first thing you do, after base-jumping into the island, meeting your handler and a short introductory mission, is choose where to set up camp. You pinpoint the precise location in-game – a secluded bay, a mountain top, a waterfall, the roof of a skyscraper – and a package is airdropped that unfolds itself into a tent. You can fast-travel there, lose your alert level, make a permanent save, or rest until a set time.

For every twenty or so locations you find – towns, islands, bases, villas, mountains, etc – you’re given the option of calling in another base of operations somewhere else.

When you get your first Revolutionary (explained next), you have to pick somewhere within a certain radius of a camp to place a comm antenna and laptop. You have to use this to issue orders on the strategic map.

You can also add other bits of equipment to any of your bases by stealing them from military bases and government facilities. These are marked with a special logo, and you can just tether one to a vehicle and drive off to rip it out. If you make it out of the area with the item intact and in tow, the agency airlifts it out and you can choose where to put it near one of your camps.

Camp bits:

Tent – pass time, save game (earned by exploring)
Laptop – strategise (unlocked by campaign)
Weapons locker – restock (stealable)
Camo net – store vehicle (stealable)
Anti-air – defense against pursuers (stealable)
Workbench – for upgrading kit (stealable)

The idea is to encourage the player to have a favourite place, and give them a way of making it significant. There aren’t many practical considerations: it doesn’t have to be near anything or easy to get to, since you can fast travel to it. So it gets you looking at the world aesthetically, something a world like Just Cause’s definitely warrants.

The extra features give an ongoing way to improve and customise your camps as you start to engage with more of the world, keeping them relevant, personal and distinct as you progress through the game.

After about five missions, you’ve stuck it to the man enough to inspire some of the locals to rebel – including a Revolutionary leader. On the map, you can send this guy to any region and he’ll Liberate it: he and his band of rebels battle any present military forces and will keep them out indefinitely, making the area a bustling and vibrant safe zone.

A few missions later, the country’s President sends an Officer to lock down the region next to his residence, putting it under Martial Law. Constant military presence, very low tolerance for misbehavior, shops, services and base camp fast-travel disabled. Each time you send out a Revolutionary, he’ll lock down more of the island in response.

If you’ve Liberated a region next to one under Martial Law, you can use your next Revolutionary to attack it. Your guy and his rebels invade, and the resident Officer emerges with his own troops. Chances of success are even, but you can join in the fight to make the odds much better. If you win and your Revolutionary survives, the region is Liberated. If both the Revolutionary and the Officer die, the region reverts to normal.

Each time you make a move on the strategic map – and the government makes one in response – you both get one new leader for every two neighbouring regions you control. So you want to keep your territories joined, and break up the enemy’s. You can pile more Revolutionaries into an already Liberated region and send them all to attack a neighbouring government territory at once, to ensure victory without having to show up in person.

The idea is to let you fight for areas you like with visible effect, to give regions strategic significance, to create a world that changes in response to your actions, and to give you something to think about while messing around. It gives a visual sense of what you’ve achieved, what you’re up against, and how each mission is getting you closer to your objective. And by linking in with Convoy and Target Opportunities, it gives those context and significance beyond fun things to do.

The actual rules of the game, particularly the reinforcement mechanic, work magnificently in the super-simple Flash game Dice Wars.

Your mission is to overthrow the President of this island state, which you go about in three different ways. These mission threads are separate, so you can alternate between them or just burn through one type that suits you.

Sabotage: A series of missions offered by your handler to cripple the local military by destroying their hardware and facilities, either strategically or with brute force. Missions typically have you taking on a large but not limitless force and culminate in the destruction of one vital asset. Eg. Fighting your way through fighter jets and boats to scuttle a battleship at sea.

Assassination: A series of missions given through dead drops by an Agency operative you never meet, to eliminate well-protected key personnel in the local military. Missions usually pit you against a vastly superior force but with a suggested way to avoid them. Eg. Hopping on top of a civilian passenger jet to fly over an island base with heavy anti-air, to drop in on a target there from above.

Heroics: A series of missions given by coded messages broadcast on the local radio, by an operative pretending to be a rebel to convince the locals there’s already an insurgency for them to join. Missions are about carefully setting up then pulling off spectacular victories, and always have some optional bonus objective that’ll make your actions all the more inspiring to the populace. Eg. Stealing a government Death Squad’s ammo reserves the night before an attack, with the option to sneak in convincing blanks so they don’t realise until they open fire.

The idea is to give the player a clear choice of what kind of challenge they want to take on, but without resorting to boilerplate template missions or fairground challenges. These are still story-driven campaigns of unique missions, you just get to pick what type you’re in the mood for – and even avoid some of your least favourites entirely.

Each mission series ties its jobs together into an overarching story about the atrocities the regime has committed, the corruption of its officials, and the few local heroes trying to undermine or expose it. You know your Agency wants to overthrow him partly to get their own preferred candidate in power, but since that entails overthrowing a true despot, you’re happy to oblige.

Near the end of each series, though, your work gets harder to rationalise. Destruction missions start to include facilities with hundreds of people inside, Assassinations shift from military to political targets, and the new leader your Heroics missions are promoting starts to show a darker side. The last mission in each firmly crosses the line, and you can both voice your concerns and refuse to do them without necessarily giving up the cause.

You’re after the President, and he’ll only leave the bunker beneath his mansion when he’s lost control of the island – when there are no regions left under Martial Law. That’s extremely hard to achieve: halfway through your missions the government starts locking down regions much faster than you can earn Revolutionaries. But completing any of the three mission threads gives you a major advantage.

Finishing the Sabotage missions deprives all Martial Law regions of hardware, meaning they can no longer invade your territories.

Completing all Assassinations means the government runs out of Officers, so the ones already on the map are all they’ll ever get.

And doing all the Heroics missions inspires the populace so much that you gain double the number of Revolutionaries each time you move.

With a good strategy and skillful fighting on the ground, it’s possible to win the game without completing any of the mission threads – though you’ll have to come close in at least two of them to earn enough Revolutionaries.

Finishing the game this way means you’ve avoided compromising yourself with any of the dubious final missions, so it unlocks a special Epilogue mission in which you can expose the new leader for the asshole he is, and instate one the local heroes you’ve encountered in the course of the missions – against your Agency’s orders.

Once you have freed the island of government control, the President uses every asset he has left to make a mad dash for the airport on the other side of the island. Three convoys of tanks and APCs, a squadron of attack helicopters and a fleet of gunboats all leave the palace area, and there’s no way of knowing which he’s in.

You have half an hour to do at least one of three options. You can destroy all convoys before they reach the airport, to make sure he’s dead. You can try to take back the runways: the government has their last aircraft carrier stationed off the coast there, shooting down rebel air support, scrambling fighter jets and sending in boats of troops. Or you can fight for the terminal building itself, taking control of the government’s anti-air and gun emplacements, and laying mines on the approaching roads to ensure the convoys will be destroyed on arrival.

The first is a very tough fight against vehicles, the second requires evasion and tactics, and the third mostly involves fighting a lot of infantry. None actually take half an hour, and failing doesn’t mean you have to restart, you just get a slightly different ending. But of course the player isn’t told that going in.

Dealers lurk in backalleys of major cities, huts in remote villages, villas in the middle of nowhere, boats in the middle of the ocean. Their prices for each of four or five narcotics vary by region: nearby dealers have similar values, distant ones massively different.

You can see how much dealers you’ve met are offering for what you have at a glance, on the map. But their prices fluctuate over time, so you have to move soon to get there while the price is high. They also change in response to your deals: sell a lot of cocaine and the price crashes in that area.

The legal status of your cargo and questionable ethics of trading it make a good excuse for why you can’t fast-travel while carrying any drugs: if you try, you’re offered the option of instantly dumping your stash with the nearest dealer for whatever their current price is. If you’re feeling ethical, you can buy up drugs just to destroy them at your camp. And if you’re feeling zealous, you can just kill the dealers: they’ll stay dead.

The idea is that this inspires the player to come up with their own travel missions, generated as a result of a changing system that will make different routes profitable at different times. Since the market evens out when they make a big run, it’s not going to be lucrative to ‘grind’ trading for more than a few good deals every half hour or so, giving a natural motive to vary their activities. Embarking on a mission that was your own idea, for a reward that you’ve calculated, is much more satisfying than doing what you’re told.

You’ll sometimes see processions of vehicles of various types crossing the country – they’re always guarding something important, and you can always steal it.

Military motorcade: truck carrying weapons. Take out its escorts without destroying it and you can grab a rare weapon from it: a high-tech assault rifle, sniper rifle, missile or grenade launcher, or a powerful demolitions charge.

Police motorcade: well-guarded prisoner van. Free the prisoner safely for a free Revolutionary.

Boatorcade: (I don’t know the proper term, okay?) Well-guarded boats are carrying drugs. Nab them, and you’re free to sell them to any dealer.

Private Jet: if you spy one of these with the government flag on it, it’ll be a corrupt official fleeing the country with his cash. If you can board the plane in flight, you can choose to rob him instead of hijacking it. While you do so, though, the pilot panics and flies erratically, so you have to be ready to abort and take the controls if you’re in danger.

When a region’s under Martial Law, the Officer who locked it down is usually safe inside a building until it’s invaded by a Revolutionary. But rarely, they’ll leave and patrol the area with a team of elite soldiers. They’re tough and well protected, but if you can take one out before he gets back inside, Martial Law is ended.

The idea is to provide a rare chance to make a real difference with a relatively quick and fun type of challenge. Once a large number of regions have fallen under Martial Law, you could even patrol them with a sniper rifle, hunting Officers but staying within the law until you spy one.

I hate that term, because it encapsulates how tacky and incongruous these little scavenger hunts often feel in open worlds. But there’s definitely a large contingent of gamers who love them, and I think I’d be one of them if anyone ever did them well.

They need to fit with the fiction to feel appropriate (like Assassin’s Creed 2’s feathers), they need to improve your character to be truly worth hunting for (like Crackdown’s Agility Orbs), they need to include scraps of story to make the world feel rich (like Fallout 3’s characters), they need to include unique items to feel special (like Fallout 3’s items), and they need to be common enough that you feel there could be one just over the next ridge, nook, clearing or summit (like Fallout 3’s quests).

Here’s my idea:

Some foreign, some from your own agency, all rotting away in the most secluded and obscure parts of the islands. They’d be tough to find, except that you’ll occasionally see a coloured light flash. You’ll find it’s a Beacon, the device agents like you use to call in air support or mark targets, and this agent’s other kit will be scattered in the area. The various bits you might find are:

Beacon: its occasionally blinking light tips you off that there’s other stuff nearby
Tracker: usually close to the beacon, this small screen reveals all his other kit on your map.
Pistol: if he’s Agency, he’ll have a gun with some upgrades you can take – whether or not you’ve unlocked them.
Main weapon: These are often unique and powerful, and some even have one or two slots that can take the same upgrades your pistol can.
PDA: states his objective and any notes he took.
Phone: some agents record their conversations; you can play back his last.
Memory card: most agents keep some sensitive images with them: photos of a target, compromising pictures, facility blueprints, scans of incriminating documents.
Cash: some agents need to carry large quantities of it for their work. Others are just corrupt.
Drugs: ditto.
Corpse: dangling from a tree, crushed under a rock, half-buried in the desert, frozen in the foetal position in the snow, impaled on a branch, twisted at the bottom of a cliff – it usually gives you some idea how he died. If he’s Agency, his suit might have some upgrades you can use.

Types of agent:

Native: beacon light is green, they’ll have a main weapon but no Agency pistol or equipment. They’ll always have a PDA with some info on what they were up to, but usually no phone or memory card with full details.
Agency: red beacon, they’ll have an Agency pistol and there’ll always be at least some decent info on what their assignment was.
Foreign: beacon light is yellow, these are rare, unknown agents with little comprehensible info on them but exotic and powerful custom weapons.
Special: blue beacon, these could be any of the above three agent types, but they always have some major info on their PDA, Phone or Memory Card relating to the assassination of the last president.

The idea is that finding this stuff is a little adventure that tells a story, in the order you discover it. Most will be fairly simple stories: guy was chasing some drug dealers, drove his speedboat off a waterfall and buried it into the side of a mountain.

But some, the ones with phones, tell the stories of people who shaped the history of the place. Finding all of these pieces together a subplot about your Agency putting the current president in power in the first place, by ruthless means.

Finding this enables a special Epilogue mission after the main game is complete, to undermine the new regime before it gets started and put a local hero in power.

I mentioned both upgrades and finding special weapons above. The two don’t often work well together: if you can keep upgrading your favourite weapon, loot becomes irrelevant, and if you ever find loot better than your most upgraded thing, upgrades feel like a waste of time.

My idea is to unlock and then buy upgrades for your Agency-issued equipment, including your infinite-ammo pistol, but larger weapons are things you find or buy. You unlock one equipment upgrade after every mission, then pay to have it installed if you actually want it. Or you can find upgrades, sometimes ones you wouldn’t have earned for hours, on dead agents.

To save fussy ferrying, every larger weapon you find is automatically added to the weapons locker at your base, and you can take a freshly loaded one from there any time. You can carry two and your pistol.

You’ll unlock more upgrades for your kit than it can take at one time, but you can switch them around freely.

Specifically:

Each bit of equipment has a number of slots, and higher-level upgrades take up more of them: you can have level 2 Calibre and Accuracy upgrades in your pistol, for example, but if you want the level 3 of one, you’ll only have room for the level 1 of the other.

(+) Full List

The idea is that you customise your core kit to suit your style, but you can be free and easy with what main weapons you pick up and try. Eventually you’ll settle on one or even two you always want, and you can then reconfigure your pistol and equipment to complement it. With the above loadout, you’d probably want something with a decent rate of fire and mag size for mid-range fighting.

Earning a steady stream of upgrades – without enough slots to fit them all – is a system that works brilliantly in Dawn of War 2’s Last Stand mode. You’re always excited about what you’re going to get next, and you try it out eagrely, but the unlocks don’t have to keep getting better to sustain this. It’s just nice to get more options, play with them, then settle on the combination you like.