TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Hey, You’re Not Chell

Portal 2’s beautiful and fun level editor just came out, and already there are 1,787 player-built puzzles for it, and already the simple rating system has lifted some incredible ones to the top. My favourite is Gate: very focused, only a few elements, but genuinely baffling for just the right amount of time. And unlike a few of the other tricky ones I’ve tried, you have to ‘get it’ to solve it, giving rise to the familiar “I’m a genius!” moment.

Let PCG’s Chris Thursten talk you through how to make a needlessly complex level for it.

Heroes Season Two

The trailer is on YouTube, and it doesn’t look very good, but! I’d like anyone else who’s watched the first two seasons of Alias to say it with me, when the moment arrives:

Sark!

Alias became terrible after – perhaps during – season two, but it was so much fun until then. Heroes has already borrowed one of its best actors, and shown that he was responsible for most of his character’s likeability. Now it’s got the other. I only hope he’s smarmily yet competently evil, and crops up unexpectedly in almost every storyline – it’d be just like old times.

Sark!

The rest is just depressing. Sylar’s still in it. I don’t even trust them with the guts to keep the Petrelli’s out. Last season’s finale was riddled with so many tedious tropes that I have no faith left in their ability to excite me. Entertain, probably.

Heroes Of Medicine

I usually play a class to whom Medics are little more than helpless witnesses to my crimes. But now that Valve have successfully bribed me to play more Heavy, I have a newfound appreciation for the power of a good physician. I’m not a talented Heavy, but any time one of these chaps stuck with me, it was over for the entire enemy team. We never lost.

So while it is not in a simple Heavy’s power to grant a medical degree, I can thank you by taking screenshots that make you look awesome. And with a hearty YOU DID WELL.

[PCG] Tim

Tim is a Kritzer, and responsible for my first proper Uberkritz combo. We only killed a few people during it, we three, but the sight so terrified the enemy that they huddled into their spawn room. A further five of them were cut down there after the charge wore off, thanks largely to the high crit chance our recent massacre had given Natascha.

[PCG] Graham

Graham and I stormed back and forth so rapidly on Badwater Basin one lunchtime that the 12-strong enemy team seemed to be immaterial. For one round we never left the cart or died, breaking my all-time points record and dominating many.

roBurky

roBurky is a combat Medic, which means if he ever does run off to pursue some meandering foe, you can relax in the knowledge that he can work a dark magic with that Blutsauger and resolve the situation faster than if you gave waddling chase yourself.

Donkey For President

I don’t know who this chap is, but he chose to stick with me for more than one round. This tends to be the secret to Heavy-Medic dominance – waiting for each other when you spawn. If your respawn cycles get out of sync, it’s rare to reunite because of the abundance of needy injured and juicy minigun targets scattered all over the map. WE MAKE GOOD TEAM.

Lack_26

James regular Lack is also ein Kritzkrieger, a profession that’s become markedly more potent since the charge time was significantly reduced. I was spewing sparkleslugs frequently enough that Supreme Soviet, for being Ubered 50 times, was one of the first Heavy achievements I earned.

My Sandvich

My chewy friend doesn’t really help me survive situations that would otherwise kill me, he just saves the time it takes to trundle over to a medkit or wait for a small one to respawn. It probably annoys Medics, but I’ve found it effective to chomp him while being healed if I’m seriously injured, since the restoration rate stacks with the relatively slow post-damage heal of the Medigun.

His main virtue, however, is that he replaces the shotgun. Technically this is a disadvantage, but it makes it so abundantly clear that the class should never have had one in the first place. Valve were so nearly fearless in making the classes utterly distinct, common shotguns were their only timid choice. The Heavy’s much more interesting to play when he has no instant-fire mid-range weaponry, and only his fists as a backup weapon.

Post-script: I think I may have fixed the CPU overload errors that have been screwing with James intermittently recently, with a little help from Bluehost. If they’ve now stopped, the problem was the spectacular size of my comment spam folder. If you have a notion of how much disk space raw text takes up, you’ll understand my full meaning when I say that Spam Karma had caught seventy megabytes of robo-comments. I hadn’t told it to delete old ones entirely, so every time any php script queries the comments SQL table – well, my logs state that one query yesterday afternoon took 1,014 seconds to complete.

If they persist: fuck.

HERO CLOSET

After a Tank fight, on Expert. This was pretty much the last time we saw each other alive.

Update: title changed because it turns out Craig picked exactly the same quote for the strapline in his review. This post is now named in honour of the dark room we hid in for ten minutes last night to survive the finalé of Blood Harvest.

The first version of Left 4 Dead that isn’t pointlessly and inexplicably butchered is in the wild now, and by in I mean on and by the wild I mean Steam. If you’ve had the chance to play through to a finalé and you hadn’t before, I hope you see why I thought it bizarre that they would leave that out of a demo. If they feared that giving away something substantial for free might harm sales rather than drive them, I would cough in such a way that the sound could be construed as the words ‘Counter’ and ‘Strike’ one after the other.

The downside for me as a player is that half the public games I’ve joined are trying to play on Expert, emboldened by the trivial ease of the demo on Normal. This is folly.

Tensions rise on the PC Gamer quartet when it becomes clear that most of us are either
stupid or crazy.

The finalés are really something. The reason I think they’re the point of Left 4 Dead is that they showcase its most surprising and profound accomplishment: difficulty. Sin Episodes, like many before it, focused entirely on that problem. It not only failed, it did so with such aplomb that the players’ primary complaint about the game was the wonky difficulty.

Left 4 Dead’s campaigns, on Normal, always run to the final map, and are always close. In our game at lunch, Tim was being so utterly pummeled by the time rescue arrived that he actually commanded us to leave without him.
“Graham’s gone too, leave him, just run for it!”
“I’m not gone! Save me!”
So I did. Except that his main problem turned out not be a pesky Hunter so much as thrity-six zombies and a Tank. I think I got the Tank, but by the time I did I was being mauled from so many directions that I couldn’t move to save Graham, and we both died there.

In our first game after work, Graham, Tim and I made it to the boat but Craig got pinned in the water. I jumped in and managed to get him on his feet, but he was knocked down again on the pier before he could get to the boat. I’d badly hurt myself with the first attempt, so I jumped onto the boat just as it pulled away – and just as Graham jumped off to come to Craig’s aid.

Then in our last game, on Dead Air, through canny use of distractionary pipe bombs, sustained high vantage-point fire from Graham and Craig, emplaced heavy weapons support from Tim and shotgun-powered back-covering from me, we all piled into the back of the cargo plane and made it to safety.

So you see his tongue has been wrapped around several objects, twisted almost, to the
point at which he can no longer clearly speak. I guess you could say it was quite a mouthful.

I’m actually not a huge fan of the raw ingredients of Left 4 Dead: I love the animation of the zombies, but they always feel slightly hollow and insubstantial to kill, your weapons rattly and unexciting. But difficulty is such a hugely important variable, and the game nails it so utterly, that the final result is an endless thrill.

Here I Am Being Interviewed By Steve Gaynor For Tone Control

Gone Home writer/designer Steve Gaynor interviewed me for his podcast on the Idle Thumbs network, Tone Control. In it, I guess we vaguely cover tone at some point probably, but also: Continued

Help Me With Some Final Gunpoint Testing!

I’ve just made a new build of the Gunpoint demo live on Steam, and I could do with some people to put it through its paces. Make sure I’ve fixed what I tried to fix without breaking anything else.

If you’re up for it, here’s what to do! Continued

Help Me Structure Some Code Better In Heat Signature

Update: Solved! See bottom of post for details.

Hello, more experienced programmers than me! I could use your advice. There’s a code-pattern I’ve been using for a while and I’ve just discovered a problem with it, but I can’t see a great alternative either. I will explain by example: Continued

Help Me Learn Finite State Machines For Guard AI In Heat Signature

I have long known that ‘Finite State Machines’ are a thing I should be using, but when I try to read up on them, the explanations are either hopelessly vague or incredibly specific to a language and situation I don’t understand.

I whined to Mike Cook about this, and he said something to the effect of, “When you read up about Finite State Machines, it sounds like they’re this one specific agreed-upon thing, but every time you talk to an actual programmer about them you’ll get a different version of what they are.”

But! I am determined to try them in Heat Signature, and I have just reached that point where there’s enough AI an animation stuff going on that I need some kind of system to manage it. So I’m going to explain how I plan to use one, and if you’re a programmer, perhaps you can warn me of any problems I’m making for myself.

If you’re not, or if you’re learning, maybe you’ll get something out of how hopelessly I’ve failed at this so far. Continued

Hellgate London Thoughts

It might not have been Bill Roper, but there was someone who worked on the Diablo games who had a direct line to the pleasure center of my brain. World of Warcraft suggested to me that he had either left, or was working on something else now: it could hook me with its grind, but never excite or enthrall me the way a few tiny gold letters could in the Diablo games. Hellgate London clinches it: he must have left Blizzard and gone to Flagship. And started drinking heavily.

The exciting stuff is there, it’s just adrift in a very messy, empty, grey game. A very repetitive one, too – this is only the demo, and even in the short time it took me to exhaust its sliver of content, I got incredibly tired of the identical warehousey tunnels.

It’s a myth that Diablo was about grind. The environments and enemies were diverse, even in the first game, and though you repeated interactions, they were interactions you wanted to repeat. The comedy clunk of a blunt object stoving in a zombie’s skull, nailing a scampering monster with a single arrow at twenty paces, pulling fire from the Earth and streaming it through your hands. It wasn’t grind, it was caress.

Hellgate is rather vague – nothing has to connect to hit, and though the sounds are satisfying, the interactions aren’t clear or physical. One-hit kills still feel right, because the soft ragdoll enacts an appropriate response to your blow. But against tougher enemies, you’re either waving your sword back and forth or holding down fire to make a health bar go down, and there’s no other visible response to your attacks. It’s not an interaction I want to repeat, and that’s fatal for this type of game.

The exciting stuff is that it’s clear they’ve developed the best concepts nascent in Diablo 2: slotting and Horadric Cube recipes. Slotting is more sophisticated, and integrated with a crafting system, and the Horadric Cube’s magical recombinatorics have evolved into a device that can keep re-enchanting your favourite weapon to keep it up to your level.

But the loot harvest is made a lot less interesting by the abundance of class-exclusive items, something Diablo 1 & 2 had no concept of whatsoever, and even Lord of Destruction had the good sense to hold off on until later levels. Most of what I find is junk that I can neither use nor understand, and again, that’s fatal to this type of game. The loot harvest is the intravenous drip of dopamine here, you can’t afford to stem anything like as much as this.

So Diablo is dead forever, I fear. The genius who can tweak the equations to make me smile has left to join a team that don’t have the art talent, coding precision or design focus to let him shine. And the people who can still do that at Blizzard don’t seem to appreciate what it was that endlessly delighted me about Diablo, only what addicted me to it.

Has anyone played and liked this yet? I’m interested to know if it has charms I’m missing – I’m entirely guilty of not taking it on its own terms.

Heavy Update: Sandwiches And Fresh Green Grass

WHAT YOU SAY!!

The ongoing story here is that Valve pronounced their expected batch of unlockable weapons for the Heavy would also include an unexpected fan-made map, cp_steel, a brand new Payload map, Badwater Basin, a whole new game mode, still unnamed, and five new maps ‘arenas’ for that mode.

They’re revealing these elements day by day until the whole thing goes live on Tuesday (probably around 8pm BST, I’d guess). The latest is that the replacement minigun, Natascha, slows enemies ‘for an instant’ when they’re hit. But the real news is the image of the thing: not the gun itself, but that the blurred scenery the Heavy is standing in is green grass and grey rocks: a type of terrain so far unseen in any TF2 map.

Mess of original post and updates follows:

Sandwiches: While the names might be enigmatic and the descriptions missing, if you download the icon set for the Heavy achievements Valve have just revealed, the filenames are more explicit about what they’re for. The interesting ones, name then filename:

Konspicuous Konsumption – Eat Sandwiches
To regain health, one assumes. Something Awful hint was “Think PopEye”.

Sypalectical Materialism – Uncover Spies
Combined with the Something Awful hint “Think Ghostbusters” I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a Medigun that did nothing except turn red when used on a Spy. Also, I once said to Robin Walker and Erik Johnson, “You guys should make a Medigun that lights up when it’s used on a Spy” and they said “That’s a good idea”. Then I saw them take notes, then scurry off to their PCs, and make that, and put it in the Heavy update.

More probably, as several commenters say, it’s just an achievement for hitting Spies while they’re cloaked, and nothing to do with seeing through disguises.

And not for nothing, but that Spy has a giant freaking silencer.

0wn The Means Of Production – Clear Stickybombs
The interesting thing here is the icon – that’s not a Sticky being pushed back slightly, it’s breaking. Not also the zero in ‘own’, to emphasise how totally pwnsome the means by which you do this is.

Five Second Plan – Teleport Fast Kill
This is probably just for killing people shortly after you come out of a teleporter, but there could be more to it.

Update! Craig points out that this compilation of the SomethingAwful hints is now two-for-two. The third unlock, according to this, is a minigun that slows people down. If true, a) I will be surprised, b) there will be riots, and c) ha! In your face people who said the Hobbler could never be done because slowing people down is always a bad idea! I may entirely agree with your claim and not even really like my own idea, but if Valve do it it’s automatically right.

Day Two! Click the image for details, and the names of all the achievements. Some of them strongly hint at what the other unlocks might be. Others – Pushkin the Cart, Stalin the Cart and Permanent Revolution – are just genius.

TF2 blog has the official word, the Heavy update site is detailing the changes day by day, and it all goes live one week from today. Holy, holy shit.

Five of the new maps are for the new game mode, all of which is currently mysterious. The sixth new map is a new Payload one focusing on wide-open spaces, and the smart money is on this being the oft-mentioned one where the cart is a platform you can build Sentries on. The seventh is an officialised version of cp_steel, that incredibly awesome-sounding changing map Chris blogged about ages ago and for which I’ve never been able to find a good server running.

Worth mentioning: some goons at Something Awful claimed to have playtested the update and offered enigmatic hints as to its content a while back. One of the three said, against all odds, that the Heavy update would come with a new game mode.

Another says “think Popeye”, but also claims the update will cost money, which is patently false.

The third says “think ghostbusters… it’s really that weird.”

Edit: Seven! Seven new maps! Maths degree, right here!

Heavy Update Thoughts So Far

Badwater Basin
Love it.

I know it’s just because it’s early days, but I haven’t hit a single impenetrable Sentry nest, and the alternate routes are deliciously labyrinthine. It feels teeming with nooks and crannies to hide out in, recharge and take an unexpected angle from. And I love having a section of track that runs underneath the main play area. Tim and I skewered the enemy team repeatedly as they tried to escort the cart through that underground tunnel, he as a Sniper from the front, I as a Spy from the back.

I thought at first it was just a superior Spy map, but I played it solely as Heavy for some time today, and it was among the most fun I’ve ever had as that class. In fact, for the first time in ten months, I broke my all-time score record. 36 points from 16 kills as a Spy defending stage 3 of Dustbowl, replaced by 37 points and 16 kills assaulting Badwater Basin as a Heavy with incalculable aid from Doctor Graham Smith. I think we survived the entire round, and were with the cart almost every metre of the way. Cap score grind plus plus.

I know, I know, you’ve got 48 kills as an Engineer and 39 as a Demo – shut up.

Arena Mode
Hate it.

Chris sums up a lot of what saddens me about this mode very eloquently at 1Fort – the lows are as low as Sudden Death, but the highs aren’t nearly as high because a two-minute victory doesn’t feel significant.

I’m not yet clear on the precise conditions that cause it to occur, but the system whereby a third of the players must sit out every round is bizarre and disastrous. I’m just not interested in spending my free time that way; impotently watching two teams of strangers blunder awkwardly into one another.

I don’t see why there can’t be two full teams. What is the presumably monumental problem that’s worth paying the exorbitant cost of boring a third of your players to solve?

If you want lower player counts, lower the player counts. If you want to scramble the teams, scramble them whenever one side wins three times in a row. Use the rescrambling to separate the highest scorers, and prefer to keep friends together unless they’re dominating.

With that system, Arena would be worthwhile to me because its format undermines the feasibility of Sentry nests, the biggest drain on my fun with TF2. Without it, I’m just not playing.

Heavy Unlocks
Funny, don’t want ’em.

I am, of course, reserving judgement on all of them until I actually try them out. The Sandvich is a lovely idea, but the prospect doesn’t entice me particularly. I don’t die because I enter a fight with partial health, I die because I take more than 300 damage before I can retreat.

Likewise, the other unlocks don’t attempt to solve any of the reasons I avoid the Heavy, and don’t add possibilities that excite me on paper. The reason I avoid him is that his slowness and similar weapons make him tactically inflexible: he can only deal with one kind of situation, and he doesn’t have the tools to engineer it. If he encounters something unexpected and undesirable, he has no options. Boxing gloves, a slow-gun and a snack don’t sound like they give me more options, and I thrive on options.

I’ll update this if that impression is mistaken, but I think unlockables need to entice as much as perform, and this is the first time they haven’t done that for me. For others, too – I’ve only seen one Natascha and no boxing gloves, and there are rarely more than four Heavies per team. It’s nothing like the mono-class unlock fever that gripped Pyro and Medic week.

Timberyard
Pretty, hate Arena.

“The goal was to establish a clear difference between the two sides of the map. One side climbs up toward a large mountain peak, and the other dips down into a vast valley.”

Reading that, I pictured a glorious mountain-climb of a map, something Tim is always saying would add some much-needed drama to TF2’s struggles. The reality is a truly lovely place that I long to spend time in, but it looks to me an awful lot like a perfectly symmetrical square of entirely flat land around big square building. I guess he’s talking about the background.

Regardless, like a lot of people I’m in love with this new style and I can’t wait for them to make a map in it that I actually want to play.

Heat Signature: What I’ve Been Working On

As well as the update above, I’ve been putting up some day-by-day logs of what I’m working on in Heat Signature. I’m only doing them for my own benefit, so they’re not mega interesting and I don’t do one every day I work – only when I think it’ll help.

Heat Signature: Infinitely Scaling Vapour Layers

Excerpt from an e-mail I just sent to artist John: Continued

Heat Signature: A Game About Sneaking Aboard Randomly Generated Spaceships

I can now show you what my space stealth game is really about! As long as I don’t get spotted like three times in a row right at the start of this video. Watch that first if you care, if not, here’s the summary. 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