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.

We’re working on something new! Can’t say for sure if it’ll work out yet, but the core combat part of it is shaping up nicely already, and I wanna show more of the process as we go than I did with Wizards.

This is being made in Godot. Get on our mailing list if you wanna test when it’s ready.

And I’ll prob be posting more clips on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pentadact.com

Here’s that earlier clip: https://youtu.be/Hla3gWrV4TA

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!

• Tracked whether I was using my PC or not automatically, without needing to remember to press a button.
• Let me configure the maximum time I’m allowed to work, and how long I have to take a break before it counts as a break.
• When I overwork, nag me in (customisable) ways that are gentle enough I won’t just close the app, but persistent enough I won’t just ignore it.
• Met or exceeded the high standards of alliteration established by Tom’s Timer.

And so!

Tom’s Tstretch Timer
(Windows, 17MB, v1.6)

“Every moment of my life it haunts me. I work. I eat. I rest. I sleep. Still it persists. Tom’s Tstretch Timer 1.4.”
Victoria Tran, referring to a previous version.

“Repeatedly” means once a minute, and it stops nagging if you’ve been AFK 30 secs already. You don’t have to click Reset to resume working, that’s just for the GIF. You can force Work or Break mode with those buttons, but generally just leaving it in Auto mode is best.

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.

TomsTimer5.exe
(v5, Windows, installer)

Here’s what it already did:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the original Timer post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black’s queen grabs the Skull:

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

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

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

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

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

Parping disrespectfully in her frozen bony face! Rude!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We’re looking for someone to make a roughly 2 minute trailer of Tactical Breach Wizards, preferably by the 9th of May.

We have a new chapter of the game to show off, but we don’t want to do our usual in-depth talkthroughs because it would start to get spoilery.

The game has pause, slowmo, level select and camera controls built in, and we’ll also provide you with the Unity project if you’re able to make use of that.

We have a composer and some tracks already in, you’d work with them directly to figure out the music needs.

Our game is a fairly straight-faced parody of a modern military action thriller, borrowing superficial tropes and critiquing or inverting some of the deeper ones. You can get a sense of it from our last talkthrough vid:

And you can get a sense of our sense of humour from the Gunpoint and Heat Signature trailers:

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.

When Heat Signature did well in, 2017, I thought: “It’s doing great so far! But how fast will it trail off? This has to cover the budget of the next game. What if Steam’s algorithm changes and all our revenue stops? Maybe after the third game I’ll know more about-”

I see what my brain is doing. There’ll always be enough uncertainty in my life that I can delay a donation in the name of caution. But I don’t think that loop ends on iteration 3 or 4, so I’m cutting it short now. I’m giving $25,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation and another $25,000 to GiveDirectly.

Malaria prevention is a cause that is not at all close to my heart. To my knowledge it hasn’t affected anyone I know. But only giving to causes close to you contributes to a global injustice with charity. The people with the most money to give are geographically and culturally distant from the people who most desperately need it. Of the $410 billion donated by Americans in 2017, only 6% went to international charities.

Everything else I do with my money is about me, my family, or people I individually care about. For charity, I just want to know “Where is this most needed?”

From the Atlantic, quoting the Against Malaria Foundation:

Every day, more than 500 people die from malaria in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the majority of these deaths are children under the age of five. AMF offers a shattering metaphor: Imagine a fully booked 747 airplane and infants strapped into seats A through K of every row of the economy section; their feet cannot reach the floor. Every day, this plane disappears into the Congo River, killing every soul on board. That is malaria — in one country.

There are known, proven ways to help prevent infection, they’re incredibly cheap. Long-lasting insecticide-treated nets have been proven effective in over 20 randomized controlled trials, and they cost less than $5 each – and yet their distribution is still constrained by funding. In other words, malaria prevention charities really do need money, and they can make incredibly impactful use of everything they get.

GiveDirectly are a charity that just gives your money directly to the extreme poor in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, no strings attached, so they can spend it on whatever they need.

There’s sometimes scepticism about what this kind of donation ends up being spent on, but it’s not supported by the evidence. Charity assessor GiveWell say:

Cash transfers also happen to be the most extensively studied non-health intervention we know of. In a large number of high-quality studies, researchers have looked to see whether cash transfers have indeed increased consumption, what sorts of consumption they’ve increased, and whether common concerns about them are supported by evidence. The consistent picture that emerges from these studies is that cash transfers generally do increase consumption, particularly on food, and that evidence to support common concerns has not emerged despite being looked for.
…
There is a smaller set of studies implying that people get significant return on investment from cash transfers, even over the long run; the case for longer-term impacts of cash transfers is broadly comparable to the case for longer-term life improvement impacts of our other top charities’ health interventions, and the cost-effectiveness according to our best estimates is in the same ballpark as well.

An example that surprised GiveWell was that the money is often spent on buying a metal roof. Mud and thatch rooves leak and have an ongoing cost in repair and maintenance – a metal one doesn’t. But GiveWell don’t know of any charity that provides people with metal rooves. Sometimes the most pressing problems in people’s lives can’t be foreseen and solved at scale by external bodies.

Giving directly also partly avoids the paternalism of dictating to poor people what’s best for them, when we have only the most abstract notion of what their lives and problems are like.

Given those causes, why these specific charities?

I mentioned GiveWell – they’re an independent charity that takes a scientific approach to evaluating the effectiveness of other charities. Against Malaria Foundation and GiveDirectly are both consistently in their top picks for the most demonstrably effective charities in the world. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best or that the others are bad – when GiveWell can’t recommend a charity they’re not saying it’s not effective, they’re just saying the information they’d need to say it’s effective is not available. There are many types of charities whose effectiveness is hard to measure because it’s hard to measure, not because it isn’t there – research is especially hard to predict and rate.

But I still think it’s really valuable to have that little island of knowledge in a sea of uncertainty. To say, “we don’t know if another charity might be more effective, but we do know for sure that these ones have an extraordinary positive effect on people who desperately need it.”

Aren’t you doing that paternalism thing with the malaria thing?

Yeah, a bit. But there are some good arguments why the distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets is a problem that needs to be fought at scale. For one, there are multiplicative benefits if everyone in a community is protected. And the main recipients are children under 5, where the ‘decide for themselves’ argument doesn’t really apply. There’s a very fair-minded comparison of these two kinds of charity on GiveWell’s blog, that concedes the virtues and downsides of both approaches.

Why don’t you give your time instead of your money?

I only have a normal amount of time to give, but a larger-than-normal amount of money. I could give both, of course, but I’m not that good a person. I would also stop making money if I did that, so the cause would lose out on a future donation like this and only get the services of a nervous game designer in exchange – not a great trade.

That’s a convenient rationalisation for what you would do anyway.

It is! Thanks.

It’s not really altruistic if you tell people you’re doing it.

True, I could potentially benefit from posting about this! But I don’t care whether this is altruism or not. I’m more interested in potentially helping to normalise it, and keeping it secret to be more virtuous doesn’t help with that. If you have two hits on Steam, it should be normal to give something significnat to some kind of charity. It should be normal to give more, but I haven’t entirely overcome my cautious instincts.

Shouldn’t you show us a giant cheque or a receipt or something?

I have the smaller of those things!

Some technical details:

• Ironically I couldn’t give this amount to GiveDirectly directly, because their UK arm only take credit card transfers, that’s why it’s through GiveWell.
• Suspicious Developments is my company. I sometimes use that name to refer to the whole teams behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature, because a company name correctly implies it’s a group effort, but as a legal entity it’s just me.
• Tax-wise, this will count like a business expense. So if SD was gonna make more than $50k profit this year, it’s now gonna make $50k less and you pay less tax if you make less profit.

Programming is about 40% of my job. Another 40% is design, and the other 20% is every other job on a game that isn’t art or music. The design part is hard to track though: I find most productive design thinking comes from a big engine in the back while you’re doing other things, as it randomly matches disparate ideas and sprinkles them with what you’re currently experiencing and asks: “Is that anything?”

Programming, though, I can measure: I start a timer and then focus on work for anywhere from 8 minutes to 80. If I get the urge to check Twitter, I can but I have to stop the timer to do it, and only log the work time. I only get to log the time if it really was focused work – all breaks and interruptions and meals and everything else is excluded. Back when I notionally worked an 8 hour-a-day job, I had an hour for lunch, lots of Twitter breaks and interruptions. I’d be surprised if I averaged as many as 6 productive hours a day.

Anyway, here’s my first full week’s programming time tracked:

The faint numbers below the days are individual work sessions, that’s where I log them. I know there are apps to automate this but my actual focus doesn’t always correlate to which app I’m switched to, I prefer to do it manually so the data is meaningful. It’s also a satisfying moment to type the number in and see the bar go up.

This comes to about 30 hours, which struck me as alarmingly low at first. It felt like a very full week! But I was forgetting a few factors:

• I do other work on Mondays, which I didn’t track at all – more on that below.
• Programming is only 40% of my job. Design’s 40% mostly overlaps with other stuff, so I’d expect programming to be more than 40% of my work time, but less than 80%.
• This is productive time only, which is very different to ‘office time’ – per above, I estimate worked less than 30 productive hours at a 40 office-hour job.

So, actually, pretty good! The graph we’ll never see is how much more I started working because I knew it was being tracked – that’s one of the reasons I started. Since I’m hovering around 4-5 hours on a normal work day, I’ll aim to get that to a solid 5.

I did not log the time I spent tweaking the layout and colours of this graph.

Some features of my week:

Business Mondays

I set aside Mondays for dealing with all the company, tax, phonecalls, organisational bullshit I hate, and e-mails which I don’t hate but did not respond to at the time. When this piles up during the week, unless it’s urgent, this system lets me shelve it guilt-free, knowing exactly when I’ll get to it. I also do a lot better with tasks I dislike when I know they’re coming – I kinda dread Mondays (I picked Monday so I’d dread the same day as folks with office jobs), but that makes dealing with them easier. I wake up knowing the day will be all bullshit, no hope of doing any interesting work. And if I can plow through the bullshit quickly, I get the rest of the day off. I also relax any diet/booze restrictions on Business Mondays, a policy offices should adopt also.

I’ve been doing Business Mondays for about 5 years now and it’s one of the most successful habits I’ve made for myself since going independent – it stops the bullshit getting you down or derailing the productive stuff. As you can see I actually did end up doing a couple of hours of real work last Monday – this was on a side-project, as a reward for getting all my boring stuff done.

Side-Project Saturdays

This is new, not sure if I’ll stick to it, but I was remembering Google’s 20% time and wondering if that could work for my back-burner projects. My main project is Tactical Breach Wizards, and it’s progressing in ways I’m optimistic about, but it hasn’t been fast. I sometimes get anxious about it because our artist John Roberts made it look so good so fast, and people reacted so well to it, that it basically has to be made. That’s two massive lucky things I’m grateful for, but I’m used to having literally a year to fuck around with ugly prototypes of random shit I make up before having to decide which one is my real project. Feeling ‘locked-in’ so early makes me anxious, and having side-projects relieves some of that.

So, I thought, maybe Saturdays are for side-projects? No hour quota, work as much or as little as I fancy. And you will see from the hour count that I fancied quite a lot. The two games I play most these days are Slay the Spire and Race for the Galaxy, and my fascination with digital, single-player card games has got to the point that I wanted to try making one. I’m also interested in trying something mechanics-heavy but completely non-violent, which means it’ll probably end up being about destroying suns. I’m making it in Unity to make sure I’m learning new things about the tools that’ll help the main project.

Evening Chillwork

Towards the end of Heat Signature, when I really needed to put in the hours, I’d sometimes give up on a bug at 6pm, have dinner, then watch TV with my laptop open and just tinker absently with it as I’m watching. It was amazing how often this solved it. When focus fails, taking the pressure off and putting your brain in the open mode is really effective. I’d also sometimes do it if the next day’s work was a big, daunting new task – just scope it out while relaxing, no pressure to get anywhere with it, and I often made surprising progress.

So now I do this occasionally, if I’m stuck on something or just didn’t find the hours in the daytime. I log this as half-time for the graph – an hour of chillwork is 30 minutes of productive time. No idea how accurate that is.

Actually Take Sunday Off

Well, the graph don’t lie, I didn’t do this. But that was evening chillwork, while watching movies. It was work I was excited to do, and sitting there forcing myself to fritter the time away instead wasn’t appealing. I won’t do this kind of thing when the side-project hits a tough part or just needs grunt work, that’s when it gets draining.

When I was making Gunpoint, towards the end, I was doing 5 days at PC Gamer and 2 days on Gunpoint. The idea here is just: don’t do that.

Daily Routine

I work from home in the morning, work out, have lunch, then go to a cafe for the afternoon’s work. I settled on this order of things because:

• Lazy mornings are the primary perk of working for yourself.
• I used to work out in the morning but if I was having a low-energy day, I’d procrastinate and it’d derail everything.
• Being around people for part of my day levels me out.

Working entirely from home is more efficient, but if I do it for too long my mood starts to suffer. I lose perspective, small problems seem maddening or utterly insurmountable. In a cafe, when a problem is driving me nuts, I feel the initial frustration but then catch myself and get perspective.

Obviously I’m amazingly lucky to have this kind of freedom over my working life. That much freedom can be dangerous: if you don’t consciously get on top of it, create systems and measure the results, you can end up throwing away a huge gift and being miserable despite it.

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

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

–

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

The fan stopped!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Q: You have 100kg of potatoes, which are 99 percent water by weight. You let them dehydrate until they’re 98 percent water by weight. How much do they weigh now?
A: 50kg

It’s not a riddle or a trick, it’s literally true and the terms mean what they seem to mean. The Wikipedia page has some good explanations and diagrams of why the answer is right, which persuaded me that it was, but that didn’t solve the problem for me. To me the problem is: why am I so wrong about this?

I see that it’s true, but it still doesn’t sound like it should be. What’s my brain doing wrong?

I think it’s because we intuitively read the question something like this:

Q. You have 99kg of water and 1kg of dried potato. You remove 1kg of water. How much does all the remaining stuff weigh?
A. 99kg

That’s what the question sounds like – a casual reading of it seems like it’s saying something along those lines, so we expect the result to be along those lines. We’re not 100% we’ve considered all the details – if we were told the real answer was 99.1kg or 98kg, we wouldn’t be massively surprised or interested enough to find out why it’s not what we guessed. But the answer’s 50. We’re nowhere close, we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the concepts.

So what’s wrong with our reading, and what’s the right one?

“You have 99kg of water and 1kg of dried potato.”
This much is true. Whether you think of it as two separate substances or all mixed up in individual potatoes isn’t relevant.

“You remove 1kg of water.”
This is where we fuck up. The original says “you let them dehydrate until they’re 98 percent water”. Removing 1kg of water leaves it as 98.99% water – barely changed at all. Each time you remove 1kg of water, you’re also removing 1kg of the total weight.

The 1kg of dried potato stays the same, so it’s really asking:

How much water do you have to remove until that 1kg of dried potato is twice as much of the total?

Then, I think, it clicks. That 1kg stays, but it makes up twice as much of the total at the end. So how much of the rest must have been removed? About half of it.

I don’t think ‘Maths problems most of us get wrong if we don’t do the maths’ rises to the level of ‘paradox’ though, which is why I’ve been putting it in derision quotes.

I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they’re ‘immersive sims’. If you asked me what I liked about them, my answer would be a phrase almost as dumb: ’emergent gameplay!’

I always used to think of these as virtually the same thing, but of course they’re not. Immersive sims usually have a whole list of traits, things like:

• Multiple solutions: you can overcome most problems in more than one way – the minimum is usually defeating enemies or finding a way around them. The best alternate name for the genre I’ve heard is Vent Crawlers.
• Emergent gameplay: (faint cheering from the back of the room) problems and solutions can ’emerge’ from the interaction of the game’s rules in ways that were not scripted and maybe not even foreseen by the developers. I’ll get more into this later.
• A wide toolset: you have more tools than just a gun or a sword, and the tools have more interestingly different effects than various amounts of damage.
• Ability progression: your suite of abilities is usually something you expand and upgrade as the game goes along, often choosing what to specialise in.
• Story-driven, goal-driven: immersive sims are generally not sandboxes, you know who you are in this world, what the story is, what you’re trying to do and why.
• A detailed and extensively interactive world: Deus Ex might not seem this way now, but it was at the time. Ability to interact with bathroom apparatus is considered especially important.
• Non-linear levels: it’s less of an immersive sim if each level is a path from start to destination.
• Exploring a story: not only is it possible to explore the world of an immersive sim more than necessary, it’s usually rewarded with snippets of story – both through environmental storytelling and written or voiced notes.

I enjoy all these elements, but a lot of them have nothing to do with each other. You could make two games inspired by immersive sims with almost no overlap between them. In fact, I think that’s pretty much what my team and Fullbright have spent the last few years doing. Fullbright are the former BioShock 2 devs behind Gone Home and Tacoma, and my studio Suspicious Developments made Gunpoint and Heat Signature. I basically make games inspired by the first three items on that list, and I’d say Fullbright double down on the last three.

So if you want to make an emergent game, but don’t especially need it to be an immersive sim, how do you do it?

I call a problem or solution emergent if it happened as a result of the game’s general rules, not because a developer specifically intended it to happen. If you put a sufficiently big crate in front of a turret in Deus Ex (any Deus Ex), the turret won’t shoot you. That’s emergent because the rules involved are:

• You can move crates.
• Crates block vision.
• Turrets only attack targets they can see.

It wasn’t necessary for the developer to write a line of code that says ‘if the player moves this crate to location x, don’t let the turret fire’. If it was, putting some other object in that spot might not work when logically it should. In a good emergent game, the developer doesn’t need to predict your strategy to make it work, they just write the rules, make sure you know them, and let you play.

So that’s rule 1 for emergence: the game must be mainly governed by consistent rules that are clear to the player.

That one’s an emergent solution, but problems can be emergent too. Once in Spelunky, I watched an enemy tribesman wander into a shop. He’d already thrown and lost his boomerang. The shop had a boomerang for sale. Tribesmen pick up boomerangs automatically. Shopkeepers go ballistic if anyone takes something out of their shop without paying. And so I ran, in absolute terror, from the sight of a man walking into a shop.

I knew the tribesman would take the boomerang. I knew he’d walk out with it. And I knew the shopkeeper would flip out. The place absolutely exploded with shotgun fire a moment later.

So rule 2: things get more interesting when non-player elements can interact with each other.

You could call this the emergence equivalent of the Bechdel test: an emergent game needs to include:
a) at least two non-player elements, that
b) interact with each other, in a way that is
c) not just murder.
The shopkeeper absolutely did murder the tribesman, and another shopkeeper, and a dog, and ultimately himself – but it was the boomerang that made things interesting.

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Can I tell you one from Heat Signature? It’s not my story so I hope it gets a pass. Dan’s objective was in a locked room. He didn’t have the keycard. A nearby guard did, but they were in a room full of other guards.

Dan had two different teleporters: a Sidewinder and a Swapper. A Sidewinder can take you anywhere you have a clear path to – around a corner, but not through a locked door. A Swapper lets you switch places with someone, but there’s no-one inside the objective room. Do you see a solution?

Dan stands right next to the locked door, touching it. He uses the Swapper on the keycard guard. Now the guard’s next to the door, so it opens – but Dan is in a room full of guards and about to die. But now he does have a clear route to the objective, because for this one second the door is open. So he just clicks a button on his Sidewinder and he’s in the room with his objective.

Rule 3: you get more interesting emergent solutions if you can do things to enemies other than kill them.

Then there was that fight in FTL. I’m up against an Engi ship, and they’re wrecking me with heavy lasers and an EMP cannon. One more hit and I’m dead. My shields are up, but when their EMP weapon fires next it’ll disable them, leaving me exposed to the heavy laser shots I cannot take. So… I turn off my shields.

An EMP shot disables your shield generator if it hits your shield. If your shields are down, it goes straight through and disables whatever system they’ve targeted. They might have targeted the shield generator, in which case I’m boned either way. But if there’s any chance they didn’t, if they’re aiming for anything else, I want them to hit. Because then I can just turn my shields back on and block the laser hit.

I turn my shields off. The EMP shot comes. And hits… life support. Perfect! We only need that if we’re gonna live more than a minute. Shields up, laser hits blocked, rip them to shreds with my finally-charged halberd beam.

Rule 4: players find more interesting solutions when they’re desperate.

That one wasn’t even a good idea. There was every chance it would achieve nothing. I only tried it because every other option was certain death. And when I did, something wonderful happened. Keeping the player on the brink of failure without frustrating them is a whole other article, of course.

Obviously these are not the only rules for emergence, they’re just some of the ones I’ve learned so far. My hope for this column is to bridge the gap between the kind of surface-scratching analysis I used to squeeze into a review, and the deeper but more technical and jargon-heavy analysis aimed at developers. I love delving into why good games work, and I hope I can share my theories in a way that isn’t impenetrable.

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.

Once I calmed down and read them, though, I was delighted: they were not only very positive, but they told entertaining stories and made intelligent points. And almost every critique I read I thought was a fair point. Hence this:

The Fair Points Update

5 new features and 3 new items, in direct response to review critiques, designed to round the game out and make it more fun for more people.

We also added a gun that fires acid money to melt the flesh from your enemies and leave only chemically bleached bone. No-one asked us for that, we just kind of did it, and now here we are.

This post goes into all the design logic, critiques and features – if you’re only interested in what’s been added, the Steam Announcement covers only that.

Fair Point 1: if you can’t manage Hard missions, progression is too slow.

That’s true, and intentional! I made two assumptions here, both wrong:

1. If you do enough Easy and Medium missions, you have good enough kit that Hard ones become doable for players of any skill level.
2. Easy and Medium missions are boring, and you should eventually be forced to do harder ones.

As it turns out, some players struggle to ever do Hard missions even after acquiring a lot of gear, and are dying often enough on the Medium ones that they’re usually playing with a new, under-equipped character.

Separately, I was surprised to hear that these players really like Easy and Medium missions. They’re having fun!

But the fix isn’t as simple as increasing the rate of liberation progress for easy missions. Most players do have a better time when pushed to take harder missions, so harder missions need to reward you more. And the rate of progress should not be faster across the board, or the game becomes too short for those players. What we really want to do is check: are you making progress too slowly? And if so, can we help you out with that in an interesting way?

Feature 1: Liberators

If you haven’t liberated a station in a while, one of your choices on character select will be a Liberator: a randomly generated character with high-level gear, and a personal mission to liberate a particular station. They already have the intel and the kit to go out there and do this, so you can just pick them and head straight out.

If you don’t usually last long enough to find high-level gear, this’ll be a nice chance to try some out – and to keep it after you’re done. Because these characters only appear after you’ve gone a while without liberating a station, they don’t make the game any easier or faster for players who aren’t struggling. They should just ensure that progress is never too slow, whatever your skill level, and that you’re unlocking new things and having new experiences along the way regardless.

Fair Point 2: Stronghold liberations are too hard for some players

Heat Signature’s philosophy is to always give you a huge range of difficulty options for every mission, to cater to all skill levels, all character levels, and player tastes. We didn’t really do that for Strongholds, the 4 climactic missions you have to do to complete the game – they’re just outright hard. Perfect for some players, nigh impossible for others. It wouldn’t quite work to let you choose the difficulty of these – there’d be an incentive to play it safe and make them easier than your real ability level. So instead:

Feature 2: Stronghold Liberators

If and only if you fail a Stronghold mission, you’ll find a Stronghold Liberator in the bar. These are like the other liberators but even better equipped, so they should make Stronghold missions easier. Still not easy, but you can also afford to take more risks and lose them, since it’s not hours and hours of progress on the line. And each time you’re offered one, their kit will be different – so may be better or worse-suited to the job.

Fair Point 3: Permadeath encourages you to choose missions below your skill level, because so much is at stake

Huh! This one completely surprised me because it makes perfect sense and yet I’ve never experienced it. I play Heat Sig with a cavalier attitude, taking on missions I’m not at all sure I can do, assuming I’ll figure it out or at least be able to abort in spectacular style if things go south. But if you’re more risk-averse about your characters and kit, it’s true, the threat of permanently losing them is a factor pushing you to take easier missions, not harder. And for the reasons above, that’s the opposite of what we want to do!

Feature 3: Glitchback Guarantee

Sometimes, one of the harder missions on offer will come with a Glitchback Guarantee. This means your client will teleport you out the moment you get hit, avoiding any permanent damage. So there’s absolutely no risk in taking these missions, you can’t lose anything no matter how badly it goes. It doesn’t make the mission easier, though – if you have to be glitched out, the mission is canceled. So this also serves as a modifier to make some missions trickier: you only get one shot.

Even though we added this feature to cater to players who think the opposite way to me, I’ve ended up really enjoying it myself. I’ll just dive into an Audacious mission with a brand new character and no real hope, and just see how the chaos plays out.

Fair Point 4: I just don’t do missions with shielded or armoured guards

Aha. These two types of kit are special, in that they are nearly impossible to deal with without specialised tools. That’s intentional, for two reasons:

1. It makes those tools especially desirable, creating a progression path and meaningful differences between what different loadouts are good for.
2. Sometimes, having to deal with an enemy you cannot take out gets really interesting, and brings out possibilities you don’t otherwise discover.

Where we screwed up, a little, is that you don’t know how many of these you’ll encounter. So even if you have a 5-use Crashbeam, you might not take a mission with shielded guards because there could be 15 of them. So you play it safe and don’t take it.

Feature 4A: Guard counts

You’re now told how many of each type of guard you’ll encounter on a mission, so you can plan accordingly. You’ll be able to tell: yes, I have enough tools to deal with this many shielded guards. But I’m also hoping you’ll sometimes think “I nearly have enough tools to deal with that many, I bet I can avoid the rest….” A 5-use Crashbeam vs 8 shielded guards is a much more interesting proposition than an unknown number.

We’ve also made the number of bosses on a mission something that can vary separately, to increase variety: so you’ll now see missions that take place on a large ship but with only a handful of armoured bosses, and others where there’s more than one boss per cluster. There are more missions with 3-6 bosses, which is very doable if you have just one tool that deals with their protection type.

Feature 4B: Acid and Crash Traps

We’re also adding two new item types to help you better deal with armour and shields. Acid Traps can be placed to strip the armour of any guard who walks on them, and Crash Traps will crash all of their electronic kit, shields included. You’ll have to use some guile to set them up and lure the target into them, but they both come with a powerful advantage: they’re always self-charging. That means even the common ones are endlessly re-usable, so there’s no upper limit on how many armoured or shielded guards you can deal with – if you can lure them in.

Fair Point 5: I sometimes have trouble making things out

We did a lot of work on clarity before launch, and saw great improvements in feedback – I think we got it to a point where it’s clear enough for the vast majority of people and also looks really nice. So I was gonna say “screw it, we did our best”. But then my friend Zack said two interesting things on the subject:
1. He has the same kind of colour blindness as at least one other person who had this trouble.
2. He wishes there was a mode he could turn on that made everything ultra-clear, regardless of the visual quality cost.

We haven’t heard about a specific colour-based distinction that’s causing trouble (we avoided knowingly relying on colour alone for this reason), but that angle helped me realise this is an accessibility issue. It doesn’t really matter whether the cause is an eye thing or a brain thing, if a percentage of people can’t see what’s going on, we should fix that.

His second point made it easier to see how we could: clarity is only hard if you’re trying to also optimise for visual richness and variety. We successfully did that for most people. For those we left behind, clarity is waaaay more important than prettiness. So if we have a way of making it clearer but less fancy, let’s make that an option!

Feature 5A: Simple Art mode

Under Accessibility Options, there’s now a Simple Art Mode you can enable. It makes all ships use a simpler version of the Foundry ship look, which is already our clearest and plainest. We’ve clarified and plainified it a bit further in this mode: the traversible space is almost entirely blank, and the solid stuff is tweaked to all look identical. Hope this helps!

Feature 5B: Explosive guard annotations

We now annotate explosive guards when they first appear on screen, since some people had trouble spotting those. You can turn this off in the options if you don’t like it.

Fair Point 6: I just hate permadeath

OK, no reviewer said this. But one or two players did, and my mental response was “Well, this game is not for you.” I’m not gonna completely remove permadeath, it would be a totally different game, and one that generates less interesting stories overall.

But maybe that’s not the right question. It’s not: would the game be better without permadeath? It’s: can we help the players who hate it? Is there something we can do for them? And that’s actually an easy answer: sure! We could let them turn it off.

This is a bit mad, so I’m interested to see how it works out. I’m very intentionally moving away from ‘auteur protecting his precious artistic vision’ and towards ‘let’s welcome everyone we can’ – as long as we can do it without affecting players who are alrady having fun.

Feature 6: A Cheat Option to turn off permadeath

We’ve added this under Cheat Options to be clear that it’s not how the game is meant to be played – I don’t want other players to feel like they’re being asked to design how the game should work. This is a cheat. Play without it unless you need it. We warn you about the ways it can make the game less interesting. It’s only there for people who cannot enjoy the game as it stands.

When permadeath is off, anything that would normally permanently kill your character instead resets you to when you were last at a station.

Fair Point 7: As it stands, there’s no way to strip the flesh from my enemies with a corrosive form of currency?

Yes, sorry, that was an oversight.

Feature 7: The Fleshstripper

The Fleshstripper is a new unique weapon that fires the same acid used as currency in the Drift – extracted from those colourful nebulae you’ve been flying through. It belts out a heavy rain of the stuff in an arc, melting through armour and flesh alike, leaving only skeletons behind. Its ammo is your savings: it costs 1 acid to fire.

From the 22nd of Space November to the 6th of Space December, there’s a shipment passing through the drift carrying the Fleshstripper – that’s your sure-fire way to obtain it. Regardless of whether you steal the shipment, it’s also available to all players as a very rare random drop.

A note on Updates

Us: Here’s a significant free update!
You: Great! I can’t believe we get these regularly for free forever!
Us: Oh, geez. This is awkward.

This update is a one-off, we don’t plan to do updates like this on a regular basis. We might add items from time to time, but only buy the game if you want the game as it stands – we don’t make promises about future content.

Nominate us in the Steam Awards!

Heat Signature is all about player choice, so we would never try to influence how or when you choose to vote for us in the Steam Awards, in the ‘Choices Matter’ category for player choice, before the 28th of November, by clicking here. That would have to be your choice.

Either way, if you’ve played enough Heat Signature to know if you recommend it, we’d love for you to leave a quick review! As you can tell from this update, we like reviews.

Removed: Death

Due to science, you cannot die during Space Halloween. Bleeding out, suffocating, or being incinerated in an exploding pod will permanently turn you into a living skeleton. Once Halloween is over, you’ll remain a skeleton but any lethal damage will finish you off. On the plus side, skeletons are undetectable by guard’s heat sensors, and can spacewalk indefinitely since they no longer need to breathe.

Actual Ghost Missions

When taking a mission with the Ghost Clause, you are now an actual ghost. As with real-life ghosts, you can still be seen but all attacks pass through you. You’ll return to normal once the mission is over.

Actual Skeleton Crew

Ships running a Skeleton Crew are now literally running a crew of skeletons. The skeletons are functionally the same as normal guards except that they can no longer feel hope.

Does That Mean I Could Potentially Become A Skeleton Ghost?

That’s a ridiculous question. Of course you can become a skeleton ghost.

A few other patch notes here. If you don’t have Heat Signature, well, getting it would be step one.

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!

Or you can buy it from the Humble Store.

Supporter’s Edition

There’s also a Supporter’s Edition, which comes with a bunch of fun extras:

• Play through Heat Signature’s development with 8 early prototypes from its 3.5 year development.
• Watch 9 developer commentary videos showing and explaining its evolution: from drilling through hulls to liberating empires. (Total: 70 minutes)
• Own the full soundtrack in 320kbps MP3 format. (19 tracks, 83 minutes)

And on the Humble Store.

Technical Issues

If you’re having any technical issues, we’re posting any known solutions here, and you can report bugs to us here.

Thaaaaaaaanks!

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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.

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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.

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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.

I’ve also been playing a lot of XCOM 2 lately, and dreaming up my own indie equivalent to solve its clarity problems. So I started to worry: am I less original now? Have I gravitated towards building on other people’s ideas? Gunpoint was derivative, but at least it was derivative of many things rather than any one game.

But it’s OK, because like so many unoriginal people I found a way to rephrase this to make myself sound good. This is not unoriginal game design, it’s playable games criticism! I used to write about where games went right or wrong, now I actually try fixing their problems and find out if I’m right!

That’s bluster, of course, but it’s reasonably true of Morphblade. It started as a private experiment: I hate getting screwed by the corridor generation in Imbroglio! Couldn’t I just remake Imbroglio and fix that? Can I fix that? Am I right that it would help?

Along the way, I realised I had opinions about almost every other part of Imbroglio, and tried doing each of them my way to see if it worked. Not: “The game has these flaws, I will fix them!” – Imbroglio is hugely successful at being the game it wants to be. More: “I wouldn’t have done it this way, how would my way have worked out?”

So here, specifically, were the main changes I was interested in trying:

Random walls vs no walls

In Imbroglio, you grab a gem to score a point, then the walls of the level regenerate around you and the next gem is in a new spot. Sometimes it generates in such a way that an enemy is now between you and the gem with no alternate routes between you and them. At this point you live or die by what tiles happen to be between you and it – if they all do 1 blue damage and the enemy has 4 blue health, you are dead. On a high level, your death is due to the layout of your board, but in the moment, it always feels like the damn corridors screwing you.

I didn’t end up replacing this with a revised corridor generator, I just scrapped walls altogether. The weapons-as-tiles concept made positioning and movement interesting enough to me – and I ended up doubling down on that with how weapons worked (see Healthbars). I didn’t feel barriers would improve it, especially when they were the cause of my initial problem.

Square grid vs hex grid

I had no problem with Imbroglio’s square grid, but I’d always wanted to try a hex one. I’m also a big fan of Hoplite, and its Slash move taught me that hex grids give you a new way to attack something: moving past it.

Building phase vs build-as-you-go

In Imbroglio, you start by designing a 16 tile grid from a deck of cards, which will be locked in place as soon as you start play. This is at least half the game, and I like it. But it’s a hell of a lot of decision making to frontload – I haven’t relapsed on Imbroglio as much as Hoplite, because when I go back to it I look at that grid and think “Oh jeez.”

Every one of those sixteen decisions is massively important and massively interconnected and there are something like 32 options for each. That’s the game Imbroglio wants to be: it’s not a series of interesting decisions, it’s a cargo container of them, dropped on you from a crane.

I wanted something that was friendlier to dive into, even if it lost that design-a-grid feeling. I was also really resistant to doing two modes – two interfaces, two control schemes, two things to teach. Something about that just clashed with all my instincts towards simplicity, especially for a focused small-scale design experiment.

So you play right away in Morphblade, on a two-tile grid, then after every wave of enemies you add a new hex. Originally you always chose both the type and position of each new hex – if you’ve played it, those occasional blank hexes used to be the only type I gave you. It was essentially a drip-feed of the same type of decisions Imbroglio puts up-front. But I found that led to me building the same grid every time, unless I had some rare insight or theory about a new strategy. I was more interested in a game that used randomisation to nudge you to build a different grid each time you played, where your decision-making is reactive rather than dictatorial.

Figuring out how to do that is where Morphblade changed from something I was gonna release for free in August 2016 to something I felt was worth five bucks in March 2017. The earliest release date Steam could give me in August was the day I left for Stugan, a two month retreat whose organisers had invited me to help me finish Heat Signature. I felt I wouldn’t be honouring that privilege if I spent any of that time on different project, so I watched lots of my new friends play Morphblade but didn’t touch it for two months.

I came back much more bothered by the same-every-time problem, and tried a few solutions. The one that ultimately solved it was simple and obvious, but I rejected it at first because it was incompatible with one of the hex types I had. Eventually I realised I had to step back and re-solve that problem a different way first.

The solution was to give the new hexes I offer you randomly preset types: do you want a Hammer up here, or a Blade down there? You still have a decision to make, but the ones you’re presented with are different each time you play.

That did not work when one of the types was Gun, which could not fire point-blank, because the answer was always “Well not the fucking Gun, obviously.” The Gun only worked as part of cleverly pre-planned designs, which was fundamentally fighting the reactive-design goal I was going for, so I scrapped it and rethunk. The result was Acid, a tile that strips armoured enemies when they move there – a faithful successor to Gun in that is it every bit as unpopular with players, who are every bit as wrong.

Two healthbars vs no healthbars

It looks a bit like everything in Imbroglio has health and mana, but they’re really more like red health and blue health – run out of either of them and you die. The game is deeply about hitpoints, and I am deeply not. I’m not as zealously against them as I used to be, but I generally think if you avoid them you end up with more immediately satisfying interactions.

So every enemy dies in one hit in Morphblade, or they don’t die at all – armoured enemies are immune to conventional attacks. Instead of dealing different amounts of damage, the various tile types in Morphblade just kill in different patterns. Hammer kills the thing in front of you without moving. Blades kill things to the sides as you move. Arrow kills two things in front of you if you have room to move that far.

This changes utility tiles. Imbroglio has a lot of tile types that do something interesting but deal less damage to compensate. I was already a little unhappy with this – if there’s a pendant that increases my mana, it felt weird to have to bludgeon people to death with it again and again until it leveled up enough to do that. It felt like all these tile types were reluctantly working two jobs: they didn’t really want to be damage dealers, but that’s how things level up so they would half-heartedly let you use them that way.

So Morphblade’s other three tile types do no damage at all. Repair, Teleport and Acid don’t let you directly hurt enemies, though in Morphblade you can always move into an enemy to shove them back. The shoving thing prevents them from being a total liability – a zero damage tile in Imbroglio, which can exist, is a deathtrap – but the other problem is how do they level up? I went for the next most obvious way: when things die on them.

It was actually Morphblade that convinced me hitpoints have their virtues – for the player. It matters a lot less if an enemy hitting you is satisfying – it probably won’t be – and having just two or three HP gives a lot more breathing room for strategies and mistakes. In particular, being in Scenario X has starkly different implications and options if you have 2 health vs if you have 1, so the interesting possibility space is expanded. The more health you allow the fuzzier and less interesting those differences get, so I kept it simple: you can take one hit without dying. With the right upgrades, you can take two.

32+ tile types vs 6 tile types

Imbroglio has lots and lots of cards, almost all with unique effects. But with Morphblade, I was really interested in trying something that didn’t take fucking ages to make.

Straight upgrades vs cross-breeds

Each tile in Imbroglio has its own upgrade path, usually increasing in damage a little and eventually unlocking some special effect. If I was going to have fewer tile types, maybe I could give you more options in how you upgrade them? Branching upgrade trees might be good, but I’m always looking for ways to collapse things down and reuse or mix together existing elements. If Suspicious Developments had one of those aspirational corporate mottos, it would be “combining things in sometimes interesting ways perhaps”. So I thought about letting you cross-breed one hex type with another.

I could have let you add the effects of any hex type onto any other, but with six types and six sides to a hexagon, I couldn’t resist making it about adjacency. So if you want to upgrade a Hammer to kill things to the sides like Blades, you’ve got to build a Blades hex next to it before you level it up. This adds a bunch of extra considerations onto which types of hex you want in which positions, which makes the multiple-choice building system more interesting. You design your possible upgrade paths by how you construct your board, then you kill things to earn the upgrades, then you choose between the options you’ve given yourself.

I had a few rules for these combinations:

Asymmetry: upgrading type A with type B should make a different hex to upgrading B with A.
Stackability: upgrading A with B should not stop you also upgrading A with C.
Nonredundancy: upgrading A with B can be more useful than upgrading A with C, but it should not render upgrading A with C pointless.
Desirability: upgrading A with B shouldn’t stop you doing something significantly useful you could do with A alone.
Exaggeration: upgrading A with A should make A better at A’s job.

This meant coding 36 different upgrades, at least 18 of which had to be redone as hex types were replaced or redesigned. This took fucking ages to make.

Conclusion

I haven’t talked about whether I think each of these changes worked, because in isolation, of course I do. If I didn’t, I would have reverted them or done something else. But that doesn’t mean I think the game is better overall. In fact, I think they’ve steered it far enough from Imbroglio that they don’t feel like two attempts to do the same thing. When the press wrote about Morphblade’s launch, Imbroglio wasn’t even the most common point of comparison – it was Hoplite.

The big one is scrapping the build phase. That moves it to a different genre. I think it ended up feeling like Space Hulk to Imbroglio’s Warhammer 40K: much smaller possibility space, but less set up, and aiming to scratch a different itch.

I’m very happy with Morphblade’s simplicity / depth balance. It’s less deep than Imbroglio, but deeper than other games with so few elements. It got a lot better when I added the list of all possible upgrades on the description of each tile: you’re constantly being presented with a menu of all the complexity the game has to offer, but you don’t have to worry about most if it because you only have a few options at each stage.

I also like that the strategies players have found successful are not at all the same as mine. The highest scores I’ve seen are based on super upgraded time-stopping teleporters, a strategy I’ve never got to work. And I’ve seen lots of others beat my high score with other builds, ones I haven’t tried. I use Arrows, obsessively, and sometimes worried that Arrows are just too good, so obviously better than other hexes. But I’ve seen no hint of that preference from other players, so it seems like it supports a bunch of different styles.

So Morphblade probably ended up being more successful as an exercise in game making than in game critique, but I’m happy anywhere on that spectrum.

Reading Michael’s posts about Imbroglio’s design makes me all the more appreciative of how much work and thought of his I’m benefiting from when I draw inspiration from the final product. I’m glad I got to hug and thank him properly at GDC this year.

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!

These are not spoilery except for The Crown, in which nothing really happens.

The Crown – Churchill’s Expression

Series 1, Episode 7
Netflix

The Crown is about the current queen of England’s early reign, a role which commands tremendous fanfare and almost no power. So the series zooms in on what small things she can do: so far her most politically influential move has been to invite someone to a dinner and then cancel it.

So when she discovers that Churchill and his senior staff have been lying to her about the type and severity of his illness, her instinct is to do nothing. Her character arc in this episode is to work up the courage and authority to instead give them a stern telling-off, which is also effectively nothing.

Churchill has been portrayed thus far as well-intentioned but manipulative – this is not the first time he’s deceived people when he thinks he knows best. He shows great respect for the crown and constitution, but not much for Elizabeth herself: in their first meeting he virtually chides her for offering him a seat, when the etiquette is to stand in the monarch’s presence.

All of which makes it uncertain how he’ll react to this earful. It’s pretty serious to be caught lying to the queen, but he seemed to think little of doing it and we all know there’ll be no real consequences. For most of her reprimand, he looks at his feet. But when the queen expounds the personal aspect of the betrayal, he looks up, and we finally see his reaction.

He might be about to cry. He might be about to die. John Lithgow’s whole considerable face trembles with dismay. He made the decision as a politician strategising to keep himself in power, but in the presence of a queen actually acting like a queen, and acting hurt by him, he’s reduced to a desperately sorry child on the verge of tears. It genuinely twisted my gut.

I heard an interview with him once where said that no matter how ‘big’ a director wants him to go with his performance, he’s always itching to go bigger. So when the practical stakes of a climactic scene are virtually nil, and the emotional stakes have to be carried by a single facial expression, he’s your guy.

The Good Place – The Dog

Series 1, Episode 1
NBC

The Good Place is probably my favourite new show of 2016. I liked the concept immediately: a woman wakes up in heaven, is told only the most virtuous people get there, is congratulated on her selfless works, introduced to her soulmate, and then, when they’re alone, tells him they have the wrong person. She did none of that stuff, she just has the same name. And she’s an asshole.

There’s obviously comedy potential in a jerk having to learn how to pass herself off as a good person, and it’s a very funny comedy. But it’s also a surprisingly compelling serial: the mechanics of how this place works, and how her presence is disrupting it, are always developing. And big cornerstones of the show’s premise are regularly smashed by new developments. It’s the only comedy I can think of where at least half the reason I’m watching is to find out what happens next.

Ted Danson plays the architect of this particular neighbourhood of heaven, and here he’s trying to track down what’s causing all the glitches.

Dirk Gently – The Negotiation

Series 1, Episode 2
Netflix

This new Dirk Gently adaptation takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it. It takes no stories and only one character from the books, Dirk, and inverts almost everything about him. He can be annoyingly zany, the show can be annoyingly serious, and his accomplice Todd can be annoyingly annoyed about both.

But surprisingly, the main thing I loved about Douglas Adams’ writing is intact. It was the nature of his worlds that made me want to keep reading: in Hitchhikers, it felt like they could go anywhere in the galaxy and something bizarre, interesting and funny would happen. In Dirk Gently, it felt like he could stay exactly where he was and something bizarre, interesting and sinister would happen.

The show has that. Weird characters and inexplicable events pile on faster than it seems possible to resolve, but as they blunder through the resulting mess, bit by bit, it starts to tie together. And once you know all the non-sequitors will ultimately make sense, it’s fun to spend time in this world where something bizarre, interesting and sinister is always about to happen.

It also features easily my favourite scene of the year. This is from episode two, and while it does reference many, many plot threads, I don’t consider it a spoiler for any of them for reasons that will become obvious.

• I made a new video showing off John Roberts’ excellent new art for the game’s four factions! (Not that surprising)
• I’m looking for a programmer in the Seattle area to help me finish the game! (Seattle part seems surprising)
• … because I’m moving to Bellevue to work on the game at Valve’s offices! (Extremely surprising but now the Seattle thing is less surprising)

Here’s the new video, which also shows what teleporters and the What Now? screen add to the game:

If you haven’t already, put it on your Steam Wishlist so you hear about it when it comes out. Also, if you were in on a Steam beta, it was probably taken off your wishlist because Steam briefly thought you owned it, so check. And if you want to be in on future tests, make sure you’re on the mailing list (top right).

The Valve thing

They want my input on something, and I’d obviously welcome theirs on Heat Sig, so I’ve accepted their offer to come and work on it at their offices instead of my bedroom. I’ll still be independent, self-employed and pretty much full time on Heat Sig, but I’m very excited to be around people again – especially these people. I’ll be there for 3 months at most, at which point the siren song of visa waiver laws will call me home.

The job (updated)

Found someone, thanks!

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.

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.

I would suggest three things to bear in mind:

1. Don’t judge one prototype mechanic against a whole finished game

I don’t know if you’ve played the early prototypes in the DLC, but the first versions of Gunpoint didn’t have much going for them. I had you trying to jump on guards who turned around at random intervals, killing you instantly. By itself the jump wasn’t particularly interesting, but once I’d got it useable that’s when I added stuff like pouncing on guards and punching them, climbing on walls and mantling round corners. I didn’t know if any of these things would be particularly good, but as it turned out the punching bit was an unexpected highlight. It still wasn’t what you’d call ‘a fun game’, though, it needed years of thought and design and testing and redesign to make it all hang together.

For a long time the Crosslink was just a theoretically interesting idea, most testers just said it had ‘potential’. It was pretty empty by itself, and it took a long time and lots of trial and error to design levels that managed to present interesting obstacles to your rewiring ability, without forcing you down a single path.

2. Fun doesn’t come from game logic / mechanics alone

The first thing that really felt ‘fun’ about Gunpoint was that endlessly punching guards thing, which isn’t mechanically interesting at all. There was no advantage to doing it, I just didn’t see a reason to prevent you. I found a sound effect of a belt being whipped, and drew an incredibly crude 2 frame animation, and something about the suddenness of that with the weirdly slap-like noise was funny, and being able to do it as rapidly as you could click was satisfying, and it worked. But the punching is not a good idea, it has no interesting implications or consequences, I just got lucky with the sound effect and some placeholder animation. So don’t expect an idea to feel fun right away if it doesn’t have those trappings yet.

3. Figure out some smaller, specific, achievable goals

‘Fun’ is a big nebulous thing with many components, and it’s hard to approach without breaking it down. You’ll have to figure out for yourself what specific types of things you find fun, but as an example my checklist is something like this:

Single, inherently satisfying actions: eg. throwing yourself through a plate glass window, or punching a guard in the face. These don’t have to be smart or interesting, and they usually only get fun once they have sound and maybe some basic animation or tweaking of their presentation. It’s quite easy to stumble on these through random experimentation.

Some kind of special player ability: pretty much every game idea I get excited about starts with the words “You can…” For me it usually ends up being something you can’t do in real life, but it doesn’t have to be too far fetched: I love Hitman, and that game’s most outlandish ability is “You can dress up as other people”.

Problems with many solutions: whatever it is you can do, I want a) some problem that can be solved with it, b) more than one way to do so, and c) interesting differences between the solutions. C is the tricky part.

If you can figure out what your components of fun are, just pick one and see if you can achieve it. Don’t worry if the other stuff doesn’t arrive fully formed around it, each part might need its own journey through experimentation, testing, revision.

Hope that helps!

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.

If you’re in the alpha:

• Yes, it’s fine to stream, screenshot, write about, and publish videos of, monetised or otherwise!
• As requested in the invite mail, please don’t send me bug reports on Twitter or DM or e-mail, I’m getting bombarded with these from all sides and I can’t sort through them this way. Using the form means I have it all in one place.

If you’re press or anyone with an audience:
I’d like to fix the first batch of crashes and bugs before I really recommend you play it. Once I’ve done that, I’ll get in touch. If I haven’t already told you I’ll send you a key, DM @HeatSig (DMs are open) to let me know you’re interested.

If you’re just a regular joe, real salt-of-the-earth type, good people, never hurt nobody, keeps emselves to emselves:
Did you see we have a store page now? And a new short video? And that you can Wishlist the game, so you’ll be told when it’s out? See those things!

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

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.

A brief history of zooming and backgrounds:

1. We worry about how to make the game look good at all the zooms between ‘local’ and ‘galaxy map’.
2. You ask if anything actually happens at those zooms. It doesn’t! I rejig the zoom system to skip them.
3. I find very close zooms are disorienting because there’s no background for a sense of speed.
4. You make tiling vapour layers and stars/dust.
5. I tell them to display at certain zoom levels, and fade in between. It looks good but is awkward code-wise, everything’s hard-coded to a certain zoom level and I have to create a new special case instance for each zoom level.
6. For unrelated reasons, I start to let the camera auto-zoom to keep two things on screen: eg. the player and their ship, if they’ve ejected.
7. The slow zoom-out gives an awesome sense of scale, except now the star layer tiles very obviously and soon the vapour layers stop showing and it’s all a big blur, which is kinda pretty but you lose the feel of ‘zooming’.
8. I think: “What we really need is for the layer itself to spot when it’s being asked to tile an unacceptable number of times, like 4, and if so create a new layer of double scale that we can fade up, and then when the old one is fully invisible, it destroys itself, and trusts the new one to spawn bigger or smaller layers as required and fade between them smoothly and destroy itself when it’s no longer needed. And vice versa for zooming in.”
9. Aeons pass.
10. I do it!

Update: better video!

• You can’t fly this fast, I’m using fast-forward.
• I fade the layers out entirely once the shapes of the galactic blobs are visible, so it doesn’t texture parts where there’s no vapour.
• The slight pulsing of vapour opacity on zoom is not intentional, though not sure if it’s worth fixing. It’s probably to do with the fact that two 0.5 opacity layers do not equal one 1.0 opacity layer.

It works! I love it. Feels like a real victory of code and art: we had this big scary problem, a gap in what we could do to a good standard, and we dodged around it for a while, and then your perfectly tiling dust layer and my new autozoom system came together in a way that suggested a smarter approach, and it just solves it completely. We fade through hundreds of orders of magnitude of scale, and the background layers just transition seamlessly as you go. And the sense of scale is so much better – it’s actually got easier to catch yourself in your pod now, because you can tell between ‘it got further away’ and ‘the camera zoomed in a bit’ – previously both looked the same.

This new system will mean I can tweak the zoom controls to not skip that big gulf between local and map, and use autozoom more liberally, for things like being chased or approaching an objective or an autopilot destination. Turns out once those zoom levels look good, there are a few gameplay uses for them!

If you can read this sentence, my method of hiding spoilers is not working for you and you should treat this as an entirely spoilery post.

I enjoyed it a lot! It sounds like all my bigger-Star-Wars-fan friends did too, which is great. I’ll keep this spoiler-free and then let people who’ve seen it click the spoiler buttons for what I’m specifically talking about.

It alternates a bit between three different ways you could approach making a Star Wars sequel:

• Nostalgia Trip: the same characters come back and do the same things but 30 years older.
• Mimic: new characters who are curiously similar to old ones, facing a curiously similar configuration of curiously similar enemies with a curiously similar threat, which they resolve with a curiously similar plan.
• New Story: new characters that occupy new roles in the familiar world, using them to explore new corners of it and create new situations and conflicts.

As you can probably tell from my phrasing, I like it best when it’s doing New Story stuff. A whole film of that would turn me full fanboy. As it is, the new stuff is still central enough that it kept me excited throughout.

Click for spoilery specifics

Spoiler stuff follows

I really like Rey, and that counts for a lot – I don’t know how the screen time tallies up, but the plot certainly revolves around her more than anyone. It’s reasonable to call her the new Luke, but she’s different enough to count as new. She’s stoic where he was a complainer, isolated where he had adopted family, fiercer and funnier. And she’s a woman, which is immediately refreshing.

Finn, as a character concept, is new: a turncoat Stormtrooper. I like him too, and generally very much like the idea of humanising people who were previously seen as valueless and interchangeable cannon fodder. But the fiction can’t make good on that idea. The very first thing he does after going rogue is slaughter dozens of interchangeable Stormtroopers, then minutes later whoops about it with his new pal. Once he’s out, he talks and behaves exactly like a normal, rogueish, wise-cracking, functioning member of the free galaxy. There’s instantly no trace of the fascist culture he’s lived it for as long as he can remember, where people get serial numbers not names, and devote their lives to working on ways to destroy more than one planet at once.

As I say, I like him. But taking on a big concept like that is a bad idea if the genre of film you’re making clashes with the inevitable consequences of it: that he would be fucked up, that Stormtroopers are people, that it’s not cool or fun to kill them.

Poe is not a new or very interesting character – standard hotshot – but I wanted to mention him here because Oscar Isaac’s performance makes him so charming. His fast friendship with Finn is what ends up making that character feel real, and stresses the stakes: when they unexpectedly see each other again and hug, it feels like they’ve been through something truly affecting.

Kylo is great. Aesthetically, in costume, he’s very guilty of the ‘Mimic’ side of the film – we need a Vader, dress someone up as Vader. But once the mask first comes off, he becomes something much more interesting: someone doing all the awful shit Vader did while being a person.

His inner conflict is happening visibly – he hides his face but will show it when challenged. He bullies his underlings like Vader but then can’t control his rage, to the point that it’s almost embarrassing. We’re told that he has ‘light in him’ and we see it: we hear his doubts and how he contextualises them as ‘temptations’ in a way that lets him dismiss them. He wants to look invincible, but can’t quite ignore his injuries – punching himself in a disturbing way that could be masochism, penance, or self-surgery. And his encounter with Han genuinely felt like it could go either way, to me. Which made his betrayal much more affecting than just bad-guy-does-bad, or even major-character-dies. There’s a sense of losing Ben too.

It spends most of its time in Mimic mode, which baffles me. It’s fine, I’m just puzzled that anyone, even the most rabid fan of the originals, thought that to recapture them you’d need to literally copy and paste the exact same elements and rename them as if they’re new.

Click for spoilery specifics

Spoiler stuff follows

Hero is a technically adept unwittingly force-sensitive loner on desert planet, villain is a masked man in black with a tannoy voice filter, who reports to an enigmatic seated overlord, and has a hierarchical rivalry with the stuffy and force-sceptical commander of the military wing, who he threatens but does not seem to entirely outrank, and the commander wants to use the big weapon but the mask guy wants to use the force, and the big weapon is a giant spherical object that can destroy planets – a strategy they have tried twice before, to expensive and memorable failure – and the rebels’ plan to defeat it is to have one set of people sneak in and disable its shields, and then another set to fly in and shoot its weak spot.

Again, this is the superficial stuff – even the strategic mechanics – so I don’t care that much. I like Rey and Kylo, who are new character-wise. Just bemused.

I’m not completely against a Nostalgia Trip. I like that old characters are back, and I think some of them are used well – as welcome cameos, or lynchpins of the plot. The time it starts to hurt the film, for me, is when old characters are leading the action and very pointedly doing exactly what they were doing 30 years ago. It feels like putting on a show – “Look! This is what you want! Things are just like they were!” It’s fine to do that for a moment, then show why things have moved on. But it’s more than a moment, here – some of them are lead characters, and that’s where it starts to feel like wallowing in the past.

A while ago I would have said there was no point at all to doing stuff like that. But once the trailers came out, I realised some people respond to it on a completely different level to me. When I see Han Solo again, I think “Yes, I recognise that man. There he is, on that ship of his.” Apparently some people experience something a little stronger, and this part of TFA is obviously for them. If it worked for them, it was probably worth it.

Click for spoilery specifics

Spoiler stuff follows

Obviously I’m talking about Han and Chewie here. Story-wise I really like Han’s arc: how the aftermath of saving the world and getting the girl has clashed with the personality that got him there. But for the long periods that he and Chewie are being action heroes, it has the feeling of a videogame tie-in: see the Iconic Characters do the Thing You Know Them For! Tag along, and press some switches at the right time to help them!

I’m glad that ended here, and with a moment that felt brave and galling: he’s finally forced to be vulnerable in the last way he wants to be, and is brutally punished for it.

Comments: if your comment mentions anything that happens in the film, please start it with [This comment contains spoilers for The Force Awakens] – that’s intentionally long so the spoilery bit won’t show up in the sidebar excerpts here. I’ll also turn on comment moderation for a while, to be safe, so your comment won’t pop up right away.

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:

What I’m doing

Right now I’m trying to add a little auto-aim when you’re pointing a gun at people. If you’re holding a gun and the cursor is near an enemy, I want a little reticule to appear on the enemy, the player to point their gun at them, and if you fire, obviously, fire in that direction.

How I’m doing it

The reticule needs to be an object – that’s the only way to specify a particular depth (z-layer) for it to be drawn at). I called it oReticule.

The code that looks for enemies to aim at is in the PlayerItemControls() script – that handles anything specific to what you’re holding in your hands, and this is a feature of guns and possibly some other item types, but not others. I tell it: if there’s an enemy near the cursor, place oReticule on it and make oReticule.visible = true.

The code that decides which way the player should face is called PlayerMovementControls(). Normally, in this ‘moving around freely’ state, the player always faces the mouse cursor. For auto-aim, I’ve added an exception to say: if oReticule.visible = true, look at that instead of exactly at the mouse. The difference is slight but important: guns fire in the direction they’re facing, so you really do need to look exactly at the reticule.

Lastly, when oReticule has drawn itself, it sets oReticule.visible = false so that it won’t be drawn again unless the auto-aim code tells it to. I don’t want to have to add lines to all other player states telling the reticule to be off, I want it to be always off unless this one specific bit of code activates it.

What the problem is

Currently, the player movement code executes earlier in the step than the player item controls. So:

1. PlayerMovementControls() checks oReticule.visible, finds that it’s false, and continues pointing straight at the cursor.
2. THEN PlayerItemControls() finds an enemy to point at, and puts the reticule there and sets oReticule.visible = true.
3. oReticule finds that visible = true, draws itself, and then sets oReticule.visible = false.
4. PlayerMovementControls() checks oReticule.visible, finds that it’s false – etc.

So the player doesn’t look at the reticule, and never will – it’s checking before the item controls has a chance to turn it on, and after the reticule has turned itself off.

Obviously I can fix this by just moving ItemControls to execute before the MovementControls, but those are separate behaviours, and I don’t want them to be order-dependent. It’s perfectly possible that I might later have the same problem the other way around, and it’s almost certain I will forget that they have this hidden order-dependency.

I also often want a similar relationship where those two scripts would be on different objects entirely, and in that case the order in which their step events execute is unknown. (It can be known, but it depends on something about how you organise your objects in GM that I change regularly, so I can’t depend on it).

What I’ve tried

What I’ve done for now is to take the ‘visible = false’ bit out of the oReticule’s draw event and put it at the start of ItemControls. Now the player does look at the reticule as desired, but there are still two problems:

1. If we leave this state at a time when the reticule is on, this code won’t execute again, so the reticule will never get turned off. I do have an OnExitState bit I could add a line to, but this feels messy. It’s also possible for the player to get destroyed unexpectedly, and since the reticule is a separate object it would continue to exist and be visible.
2. It’s perfectly possible that I might want something else to also turn on the reticule.

So what I want is

• Several bits of code that can each turn the reticule on
• Several other bits of code that need to know whether the reticule is currently on
• If none of the bits of code that turn the reticule on execute, the reticule should be off
• None of these bits of code know what order they will execute in, on a given step
• It’s fine if the listening bits of code respond on the next step instead of this one

Context

This in Game Maker Studio 1.4, which uses its own language GML. It doesn’t have delegates or coroutines or structs, that I know of. All functions are public and can be called from anywhere.

Any thoughts?

Update: Solved!

Thanks everyone! Lots of very different ideas, many of them involving big concepts I didn’t know about. As usual, finding out all the different ways other people tackle this problem clarifies where the issue is, and I found I could boil it down into something pretty simple and lo-fi: I just need two variables instead of one.

The two types of code I identified above are ones that can set the variable and ones that listen for it. If these two operate on the same variable, order will always be a problem. So instead we’ll call the ones that can set it Signallers, and the ones that listen for it Listeners. And we replace the single variable with:

OnSignal: anyone can set this, but it is never read by anything other than the object.
OnState: only the object can set this, and anything can read it.

So Signallers all set OnSignal, and Listeners all listen for OnState. Then in the object’s code, we say:

OnState = OnSignal
OnSignal = false

Anything that listens for OnState – including this object’s draw code – will trigger once for every step when OnSignal was triggered by anything (it may be the next step). And will stop triggering if nothing set it since last step.

Tested it: it works, is only 2 lines, and most importantly, doesn’t involve adding code where there wasn’t already code for this.

Thanks again for the ideas!

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.