If you’re just arriving, we are Suspicious Developments. We did:

• Gunpoint (2013) – 10k reviews, 98% positive
• Heat Signature (2017) – 6k reviews, 94% positive
• Tactical Breach Wizards (2024) – 10k reviews, 98% positive

I’m the game designer and writer, I do some code, and until recently I ran the company (I now have help).

As you might be able to tell from the list, our games are all over the place in development time and genre. But they all sold great and reviewed great, and to the extent that we controlled that at all, I credit it to prioritising sustainability.

That means definining success not in total sales or accolades, but in how sure you can be of making another game at a happy, comfortable pace. All our games made more than twice their money back, and we’ve never been closer than 2 years to running out of funds.

The biggest factor in getting to that position, of course, was sheer luck: we made our first game in our spare time, with no budget, and it came out at the perfect time: 2013. Indie games had started to make real money on Steam, but the scene wasn’t flooded yet, so a small-scope thing from first timers had much easier time selling. That kickstart from zero to game-budget-money is ultimately why we’ve never needed a publisher.

So I’m not the right person to ask about startup funding. But we weren’t that rare in our first success, and we are increasingly rare in our still-being-here, still-making-stuff, still-independent. So I can at least advise on how to make what you have go as far as possible.

Looking back, this is what feels like the highest-impact, most-copyable aspects of that. I hope it can be of help.

Why four?
Look, I’ve only been at it 15 years. It’s gonna take me til 2030 to learn a fifth thing.

Contents

1. Stay as small as you can
2. Pick something prototypable
3. Testing is the magic bullet
4. Price is a solved problem
5. A timeline, to illustrate

1. Stay as small as you can

I hate to say this at a time when it would sure be nice if there were more jobs, but I say it to encourage more stable jobs. Staffing up doesn’t really create jobs if it leads to layoffs or closure, and it fucks with a lot of lives along the way.

I think we only get to a healthier industry for workers when more studios are sustainable, and more jobs are stable. And things get unstable very fast as you grow.

The maths of how team size affects your chance of success is brutal:

• Success is making more money than you spent
• Doubling your team size doubles the amount of money you need to make
• But as the numbers go up, vanishingly fewer games make that much money. So it’s not just half the chance of success, it might be a tenth

For reference, Suspicious Developments’ average burn rate is about 3 full time salaries. I think if we had scaled up to 8 after Gunpoint, we would have made a bad game next, then no games at all.

Heat Signature was a tough game to figure out, and if we’d had less than 3.5 years of runway to test and iterate, we would have just had to release it in a bad state. If we’d had only 3.5 years of runway, I’d have been stressed as hell and the company would have collapsed if it wasn’t a hit.

We haven’t been consistent because all our ideas are golden, we’ve done it by staying small enough to keep testing and working until they’re good. And that’s a more sustainable kind of success, because rolling with punches is built in.

A lower burn rate is a superpower. There’s nothing else that’s fully within your control that can so dramatically increase your chances of success.

2. Pick something prototypable

This didn’t really work, which was useful to know 6 years before launch.

By ‘prototype’ I mean a playable build that meaningfully shows what’s good about your game – a proof of concept.

A prototypable project is one where you can build that in an amount of time you can afford to lose. If you can make a prototype but it’s gonna take 3 years, it can’t serve the main purpose of a prototype: to check this game idea works while there’s still time to change tack.

Being able to do this quickly is crucial for two reasons:

1. If the prototype ends up proving your idea doesn’t work, or is beyond your means, you’re gonna want as much time as possible to do something about that.

2. If your prototype proves the idea can work, how much time you have left directly determines how good the game will actually be.

It’s also just incredibly motivating and clarifying for the whole team to be able to play the game they’re working on, and see where it’s headed.

So:

• Choose your project based heavily on which seems the easiest to prototype.
• Pick stuff you can prototype with the people you already have.
• Don’t obsess about anything until you have a prototype: you don’t know what’s important yet.
• Assume everything you do before you have a prototype might need to be scrapped or redone.

3. Testing is the magic bullet

How did we make Wizards good? We asked players which bits were bad, then fixed them.

You are going to take an exam that costs all of your life savings to sit. If you ace this exam, you’ll win 2-10 times your life savings. The games-playing public already knows all the answers to the exam, and will tell you if you ask them.

It is incredible how many devs don’t ask them. Or don’t ask enough of them. Or don’t ask them early enough, or enough times.

Testing can be a fair bit of work and time, but nothing is as expensive as launching without it.

This phase of development is called ‘making the game good’, and if you don’t have time for it, that’s as big of a problem as it sounds.

4. Price is a solved problem

On a pretty real level, your sales are a function of:

1. How many people arrive at your Steam page
2. How much your Steam page makes them want to buy it
3. How much it costs

The first one is famously hard. The second one heavily depends on making the game good, which you’re gonna spend 90% of your time on.

The third one is just a single number you can change in 30 seconds, and you can find out the correct value for it in one round of testing.

We just ask people how much they think the game should cost, and every time we’ve gone with the price most people chose, and every time they’ve sold great and reviewed great.

A timeline, to illustrate

I’m a visual thinker, so I laid all this out on a timeline. The positions are arbitrary, of course, but there’s no realistic place to put those five lines that doesn’t make doubling your headcount terrifying for your breathing room on both quality and stability.

Obviously most of this post is broadly aligned with conventional wisdom. But the thing I want to yell about, that people don’t seem to internalise enough, is how dramatically and reliably having more time, with a testable build, converts to your game being better and your studio being safer.

But does making a good game guarantee a hit?

Nope! But at the indie scale, making a bad one sure prevents it. And staying small helps again here: if you need to sell a million copies at launch, quality alone can’t ensure it – marketing and other factors all need to align. If you only need to sell 50k, you can get a lot closer to that with just good word of mouth.

Again, this is not a guide to selling the most copies. It’s a guide to making whatever funds, talent and good fortune you have go as far as possible, and keeping you better insulated from whatever bullshit happens next. And that comes down to giving yourself as much time as possible, and checking in with players to make sure you’re spending it well.

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!

So I got mildly snowed on while I rambled about board games as roguelikes, what matters when making games ‘different every time’, and how Dune Imperium pulls it off so well.

Unless there’s a legal guarantee of being able to stick with the terms that came with the version of Unity you use, though, this attempt at a scumbag pressure tactic leaves Unity a very risky prospect for future projects.

Original post:

Last week, Unity announced that they will soon start charging developers $0.20 each time their games are installed, past certain (high) thresholds. This came as a surprise to me and a few thousand other developers who chose Unity, invested in it, and paid for it in large part because they told us they wouldn’t take any of our revenue.

The reaction has been huge, but it’s not clear yet if Unity will make it right. The hasty, vague, conflicting clarifications they’ve offered all seemed aimed at reassuring people “No no, we’re not gonna steal much of your money, because you won’t be successful. Our plan is to steal that guy’s money.”

That’s not my issue, so I just wanna spell out exactly what my issue is.

My issue

We chose Unity for Tactical Breach Wizards over 5 years ago. The deal was, it costs $125 per month per programmer, but that’s it – they take no share of your income when you release. Unreal, a rival engine, has no monthly fee but takes 5% of your revenue when you release. If Unity wanted any part of our revenue, whether percentage or per-install, we wouldn’t have used it – I had more experience in Game Maker, which takes no rev share and has a lower sub cost.

So now we’ve spent 5+ years investing in Unity on that understanding:

• All of our coding and implementation work (about 70% of my job, and all of my programmer’s job) is in Unity, and could not be pasted into some other engine – it would need to be redone.
• To be able to even do that productive work, I spent a ton of this time learning Unity.
• Relatedly, I took around 3,824 points of psychic damage during this time from Unity’s bizarre, maddening quirks.
• I’ve also paid Unity over $10,000 in subscription fees so far.

And not for a slew of useful new features – we use Unity 2019.3. In the last 4 years, the only additional value Unity have provided us is bug fixes to that version. But that’s OK! I’m happy to pay a large fee up front to avoid having our income skimmed forever.

In case we were worried about how much we were investing, in 2019 Unity went out of their way to say, and cement in their Terms of Service, that “When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS.”

But, well, EULA’s say the darnedest things!

A year ago, they quietly removed that part of the TOS. I probably clicked agree on something since then. It wasn’t on my radar that the most reputable indie engine might be silently laying the groundwork for a moustache-twirling betrayal next year.

The new per-install fee is not in the current terms I’ve agreed to, so you might think I have an out – just don’t agree to the new ones! But Unity is a subscription, not a product I bought one time. I have to accept the new terms to continue paying for it, which we have to do to keep legally using Unity, which we have to do to finish our game – because by this point we’re trapped in their platform to the tune of 5 years’ work.

The crux

This is why I am not remotely mollified by reassurances that the current profit-skimming terms won’t sting me in particular too badly. That’s not the fuckin’ headline! The headline is that you (surprisingly) can and (staggeringly) will change how much of our revenue you wish to take at any time after we’ve already committed.

• Not just the size of the monthly fee, but the very conceptual structure of what kind of debt we owe you.
• Not just to use future versions of your engine, with whatever features you think justify this sharp hike, but even for past versions you previously promised would be usable under the old terms forever.
• And not just for games that are starting development now, or mid development – even for games that are already released.

You’re cool with punishing our trust and investment in your platform by using it as a trap to pressure us into terms we would never agree to if we had free choice.

So if I don’t seem impressed that the current terms won’t brutalise my expected revenue, it’s cos it doesn’t take a genius to flash forward to your next twist of the knife. Even after Tactical Breach Wizards is finished and released, apparently you’re able and willing to change the terms under which we used your engine, placing the fees and thresholds wherever you like to see what you can force out of us.

The only difference with a released game is our recourse: instead of having to abandon development of our game, we’d just have to abandon the game – never patch, never update. Which sucks for players almost as much as it sucks for devs.

Maybe they won’t force worse terms on us later??

Well, as far as trusting Unity not to do something scummy if they think they legally can: *waves vaguely at the whole situation*

But more specifically, forcing this new fee structure is a desperate move. They knew it would be roundly despised – their own staff told them so – and they did it anyway. The money was more important than their integrity or reputation. Under those terms, what wouldn’t a corporation do? If taking 100% of our revenue would make them more money than it loses, is anyone confident they wouldn’t do it? For some people, they already have: one dev calculated they’d owe Unity 108% of the year’s revenue under the current terms.

But I heard it’s not retroactive?

Unity are saying it’s ‘not retroactive’ in the sense that when they count how many installs you owe them money for, they won’t count installs that happened before Jan 2024.

It is retroactive in the sense that it doesn’t matter how long ago your game released, or what version of Unity it was made in, if you still need to use Unity at all, you agree to pay Unity for each install of any of your Unity games, over the thresholds.

Again, the thresholds are high, and again, the thresholds are not the point. If this change is allowed to be retroactive in that sense, there’s nothing to stop them making a “100% of your revenue” TOS retroactive in that sense.

But they have to do this, their game engine business isn’t profitable!

Ah, I didn’t know that, perhaps because I don’t give a fuck? It’s not the customer’s job to make your business plan pay off. I didn’t ask them to offer terms that don’t work for them, I didn’t ask them to hire 7,000 people, I never even made a feature request. They asked me to pay them $10,000 in sub fees on the promise that it meant no fee per-sale, then once I was in too deep to switch, they changed the deal.

But game engines are hard to make and update, it’s not reasonable to expect them to be cheap

I have no opinions about how much they should cost. My thing is, if you offer me Unity 2019 at $150 a month, it’s a scumbag move to wait til I’m too far invested to switch, then change it to a per-install deal even if I keep using the old version. You can change the price, and even the nature of the cost, for any and all future versions, no probs! I get to not buy those. I can’t not-buy Unity 2019 cos I already paid you $10k and spent over 5 years work on it, so you shouldn’t be able to layer on a new type of debt I owe you.

Especially, I feel, if you promised not to.

But now that trust is broken, would backtracking these changes even help?

Yes, in two ways. A soft one: it would signify that upsetting almost every one of their game dev customers was not worth the financial upside, which is reason to believe they wouldn’t try it again for the foreseeable.

And potentially a hard one: if they make line 1 of their EULA one that guarantees we can continue to use current and past versions of Unity under those terms, maybe with a provision that they can scale the sub fee within some reasonable bounds – that’s better than trust.

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.

I am gonna call these problems problems, though, because it gets exhausting to say “possible areas where there’s scope to broaden or mutate its appeal to a different set of people, without wishing to detract from or disparage the great enjoyment many already draw from the game as it stands.” And because some of them, from my perspective, for players like me, with all the caveats above, seem incredibly fucking stupid.

1. Being exhaustive is exhausting

This is my main one. To be competent at chess – not even good – you need to at minimum check over every piece on the board, all the squares it could move to, what it could potentially capture, and what could capture it in response if it did so. There are 32 pieces on a chess board, and 64 squares. I just don’t have the kind of brain that can do that diligiently and hold all the results in its RAM, turn after turn, and so I endlessly slip up and leave an important piece vulnerable.

If you’re doing that regularly, you just don’t get to play actual chess. There’s no room in the brain to read your opponent’s strategy or formulate your own, you just have to spend every brain cell running a brute force search on “What can take what?” – and still missing shit.

I also just don’t enjoy that kind of mental work. It’s not juicy or exciting to me. And it’s so central to success: seeing two or three moves ahead is really just even more of that work – exponentially more. Whoever can do that better has such a huge advantage that any other strategic merits either player might have waft into irrelevance. The parts of the game’s strategy that sound interesting only really kick in if both players are at roughly the same move-crunching ability tier.

2. The early game is slow and boring

All your good pieces are trapped behind a wall of bad pieces, so you both have to spend a bunch of turns moving the bad pieces out of the way so the good pieces can fight. Having a ramp-up can be good, but because the initial board setup is the same for every game, there’s now just a known list of viable openings. Expert players do one of those, while beginners like me just have no idea how the specifics of all that awkward early un-jamming affects the very long sequence of moves that will eventually put important pieces in dominance or danger.

3. The pawn is a shitshow of clumsy balance changes

Oh my God. OK, so as far as I can tell, the pawn has always been fiddly all the way back to chaturanga, the game chess comes from. Unlike every other piece, it can move to some tiles only if they’re empty, and to others only if they’re occupied, and only if by an enemy. And unlike every other piece, one of their moves is directionally locked – every other piece’s move options are rotationally symmetric. It wasn’t until I tried to program this in my own chess game that I realised this is already three special cases, for the least exciting unit in the game. That would already have me going back to the drawing board of a game concept to see if there’s a more elegant way of hitting the design goals.

But then the history of the pawn reads like the patch notes of an incompetent game dev scrambling to appease a community without any conviction or guiding principles of its own.

• The pawn can move 1 square forwards if the space is empty, or capture 1 square diagonally forwards if the destination is occupied by an enemy. Weird and bad, but seemingly there from the start, so fine.
• In 15th-century Europe, it was decided the early game was too slow (agreed!), so the pawn should be able to move 1 or 2 spaces on its first turn. This is two more special cases: no other piece has range other than infinity or 1, and no other piece has different movement rules depending on their history.
• But there was consternation that now a pawn could skip past a position that would have threatened it under the previous rules. I can’t speak to how important this is, but the fix is the absolute nadir of fussy, awkward, unsatisfying game design: if and only if a pawn just moved 2 spaces on its last turn, and an enemy pawn (and only a pawn!) could have taken it on the intervening square, this turn and only this turn, that pawn may move to the square the original pawn would have been on, and capture it as if it was there.

FUCKING LISTEN TO YOURSELF! What the fuck are you doing?! That is blithering, dithering, baffling bullshit. It reads like a bad faith thought experiment you’d use to shoot down someone’s suggestion: “Oh, what do you want us to do, [that horror show of rule salad]?!” And I say bad faith because apart from the other 20 problems with this, there’s a much simpler solution that better addresses the stated problem:

• If the square in front of a pawn is threatened, it cannot move 2 spaces.

It’s still a special case, but it only takes one sentence to explain, chess already has other rules where threats prevent movement, and it doesn’t involve pieces capturing the imaginary history-ghost of a piece that could have been there in a previous version of the game’s rules for fuck’s cocking sake.

*deep breath*

I’m so angry about en passant.

4. Draws are common and draws are bad

That’s not great. It’s not as common at lower skill levels, but it still happens way more than it should. A draw is almost always a failure of game design: a 1v1 game implicitly promises a victor, when it ends in a draw the design could not deliver what it promised. Because chess can only be won by forcing an opponent into checkmate, or hoping they resign, it’s very easy for both players to end up with too few powerful pieces left to ever trap each other so decisively.

In fact, chess’s other string of embarrassing patch notes include an increasing list of rules about when you can force a draw to avoid the game just going on forever. The miserable outcome of a draw is actually one better than the infinite tedium many chess matches would otherwise end in. And it’s pawn movement you chose to patch?

5. Stalemate is a wildly stupid concept

All that draw stuff, above, is what I thought ‘stalemate’ meant – you determine no-one can win and it’s a draw. That’s not it! A stalemate is when one player, let’s say white, is left in a position where every move they can make would let their king be taken. Ooh, tough game design problem! Who can say who should win that game? Maybe a draw, maybe white wins, maybe it’s illegal to put someone in that position?

NO, idiots! BLACK FUCKING WON! Read it back to yourself! White is in a position where EVERY MOVE THEY COULD MAKE would lead their KING, THE PIECE YOU MUST NOT LOSE, to be LOST. That is check fuckin mate, mate, in everything but name. The concept of stalemate was absolutely introduced by a sore loser with a lot of clout when they found themselves utterly outplayed. “Waaaa, every move I could make would lose me my king!” THEN FACE YOUR DEATH, COWARD.

It comes, of course, from another bit of weird but normally harmless bullshit chess talked itself into: instead of ending when someone loses their king, it ends one turn earlier, when that’s the only possible outcome. Seems weak to skip the climactic kill of this whole charade, but I guess it’s the punch Ali never threw – fine. But somehow that got mutated into “It’s illegal to move your king into danger”. Why?! What’s the point of that rule? If you wanna lose, go ahead. You lose! You can already surrender a game, so it’s not like we’re preventing suicide.

The only material effect of this rule is that it allows rules lawyers who’ve forgotten the point of the game to talk themselves in circles until they declare something provably insane like “If you put me in a position where I’ll definitely lose my king, YOU lose the game.” That was actually the rule in 18th century England. In fact, all the examples I gave of laughably bad ways to handle this situation were real: 

Today, a stalemate is a draw. Baffling. Your game already has a chronic abundance of draws, you cannot afford to be lawyering legit victories into more of the worst outcome possible.

If it was up to me, a stalemate would count for more than checkmate. 1.5 wins. It’s the secret unlockable ending where you actually get to take their king. Maybe throw it at them.

Why are you telling me this?

Oh, I’m making a chess game in my spare time. It’s been in the back of my mind as a fun design exercise to try ever since Bennett Foddy suggested it in a GDC talk, and tinkering with it has been super fun so far. Design-wise, I wanted to thrash out what it is I’m trying to fix, at minimum, before I get into what kind of flavour and twists I want to add. 

What I have so far, a week in, does a pretty good job of alleviating 1 and 2. 3 is interesting, because obviously I’m ditching pawns in their current form, and removing them clarifies what their role is. The hole they leave is not specifically pawn-shaped, but what I fill it with will probably be recognisably equivalent. 4 is not hard if you’re not trying to please die-hards, and 5 is self-evident.

There’s also a 6, but it’s such a stretch to call it a problem with chess that I ended up deleting it from this post: I want it to be single-player.

• Sound effects: hitting a shuttlecock (they call them birdies here) doesn’t just make a great sound, it makes a whole range of them. You’ve got your gentle pongs, your lively thwaps, all the way up to the fearsome splack of a good overhand smash. I’d say the only sport that can claim more satisfying noises is archery, and in badminton no-one has to die.
• It involves a lot less walking around and picking things up: this is the main thing it has over tennis – even a ridiculously overpowered shot never goes more than a couple feet from the court, and in tennis even the gentlest shot can bounce to a neighbouring country if you’re not there to stop it. This is because of a secret feature of badminton:
• It has Bullet Time built in: a shuttlecock is a weird little contradiction – streamlined in silhouette but engineered to slur through the air like it’s treacle. The harder you hit it, the faster it slows – meaning, basically, go ham. You pretty quickly learn to lunge for shots you think you’ve already missed, because the proportionate slowdown is so extreme that you sometimes get them anyway. It almost feels like you’ve gone slightly back in time to get another chance.
• Extreme dynamic range: these hard shots – aim them up and they absolutely soar, giving your opponent plenty of time to get in position, but also plenty of time to overthink it and whiff at the last minute. Aim them down and it’s the opposite: an absolute bullet to the ground, brutally difficult to defend, but when they do come back it’s such a sudden reversal that all you can do is flinch in self-defense. And those are just the hard shots – at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a whole artform in barely touching the birdie so that it lazily bellyflops over the net and dribbles down the other side in a fatal fall that leaves them hurling themselves across the court to reach it and attempt an equally pathetic shot back.
• Comedy: that’s very, very funny. Even more so as a return to a much more dramatic shot. And even more so if you’re busy celebrating your genius when the fucking thing comes back with exactly the same smug lethargy. And these are just the shots that work – badminton is a masterclass in the taste of victory turning to ashes in your mouth. Pride, cleverness, and an ostentatious wind-up come before a public self-own every three shots. Sometimes a long-awaited serve just drops to the floor without even touching a racket. Sometimes your sneaky side shot goes so far out it’s a valid shot in the next court. Sometimes they set you up for the perfect unstoppable smash and you just beast it directly into the net. Sometimes you beast it under the net. Sometimes you just beast it directly into the ground, and look around at everyone like, well I don’t know what that was supposed to be.
• It’s exercise but I enjoy it? This is sort of self-referential and redundant – I like badminton because I like badminton? – but the last point was too long-winded to feel like a conclusion so here we are.

Void Bastards is a roguelike first-person shooter about boarding randomly generated spaceships. I designed a top-down roguelike about boarding randomly generated spaceships, so it’s interesting to see how the two games tackled the same issues differently, and how well their solutions worked out! I picked three:

Progression

Starting with this because I think VB absolutely aced it and HS did not. In a roguelike context, I’m using ‘progression’ to mean anything persistent you unlock or earn – how the outcome of one life can potentially affect those that come after.

In Heat Sig, doing missions gradually lets you ‘liberate’ space stations, and liberating stations permanently unlocks new items in the shops. I’m very happy with the items themselves, and how they support new playstyles, but you can find any and all of them from the start, as random loot. So the shop-unlock reward was never as strong an incentive as I’d like.

I considered the alternative, of course: holding these items back entirely until they’re unlocked. But the cost was too high:

• Having a limited pool of loot for hours.
• Having no Choice Glimpses to know if an item is worth working towards.
• And potentially missing the game’s best gadgets if we fail to describe/present them to you in a way that fully conveys their value – which we would.

Progression in Void Bastards is one big screen of unlocks and upgrades, which you earn by acquiring particular crafting ingredients then choosing which to spend them on. Unlike Heat Sig, weapons you haven’t unlocked yet are completely unavailable to you, but it avoids most of the problems I feared in a few ways:

• You never actually find weapons or gadgets on the ships you board, only crafting materials. This gets around the ‘limited loot pool’ problem in the early game, because materials are inherently valuable and what they might ultimately get you is unknown and unlimited. That makes it feel good to find them even before you have enough to unlock anything at all. They’re also persistent between lives, so you’re always ‘spending’ temporary resources – ammo and your life – to gain permanent ones – another good feeling.
• While you’re mostly finding ‘materials’, in their hundreds, each ship also has a single special ‘part’. Every upgrade is built from just 2 or 3 specific parts, and materials are only useful in that you can spend hundreds of them to craft a part you need to unlock something. Finding the part itself is much, much faster. But because they’re only used in specific unlocks, the random selection of parts you come across gives you a big headstart for a random selection of upgrades. This partly solves the “Didn’t unlock it because it didn’t sound good” problem – you might not think the Nebulator sounds cool, but if you come across one of its components and can afford to craft the other one, now that unlock is temptingly close while the Armour upgrade you’re really interested in is a long way off. And if you find both parts, unlocking the Nebulator doesn’t even cost you anything you could spend on the Armour upgrade anyway.
• Many of the upgrades are just massive boosts to your effectiveness, which gives them a powerful desirability that isn’t susceptible to the “doesn’t sound good” problem. Most weapon upgrades double or triple its damage output. An armour upgrade can nearly double your health. That’s an easy sell. We didn’t do this in Heat Sig because a) we don’t have damage or health, as concepts, b) in a game where gadgets and weapons are the drops, there’s danger in letting the player persistently get more powerful – finding that stuff becomes less special, c) I would have been scared to mess with the difficulty system, which was hard to get right, and d) I didn’t think of it.

Main Quest

I don’t think this was a big focus for either game. In Heat Sig, you’re ultimately trying to liberate 10 stations from each faction and then their strongholds. There is no special ‘content’ to this campaign until you finish it, then there’s a short scripted scene.

Void Bastards goes a bit further: you’re tasked with crafting an item, and when you do, there’s a short comic-book cut-scene explaining why this didn’t solve your predicament and why you need the next item. That cycle repeats 4 or 5 times, then the game ends.

Void Bastards’ presentation is slicker and these scenes give them a place for some jokes, but I actually prefer Heat Sig’s system because of one key difference: in Void Bastards, progress towards completing the game must be made instead of progress towards unlocks. You gather materials and parts for these plot items instead of gathering them for unlocks you want. In Heat Sig, you do both at once – the stations you’re liberating to work towards your overall goal are also unlocking new gadgets as you do so.

This meant VB’s extremely compelling unlock system actually worked against its main quest, for me. I was so excited to get new weapons and make my favourite ones more powerful, that the prospect of diverting my efforts towards mere completion was really unappealing. For all the same reasons it felt especially good to earn unlocks, it felt especially bad to spend those same resources and earn nothing.

Ship Systems

This is an area where Void Bastards reminds me more of my early plans for Heat Sig than Heat Sig does. Every part of the ship was going to be a different subsystem of the ship’s functionality, and you’d be tinkering with them all to manipulate it. We moved away from that stuff because:

• We had to de-emphasise the space game, partly just to focus, and partly because some players struggled enough with the controls that adding any extra challenge there would leave them unable to play the game.
• To give the player intentionality about what systems to visit/mess with, we’d need to give them free run of the ship in a non-linear way, and that tightly constrains how we can design levels to make the critical path substantial/interesting without the ship size getting unwieldy framerate-wise.
• I worried that whatever universal rules we came up with for what these systems did, it would devolve into the player doing the same thing every time.

So in Heat Sig only one ship system is consistently present and relevant enough that you’ll usually visit it: the cockpit. Many others are present and messable-with but rarely end up relevant.

In Void Bastards, every area of the ship has a purpose and most are gameplay relevant. Early on, my pattern was to always visit the Helm for a map, then use this to scour the ship of loot, stopping by Atmo when I was low on air. Later, some ships don’t have a Helm: on these I’d come up with some logical order to search the rooms, to make it easier to keep track of where I’d been and not. Some ships are powered down, in which case you have to visit Gen first to power them up, before applying the normal strat.

This is a significantly better level of player engagement with ship systems than Heat Sig has. But it’s still a little rote: everything comes down to “If X, then Y”. I think an interesting direction to expand in would be: what ship systems would we need to get the player to feel like they’re making a judgement call each time?

Maybe a system that can clear the tricky but not impossible environmental hazards, like fire and electrical leaks? One that adds a new type of enemy, plus some loot? What if the question we ask you is not just “What order do you visit these rooms in?” but “Which 3 of these systems do you most want to use on this ship?” If  each system you mess with took the ship closer to lockdown, there could be a limit that would push you to make bigger decisions than order of operations.

Here’s Void Bastards on Steam, and here’s Heat Signature.

Update: We’ll continue taking applications for the composer position until noon Pacific Time on Wednesday this week! This link should tell you when that is for you.

Original post:

We’re looking for a composer to handle the music for Tactical Breach Wizards!

• This is a contract position for this project only.
• Remote, paid – let us know your preferred rate. Ask for what’s fair, getting this done cheaply is not a priority for us.
• See below for the scope and nature of the work.
• We expect to be working on the game for at least 1 more year, so that’s the rough time frame for working on this.

We don’t care about years of experience or prestige of prior projects, all we need is to hear some of your existing work – whether it’s personal or professional. You don’t need to have worked in games before – the game-specific concerns are outlined here so you can judge if they’re gonna be a problem.

Instructions for applying are at the bottom of this post, but first I’ll give as much info as I can about the job:

The Work

Tactical Breach Wizards is a story-driven puzzle tactics game about wizards in modern-day tactical gear tackling a global conspiracy. We plan for the campaign to be about 12 hours long, alternating between turn-based tactics missions and interactive dialogue scenes that progress the story. So our music needs include:

Mission music: (probably 70% of the work) We’ll generally want the music during gameplay to give a sense of tension and stakes but also have a bit of a groove to it, and not to steal focus – the player will be thinking through some complex situations so we don’t want anything too distracting or intrusive. The campaign will take you to four different countries, and it would be nice if the music for each conveyed a sense of the place. But the countries in the game world don’t relate to ones in our real world, so we don’t want the music to specifically evoke real world ones. I can run you through these in more detail once we’re working together, and your input would be welcome too. I estimate these tracks would need to be 3+ minutes to avoid getting repetitive, and we’ll probably need at least 6 of them, probably not more than 12.

Story scene music: for some scenes, we’ll want bespoke music to convey a mood or a moment. The story involves some dramatic events and some intense emotions, but the dialogue is text-only, so the music will be important to get across things like intensity, tone, and emotion in a more direct way. I’d estimate these would be around 1 minute long and we might need about 6 of them.

Incidental music: for the larger number of less intense/impactful conversations, something a bit more chill than the mission music, at a guess these might be 2-ish minutes and we might need around 4 of them.

We’re not looking to do anything too complex in terms of dynamic music – being a fixed story campaign, we have a good idea of what we want the mood of each level and scene to be. However, the structure of our missions is that you play 4-6 short levels in the same location, with a ratings screen between each. This seems like it could be a good fit for several variations on a single track, giving the place a unified mood but with either variation between each level, and/or rising intensity for the final levels of the mission. If hired, we’d want your thoughts on whether that’s a good direction or if you have other ideas.

Us

We’re an entirely remote team of 3 people (UK, US, Canada) and entirely independent, meaning no external parties giving notes or setting milestone dates etc. So far I haven’t found it necessary to set deadlines on tasks, I just give a brief, you go off and make something, come back when it’s ready and I’ll give feedback. But if you prefer to have a hard deadline we can do that too. If the pace of that ever does look like it’s gonna be an issue, we’d discuss to see if the pace or the scope of work needs to change.

We mostly co-ordinate via text on Discord, where each discipline has its own channel. I’m also happy to work entirely via e-mail or DM, which we’ve done in the past, if you prefer our feedback loop to be private (very reasonable). We have a zoom call roughly once every two months, at 9am Pacific Time, but that’s optional. It’s not a job where you’ll see our faces much, for better or worse!

We don’t require an interview call, video or otherwise, but we can do further in the process if it’s useful for you.

You

We’re looking for 3 things:

Talent: you already have this, don’t worry about it. In all the times I’ve done this process I can’t think of any candidate who wasn’t talented enough.

Fit: this is a bit of a crapshoot I’m afraid – it’s just, is the kind of music you make, the kind of music I like – for games. Here are links to the soundtracks for our previous games Gunpoint and Heat Signature to get a sense.

Working relationship: we’ve had the best work produced and the happiest work life with folks who are happy to make changes and expect it as part of the process. We all have to kill our darlings pretty regularly on the altar of practicality and playability, so if you’re someone who gets very attached to a version of your work and hates to mess with it, this won’t be a good fit. I’m afraid I have no musical education and I’ll be the one giving you feedback, so it’s going to be bumbling things like “I’m not sure what’s happening at 1m28s but it sounds kind of discordant to me?” and “This is a bit too busy or intrusive” without a lot of specifics and accurate technical terms.

A few practical requirements:

• You must be at least 18
• It’s a big help if you’re able to play games on a Windows machine, you’d need to to hear your work in context
• If you have an existing job, check they don’t have any claim on what you do outside of work

Applying

If you’re interested, you should read Please e-mail wizardcomposer@suspiciousdevelopments.com with, first and foremost, a link to where we can hear some of your music that you think best shows your suitability for this role – especially for the Mission Music part of the job. A direct link to (or attachment of) an MP3 or two is ideal, if possible – if I can put everyone on a big playlist and listen to it on loop that’s a great help. Attachments up to 25MB are fine.

Please don’t make anything for us yet – after this phase, we’ll choose some candidates and offer them a fee to produce a sample, we don’t want anyone doing it for free.

You don’t need to write a cover letter – we don’t need you to declare your undying passion for the thing before you even know if you have a chance. If you’re looking for work you have to do a lot of these, so let’s make it as quick and easy as possible for both of us until we know if we’re a good fit.

Do feel free to list your previous work – as I say, prestige isn’t a factor for us, but if it happens to include something I’ve heard, that’s a helpful shortcut to me knowing more about your work. It’s easier if you list this in the e-mail than needing us to open up a resume and find it.

Do tell us what you’d like to be paid. An hourly rate would be nice, so that if we need to keep asking for revisions of a track you’re still being compensated for the extra time. If you prefer a per-track rate, a rough idea of how many hours an eg 3-minute track typically takes you would be helpful.

Thanks for reading!

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.

Slay the Spire has a power where you draw 1 extra card per turn, then must discard 1 of your choice right after.

Slay’s power is straight up better: you get to see what the new card is before deciding what to discard, which both lets you factor it into synergy considerations, and allows you to discard the new card itself, if it’s worse than what you have.

But experientially, Nowhere Prophet’s feels more positive. You’re presented with a hand you can keep, or if you like you can get a do-over on the card you like least. Doing nothing is fine, but if you see a bad card you can chuck it for good odds of a better one. Yay!

Slay’s power deals you a hand of 6 cards instead of 5, then forces you to choose one to lose. You’ll still end up with 5, so this shouldn’t be a hardship, but it feels like one. You’re being shown a nice big hand you can’t have, and being forced to make a tough decision to cut it down to a worse hand you can keep.

Inaction is not an option, which adds pressure and friction to play, and your only action is a negative one – to lose something it looks like you have.

Slay’s power comes from a card called Tools of the Trade, and I never take it anymore. Every time I did, I’d have moments where I’m dealt those 6 cards, the game says “Choose one to discard”, and my instinctive reaction was a nonsensical whine of: “But I don’t want to!”

I feel like I’m having a worse time with it, even though it’s purely a benefit once it’s in play. The feel of an ability is not just cosmetic, in this case it’s actually driving my gameplay decisions.

The Fix

I think you could make Slay’s power dramatically better purely with UX changes:

– You’re dealt your normal 5 cards
– The extra card is shown in the center of the screen
– “Choose a card to replace with this, or pass”

+ The benefit you’re getting is now visible and specific
+ There’s now an easy ‘default’ you can resort to if you don’t care – less pressure and friction
+ Player action is now positive – ‘replace’ rather than ‘lose’

Highlighting the ‘extra’ card also means that when it’s an especially good one, you’ll think “Oh shit, this power saved me.” With the existing UX that can never happen, since there’s no concept of which card is the ‘extra’ one. Mechanics and balance-wise, of course, it’s irrelevant which one is the ‘extra’ – your options are exactly the same. But just that cosmetic change can completely change your emotional response to the situation, and how you feel about your decision to invest in this power.

Everything marked ‘info’ was either learned by me first hand, or told to me by Valve at events with the express purpose of getting this kind of info out to developers, without request of confidentiality. I say this because I do also get told things confidentially – none of that is in here.

Info: wishlists matter a lot

Getting people to wishlist your game on Steam before launch is the most effective way I know of making your game sell better when it comes out. When Heat Signature launched, 33,000 people had wishlisted it. One month after launch, the number of wishlisters who’d bought the game was 30,000. Some of those may have wishlisted it during that month, of course, but it’s still a good ratio.

People who’ve wishlisted your game get an e-mail from Steam when it’s released, and each time it goes on sale, until they buy it or take it off. This is even better than them signing up to your mailing list, because a) mails from small, new or less established mailing lists generally go straight to spam, and b) it’s free. At this point it costs me $220 to e-mail the Suspicious Developments mailing list. (I still do that too)

Wishlists also factor in to how your game shows up in search results on the store.

Advice: get a store page up as early as possible

Heat Signature had a store page for 1.5 years before launch, and my best guess is this was the biggest (marketing) factor in its success. The fact that the game took longer than expected – which happens to most of us – ended up giving it longer to build interest in a way that meaningfully converted to sales. That was only true because its store page was up so early.

It’s only too early for a store page if:

• You can’t show appealing screenshots. (It used to be mandatory to have a trailer too, but now you don’t need that until you launch)
• Your basic pitch for the game may fundamentally change.

With Wizards, six months ago I was still undecided on things like ‘do units act simultaneously’, and I think building excitement then could have led to disappointment if that changed. Once that was figured out, we focused on making a few interactions feel good and have interesting results, made a trailer and put up a store page. From now on, any effort I put into showing off the game feels like it’s reducing the chance it will fail, and raising the ceiling on how well it could do.

Info: as the developer, you have magic tagging powers

What tags people add to your game affect when it shows up in various places, most notably on other games’ pages, in the ‘more like this’ box. How many people applied each tag matters, and as the game’s developer, you have a secret super power to boost this. If you’re logged into Steam with the account you use for Steamworks, when you go to your own game’s store page and add a tag, it counts extra – the official docs don’t give a figure, but I think I heard you count as 50 people.

I don’t think it’s worth trying to game this system, but check the Steamworks docs page on tags for more details – there’s very specific stuff on which tags count and how they’re weighted, which may influence which ones you want to boost. I’ve heard wildly varying results from this from devs, some say it gave them a huge boost to store traffic. I think I recall it helping for Gunpoint but less so for Heat Signature. It’ll vary a lot per game, because it depends on how popular games similar to yours are, how similar yours is to theirs, and how many others are more similar.

Info: giving testers a beta key takes the game off their wishlist

This is bad. Steam is generally great for beta testing, since everyone has it and it auto-patches. But even if you set up a separate beta package, and generate keys just for that package, when testers redeem the key, the game is removed from their wishlist. When the beta’s over, you can remove the app from the package or revoke the keys, but neither method puts the game back on their wishlist. We lost a huge chunk of our wishlisters for Heat Sig this way.

Advice: set up a separate app

To avoid this, I now create a separate app for beta testing. If you don’t have a complimentary app credit, you use the Contact Steamworks Support option in Steamworks to ask for one – at their roundtables with devs, Valve often stress that this really does go to a human who will try to help.

Info: your user review rating doesn’t affect visibility, unless it’s ‘mostly negative’ or worse

This is straight from Valve, confirmed twice. User review % has no effect on when or where the Steam store promotes your game, unless it’s ‘mostly negative’ or worse. That’s not to say it won’t affect sales, of course: if I see something’s ‘mixed’ I at least scroll down to find out why. Steam also surfaces your user review rating in many places other than your store page, so while it won’t affect when it gets shown, it might affect how many people click through.

Still, not worth stressing over dropping from ‘overwhelmingly positive’ to ‘very’.

Info: the release date you set in Steamworks is important, even if you hide it

You can hide your game’s release date or replace it with a phrase like ‘When it’s done’, but you do have to set one. And it matters. It will determine when your game shows in the Coming Soon section of the store, and on the date you set, a load of third party services will announce your game has been released – eg Twitter accounts that tweet every new game.

I was alarmed to learn Heat Sig had come out, months before we’d finished it. Luckily it hadn’t actually released, we’d just hit the arbitrary date I’d typed in when we didn’t have a date. But it led to a bunch of people being pissed off and disappointed after our fake surprise launch.

Advice: tell Steam your game is coming out in 3019

Info: Steam’s visibility algorithms are trying to amplify external interest

That means: if the Steam store notices a lot of traffic coming in to a game’s store page, it will start to feature that game more prominently on Steam itself too.

Advice: maximise external interest in your Steam page on launch day

Obviously you’re probably trying to maximise this anyway, but for me this means I specifically promote our Steam page above all else. Getting a few % more of the revenue on another storefront is small fry compared to getting more prominently featured on Steam, where 95% of our sales are going to come from either way. It also means it’s worth asking press and streamers to hold their coverage til launch day, so it hits all at once.

Advice: don’t do pre-orders

Pre-orders spread out your launch sales out over some preceding period, leading to a smaller spike on launch day and less favour from the algorithms.

I didn’t do pre-orders for Heat Signature, and we hit #1 in the charts on launch day, but I noticed only 3% of our store traffic came from people clicking it in the top sellers list. Nice enough, but not a game changer. So I asked Valve if maybe it wasn’t that important to have a big spike of sales on your launch day specifically? They said it still is, because it will determine how much the store promotes you. Having the same number of sales spread out over a week of pre-orders beforehand will lead to being featured less. Intensity matters.

Advice: think carefully about Early Access

Not saying don’t do it, but this is a reason to think twice. If it effectively gives you two smaller launches, you’d fare worse with the algorithms. I still see two situations where Early Access is probably worth it:

• You’re nearly out of money and the game is unfinished. Much better to call it that than pretend it is
• You’re sure you can – and want to – do regular updates until launch

The latter is the route that Dead Cells, Subnautica and Slay the Spire all took, to a level of success way beyond any of my games. I saw talks by the devs of all three at GDC, and all three said the extremely frequent and consistent updates were the key to making this work. Some also said it made the game take dramatically longer than it would have otherwise. For my part, I think having a publicly committed deadline every week or fortnight would break me.

Click through for details on each:

• Character Traits
• 7 New Hazards
• Glory Missions & Clients
• Upgraded AI & Reworked Alarms
• Player Story Trading Cards
• Contractors: 4 Unique Enemy Types
• The Daily Challenge
• 10 Quality of Life Features

This update is a one-off, we don’t plan to do updates like this on a regular basis. You should only buy the game if you want it in its current state – we don’t make promises about future content.

This update was made by
Tom Francis: design/code
John Winder: code
John Roberts: art

Dedicated to John Francis
We started this update in April this year, and my dad passed away in May. He was an electrical engineer, a software engineer and an inventor. He got me into computers at an early age, inspired me to be ambitious with his infinite faith in me, and protected me from the fear of failure by making me feel I could never disappoint him. I hope everyone reading this knows they deserve that kind of boost in life, whether you’ve been lucky enough to receive it or not.

Dad was extremely excited when my games took off, making his own graphs and projections from the sales figures I sent him. All of you who bought Heat Signature or Gunpoint made him so happy and proud. I hope this update can say thank you for that.

It’s too early to know if this is my next big project or not – my prototype doesn’t have enough to prove the concept yet – but I do want to start showing more of it. And I’ve been holding back part of the concept, and indeed the name. It’s not hard to describe, but it’ll only really work with the right art, so I didn’t want to talk about it until I was sure that side of things would work.

And hey, you know who’s good at art? Gunpoint and Heat Signature artist John Roberts! So he’s joined me again and sketched out some ideas for this new concept. Which is…

TACTICAL BREACH WIZARDS

It’s a present-day turn-based strategy game about coordinating a small team to breach into rooms full of gangsters and other hostiles, but your team are all wizards. In tactical gear.

It’s partly based on a thing we used to joke about at PC Gamer sometimes, the idea of a super serious Call of Duty type military game, but the team are just wizards for some reason. We were probably all picturing different takes on this, but in my head it was kevlar over robes, staves with scopes, wands with silencers, grenades full of basilisk tears.

January last year, I was playing XCOM 2 and thinking “This is so good, and yet has so many clarity problems – I wish there were more indie XCOMs.” I started making notes for my own take on that, and about 400 words into the document, the wizards joke popped into my head, I hit caps lock and wrote:

TACTICAL BREACH WIZARDS!!!!!

I sent a mail round to check everyone I used to laugh about this with was OK with it, and they were. So, I’m taking that gag and mixing it with all my XCOM inspirations and hangups.

Here’s John’s sketch of what a scene might look like:

I’m picturing you working your way through a building room-by-room like that, only having to worry about enemies in the current room.

Each of your units would be a named character with a unique class, and there’d be conversations with them between missions. Here are some of the character ideas we’ve been throwing around:

And because John is a beast, he’s already modeled one in 3D:

The sharpshooter would have different staves, which you’d probably see on the UI for weapon switching, so here are some concepts for those:

Our current rule is that the functional part of an item is always magical, but it’s housed, framed, and accessorised like a modern tactical weapon.

Mechanics-wise, the concept is that you tell one wizard where to move and shoot, they do it, then you rewind and give the next one orders – they’ll execute at the same time.

Another principle I’m trying is that you can play out a turn as many times as you like before you commit – you can keep rewinding and changing your orders until you’re happy with the result. Like Frozen Synapse, but without even the uncertainty about the enemy’s actions – all of the surprise will happen on their turn.

My prototype is too early to say if either of those systems will stick, I’ll happily scrap or change them if not. I might end up making a totally different tactics game with this same theme, or as I say, the whole thing might completely fail to coalesce and I scotch the lot.

If you want to know when we have a build ready for testing, get on the Suspicious Developments mailing list if you’re not already. It’ll be a while yet, though.

Update On The Everything Gun

It’s been great to see how much people are loving this very silly weapon, and how excited people are to send us shots of them finding it. One thing I didn’t forsee was that for a small number of people, it could cause anxiety: the fear of missing out, or even when they have it, the fear of somehow losing it. So we’re going to simplify it:

If you play any time between now and Oct 5th, you’ll unlock the Everything Gun as a random drop.

Within six months, we’ll unlock it as a random drop for everyone.

I hope that allows it to still be a special thing for everyone who was part of our launch, without causing anyone worry. A few more details if you need them:

• If you’ve already stolen it from the shipment (even if you died right after), you’ve already unlocked it even if you don’t play again before Oct 5.
• You can still steal it from the shipment if you haven’t already, that’s just a reliable way of obtaining it the first time.
• Its unlocked status is stored both in your saves and backed up on Steam Cloud (unless you’re playing off Steam or have disabled Steam Cloud).
• It’s a file called Progress.dat if you want to back it up manually.
• Once it’s unlocked for everyone it’ll just be in the game, no save file involved, so there isn’t and never will be any way to permanently lose it.

Three things to know about finding it as a random drop:

• It’s a Unique Item, the rarest tier, so it doesn’t come up frequently.
• It’s a Unique Item, so there’s only one per galaxy. If one of your active characters has it, you won’t be finding it in crates in this galaxy, because look, there it is, that person’s got it.
• Any time it’s not owned by one of your active characters, you can find it. Doesn’t matter how/why/when it was lost. Doesn’t matter if a character retired with it and didn’t pass it on. Doesn’t matter if you blew it up or flung it into space. Honestly it sounds like you’re trying to lose it, but tough, you can’t.

How The Launch Went

Heat Signature has been out for six days, and my God. It has been a storm. The good kind. It took three and a half years and I spent about £200,000 on it, making it probably the biggest risk of my life. And by the time it was done, the chance for any given indie game to succeed had dropped enough that the term for this trend ends in ‘pocalypse’.

I knew I wouldn’t have another Gunpoint-size success – that came out in the sweet spot for indie, when demand was high and supply was low. So my best-case-scenario was to do half as well as Gunpoint did in the same timeframe.

It’s done better than Gunpoint. Not by much, and it’s too soon to know if it’ll have the same long-tail Gunpoint did, but so far it really is a Gunpoint-size success. We hit #1 on Steam on launch day, and stayed in the top 10 for most of the week. Thank you so much to everyone who bought it and spread the word, and to everyone who’s left such lovely reviews. This was a huge gamble and I’m so relieved and grateful and frankly surprised it paid off.

If you haven’t got it yet but plan to, the 10% discount ends tomorrow.

Reception

The other shock is how people are reacting to it. I knew I’d designed a weird thing – it’s like a roguelike but in a persistent world, it’s like Hotline Miami but it’s not about skill, it has a goal but it’s not the point. Whatever you think it is before you play, it’s probably not quite that, and I’ve seen that not-as-expected thing lead to a bad reception for games I love.

That does not seem to have stopped it. Overwhelmingly people get it, and I can use that word now because at time of writing our user reviews are ‘Overwhelmingly Positive (95%)’ on Steam. But more than that, so many people are having the perfect response to it: they’re telling stories. For me a Story Generator is one of the highest goals in game design, it’s the common thread between my love for Deus Ex, Spelunky and Invisible Inc. So it’s wonderful to see Heat Sig is not just generating ones that players enjoy, but ones they’re excited to share. This didn’t happen with Gunpoint – people liked it, but at best they’d share jokes I wrote, not unique experiences they’d had.

If you browse a Twitter search for @HeatSig you’ll see them still pouring out. This one by my friend roBurky is a favourite. Today someone sent us fan art they’d done of their own characters, their own story. That feels like a sign we got something important right.

Which brings us to:

Our First Player Legend Trading Card

We want real player stories to be the legends of Heat Signature’s world, so we’ve been asking you to send us clips of your hijinks and turning the best ones into our Steam Trading Cards. We’re still accepting these on Twitter and haven’t nearly finished selection, but one came in that was such an easy Yes that we made the card right away. I’m posting it now to give you an idea of the glory that awaits you, and what a good entry looks like. To be clear, you just send us the clip (below – put @HeatSig at the end not the start) and say roughly what happened – John does your glamour shot, I give you a nickname and write your story. (I’m a recovering games journalist, let me have this.)

Ferris ‘Swapshot’ Harris

As a ship’s security guard, especially as an armoured elite, you have to be ready for anything. This one saw Ferris Harris coming. He saw an Offworld Angel coming at his ship’s broken window full burn, and even though he knew it couldn’t dock, he was ready for whatever other nonsense they were about to try.

At the moment of impact, Harris hit eject. He threw himself from his pod, through the pressure-retention field, and skidded to a halt directly in front of the guard. The guard didn’t flinch. He fired. And Harris swapped with him.

The guard was not ready for this. He suddenly found himself staring at the blue glow of the forcefield Harris just came through. He couldn’t process the situation fast enough to realise what would happen next: his own bullet hit him in the back of the head. His heavy armour saved him from the lethal impact, but the force was just enough to nudge him one step forwards – into the pressure field.

What we don’t know is if, in the 15 seconds between being flung into the icy void and asphyxiating, he had time to figure out what the hell just happened.

Now

Now I’m in a state of simultaneously needing a) a break, b) to catch up on a backlog of urgent things I let slide during development, and c) to tweak the game in response to feedback. But I’m happy to be doing all that in the aftermath of a success, rather than eg. the shadow of a massive financial disaster. So thank you for 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

We don’t do pre-order bonuses because I don’t want to pressure you to buy before reviews are out. But I am super grateful to those who buy at launch, because our whole future depends on how we do that first week. So we’re doing a few special things to celebrate it and thank those of you who are joining us:

Unique Shipment: The Everything Gun

For the first two weeks, there’s a ship carrying a unique weapon passing through the galaxy. It’s called the Everything Gun, and if you steal it, you’ll also unlock it as a random drop in this and all your future games. More info below.

–

Be One Of Our Trading Cards

Heat Signature is all about the stories that emerge from what you get up to in game, not our pre-written lore. So for Steam Trading Cards, we want them to be about your stories. We want to see GIFs or short videos of crazy situations you’ve got into or clever tricks you’ve discovered, and we’ll turn the best into trading cards with your name on! You’ll have the strange sensation of being traded, sold, and perhaps broken down to make a badge. More info below.

–

Unique Shipment FAQ

How do I find the shipment?
You’ll come across it randomly (about every 30 secs) as you fly around, quite frequently, and you’ll know it by a big golden light flashing on it, like in the video.

Does this mean I have to be online to play?
Haha, God no. It’s a single player game and we’re not assholes. This is just a bit of fun.

What happens if I board the ship but fail?
That’s fine! The ship will still be flying around until the date it’s due to leave, so you’ve got as many chances as you like, with whatever characters you like.

What if I buy the game after the date the shipment leaves?
Same, you won’t get the Everything Gun, and it won’t drop randomly for you.

If miss out, will it ever return?
Yes, though we haven’t planned when exactly.

Is the ship hard?
Nope! See the video.

–

Be On A Trading Card FAQ

What kind of clips are you looking for?

– Clever or ridiculous: my favourite are ‘I was in this impossible situation and here’s the mad thing I tried to solve it’
– Less than 1 minute in length, preferably less than 30 secs.
– GIF, GFY or very short YouTube clip. You can also link to a particular timestamp in a longer YouTube or Twitch vid if you like
– Cut, or link, straight to the good bit, or at most a few seconds before. No lead-in – if it needs that it’s probably not what we’re after.
– Tell us in the Tweet what is happening, as best you can in the character limit.

How do I submit one?

On Twitter! But!

– Do it as a normal tweet, not a reply to us – we’d like people who don’t already follow us to see it. That means don’t start your tweet with @HeatSig.
– Instead, mention @HeatSig at the end! You can say something like “I just did X in @HeatSig [link]” – that way we’ll see it.
– Upload or link your clip, obviously. GIFs uploaded direct to Twitter are the coolest, but I know they’re more hassle to make and if they’re more than a few seconds they won’t fit in Twitter’s 7Mb, so links are fine.

Example:
I just used a Glitchtrap to teleport a body into space and then Swapped with it to escape the ship in @HeatSig https://youtu.be/zGRddCgdKPQ

What’s the deadline?
We’ll start looking at entries September 28th, but we’ll keep accepting them until we have enough that we love!

How will I know if I’m picked?
We’ll reply to you on Twitter.

How will I be credited on the Trading Card?

We’d like to make the title of the card your name, but!
– If you prefer an alias we can do that (caveat below).
– If you’d rather we used the name of the character you were playing at the time we’re very happy do that (we can still credit your real name in the description or not, your choice).
– If we’re using your name or an alias it’ll be subject to our approval: we don’t want anything that is or sounds like a joke name or something that’ll clash with the fiction.
– We can discuss this if you’re picked.

The description on the card will probably be our summary of your cool moment.

How do I capture videos or GIFs?

If your PC has an nVidia card I like nVidia ShadowPlay. It’s included in the GeForce Experience (unfortunately you have to make an nVidia account) and you can set it up to always be recording, then hit a key to have it save the last 5 minutes. Amazingly it seems to have almost no performance impact. That’s what I do.

Otherwise, OBS is your best bet. You’ll want to go to Settings > Broadcast Settings > Mode > File Output Only to make it save to disk instead of streaming live. I think it can do a similar always-recording thing but I haven’t used it for that myself.

For editing, I like Avidemux.

For sharing, I suggest YouTube. In theory it’s possible to upload videos straight to Twitter but it’s never worked for gameplay videos for me.

To make GIFs, first make a video as above, then I recommend GIFCam for capturing the bit you want.

You just watch your video back and put GIFcam on top of it and hit Record. I’d say 16 fps is good enough for this, and you’ll need the file size to be under 7MB to upload it on Twitter, which is the best way.

Failing that, you can upload small videos to GFYCat and it’ll both GIF them and GFY them – GFYs are better quality equivalent of GIFs, but they don’t embed natively in Twitter.

I talked through my thoughts on both intros as I replayed them in the videos here, and I’ll summarise and add some conclusions through the magic of text. Obviously both parts of this post spoil the intros to these games.

Prey

• No intro cut-scene, you’re in control right away.
• Starting in your apartment gives you a safe place to play around, and a few hints at who you are in this world.
• If you’re intrigued, there are e-mails to read for more background, but the game is not held up for this exposition if you don’t want it.
• The mysteries are big, and central to you:
• Who am I in this world?
• What is my brother’s work and what’s my part in it?
• What are these tests for, and why is everyone so surprised when I do the obvious solution?
• For each, you get enough info to speculate but not enough to clear it up, and they’re all intriguing to me.
• The tests are framed as a thing you must do before you can go to space and Talos 1, treating that as an exciting reward. Going to space is exciting, I relate to this motivation. And it makes it cooler to be there, especially as it comes sooner than you’re led to believe.
• Waking up as if the day is repeating raises further intriguing questions about your place in this world – especially when you realise it isn’t.
• Breaking the glass is a great visual reveal: your first dramatic action is also the game’s most dramatic revelation so far.
• Behind the scenes, all the notes, e-mails and environmental storytelling are interesting because they’re about you or people directly related to you, and feed into your many pressing questions about what’s going on.
• I didn’t get to it in the video, but later when you emerge into the lobby, that’s a big, beautiful, visual reveal of a big piece of information – or a satisfying confirmation of what you’ve already twigged through your own investigations.

Sorry the mic gets drowned out in parts.

Mankind Divided

• Non-interactive intro cut scene.
• Starts with a news report about a terrorist incident, layered over footage of unknown men attacking other unknown men. Same incident? Seemingly not. Same men? Maybe. What’s this incident? Don’t know yet. Trying to tell two stories at once, and both are just ‘terrorists do bad things’ so far.
• Long, talky briefing, all tell and no show. We’re going after an arms dealer. He’s selling to some faction. One team is gonna do one thing, I’m gonna… block? An entrance? To keep the Jinn out? Aren’t the Jinn already there? Isn’t that who the deal is with?
• Also interact with some gizmo in some way that’ll save? Our undercover agent? Why, how, which one was he again?
• Long, unusually difficult stretch of gameplay with no further explanation. What I do in the level seems unrelated to what the briefing said: I’m not stopping the Jinn getting in, I’m moving through a level beating them up.
• Peter Serafinowicz and I keep calling each other up to be assholes to each other. I don’t like either of us.
• Get to the deal. Bad guys are there but other bad guys kill them. I must unplug a helicopter!
• I don’t know who the gold mask guys are but it doesn’t seem interesting or important. Some bad guys killed some other bad guys over some weapons. The new ones are mysterious, but to be honest I knew next to nothing about the folks they just killed either. They’re both just violent people who want weapons, that’s all the plot that’s been communicated after about 30 minutes of talking and fighting.
• Long credits sequence of disjointed news reports and symbolic imagery.
• Long conspirator chat that doesn’t clarify anything.
• Game suddenly goes back into intro mode, with a long non-interactive talky sequence arriving in Prague. The game’s biggest twist so far – I’m a double agent! – is never really mentioned, only indirectly implied by the nature of this conversation about Interpol logistics.
• Another inciting incident! An explosion! It doesn’t reveal or relate to anything else so far.
• In the third of three intros, you wake up in your apartment. Some of the augs you didn’t choose are disabled now but some aren’t and you can’t see which ones because that screen is broken – until you go and do a mission that’s hard and annoying without knowing what your augs are.

Lessons:

Start from a place that needs no explaining

MD needs you to understand all the factions and political context of an arms deal, and a double-agent within one of them, to make sense of what you’re being asked to do and why you should care. You can’t really show that, so they just have to talk to you about it for 7 full minutes before you can start playing. The result is I didn’t really follow it and I don’t really care.

When you wake up in your apartment in Prey, all that really needs saying is that you’re going to work for your brother on a space station. The other stuff you don’t know is fun to figure out.

Unanswered questions are not automatically mysteries

Unanswered question: who are the gold mask guys who kill the other terrorists?
Mystery: why am I waking up as if my day is repeating?

The difference is that this mystery is:

• Consequential: it matters a lot what the answer is.
• Personal: the answer will affect my character specifically.
• Hard to answer: there’s no obvious answer that isn’t interesting in itself.

With the gold mask guys, it’s not clear why it’s important who they are, they have no relation to my character yet, and a very likely answer is very boring: they’re just another group of terrorists who want weapons. If they at least didn’t take the weapons, that’d be something to pique some interest – a vendetta? A hit? But still, faction-kills-faction is always gonna struggle to rank on those three points.

Pick a reveal you can show

MD’s intro does have a cool piece of information to reveal, but it comes more than half an hour in, delivered through dialogue, and only implied. You’re a double-agent! Whoa! That makes both you and Interpol more interesting. But I learned that from a loading screen tip, after a long conversation that conveys it so indirectly I didn’t grasp it at all.

Could MD have done their reveal visually? Maybe. If your first mission had been to retrieve some vital drive, you could have a scene like:

MILLER (VO): When you get to Prague bring it straight to my office, Jensen, we can’t take any risks.
JENSEN: Understood.
We see him put the drive in a brown paper bag and leave the train. As soon as he steps onto the platform, he drops it in the trash. He passes a woman sitting at a cafe, touches her table as he squeezes past, and without looking at her:
JENSEN: Package is in, you’ve got 20 minutes.
We stay on Jensen as he blends into the crowd, but can see her get up as she leaves the frame.

There’d still be some Tell before and after the Show, but the reveal itself is a big, dirty betrayal we see with our own eyes.

Prey’s big reveal is that your reality is an artifice and you’re the subject of a test. That’s an easy one to show visually, and they do it with style: you unwittingly shatter the false world’s thin facade with a wrench blow.

Morphblade was heavily inspired by Imbroglio, so I asked Michael Brough’s permission before developing and selling it, and he was kind enough to give his blessing. The core idea that your location determines your weapon is straight from Imbroglio, but along the way I changed pretty much everything else.

So you move around a hexagonal grid slicing, smashing and bursting waves of nasty red bugs. Each hex you move to turns you into a different weapon: on a Blades hex you can kill things to your sides, on an Arrow you can fire yourself through two enemies in a row. And between waves, you choose how to build out the grid to your own design.

If you’re subscribed to the Humble Monthly Bundle (on 3/3/2017), you already have it. If not, grab it from Steam for $5.

Here’s a video that explains it better!

Throw A Rock As Far As You Can

Players: 1+

 
Notes:
Probably best to do this at the lake.
The reeds in the lake serve as good distance marker.
It is interesting to determine the optimal size of a rock for distance.
It is somewhat interesting to determine the optimal throwing angle.
The random nature of available rocks makes true scientific assessments of adjustments in method tricky.
Although Throw A Rock As Far As You Can can be played with others, the true enemy is the prison of your mind.

Catchy Pinecone

Players: 1

 
Notes:
This is easier when your throw is very symmetrical and your two hands can do the same catching action.
It is slightly more interesting to intentionally avoid this.

Super Catchy Pinecone

Players: 2

Catchy Highcone

Players: 2

 
Notes: this is not as good as Super Catchy Pinecone, which is reflected in its name.

Throwy Pinecone

Players: 1+

 
Notes: this is weirdly hard.

Shit Dice Game

Players: 2+

 
Notes: the ‘closest without exceeding’ thing I am half remembering from something else, and it ruins this already fairly weak game.

Dice of Havoc

Players: 2+

 
Notes: the first round of this is the best, before everyone has established how many of what kinds of dice are involved, because no-one has a good ballpark of what the value might be. We guessed in the hundreds and the value was sixty something.

Buoyancy Ball

Players: 1+

 
Notes:
Getting into the balance position seems very hard at first, but can usually be mastered quickly.
If you are light enough for the ball to counteract your water weight, this game may be impossible.
If you want to get technical, as anyone having fun in a pool naturally would, jump height should be measured relative to the person’s standing height, to control for player height.

Super Buoyancy Ball

Players: 2+

Shooty Balloon

Players: 2+

 
Notes: with enough balloons and guns this quickly becomes impossible, but involves so much shooting that it’s hard not to enjoy.

Monsoon Balloon

Players: 2+

 
Notes: this is awesome.

Catch or Die

Players: 2+

 
Notes:
We tried ‘3-2-1-go’ but it doesn’t work well as the thrower does not know in advance when the best time to catch will be. We saw best results from just saying ‘Ready’ shortly before throwing, so the catcher has a rough notion, but still relying on the precise timing of the ‘Catch!’ for success.
I guess there is no special reason this game needs to be in a pool.
If the catch fails, it is not strictly necessary to die, but it is against the spirit of the game to go on with your life.

Armel adds:

Frisball

Players: 2+

Notes:
The building phase of the Frisball itself is underrated, as playing with a carefully made Frisball drastically improves the chance of it not falling apart after even the lightest throw.
Some purists say the real game only begins when someone else asks what the hell everyone is doing and you have to think of a clever explanation.

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.

After the pretty shots, and a warning, I’m also gonna dump the scrawled-over shots I used to solve some of the trickier puzzles, in case that’s interesting. One of the game’s stranger quirks, to me, is that despite having 523 draw-a-line-on-an-iPad puzzles, its interface for doing this is not as good as a standard paint program, so I often fell back on one of those.

Below This Are Images Of Puzzle Solutions, Although Not Necessarily All Correct Ones

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 was hired by a merchant to find him a wife – in the slave markets. Chris chose where that market would be – Bantus, for its name. But on the journey there from Baghdad I encountered a doom-saying prophet, and decided to abduct him. He was the related to a prince, and the ransom really was a princely sum: that’s where it put me on the wealth track, ‘Princely’. When I reached the market, I found the perfect slave for my employer, but also fell in love with her. Since my price for delivering her to the merchant was nothing compared to my ransom riches, we married, and Bantus became our home.

Unfortunately, marriage turns out to be pretty limiting – every time I have an encounter in a city, I have to return home before I can have another. Also, everywhere I go there is a chance my furious merchant employer will catch me. A card I have could rid me of both these problems, should I wish: if I can get to Gaya and roll a 5, I can remove any of my ‘statuses’ – including marriage. Gaya is the other side of the world, though, and I can’t stop in any other cities on the way or I’d have to return home. I set off all the same.

After a long journey, I make it. But I roll a 4: instead of losing my pursuer and getting a divorce, I develop magic powers. As I ponder how to explain this to my wife on the way home, I run into a horrific creature. Since stealth is one of my skills, I hide – but the mere sight of it sends me insane. Insanity means that I cannot choose my response to anything I encounter – I have to pick another player to choose for me. And on my very next turn, the angry merchant catches up to me.

I choose Pip to pick my response, as the player most likely to be nice even when it helps an opponent. She decides that I will bargain with the Merchant. This goes badly: his agents slit my throat and leave me for dead in the desert. But a passing Dervish saves me, and I awake Crippled but with lots of Story Points and the Enduring Hardship skill. This is good because the next thing that happens to me is I get locked in a cave by a ghost, abandoned by my camel, then sucked into a black whirlpool, lose all my possessions, and drift ashore on a barrel at an island on the other side of the world.

Pip won shortly after that, but if the game had carried on I would have arrived back home in a few turns, where my wife and I would try for a baby. There’s a small chance it would be born ugly, which would leave me Grief Stricken, or it would look like the moon, making me Respected. If not, it would just generate Destiny points each time we successfully tried. Which was fine by me, I’d had enough Story.

Thoughts

This was a much better story than I had in my previous half-game of Arabian Nights, and maybe my favourite one I’ve seen in the game so far. So I might try to pick apart why it worked.

1. My quest involved a choice. This is pretty basic and not foreign to other games, board or digital, but it made a good starting point. On my way there I was debating which thing I would do (unrealistically, I was told in advance I would fall in love with this slave), and the surprising windfall I made on the way changed my decision.

2. The consequences of my choice affected everything from then on. I was Married, which radically changes how I’m able to play, and Pursued, which means the possibility of running into the person I screwed over will follow me everywhere.

3. Those consequences took the form of specific people, with whom I had a history. When the merchant caught me, it was completely unlike a random encounter with an angry merchant, and even unlike some other long-acquired Status coming into play. If instead of Pursued I’d been Poisoned, and it had finally kicked in then and Crippled me, that’s a much less interesting story. The drama of the moment was: oh shit, it’s that guy – the one I screwed over for my own personal gain.

4. The consequences became my quest. I did actually get given another formal ‘quest’, but it wasn’t interesting to me. My real mission became to deal with the fallout of what I’d done, and rid myself of the consequences that hounded me. That made it personal and inherently compelling.

5. The relatable nature of the consequences added flavour to my decisions. Imagine if instead of ‘Married’ I’d become ‘Cursed’, with the same rules: can’t go to two cities in a row without returning home first. The rule actually makes more sense as a curse. But my decision to go out and rid myself of it would have been automatic and less interesting: of course you want to lose a curse. But if you call it a Marriage, the fact that it turns out to be drag is kind of funny, my quest to rid myself of it is kind of dickish, I feel conflicted about it, and had I succeeded, that story event would be recognisable to us as a divorce, which has its own set of social connotations.

The game didn’t do a perfect job of capitalising on this. In Arabian Nights, every turn has something absurdly dramatic happen to you, and it often permanently scars you. These disasters-of-the-day felt like they muddied the waters of my otherwise very compelling story, because they were actually more spectacular than my little domestic drama but meant so much less to me. That bit at the end where I “get locked in a cave by a ghost, abandoned by my camel, then sucked into a black whirlpool, lose all my possessions, and drift ashore on a barrel at an island on the other side of the world” – I had trouble remembering that stuff, and might have got it wrong or in the wrong order. It was just a bunch of mad shit that had nothing to do with anything else or each other – my camel abandoned me when I was technically still locked in that cave, and in another situation that could have happened to me even at sea.

I’d like it if these in-between events were relatively minor, and the really impactful stuff was related to your Quest. And if instead of being given a new random quest when you finish the last one, they could have branching ‘sequels’. You’d only need to go a few stages with these, to cover a normal length game – if the sequel to my quest had been ‘get a divorce or have a child’, I would not have managed either by the time our game ended. And if I’d returned the slave to the merchant, perhaps she hates him and escapes, and I have a chance of running into her at each city I visit, and a choice of whether to help hide her or capture her and bring her home.

So that’s why I was replaying the Deus Ex games recently. My conclusions from that combined with two other ideas I’d been having about how to improve ship generation, namely:

1. Getting from the airlock to your objective should involve a series of Gates and Keys. For each locked Gate you encounter, there’s a corresponding Key somewhere in the area you can access, and fighting/hacking/sneaking your way to that is how you progress.

2. Whenever I sketch out what a cool ship interior might look like, I draw it as a series of little bubbles of space, about 3-6 modules each. One might be a long room, another might be a row of rooms, another might just be corridors that connect the rest. I call them Sectors. It feels like these lead to natural/pleasing/readable ship layouts – can I teach the game to build them this way?

And the relevant conclusions from my Deus Ex replay are:

3. The player needs multiple routes to their objective.

4. Those routes must be blocked by different obstacles, which require different methods to get past.

There’s some other stuff, but that’s what’s relevant to ship layout.

The first two are more instinct than rigorous logic: I feel like 1 will make the ships feel more like ‘levels’, and I think that’s more positive than it sounds: right now they feel like random, empty mazes – to use an even less liked term, they don’t feel like ‘content’. And they need to – if each ship isn’t a fun little challenge, the game has nothing at its core.

And 2 is my best guess at how to combat the corresponding visual ‘blah’ factor: they look like random mazes, and I want them to look more designed.

Teaching the computer to think in Sectors

Checking all these boxes is a massively complicated challenge both technically and creatively, so I tried to start as simple as possible. Let’s just have one type of Sector for now: a 3×1 room. Can you build a ship out of these?

The two neat features of my current ship generation algorithm are:

a) The interior layout always fills the whole ship
b) You can always get from every module to every other module

a) would be tricky with only 3×1 sectors, but should be doable with sectors in general – we just let one of the Sector types be a 1×1 module and then any gaps are fillable.

b) sounds tricky, but actually I’m already fulfilling it in the sketches I draw, and the way I draw them is the key to teaching the computer to do it. I start by drawing one Sector, then draw another adjacent to it, then new ones adjacent to those, and so on. If I created a doorway from the existing sector to the new one I’m drawing each time, every sector would have a route back to the start, and therefore every sector has a route to every other.

So after tinkering for a bit, I got the algorithm to do this:

And then this:

Great! They’re not connected yet, and they all tend to point in the same direction, but this is promising. The little 1×1 rooms are spaces where it couldn’t fit a 3×1 sector, in the order that they were laid. It’s definitely possible to do a better job of it than that, but that’s irrelevant – those little pockets look nice, I want them. If they were all clustered in one corner it’d look bad, but randomly dotted around like that is great.

So next, remove that direction bias. It’s happening because the code tries to place the sector lengthwise, and then if it doesn’t fit, goes through each possible rotation in turn. Since it always tries them in the same order, you end up with a lot of lengthwise ones. I tweaked it to try the rotations in a random order, producing this:

Lovely!

Now we need to connect them. As I say, it seems like you could just do this each time you place one: connect it to the old one. It’s a little trickier than it sounds to find the co-ords of the two modules in question (we need to know which modules to link, not just which sectors), but I got something logical working:

I actually don’t know why this works so well. My connect-as-you-go concept assumes that every module is part of some sector, but at this stage those 1×1 bits aren’t part of any sector – they’re just leftovers. I don’t quite have a good enough handle on my own code to tell you how it knows to link those up too, but it does.

So now I need to do some messy replumbing: right now we’re working with a single fixed sector size, but obviously I want a variety of sectors. After some deliberating, I decided to make each Sector type an object – a sort of invisible template the ship can refer to when creating itself. The template for each sector could store what its dimensions are, and what kinds of modules it contains.

Making those is easy, but having the algorithm read them in, rotate them to try 8 different orientations, then actually place them is all rather fiddly. For now I’ve settled on a slightly rigid system, where a Sector can either be a ‘Big Room’ or ‘Corridors’ or ‘Small Rooms’, but it can’t specify an arrangement of multiple elements – like one small room surrounded by corridors, for example. Supporting that would add a lot of complexity, so I decided to leave it until I’m really sure I need it.

So, with the new Sector templates in – just 3×1 and 1×1 for now – how does it look?

Oh, it’s broken. Parts of this layout are OK, but it fails both our conditions: doesn’t fill the ship, and the bits it does fill aren’t all connected to each other. Doesn’t make sense as a ship.

This, and a similar glitch, took me about a day to solve. I kept thinking there was some flaw in the way I’d implemented ‘connect as you go’ that could lead to a Sector being created but not connected to the previous one. As it turned out, the reason I couldn’t find a flaw in this code is that it was exactly right. I just had two very stupid, unrelated mistakes that both caused very similar symptoms, and kept looking like one thing.

a) I’d created a 3×1 ‘Corridor’ sector, but forgot to tell each module of it to link to the next – it wasn’t internally connected. The connections to other sectors were fine.

b) I’d set the dimension values of the 1×1 Sector to 1×3. This is incorrect. Maths tells us that 1 = 1 and not 3, so that 3 should be 1, so that it reads ‘1×1’, because one is not three, in fact it is less. Stop me if I’m going too fast.

Fixed these, and blam:

Blam is the sound of a ship being generated with a connected and spanning interior graph:

This is looking great to me, especially on smaller ships. So, on to Gates and Keys!

On, indeed, to Gates and Keys

Again I wanted to start as simple as possible. Some ships will play host to a particular mission with a specific objective, but for any that don’t, we should default to treating the ship’s cockpit as the ‘objective’ – it’s the thing they’d most want to protect.

Because we generate as we go, we don’t actually know how far along your path to the objective we are when we place a Sector. But we can fudge it: if the next sector is physically closer to the objective’s location, then we increase the security level of the door we’re placing between them. And to ensure you can open it, we put a keycard of the same level somewhere in the previous sector. Again, for now, I went ultra-basic: it dumps it right in front of the door.

This works! You can’t see them well, but those black square outlines in some modules are where keycards are placed, and some are placed less gracefully in corridors and stuff. The level it generates is always completable, though obviously not challenging yet.

So we need to move those keycards to more secluded locations, so that we can put obstacles between the player and them: enemies, security, etc. But before I put a lot of work into ensuring that can happen, I wanted to look into a possible worry with the kind of layout this is generating. And since this has taken a while to write up already, I’ll save that for the next post!

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.

A lot of the time, MGS V is just a very good stealth game. You have lots of tools to distract, evade or take down your enemies, and they’re all very satisfying to use – just like Deus Ex 3. Its levels are encampments dotted seamlessly around a huge open world – just like Far Cries 2-4. Its layered systems turn failures into new challenges rather than end points – just like Invisible Inc. But none of those things are new, and MGS V sometimes feels like something that is.

Those times, for me, are not during some particularly great mission, or when some unexpected chain of events creates a cool story. They’re after: when the guards lie sleeping or dead, the cargo containers are ballooning skyward, I’m scampering out with the target (too weak to be similarly ballooned) slung over my shoulders.

Because what happens next is both incredibly mundane and incredibly unusual. I heave them into the back seat of a 4×4, get in the driver’s seat, and drive off. I bring up the map and tell my chopper pilot where to pick us up. Then I drive them there. Then I park, haul them out, carry them to the chopper, and put them in. Then the chopper flies off. Then I go back to my car, look at my map, and figure out where I’m going next.

None of these things are thrilling or even challenging, they’re just the things you would need to do if this was your mission and these were you tools. And that makes you feel more like an actual field operative than any other game I can think of. Instead of cutting to the next exciting mission or cinematic, it leaves you to deal with the basic mechanical business of getting things done and moving on. It’s more than feeling like the star of an action movie – it’s feeling like this is your job.

As I’ve started to figure out that this is what’s special about the game, I’ve also figured out how to maximise the feeling. Because it doesn’t always do this: main missions often do cut away, or force you to return to base. So now I drop myself at sunset, in whichever country has the most side-ops scattered across its map, climb in my car, and work through the night.

That means getting from each mission area to the next, sometimes through 3 kilometers of twisting, guard-infested roads. I mostly drive, cutting my headlights and offroading dangerously to skirt watchtowers, and enjoying the empty, dark stretches between. Other times I ride, hanging off the saddle to hide behind my horse as we trot past patrols in the shadows. And for the longest journeys, I sneak into an outpost’s delivery point, climb inside a stamped addressed cardboard box, and post myself to the next town.

That part is probably not a lot like a real commando’s job.

But it’s these between moments, staying in the world between objectives, that makes it work. It has all the appeal of methodically taking down the outposts in Far Cry 3 and 4, but the added sense of purpose from the side-ops makes a huge difference to the fantasy you’re living: you’re an agent with a job to do rather than a madman with a murderous hobby.

In fact you’ve got lots of jobs to do, and the more of them you do in one continuous marathon of espionage, the deeper you can sink into this other life. Last night I tranqed a whole airport to find a crucial blueprint, interrogated a lookout to locate a prisoner, incapacitated four heavy infantry with my bare hands, and stole a tank from under the noses of its sniper guardians. By the time I drove out to a remote shack to capture an interpreter, the sun was coming up. I tranqed him and one of his bodyguards at range, then snuck up on the last one and slammed him into the shack. For no practical reason, I loaded the target and the better of the two bodyguards into my jeep and drove to the nearest pickup point… then this happened:

Turns out the game sometimes auto-extracts people when you leave the mission area. Which is one of many signs that this sense of doing all the between bits yourself wasn’t a particularly high priority for the developers. But when you play that way, and when they let you, it’s really something special.

Almost every game that lets you take people out lethally or non-lethally presents it as a choice between pragmatism and ethics: killing is easier, but tranqing is nicer. That’s true in MGS V too, but it adds something else to that choice that solves a problem I’ve had with these games for ages.

The ability to play a game nonlethally lets you adopt that policy as your character’s moral code, and that makes your game persona a little more sympathetic. By the same token, it also demonises the act of killing: it’s no longer possible to claim it’s necessary, because you often have the developer’s word that it isn’t. To kill is now either the act of a sadistic monster, or an unsatisfying compromise made because you either couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered to pull off the non-lethal option.

So the ways of playing these games – including my own – boil down to:

1. Do everything nonlethally forever, no matter how difficult or boring it becomes.
2. Kill everyone, playing the role of a psychotic monster who usually clashes with both the story and your own ability to embody your character.
3. Stop caring about the distinction and do a messy mix of both, as your mood or the situation dictates.

It’s probably clear from the way I’ve phrased these that I don’t find any of them entirely satisfactory. Very few games make the purely nonlethal option inherently fun – the faint satisfaction of knowing you’ve done the ‘right’ thing is balanced against how boring and time consuming the methods were, how many cool tools you weren’t allowed to use, and how utterly fake the whole charade is – you’re usually only doing it this way because you have divine knowledge that the world has been architected to make it possible.

Mechanically, I like the third option. I like having a lot of tools. Option 1 makes lethal tools forbidden, and option 2 makes nonlethal tools pointless. But by itself, option 3 doesn’t give you any particular reason to use both sets, so it can feel kind of empty.

That’s the thing MGS V fixes. With an early upgrade to your binoculars, you can scan every soldier to see how good they are at a variety of different tasks. If they’re any good, it’s worth taking them out non-lethally, because you can then tie a balloon to them, send them up into the sky, have your colleagues collect them with a passing plane, fly them to the Seychelles, drop them off at an offshore base, persuade them to change sides to your private mercenary corp, then put them in full-time, devotedly loyal employment in the division of your base that their talents best suit.

I’ll be honest, this was not my next guess for how games would ultimately fix this problem.

But it does work.

You have to disengage with the moral aspect completely, of course – you’re now operating in a pretty grotesque fantasy land where no-one has a will that can’t be bent to serve your own. You can shoot a person 7 times in the knees and then make them work in your box-delivery department forever, and they will salute you on sight and thank you if you punch them. You could read it as parody or an ugly dominance fantasy, but I suspect it’s just where a series of cool systems ideas led them, and they didn’t much mind that it was narratively mad. Luckily, neither do I.

It works because there’s now a strong practical reason to use nonlethal tactics for some guards, and lethal for others. This guard has an A in Engineering and this one has a B in Intel, so I’ll tranq those two and kill the rest. You don’t have to kill the rest, but as in most games it’s easier: you have more powerful, more varied, and more satisfying tools to do it, and it eliminates them from the complicated patrol equation: people don’t get up from death.

Pure lethal and pure nonlethal are still options, but by fleshing out option 3 with interesting systems, it makes it clear how much less interesting they really are. Fine for an experimental or role-playing playthrough, but monotonous compared to the juice you can get out of that choice if you let it vary situationally.

In other games, the “kill or tranq?” question asks you to pick one of two possible playthroughs at the start, and it takes a dozen hours to finish enunciating your answer. MGS V lets it become an ongoing debate.

If you have keen eyesight, you might have noticed that the person in my screenshots is not straggly-bearded horned male Venom Boss Big Punished Ahab Snake. She’s Amber Fox, a low level support officer I think I extracted on an early mission [update: Andy tells me you get her by importing your Ground Zeroes save], along with another Fox with the same tattoo who might be her brother. She’s not a story character, just one of hundreds of recruits I have milling around my base.

Once you unlock the ‘combat’ bit of your base, you can choose to play as anyone you station there instead of Big Venom Punished Ahab. This is bizarre for many reasons.

1. It must have been a huge amount of work to support something that there is little practical reason to do. The recruits mostly differ from Ahab Venom by lacking some of his abilities, and their own special traits often just restore one of them. Only two of my hundreds of recruits are women, and yet they’ve modeled a female-tailored version of every outfit Punished Big can wear. She has her own voice acting for common commands interactions like interrogating guards, and presumably the male recruits do too.
2. And yet, it’s also a little shoddy. Not in any ways that matter at all to me, but it creates all these little contradictions and narrative ‘bugs’ that you would think a highly polished game like this would hate to ship. Everyone keeps calling you by the wrong name, some cut-scenes show your character but people treat you like Boss, others replace you with Boss, others won’t trigger unless you switch back to Boss. None of that is a problem for me, I’m just really surprised they were OK with it.
3. And it seems totally at odds with a game that often seems determined to tell a very specific character-driven story. It has a long and expensively produced intro to set up who you are in this world, and why you’re doing this, then also puts in loads of work to let you not be that person.

Anyway, I’m absolutely delighted that they did it despite all of this. I hate playing as grizzled old men in general, and the ridiculous miscellany of costume-shop accessories on Snake Boss’s face made it hard to forget: “You’re playing Hideo Kojima’s alternatingly extremely silly and extremely self-serious fantasy.”

Amber Fox just looks cool. It’s nice to be a woman in what is not only typically a man’s role, but in this case actually is a specific man’s role. I like when people call her Boss. I ret-con that she really was just some random recruit, given one field op to test out the new combat unit idea, and pulled it off so spectacularly that she became the organisation’s primary operative, and now everyone’s just kind of in awe of this very sensible, very practical, mysterious woman who just showed up and killed it. It made stories like this one all the more exciting for me, because I wasn’t playing as some superhuman legend, I was just a new recruit who had to nearly break herself to get the job done, and came out bleeding and gasping but triumphant.

This was the last game I expected to let me write my own story.

Being an outsider to the Metal Gear series, I was only cautiously optimistic about V. All I heard about the last one was that it had 90-minute cut-scenes. I watched enough of one of them on YouTube to determine that it was… not my cup of tea. Of V, I’d seen some fun stuff in videos, but I was half-assuming the story would barge in and ruin it.

Well, the story does barge in. But only for the intro and a few brief intrusions, spread out over the vast, ridiculous amount of time I’ve played the game for so far – at least thirty hours, I think. That’s a ridiculously tiny fraction, and the rest is extraordinarily good.

So many things about it are surprising or different or interesting and I want to write about all of them. So I think I’ll do that, one post at a time, starting with this:

MGS V is extremely forgiving

Outside of those few scripted intrusions, I’ve only actually died a handful of times in those thirty hours. The game has an enormous failure spectrum – I mentioned these in respect to Invisible Inc, but here’s the gist:

MGS V has most of the stealth genre’s most generous failsafes, plus an incredibly generous one of its own inserted at the crucial moment – Reflex Mode. The result is something like this:

• If a guard sees you, you get an ‘awareness’ indicator showing you where they are. If you reduce your visibility, that goes away completely and the guard won’t even investigate.
• If you stay in sight and/or make yourself more visible, the guard will very, very slowly come over to investigate. Even then, this alerts no-one else and doesn’t count against you in any score or performance metrics, and you don’t even have to move: going prone and using a ‘hide’ button makes you damn nearly invisible – I’ve had a guard stood 2 feet from me shining a torch directly on my body without spotting me in that mode.
• If they DO definitively see you and recognise you as an intruder, Reflex Mode puts the world in slowmo and you get a huuuuuuuuge amount of time to do something about it. Your view is snapped to the person who saw you, the yelp of recognition they make seems to be inaudible to other guards, and if you shoot them in the head with a quiet weapon (you start with two) in this ample time, no alert is triggered.
• If you fail to take them out in this time, or someone else sees them die, the surviving guard will yell. Others in earshot will be alerted, but no-one beyond that at this stage. Your default weapon is rapid fire, accurate and silenced, and if you can take out everyone who heard before they have a chance to radio, the alert is contained.
• Even if you do give them time to radio, it will do nothing if you’ve already taken out their communications equipment.
• Even if they manage to radio for reinforcements, it’s easy to run away and they won’t give chase.
• Even if you don’t run away, it’s quite possible to kill everyone without taking a hit.
• Even if you take a hit, your health regenerates for free.
• Even if you get hit a LOT – even if you get hit by a mortar – you only go into a ‘wounded’ state that restricts your movement but still gives you a chance to take everyone out.
• If you fuck that up, yeah, you’re dead.

Listing it like that makes it sound absurd, but I really think this is one of the main reasons I and so many people end up having such a great time. Moving to these messier states creates stories of panic and improvisation, instead of frustrating game-overs. It’s the same reason it works in Invisible Inc:

2 minutes left, sprinted to put myself between two tanks and a guard-infested checkpoint they were trying to reach. De-roaded one, nearly killed by the other. Scrambled to cover, lay on my back headshotting 8 incoming dudes through choking smoke, then, close to death, pulse pounding and soaked in my own blood, crawled back out into the crashed tank’s line of fire to finish it off with the last of my rockets – and destroyed it with 15 seconds to spare.

Spent them lying in the grass, praying no-one else would find me, listening to my character gasp for air through her own blood.

Game’s grade for my performance: C
Video: came out with a black screen throughout

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.

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.

I didn’t like it at first but then I did. A few people have asked if I’ll do a Let’s Play: I tried, but as you’ll hear, level 1 did not go well and took a very long time, so I stopped. Steve Gaynor’s playthrough here is much how mine went: we both tried the same thing and had the same problems.

The Switch

Side-on platformer style view, very stark orange and black art style, rusty, nasty.

Your character and one other are slave labourers in a big, dilapidated factory of extremely dangerous machines. In a short, wordless intro:

Scene 1

• A machine malfunctions and cuts your arm off
• The guards ignore you
• Your partner loses it and attacks a guard
• The guard beats them
• You try to help but collapse
• You’re both overpowered dragged away
• Your partner grabs something from the production line just as we fade to black

Scene 2

• The guard drags you both, throws you into a chamber with blackened walls
• Your stump is bandaged in a shirt but still bleeding
• Just before your cell door closes, your partner throws something into your cell that clatters on the floor.
• Your partner is thrown into a similar chamber opposite
• When the guard walks away, there’s a small green light stuck to him
• Faintly visible gas floods your partner’s cell with a hiss
• It suddenly ignites in dazzling orange flame, then fades: nothing is left
• When you pick up the object you get a prompt: “Right mouse: Switch”
• The same gas floods into your cell
• If you flick the switch, you and the guard instantly switch places: he’s incinerated and you’re free
• If you don’t it is a short game

The Game

The Switch is a slim metal cylinder with a simple lever switch on the end. It now has something attached to the bottom: the Tag, a thin disc with the feel of a fridge magnet.

Left click throws the Tag. It sticks to whatever it hits, but the Switch only works if it’s stuck to a human: the things it switches need to be similar in mass and composition. It’s light enough that they won’t feel anything if they didn’t see you throw it, and you don’t have to be nearby or in line of sight to press Right mouse and switch places with them.

Once the tag is thrown, Left clicking again teleports it back to you without switching.

So it’s a stealth puzzle game about quietly tagging enemies, then purposefully throwing or trapping yourself into fatal hazards and switching at the last minute. The factory is a complete deathtrap: you’ll stand under smashing pistons, throw yourself into grinding gears, jump onto rusty sawblades, lock yourself in trash compactors, drop onto conveyor belts too fast to run against, walk off sheer drops, and dive onto safety railings have decayed into javelins of rust. The idea is invert the idea of avoiding death, and to make you feel a little of what you’re about to inflict: that physical wince just before you die of something unsettlingly physical in a videogame, like a long fall or heavy object.

Your task is to escape, obviously, and along the way you’ll mostly be using the Switch to get guards out of your way. In some situations, though, guards can also double as ‘lives’: tag one before attempting to navigate a tricky part of the factory, and if you slip and fail you can Switch to put him in your place and get another go. In those situations and others, killing isn’t strictly necessary, and if you’re trying to minimise it you’ll have to decide whether you want to set up that murderous contingency plan in case it comes to it.

Obviously there are thematic similarities with The Swapper, but both the tech and usage are different: that game was about cloning yourself, the Switch is just a teleporter. It’s about doing horribly suicidal and reckless things to yourself and using your unconventional weapon to transfer the consequences to others. Which is also why it needs a nasty intro and a persistent reminder of your desperate circumstances.

Previously: I came up with ideas for 8 previous game jams, 3 of which I actually made – Scanno Domini, Jake and the Infinite Jerkbots, and Floating Point. You can read about them all and play those three by browsing the game jams tag here.

It’s been fantastic. GDC has been the highlight of my year in each of the three years I’ve been. This was my first Rezzed, but it was much like the brilliant EGX with better food, more people I knew, and no queues for the bathroom.

For most of the year I like my peaceful, productive life at home, but for these few weeks I love switching into the opposite mode, and getting all the benefits of that in rapid succession. That’s why I’ve been chaining these events together: preparing and organising is the only part I don’t like, so any time I can do two for the price of one is great.

That introvert/extrovert flip is also a big jolt to the system, combined with a massive influx of fresh perspectives from a diverse crowd of smart people, combined with a deluge of raw feedback and reactions to the current state of my game, combined with a big break from my usual working schedule, combined with lots of new sights and sounds and games and experiences and inspiration.

I might do a separate post about what I learned about Heat Signature from the reaction it got, but in this one I’ll just boil down two things this trip clarified about life and people and events like these.

This was in my room at the hostel.

Acceptance is like armour

The way confidence and success feed off each other is deeply unfair. “Have confidence!” “Believe in yourself!” and “Fake it till you make it!” are all bits of advice that can work for some people in some situations. But a lot of the time, you might as well be saying “Have gills!” “Believe you have gills!” “Fake having gills until you have gills!”

People say those things because confidence, unlike gills, can quickly lead to the kind of success or approval that gives you more. That’s the part I became familiar with on this trip: the more people heap disproportionate praise on Gunpoint, the easier it gets to talk to people – even the ones who aren’t praising it and have no idea what it is. That acceptance gives you one point of armour, and you can take that armour into any situation you like.

Once you get one point of acceptance-armour, it’s not that scary to talk to someone who might hit you with rejection. You know it doesn’t mean you’re worthless, because you have this piece of acceptance that says you’re not. And of course, most of the people you were scared of talking to actually have no intention of doing that, so they usually give you another point of acceptance-armour and then you can talk to basically anyone. But when you have zero, that fear is so much harder to shake.

I don’t have One Weird Trick for breaking out of that state, because I stumbled out of it largely by luck, and my brain is so self-defeating that it sometimes tries to crawl back in there if I go too long without even more of that luck. But I can tell you what I did try to maximise my chances of getting off the confidence floor.

Your brain is great at remembering criticism and great and forgetting praise, so I tried to reverse that bias. I wrote down anything nice anyone said about my work in a sort of Praise File, to refer back to when I was losing faith. I didn’t keep a file of criticisms, and as hard as it tries, the brain can’t remember those forever.

So was this.

Praise feels different in real life

Getting ten positive internet comments about your thing is radically different to having ten different people come up to you and say they loved it. The first feels good, but the second is extraordinary – it’s the moment the most childish part of your brain is dreaming of while you’re fretting over all the little dilemmas and struggles you had making it.

“Maybe if I just get through this and do it right, there’ll be… like… some kind of party? And everyone will tell me how great I am? And there’s cake?” That’s dumb, that brain-part is an idiot. But if you’re lucky enough that your thing catches on, and you go to these events, that can actually happen.

I was going to say “except for the cake”, but then I remembered that on the last day of Rezzed someone actually did produce a giant box of cupcakes and gave me one. This is ridiculous.

Bear this in mind if you ever get a nice comment on the internet. Try to imagine someone coming up to you and saying it in real life, how nice that is, and how many more people must be feeling the same thing without explicitly saying it.

That’s it, thanks so much to everyone who made this a fantastic trip. Here are some more pics from it:

From the plane, on approach to SFO.

Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco.

Bananas Foster is/are a hell of a thing.

Old Fashioneds (Olds Fashioned?) at the Hog & Rocks, a discovery of my friends at Asymmetric.

Introversion improvise a way to adjust the projector in our room at Rezzed.

Gunpoint/Heat Signature artist John Roberts supervises our booth while I nip out for lunch.

I’d forgotten how amazing the first 10-20 hours with an Elder Scrolls game are. Such a sense of adventure, freedom, a beautiful country to explore, a personal journey where the little stories you encounter get tangled up in the systems of the world as they react to your reckless decisions. Waiting for a storm to pass. Holing up in a shack for the night. Finding something amazing.

That build skipped the intro, and I start by turning 180 in an attempt to explore off the beaten track – it’s funny to realise the walled-off town I ‘discover’ up the hill was Helgen.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim preview – PC Gamer

I have thoughts on why the combat still feels murky after all this time, my experience switching from Casual to Hard, my lesbian Inquisitor trying to seduce the only two straight women in Thedas, the difference between this and Mass Effect, and the one great thing that’s the same.

As before it’s Tom Senior you hear first, I’m the one who pipes up at 44m55s.

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:

Don’t let me forget that I plan to do a ‘How to fix Far Cry 4’ type post at some point, too.

One year on, and the latest video shows how far it’s come.

But I have to keep reminding myself it hasn’t been a year of work yet. When I started it, I was still torn between this and another project, a heist game using grappling hooks. In the year since I started Heat Signature, I have also:

• Worked for about two months on that grappling hook heist game. The last two dev log videos I made for that show what I did on it in that time.
• Took the grappling hook tech from the heist game and spent five weeks to make Floating Point, a peaceful game about swinging around elegantly, released on Steam for free.
• Went to the BAFTA Games Awards: for Gunpoint, lost to some shitty car game.
• Collaborated with Natalie Hanke and Jukio Kallio to make Distance, a short visual story piece for the Space Cowboy Game Jam.
• Collaborated with Liselore Goedhart to make SimAntics: a two-player competitive anteater licking simulator, where you steer a prehensile tongue with the mouse to lick up more ants than your opponent. Filmed and released as part of the Super Game Jam documentary.
• In my ‘spare time’, knocked together a basic RTS-style framework for possible use in a civ-building game I’d like to try some day.
• Wrote and successfully pitched an hour-long talk for next year’s GDC.

And I’ve also done a bunch of Heat Signature related stuff other than the actual development:

• IndieCade East, New York: to show the heist game and Heat Sig.
• GDC, San Francisco: to show Heat Sig.
• Fantastic Arcade, Austin: to show and give a presentation of Heat Sig.
• EGX, London: to show Heat Sig.
• Made a bunch of videos about it.
• Spent more than a month finding and reviewing applicants for the artist and composer positions on the team, and eventually making a decision on both.
• With John, built a nice website for it.

I’m listing all this mostly for myself, because I’m always haunted by this feeling that I’m not being productive enough, that I should have done more. When I write it all down, though, it seems like a lot.

I intentionally let myself wander a bit after Gunpoint, since that had taken three years of sustained focus to finish. And Heat Signature itself is actually the result of that: I let myself get distracted from the heist game to try it out, and it turned into something both cooler and easier to make.

When I started working on it properly, I had a time frame in mind. But right away, it started to stress me out. The scope would change or my ETAs for individual features would be off, and I’d start to feel like I was failing even though nothing had gone wrong. So now I don’t even have an internal release date, it’s just a thing I’ll work on as efficiently as possible, at least until it feels ready, and then until I feel like moving on. I’m having a great time doing that, so I’m not going to let anything spoil it.

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: