Gunpoint Exclusive Edition Owners Now Have A Two-Week Alpha Of Heat Signature

If you own the Exclusive Edition of Gunpoint on Steam – or the Exclusive Extras as DLC – you now have access to a Windows-only, very rough and time-limited alpha test version of Heat Signature!

If you don’t, though, I don’t recommend buying it just to get in on this! This is very unfinished, very unoptimised, and time-limited: I will close it down in two weeks and then you won’t have it anymore. It exists purely to help me find problems with the game and get people’s thoughts, not necessarily to give them the best experience or one I’d charge for individually. Continued

Vapour Trail Experiments

It’s Sunday, so I’m allowed to work on things that aren’t important. This started as a test for an idea I have of how to create a ‘wake’ that expands behind you, something I ultimately want to use to cut through some layers of cloud as you fly. But I accidentally made a cooler version of the existing contrail, so I tried randomly colouring it, and here we are.

Not sure what to do with it from here. I like everything about it except the end, it has what I call ‘fat tail’ problem: no matter how gently I tell the alpha to fade out, the final, big chunk of vapour always looks like it ends rather suddenly, like your ship just has this big fat tail following it.

I like the idea that breacher ships of different factions would have different contrail colours, though. And I think engine upgrades will probably affect this too.

Here are a million shots: Continued

Spot The Bug

My current task in Heat Signature is to tweak the airlocks so there’s room to put a closed door between you and the rest of the ship when you board. That way, you have as much time as you like to plan out your attack and wait till the guards are where you want them.

I needed the airlocks to clear 4 squares on the ship’s collision grid, to give you room to stand. But I hit a weird bug: some of them, maybe a third, did not clear. I checked the ‘clear grid’ function was executing on each of them, but still some of them ended up blocked. Continued

Eurogamer Play Heat Signature

I let Eurogamer play Heat Signature and sat in the back seat to passive-aggressively criticise! It went great!

This is both a slightly better looking build than the last trailer, and a longer vid – shows the whole disrupt/isolate/capture cycle.

What It’s Like Showing Heat Signature To The Press

I used to be press! Now I’m a developer. So I’m showing them my game, and trying to figure out if what I’m showing is exciting. Here’s what that’s like. I would like it known that I really am saying ‘Alec’ when I refer to Alec but it sounds a bit like Alex because of a mouth thing. A similar mouth thing to when I appear to say ‘intereted’ right after.

New Heat Signature Video: Galaxies, Suction And Wrench-Throwing

As always, follow it on Twitter or sign up to be told when it’s out, or ready for testing, here.

I also made a short montage of all the ways I fucked this video up in previous takes: Continued

Why I’m Letting Heat Signature Get Bigger

Here is a video blog about that, and how I’m changing how I think about working on it.

Galactic Zoom In Heat Signature

Heat Signature’s universe has been infinite since day 2 or 3, but until now you’ve only been able to see a meager 35,000 x 35,000 pixels of it at once. I knew at some point I wanted to let you see an overview of the part of space you’re in, a collection of vast gas clouds that I think is going to be called The Grove. But I wasn’t sure if this would have be a map mode or if we could zoom smoothly from one to the other. I’m still not sure if the latter is viable performance-wise, or even if it’s the right way to go, and the galaxy is ugly at the moment, but for what it’s worth I made it and here it is: (CPU warning, mega-GFY!) Continued

From Gunpoint To Heat Signature: A Narrative Journey

Many of you have been asking how the story of Heat Signature follows on from Gunpoint. We can now explain.

Detpacks

Today I added Detpacks to Heat Signature. Here is a Detpack:

Continued

How To Find An Object’s DrawGUI Co-ordinates In Game Maker Studio With A Rotated View

Update: This was originally a post to ask for help, but now that we’ve solved the problem I’m posting the solution for anyone who needs it, and changing the title to make it more searchable. It’s a function that lets you find where an object appears on-screen, so that you can use the DrawGUI event to draw interface elements over it or annotate it, useful for tutorials. Original post follows, updates and working script at the end! Continued

Heat Signature, One Year Later

I started making Heat Signature on December the 1st, 2013. I know this because I released the first video of it two days later. Continued

New Heat Signature Trailer Shows Art, Music, Wrenches And Guns

Heat Signature Screenshots

Here’s what Heat Signature looks like these days! The new art is by the multi-talented John Roberts, who also did art for our last game, Gunpoint. Next week I’ll put up a trailer to show all this in action. For those who haven’t seen it moving yet, there’s no break between inside and out: you zoom smoothly from the scale of these interior shots to the big-scale space battles.

When I have new shots in future, I’ll add them on this page and take down any outdated ones. I’ll keep the first three as reasonably representative ones, then below them it’ll be newest-first. Everyone has permission to use these shots in any articles or videos, print or online, as long as you make it clear what game they’re from. Continued

Heat Signature Trailers

I think if I embed a YouTube playlist, I can make this post always show the latest Heat Signature trailer even when I change it in future.