TOM FRANCIS
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Gunpoint Music Submissions Update

Thank you so much to everyone who’s sent in samples for Gunpoint’s music! It’s been exciting to sit here listening to all this awesome work. Some people have asked for a) a deadline and b) a bit more guidance. I mentioned Monday on Twitter – I’d like to extend that to Friday the 23rd of December, since I won’t have time to go through everything thoroughly on a weeknight anyway.

As for b), I don’t want to get too specific about genre or style, because the great thing about this process is that people are always surprising me with things I wouldn’t have thought would work, or just hadn’t considered at all. I will say that you need to put it over the gameplay video, and if your music doesn’t ever change in response to what’s happening in the game, it’ll probably lose out to something that does.

When you’re done, uploading it to YouTube and posting a link in the comments here seems to be the best way to get it out there. E-mailing me a download link is fine too though. I’ll see it either way so you don’t need to do both.

To help out as much as I can, I want to pick out some to he submissions that have come in so far and point out specific things that are awesome about them. This isn’t a best-of list, I won’t decide stuff like that till all the submissions are in. There are some great ones I haven’t included here because they’re just generally good, or because the thing they do well is already covered here.

C418 worked on something called a Minecraft? I am stunned and immensely flattered that he made a sample for Gunpoint, and stunned and immensely excited by how good it is. A few people on Twitter said things to the effect of “Contest over!” – that’s not true. I’m serious about the open submissions idea – if John Williams, Jeremy Seoule and Jesper Kyd sent in samples too, I’d still listen carefully to every submission anyone put their time and effort into, and give them all a fair chance.

The two things I love most about C418’s take are a) the clever transitions between indoors and outdoors – not only adding an extra layer when you go inside, but muffling the music when you leave again. And b) the beautiful crosslink music, and the natural way it builds onto the existing track – I get excited thinking about how switching in and out of crosslink could feel like composing your own music on the fly.

HyperDuck’s take is a great example of subtle game music, focused entirely on atmosphere and tone. There’s a fantastic heartbeat pulse when you pounce a guy, which fades after just the right amount of time. And the tinny muzak in the elevators is hilarious.

A really stylish old-school take, gorgeous upright bass. There’s a huge upkick when you’ve completed your objectives – it might be too dramatic for some levels, but it’s a really cool idea to give the player a “Let’s get out of here!” vibe without actually imposing a hard time limit. It’d also be great for when a gun goes off – at which point there really is a time limit.

This is just one track at the moment, but I love the mood of it, and the way it can turn from an anticipatory, suspenseful tone to an exciting action one smoothly.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/29664976″]

John also made a video, but it’s the full version of this song he wrote for the menus that I want to highlight. It’s a gorgeous, lonely piece of brass, the kind of sad, sinister track you’d hear in one of LA Confidential’s darker moments. If this started playing when you died, I’d probably sit and listen to it before reloading.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/30169493″]

As Ben says himself this piece isn’t really a soundtrack, I’m just including it here because wow, what a great track.

Apologies if I haven’t mentioned yours – it doesn’t mean it wasn’t awesome, because that list would be very long. Thanks again for all your hard work, and sorry if you asked for a reply and I haven’t sent one – my backlog is so huge that I may just have to come to terms with seeming rude to some people. I’ll try to keep up with posts like these to give as much feedback and detail as I can.

Gunpoint Mac And Linux Ready For Testing

Update:

The game is now out on Mac and Linux!

Old post:

The fine folks at Abstraction have finally got Gunpoint working well enough on OSX and Linux that we’re ready for you guys to give it a try and see what breaks.

If you already own Gunpoint, right-click it in your Steam list and go to Properties. Under the ‘Betas’ tab, choose ‘maclinuxbeta’ and ‘OK’. The game should update.

If you don’t already own the game but would like to help test it on Mac or Linux, add yourself to this mailing list: if I can, I’ll get some time-limited beta keys to let you guys in too.

If you find any problems, post in the Mac or Linux support forums to tell us about them! Tell us as much as you can about your system, what you were doing, and what happened.

Caution! The Mac and Linux versions are in beta, so I don’t recommend buying the game yet if that’s what you’ll be playing on!

To make sure everyone has the latest fixes, the beta is Steam-only. When they’re ready, the Mac and Linux versions will of course be available DRM-free for people who bought here or on the Humble Store. And buying it from anywhere at any time on any of these three platforms means you own it on all three.

Gunpoint Level Editor Trailer

Gunpoint will have a level editor! Here’s a quick video of what it’s like to use:

This is by far the most requested feature both from people who’ve played it and people who haven’t. I always planned to add one after release, but when I came to see if it was feasible, it turned out to be easier than I thought. It’s working nicely enough now that I can have it in for release. Which will be… in the future.

Here are some cool things about the level editor: Continued

Gunpoint Is Out!

After three years of working in my weekends, Gunpoint is out! Try it first, then if it works OK and you like it, buy it below!

What are these fancy editions?

They’re fancy! You can get all three from Steam or from here, and you can upgrade to any of them later. Here are the details!

Gunpoint: Special Edition

• Gunpoint: a 2D stealth game about rewiring things and punching people.
• The Soundtrack: includes all of the game’s noir-inspired spy music in high quality MP3 format.
• Developer Commentary:
  when enabled, you’ll find little sprites of Gunpoint’s developers on
  every mission. Talk to us to hear a little about our thinking behind the
  design (Tom), the art (John), and the music (Ryan). Caution: shooting a
  developer while he’s talking ends his current commentary track. This
  kills the developer.

Gunpoint: Exclusive Edition

• Gunpoint: a 2D stealth game about rewiring things and punching people.
• The Soundtrack: includes all of the game’s noir-inspired spy music in high quality MP3 format.
• Developer Commentary:
  when enabled, you’ll find little sprites of Gunpoint’s developers on
  every mission. Talk to us to hear a little about our thinking behind the
  design (Tom), the art (John), and the music (Ryan). Caution: shooting a
  developer while he’s talking ends his current commentary track. This
  kills the developer.
• The Making Of Gunpoint: a
  40-minute video feature taking you through how Gunpoint developed from a
  one-room test game to what you play today. Featuring Gunpoint’s
  designer playing his earliest prototypes for the first time since they
  were made, to great personal embarrassment and shame.
• The Prototype Pack (Windows only): play
  snapshots of Gunpoint’s development at 9 different stages, including
  cartoony programmer art, the first conception of the hacking system,
  many scrapped levels, and overpowered gadgets we later cut. For
  hopefully obvious reasons, we can’t give technical support for these.
• 4 Exclusive Tracks: bonus
  pieces produced specially by Gunpoint’s composers for this edition,
  mixing the game’s noir style with electronic influences. Since they’re
  not used as background music in the game, our composers took the chance
  to be more adventurous with these tracks.
• The Secret Beta Access List (Windows only):
  adds an option in the game menu to sign up to our Secret Beta Access
  List. If and when future Suspicious Developments games are developed,
  we’ll sometimes give secret beta versions only to the members of this
  list.

Special Edition Extras

If you already have the base game, you can buy the extras from these editions separately:

Exclusive Edition Extras

Note! The Exclusive Extras don’t include the Special Extras, they’re separate.

Have some facts!

• The main story takes most people about 3 hours to play through once.
• You can replay any mission you’ve already completed with whatever
  gadgets you currently have, to try to earn different ratings for
  avoiding violence, kills, noise, witnesses, etc.
• All editions come with the level editor, which is now integrated with the Steam Workshop if you’re playing on Steam.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s already bought it. I have been hurled across the room by your generosity, crushed against the wall by your enthusiasm, and stamped into a broken heap by your support. It’s the good kind of heap.

Gunpoint Is In The New Humble Indie Bundle!

I’m drunk to announce that Gunpoint is in the Humble Indie Bundle 12! Best of all, you get it no matter what you pay. No! Best of all is what else you get if your generosity stretches to the princely sum of ten dollars:

• Gunpoint, I just said that
• Gone fucking Home
• Papers fucking Please
• Prison fucking Architect!
• Luftrausers!
• Hammerwatch!
• SteamWorld Dig!
• What!

What is not a game, this is just an alarming selection of stuff. And for the first time ever, there’s also a $65 special edition that comes with a load of physical goods like:

• A T-shirt featuring all these games!
• A vinyl record with a song from each of these games – in Gunpoint’s case, The Five-Floor Goodbye.
• A floppy disk! I don’t know what’s on that!
• A manual! I don’t know what it says!
• Some badges, or pins if you’re American!
• It comes in an actual box!

This has been in the works for a loooooooong time, and it’s only thanks to the hard work of the guys at Abstraction that we have Mac and Linux versions of Gunpoint to make us eligible to be in one. I’m particularly delighted to be in this one, with such extraordinary company (two BAFTA winners!), because the biggest upside for me is the sheer number of people who’ll hopefully get to try our game. And when Gunpoint is nowhere near the headliner, lots of those will be people who might never have tried it otherwise.

Gunpoint Is Delayed, Level Design Is Hard, Choice Is Weird

With a comical inevitability, I have to admit I can’t see Gunpoint being ready for Christmas. Lots of elements I think of as ‘done’ aren’t really ready, and finishing each of those seems to take about as long as coding them in the first place. Then there’s level design.

I’ve been mentally filing levels under ‘content’, stuff I already know how to produce and which just needs a little grunt work to churn it out. I’m now discovering that it’s really more like the game systems: something that shapes the experience so fundamentally that you need to get it in early and keep tweaking and revising it as you go along.

I’ve also learnt a lot about the difference between a puzzle game and something more open ended like Deus Ex, and some of it really surprised me.

In the first prototype that included the Crosslink device, you could literally link any device to any other. It was fun to mess around with, but there was no game there really – as I think all testers noticed, you could stand by one light switch and just wire it to everything else you wanted to change.

It was never going to stay that way, I knew how to shape it: I put some devices on different coloured circuits, ones you can’t rewire until you reach the right circuit box and tap into it. That let me design puzzles: proper obstacles to your progress that you have to think your way around, tapping into the right circuit and finding ways to get to the next one.

I guess I just assumed that was level design, because when I sent out the last build I realised I’d pretty much ended up with a straight puzzle game. Sometimes it works, other times it feels like it’s just keeping you busy: you have to get to this circuit box to progress, and there’s really only one way to do it. If figuring out that method isn’t interesting, the only fun is in the basic interactions: pouncing, punching, executing chain reactions, knocking people off rooftops and through windows.

I should probably be happy with that. I asked testers what they’d give the game if they were reviewing it, and the overwhelming majority said 8/10. Even accounting for a large positive bias in the selection process, that’s way better than I was hoping for.

But I still want it to be more than a puzzle game with punching. The point of the Crosslink mechanic is to let the player be creative, and I feel like I must be able to do a better job of that.

So I tried designing a new level with a completely different philosophy: make a building, not a level. Just make sure there are at least two routes to every objective and sub-objective.

It was terrible. It might be the worst level I’ve ever made. It felt like the game was just broken – you keep asking yourself “What’s this room for? Why would I want to go there? Wait, I’ve completed it? Did I cheat?” It wasn’t easier than the other levels, it just felt like most of it was misleading or irrelevant.

I tried it a few other ways and kept running into the same problem:

If a puzzle has one solution, it’s only really fun to solve once.

So, you just do that one. Even if you notice the others, they add nothing: it feels pointless to take a longer or harder route, even if it involves some interesting tricks.

This really surprised me. I’ve always thought the opposite: that alternate routes are always valuable, even if you don’t take them, because you appreciate having options. Nope! Sometimes alternate routes are just noise. Sometimes having a lot of options just makes it feel like there isn’t really an obstacle at all, so getting past it feels more like a commute than a challenge.

So why do I enjoy taking alternate routes in Deus Ex? Why don’t I always go for the first or easiest one?

Honestly: because it sucks. In Deus Ex the shooting is intentionally bad, and even in Human Revolution, the cover shooting is nothing like as cool as the stealth. Deus Ex doesn’t offer you choice by presenting you with door A and door B. It presents you with a really difficult and awkward door A, then says “Oh no! I can’t believe you found a vent!”

Choice, I think, needs to be a fuck-you from the player to the designer.

You have to see and understand what you’re expected to do, and make a personal decision to reject it. Either because you just don’t like it, or because it doesn’t fit with the play style you’ve chosen.

In Gunpoint, that means I actually do want one clear solution to each puzzle. I just need to give you the power to override it and do things your own way if you want to.

I haven’t finished figuring out my full solution to that yet, but here’s what’s working well so far:

1. Reworking levels at least twice

All my favourites are old ones that I’ve changed bit by bit, adding sneakier possibilities as they occur to me, and encouraging fun situations I found myself in when testing. Pretty much by accident, these have one clear solution and a bunch of ways to bypass it.

2. Play style incentives

I’d already planned for clients to have optional requests – “There’s an extra $200 in it for you if you don’t hurt anyone.” Now that I’ve put these in, they add complex, tricky and ever-changing routes through the levels that I don’t even have to design. Avoiding guards is almost always possible just because you’re so mobile, but it’s much harder than taking them out. It’s not a fuck-you to the client, but it’s a fuck-you to the conventional design of the level.

3. Gadgets

I’ve added some tools you can buy which can let you shortcut certain types of puzzles, and set up more elaborate chain reactions and traps. The Transfuser, for example, lets you connect two things that are on different circuits, with a pretty blended wire that shades between their different colours.

4. Persistent consumables

These gadgets have charges, and your total carries over to future missions. So sometimes the shorter route has a cost associated with it, and it’s up to you when you think it’s worth it.

5. Upgrades

You can upgrade lots of different aspects of your kit to suit different playstyles. If you go for one heavily, you can sometimes get past obstacles with the method they’re designed to stop. The Deathfluke, for example, repels a percentage of the least accurate shots fired at you. Upgrade that and your jumping speed enough and enemies have a hard time hitting you, letting you get past them in some situations you’re not meant to.

So that’s partly why it’s taking longer. I’ve got five or six levels that need designing from the ground up, and six or seven more that need a few more iterations to make them more flexible and fun. Then there’s the little stuff, like creating a scripting engine for story events and writing the entire game.

Truthfully, I have no idea how long that stuff will take me. Lyingly, let’s say March and I’ll let you know when that seems impossible too. If you’ve mailed me about testing, I should have a version for you in December.

Gunpoint In The Press

Gunpoint got lots of wonderful write-ups when I put up the first batch of shots two weeks back. In fact, the reaction took me by surprise a bit, and I’ve been struggling to keep up with all the interesting e-mails that have come in since.

I wasn’t expecting anyone to cover this, so I didn’t really talk to anyone beforehand. If you work for a site or mag and are interested in covering Gunpoint, just drop me a mail at pentadact@gmail.com.

I’m always happy to sort you out with a recent build so you can have a play, and answer any questions. I managed to do this with Ars Technica, so their piece is a preview. Here are some quotes from that, and some of the other lovely words people wrote about Gunpoint.

Gunpoint hands on: an intelligent indie spy thriller—with breakable glass

“Guns actually introduce tension into the game, which is a rare thing in modern action titles… In minutes I felt like a capable killer, and began skulking around each level like a pro. The full release can’t come soon enough.”

Ars Technica

Gunpoint Points Out Its New Look

“In between murdering trees and optimising for search engines, Tom’s drafted in some artists to dramatically overhaul the game’s look, which results in the rather eye-catching, Flashback-y aesthetic…”

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Secret agent indie Gunpoint makes being an electrician cool

“From plumbers and farmers to … Noids, video games have a long tradition of elevating blue collar jobs to rockstar status. Now, after eying these new Gunpoint screens, it looks like we’ll be adding “electrician” to that list when Tom Francis’ secret agent game arrives this Christmas.”

Joystiq

This Indie Game is Giving me Flashbacks of, Well, Flashback

“It looks wonderful, in a “Deus Ex meets Canabalt” kind of way. It also helps the game has photocopiers. I love games with photocopiers.”

Kotaku

Stealth Platformer Gunpoint is Looking Mighty Fine!

“Gunpoint looks absolutely glorious.”

IndieGames.com

Gunpoint’s Graphics Now As Awesome As Its Concept

GameSetWatch

Gunpoint Half-Price Sale, Edition Upgrades, And Trading Cards

Short version: Gunpoint is half-price for two days, you can now upgrade between editions, and we’ve added trading cards. Here’s a video explaining all that:

Continued

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

Gunpoint Development Breakdown

I feel terribly guilty about Gunpoint’s success, so I often wonder if there’s some way I can use what I’ve learned from it to help. The trouble is that offering any kind of advice seems to make people angry – people who aren’t in your exact situation feel like you’re ignoring their circumstances, criticising their methods or dismissing their struggles.

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

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

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

Gunpoint Dev Log: From A Broken Mess To A Working Game

A quick update on how Gunpoint’s going.

I AM SO SORRY I LEFT AUTOFOCUS ON! I will remember to disable it next time. My camera is great at everything except detecting how far away an almost stationary human in the center of the frame is.

Gunpoint Demo Released! Pre-Orders Open! Release Date Announced!

Stop what you’re doing and play the Gunpoint demo! (Also on Steam!)

Note: If you don’t have admin privileges, choose a different folder than the default ‘Program Files’. Sorry, I’ll get a new version up with a different default.

Like it? Pre-order it! Really like it? Get a fancy edition!

When’s it out?

Unbelievably, Gunpoint is out next Monday, the 3rd of June.

Why are there fancy editions?

I’ve been working on Gunpoint for three years, and it could be a turning point in my life. If it does well enough, I will quit my job to become a full time game developer. I could make more games like this, hopefully better and more quickly. This would be amazing.

Gunpoint is not really a mass-market thing, but I’ve noticed that it just clicks with some people. If those people are happy to support it in exchange for a few extras, Gunpoint could succeed because of passionate players, rather than just a very large number of players. This would be amazing.

I’ve tried to design the extra goodies so that if this was an indie game I was excited about, like FTL, I’d buy the $30 edition no question. But I know everyone’s circumstances are different, so I’ve made sure the base game is the same for everyone – no exclusive missions or bullshit bonus items.

If you can’t afford to go fancy, you can still do me a huge favour by spreading the word and pointing it out to people who do Let’s Plays and the like. Speaking of which, anyone who does game videos to a decent following (say 1,000 subs or followers), get in touch.

So, what fancy editions? What fancy editions!

Gunpoint – $10 – $9

• Both a DRM-free download of Gunpoint.
• And a Steam key to own Gunpoint on Steam.

Gunpoint: Special Edition – $20 – $15

• Both a DRM-free download of Gunpoint.
• And a Steam key to own Gunpoint on Steam.
• The Soundtrack: includes all of the game’s noir-inspired spy music in high quality MP3 format.
• Developer Commentary:
  when enabled, you’ll find little sprites of Gunpoint’s developers on
  every mission. Talk to us to hear a little about our thinking behind the
  design (Tom), the art (John), and the music (Ryan). Caution: shooting a
  developer while he’s talking ends his current commentary track. This
  kills the developer.

Gunpoint: Exclusive Edition – $30 – $27

• Both a DRM-free download of Gunpoint.
• And a Steam key to own Gunpoint on Steam.
• The Soundtrack: includes all of the game’s noir-inspired spy music in high quality MP3 format.
• Developer Commentary:
  when enabled, you’ll find little sprites of Gunpoint’s developers on
  every mission. Talk to us to hear a little about our thinking behind the
  design (Tom), the art (John), and the music (Ryan). Caution: shooting a
  developer while he’s talking ends his current commentary track. This
  kills the developer.
• The Making Of Gunpoint: a
  40-minute video feature taking you through how Gunpoint developed from a
  one-room test game to what you play today. Featuring Gunpoint’s
  designer playing his earliest prototypes for the first time since they
  were made, to great personal embarrassment and shame.
• The Prototype Pack: play
  snapshots of Gunpoint’s development at 9 different stages, including
  cartoony programmer art, the first conception of the hacking system,
  many scrapped levels, and overpowered gadgets we later cut. For
  hopefully obvious reasons, we can’t give technical support for these.
• 4 Exclusive Tracks: bonus
  pieces produced specially by Gunpoint’s composers for this edition,
  mixing the game’s noir style with electronic influences. Since they’re
  not used as background music in the game, our composers took the chance
  to be more adventurous with these tracks.
• The Secret Beta Access List:
  adds an option in the game menu to sign up to our Secret Beta Access
  List. If and when future Suspicious Developments games are developed,
  we’ll sometimes give secret beta versions only to the members of this
  list.

Have some facts!

• Gunpoint is for Windows only right now. Hope to do Mac and Linux versions next.
• The main story takes most people about 3 hours to play through once.
• You can replay any mission you’ve already completed with whatever
  gadgets you currently have, to try to earn different ratings for
  avoiding violence, kills, noise, witnesses, etc.
• There’s a level editor. The levels it makes are saved as simple text files so they’re easy to share.
• You can also buy it from Steam if you prefer. We get a bit less of your money that way.

Thanks so much to those who helped Gunpoint by expressing excitement
or telling people about it. It would have been much harder without that.

I am now a useless ball of nerves, so I’ll stop here and let you know how it goes. Cheers!

Gunpoint Delayed To… I Don’t Know, Christmas?

Game release dates should probably be phrased as “I don’t yet know why the game won’t be ready in July.” I’m changing this for Gunpoint to “I don’t yet know why the game won’t be ready by Christmas.”

It’s going well now, actually. But here are the two things I didn’t know when I predicted July:

1. Rewriting the collision system, which I had planned for, would take an amount of time I had not planned for. It would also send me quietly mad on Twitter.
2. Integrating new art and animation, which I had planned for, leaves the game pretty much unplayable until it’s done. This, I hadn’t planned for.

2 means I can’t make much progress on the game’s levels while John is still working on the character art, because you can’t make what you can’t play. He’s burning through it super fast, though, and it’s starting to look awesome in-game. The player character, Conway, has just the right mix of super-spy suave and silliness. Here’s one of my favourite animations for him so far:

All the basic movements are already done for the player character, so all I really need is for one guard type to be jumpable-on and punchable-in-the-face. That’ll be enough to make actual levels that work, even if a lot of the poses and sprites are placeholder. As before, I really have no clue how long that part will take.

Meanwhile Fabian has been creating a gorgeous logo concept – one that combines an elegantly simple icon I can’t believe I didn’t think of, but in the context of a sumptuous image that gets across the rainy city atmosphere. I’m not quite ready to show that yet.

80% of development takes 10% of the time you think it will, and 20% takes 800%. It’s much easier and nicer working without fixed deadlines, so I’m not worried about how long it takes. There’s no feature-creep: my idea of what the finished game will be has been fixed for a long time now, and we’re getting significantly closer to it all the time.

So let’s say Christmas, and I’ll tell you why it isn’t Christmas this Christmas. Sorry it’s been a while, by the way – follow @GunpointGame on Twitter for more regular updates and face-palming.

Gunpoint Business Cards Render Quality Of Actual Game Irrelevant

I get to go to GDC for the first time this year, to cover it, give a talk, demo my game, and lose an award! I thought I might need some classy-ass business cards to give to all the classy-ass people I’m sure to meet there, so I did these via Moo.com. Details are on the back, on the same scene in Crosslink mode.

From what I understand of business, the quality of your card stock and matte laminate are the primary traits by which companies attract a mate, and beyond that your actual work has little bearing.

Gunpoint At Minecon

Gunpoint will be playable at Minecon in Paris this weekend! I’ll be around to answer any questions. Say hi if you see me, I look like this.

I’m also giving a talk on the Sunday, about what I’ve learnt as a critic making my first game. That’s at 10.30 AM Sunday, in the Indie Theater, which is in the New York Convention Centre. That’s just a name, it’s in Paris like the rest of it.

If you won’t be there, my talk should be going online afterwards.