So if you’re interested in doing music for it, I’d love it if you could add what you think is appropriate to this version of the trailer.

I’m mostly open-minded about what the music should be like, but here are a few thoughts I have on it:

• You’re a spy, and it’s a stealth game. It needs to be quiet most of the time – possibly silent. I don’t think constant music is necessary, certainly nothing too busy or active.
   
• Music can be triggered by in-game events, but obviously you need to know what specifically it should respond to – it can’t just be “Action” without a clear idea of what defines that.
   
• Gunpoint’s set in the near future, with some silly gadgets, but also tries to be noir-inspired wherever possible. So electronic stuff is cool, and lonely sax is cool, but by no means compulsory.
   
• A light touch is good. I’d rather people not notice the music than notice when it doesn’t fit.
   
• I’m personally not wild about chiptunes. I’m open to it, of course, but I’ve never heard anything chiptuney that feels like a good fit for this style, to me.
   
• The flow of the game will probably go:

  Mission: leaping around a building, looking for a way in, avoiding detection.
  Mission: Pouncing on a guard or two – sudden bursts of violence that’ll usually be contained and go back to quiet sneaking.
  Mission: reaching your objective, getting what you want.
  Mission: escaping – not usually to a time limit, but there’s generally a quick way out.

  Dialogue: debrief with a client, they react to your missions, you choose dialogue options.

  Menus: buying new gadgets, upgrading gadgets, reading briefings and choosing your next mission.

  Dialogue: briefing with a client, you choose dialogue options, ask questions.

  Then back to a mission.

If Gunpoint ends up being free, I can’t pay you anything. Sweet deal, I know! If we do end up charging for it, and you end up doing the music, you will get a share of it. I should warn, though, that it’ll be a very small share – I have to prioritise the stuff the game wouldn’t work without. Basically, for God’s sake don’t do this for the money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Reworking levels at least twice

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

2. Play style incentives

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

3. Gadgets

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

4. Persistent consumables

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

5. Upgrades

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

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

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

Sorry that this isn’t all of them, by a long shot – they came in faster than I could keep up with, and I had to trim this video to stop it getting ridiculously long. If I end up using any of the ones that aren’t shown in this video, I’ll put them up here too.

I want a really satisfying, fun, excitingly electronic noise for when you switch into this mode. There’s a great web app called BFXR by Dr Petter and the incomparable increpare, for doing stuff like that. You just hit the randomise button a lot, drag some sliders around, and you can ‘Copy link’ to send it to someone as a URL. Here’s a weird one I just made.

Since that’s how I was gonna make the Crosslink noise anyway, and it’s easy to do, I thought it might be fun to see if you wanna come up with something yourself. Have a play around with BFXR, then when you’re happy with it, click Copy Link and send the URL to me – either via e-mail, or as an @GunpointGame reply on Twitter.

The only prize is making Gunpoint slightly better, getting your name in the credits, and sorta feeling like you did something today, if you don’t already. To be totally clear: don’t send me a link to your sound unless you’re happy for me to use it. That would be weird.

You slip into a mindset where you expect things to work, which makes you angry rather than confused when they don’t. I’ve had to start spotting this mindset when it crops up, and taking a long, relaxing break before I go any further.

When I come back, I have to change gear. And the most useful way I’ve found to think of it is this:

It has completely lost it, and you have to be expect every sensible instruction to be met with screaming, preposterous bullshit.

Programmer: Hello Game, how are you feeling? I’d like to make this object stop when it hits a wall, if that’s OK with you.

Game: GRAVITY NO LONGER EXISTS!

Programmer: What?

Game: Every lightswitch in the world will fire a single red laser at one man’s head, and that man is… HIM!

Progammer: OK – I’m not sure how that’s related, but I’ll look into-

Game: I DON’T KNOW WHAT SPACE IS!

Programmer: The key, or…

Game: SPACE! SPACE! HORIZONTAL CO-ORDINATES! I have over five thousand references to ‘x’ and I’ve NEVER HEARD OF X.

Programmer: That’s… that’s how far right things are, Game. It’s the first thing we learned.

Game: NO! It’s a room! A room with a box, and a photocopier, and a lighting error, off the corner of Baker and 45th.

Programmer: …

Game: X IS A ROOM!

Programmer: Ohh, I actually did change the name of an old test level to that for a moment, I guess that’s what’s getting you confused – I’ll fix it.

Game: PRANKSPASM IS UNDEFINED!

Programmer: That one I’ll give you.

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

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

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

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

Ars Technica

Gunpoint Points Out Its New Look

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

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Secret agent indie Gunpoint makes being an electrician cool

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

Joystiq

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

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

Kotaku

Stealth Platformer Gunpoint is Looking Mighty Fine!

“Gunpoint looks absolutely glorious.”

IndieGames.com

Gunpoint’s Graphics Now As Awesome As Its Concept

GameSetWatch

Gunpoint’s at a really exciting stage now – character animation for the player and the basic guard type is done, so the game has a lot of its final ‘feel’. And John’s just passed over the first set of environment art, along with a mockup showing all of it crammed into one showcase level – a real one would be less busy. And check it the hell out (click):

It looks way too good. Now I feel like I’ve got to make a proper game or something. The background is obviously just a stretched version of Fabian’s original at the moment, but the rest just looks done. Which means I’m way behind on the coding side of things.

So by the end of this weekend, I want to have all of Gunpoint’s Act One working: that’s the first for or five levels, which mostly use this tile set. It’s sort of about escape anyway, come to think of it. By the end of them, the player should understand all the basic mechanics and have played around with crosslinking a bit – enough to see the point of it.

It’ll also kick off the plot, and resolve the most immediate part of it, but how much of that will work at this stage I don’t know. I’ll certainly get the actual dialogue in there – so far, writing has been the easy bit.

Update: John’s proposal to fix this:

Update: What we actually ended up with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s also a useful one for anyone involved with games to ask. It’s one game critics like me should be able to answer reflexively. It’s one developers should answer before they start making something. And it’s one gamers should probably think about before writing a one-star Amazon review saying ‘lol ass’.

I’m sad to say that on the press side of things, we haven’t really got anywhere. Half of us apparently think games meaningfully break down into “Presentation, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay, and Lasting Appeal”. And the other half believe they’re unquantifiable pixie dust and anyone who wants even the faintest idea of their merits should have to read 3,000 words of waffle.

The former is confusing a game’s component parts with what the whole achieves. The latter is just giving up. It’s not that games can be captured in a few metrics, it’s that they still can’t in 3,000 words. So instead of abandoning analysis, let’s just be smarter about where analysis stops.

It can’t stop at words like ‘gameplay’, because those aren’t useful: tell me a game has good gameplay, and all I really know is that you like it. Are your actions in it satisfying on some tactile level? If so, great. We don’t really need to know why they’re satisfying, just to say ‘it feels good’ is far more specific and useful than what we had before.

That’s what I mean by being smarter about where analysis stops. Keep asking “Why is that good?” until you hit the primal, instinctive pleasure response you’re having. It’s not impossible to keep going, but it’s more neuroscience than critique past that point.

I’ll try to explain six things that can make a game great, for me. Games don’t need to do all of them well, sometimes one is enough. But the hope is to cover every kind of draw they can have. Every game I like, I like because it does one of these things well.

1. Challenge

How much you enjoy tackling what you’re being asked to do.

Challenge is about what a game asks your brain or fingers to do, and whether it’s something you enjoy struggling with. Personally, I don’t like struggling with anything that requires extreme precision or reactions, like Super Meat Boy. But I love struggling with mental problems, like the time-bending of Braid.

Obviously difficulty is part of it – either extreme makes it hard to engage with the challenge. But just as importantly, difficulty is a way of pacing rewards. It makes games enjoyable by spacing out the dopamine kicks of success, so that you never get bored of getting them, nor of waiting for them.

A game like Tetris has a simple challenge – SORT THESE SHAPES – but a well-paced one. Its mechanics naturally make satisfying successes frequent at first, then rarer and harder the longer you play. There’s never a time in Tetris when clearing a line isn’t satisfying.

2. Feel

Making individual interactions convincing and pleasurable

When you fire a virtual gun, feel is the sound of the shot, the muzzle flash, the recoil of the weapon model, whether it offsets my aim, the reaction of the target, and what all that suggests about the unseen parts of the interaction: the weight of the bullet, its hardness, where it hit, how that felt, what damage has been done.

But feel is just as important in non-violent games. Bejeweled is incredible at it: I know exactly how hard a topaz is despite the fact that it never touches anything, just from its sound and motion. The sound of four gems forming a super-gem, and the glow that gives it, makes the thing feel dense, pregnant – all reinforced by the cathartic boom when it goes off.

If you’re ever wondering why a PopCap game succeeded despite being suspiciously similar to an existing game that was only moderately popular, it’s because the first game got the challenge right and PopCap added the feel.

3. Freedom

The extent to which a game reacts to your choices with interesting results

A game that put you in an infinite empty field would have a lot of freedom in the ordinary sense of the word, but it’s not just about maximising options. Freedom is about how many different options the game has an interesting response to.

If the result is just “Your character moves a bit in that infinite field”, that’s not interesting. In Deus Ex, though, your choices about how to approach a wide-open level all lead to meaningfully different situations. The front door gets you into a dangerous dance with a patrolling bot, the side entrance exposes you to a lot of guards, the rear gets you a key to the building. Shooting attracts guards and results in a big gunfight, stealth keeps things under control but gives you more threats to think about in the long run.

There are more complex reasons why those choices are particularly compelling, and more complex ways that the sub-options within them interact. But basically, a big reason Deus Ex is great is that it gives you a lot of options, and has something different to offer you whichever one you pick.

4. Place

A world you want to be in

It’s funny how many people can’t see the point of games, but see traveling as one of the most enriching and exciting pleasures of life. I love both, often for the same reason and in the same way. Stepping off a zeppelin in Durotar is as clear and fond a memory getting off a plane in Zimbabwe.

Mirror’s Edge is a good case study, because place is the only thing it does perfectly. It shows how an urban environment can be as visually exciting and artistically inventive as a different planet. It had an incredible vision for its setting, and the tech was bent and boosted to show it dazzlingly. The place glows, and my desire to be there outweighs every problem with the game’s mechanics.

5. Promise

The temptation of further possibilities

You could claim this doesn’t count, that the mere promise of something interesting or better is not a pleasure in itself, just the anticipation of one. Nope!

On its most basic level, the promise of ever-better items and stats keeps RPGs interesting way beyond the sell-by date of their challenge and feel. But promise can also be the anticipation of story developments, new puzzle mechanics or unknown abilities.

Most of my time actually playing Dawn of War 2: Retribution was before I unlocked the particular abilities for my heroes that turned them into a perfectly co-ordinated killing machine. But long before I had them, they were making the game exciting just by sitting there, greyed out on the character sheet, promising.

6. Fantasy

The appeal of playing this role

This is different to story – I think Mass Effect 2’s story is outright bad, but I love being a badass lady space captain zooming around the galaxy punching robots and telling people to fuck themselves.

For some reason ‘fantasy’ has become a slightly shameful word, while ‘escapism’ – trying to get away from your life – is accepted as normal. I think discovering new places and ideas is healthier than vegetating in front of some glossy people making out on TV. I don’t play games to escape my life, I play them to explore new ones.

Why isn’t Story on there?

It’s a little personal, of course. But for me, the pleasure of a good story is in making this alternate life interesting (Fantasy), suggesting a rich world (Place), and keeping me wondering about what’s coming next (Promise). If it doesn’t do any of those things – even if it’s Of Mice and Men – it doesn’t make a good game. So it’s not a pleasure in itself.

How does this help?

An early version of Gunpoint’s plot was an attempt at a good story, rather than a good Fantasy. The player was involved, but his role wasn’t a very exciting one, and there was no hint of a world beyond this plot.

Deciding on this list made it dramatically easier to see and solve those problems in a total rewrite. I started with the Fantasy – being a spy for hire – and built everything around that. I’ll get a bunch of other stuff wrong, but that’s one less.

Has it also helped you understand why you love, hate or only like certain games?

It’s also helped me understand why I love, hate, or only like certain games.

Why isn’t Just Cause 2 my favourite game ever? Great Feel, amazing Place, but it doesn’t have Promise like the others do. There’s no sense that anything interestingly different will happen if I keep playing.

Why do I never stick with World of Warcraft? Amazing sense of Place, no Feel. Why don’t I like the Witcher games as much as people tell me I will? I hate the Fantasy, I don’t want to be this guy, in this world, doing this.

And why is Minecraft so popular? Under a traditional notion of challenge, it has none. But it does rarefy its rewards well, and that’s what Challenge is really about. Minecraft is great at Challenge, Feel, Place, Freedom and Promise, so it’s not surprising it appeals to a pretty broad audience.

This list is a first stab at something I’ll keep working on as I write about and try making games. I hate the feeble attitude that games are too complex, too new, or too arty to quantify their appeal in specific or useful ways. Because it’s hurting our ability to understand them, to explain them to people who don’t get them, and to make them better.

I’m asking because I’m in the early stages of writing stuff for Gunpoint, but I’m also interested in general. I’m incredibly impatient with stories that don’t engage me right away: Dragon Age 2 is dead to me, just because it introduced too many people I didn’t care about and didn’t make them do anything interesting in the first hour or so. The other eighty hours of the game might as well not exist.

Cared.

Mass Effect, on the other hand, is my gold standard: I saw Saren’s betrayal in the first mission (even though my character didn’t), and it was genuinely maddening that he got away with it.

The rest of the game isn’t even that well written – I didn’t really understand why I needed the Thorian or Benezia or Liara or the vision or what the Conduit was until I read the wiki afterwards, but it didn’t matter because the Saren thread hooked me so early.

Did not care.

What’s yours? I’m interested in games that hooked you quickly, immediately made you want to know what happens next, and why you think they worked. I’m also interested in characters you immediately liked, hated or just cared about on any level.

Most games can do that if you’re willing to read or listen to 3,000 words of dialogue, so really I’m interested in the ones that didn’t take ten hours of investment to make you give a shit. CoughJadeEmpire.

If the answer’s Portal 2, by the way, it would be nice if you could avoid spoilers. Cheers!

This means the people in Gunpoint are going to look a bit like this:

We’re going to have a chat about it, try some things out, and tweak all this until it fits together nicely, looks clear and readable, and makes you really want to play it. At that point I’ll try to pull it all together into a first proper screenshot so you guys can see what the game’s going to look like.

I’m not kicking into proper “Woo, look at my game!” mode yet, but I have set up a Twitter account: @GunpointGame, to talk about the development, make programming jokes, link other indie dudes I think are cool, and ask you guys for opinions on how some things should work. I’ll also be putting out future calls for testers on there – not sure when the next prototype will be yet.

As you’ll see from the first tweet there, I’ve now got every feature I want in Gunpoint working. This is the fundamental stuff, like:

• Branching conversation trees with player choice
• Mission select menu where new jobs unlock depending on your performance and experience so far
• A shop system where you can buy upgrades and equipment
• Stats that track your performance in a mission so the client can react to how you dealt with it

It doesn’t mean I have the pause menu done or anything looking good, but the full skeleton of the game is there now. The plan for those elements has stayed steady for a long time, but it feels a lot more concrete now I know they all work.

Once we know what we’re doing for the art, my next job is making all the levels. Which means knowing what the missions are about, which means knowing the objectives, which means knowing the clients, which means knowing the key players and their conflicts and characters, which means basically coming up with the story. I’ll put up another post about that probably tomorrow, because I’d like your advice on how to make it not suck.

Lastly, I was interviewed over at Laser Romance, about stuff like why Gunpoint is no longer about a murderous space robot.

As mentioned there, Gunpoint now has a proper URL if you want to link it anywhere: gunpointgame.com. It currently just shows you all the posts here tagged with Gunpoint, but I’ll eventually make it a bespoke site. Incidentally, if anyone knows how to make only posts in the Gunpoint category appear at https://www.pentadact.com/gunpoint with WordPress, I’m having a hard time figuring it out.

 Ethzee

EthZee’s main character mockup is exactly what I was hoping to get – something not a million miles from what I’ve got, but correctly proportioned, nicely shaded, and animated. I love that he used treadmills to explain why the walking and running animations stay on the spot.

Michael Hussinger

Michael’s stuff is amazing. It puts me in mind of some sublimely quirky French adventure, full of excitingly atypical characters. I tried to see a way it could gel with the mood and feel of what I have in mind for Gunpoint, but I couldn’t. I really hope he can use this guy, and the others he made in a similar style, in a future game.

Teck Lee Tan

I particularly love Teck’s second take on the hero. It’s based on a sprite he did of Mal Reynolds from Firefly, and it’s awesome that even at this resolution, you can kind of tell.

Michael Hodkinson

I am scared of this. Definitely one of the most original takes on what the character could be.

Dan Lowe

Dan, an artist at Bizarre Creations until they went under, did the awesome sprite above in the comments here just for fun. He can’t actually do the art for Gunpoint since he’s busy applying for jobs, but he had a go at reducing it down to the 24px size of Gunpoint’s other characters anyway, and it’s somehow even cuter.

John Roberts

The sprite above is the first thing John sent, his take on the ‘professional killer’ enemy type with an android twist (I hadn’t set out my full specs for the setting at the time). It’s one of the rare pieces of art that, even in isolation, just makes me think “Holy fuck I want to play that game.” I’d be this guy, I’d fight this guy, I don’t care, I just want to be playing around in a world with things like that. The guys below that are what the more conventional guards would look like: lean, capable, cool.

Eric Heitman

Eric’s a professional who’s worked on a lot of big licenses, which might explain why his version of the player character does such a perfect job of capturing what I was trying to do with my original art. I tried to do something cartoony in style without being silly, and that’s exactly what he’s pulled off.

Chris

If there’s ever a Nintendo DS version of Gunpoint, this is definitely what it should look like. I like the cleaness.

Condi Buggle

A great character, a little smarter than the Columbo-like slob I was imagining. I can picture him jabbing someone with his umbrella to release a slow-acting poison, and that’s a quality I like in a sprite.

 Curt

Great to see a complete take on it – some of the things I don’t like about my placeholder stuff, like the beige walls, actually look fine once there’s some well-drawn detail in there. Glass-backed elevator is a cool idea.

Chris

A nice selection of interesting environment types here – I think big windows facing out onto the city are a must, and I really dig the giant Pollock in the modern-looking office below.

Graeme Moralee

This is about as clean, clear and cute as the game could possibly get – I don’t have to magnify it, or even really open my eyes, to see every detail. The cityscape is lovely, as is the sparkly rain, and the whole thing has a nice cohesiveness. I can’t quite figure out if the mood of the game would clash with just how adorable these guys are.

John Roberts

If you ask John (who did the awesome trenchcoated android) if he’s interested in doing any environment art, this is what you get back the next day. It looks like a finished game. An amazing amount of detail – the cleanness and bursts of colour remind me simultaneously of Aperture Science and Mirror’s Edge, which is sort of saying something. Click through for the bigger versions of these. The Crosslink mode is so much cooler than the way I imagined it, making it something you’d be excited to switch to rather than an ugly but necessary mess.

Beldak

Such an amazing city backdrop. Has the gloomy, ominous mood I was going for, but is also just slightly futuristic and strange – these tall lit towers are unusual architecturally, and it gives the place an intriguing atmosphere that makes you want to explore it. I’m so set on rain being a big part of the atmosphere on some levels that I’ve been thinking of having varying strengths of it – it’s such an easy win on the audio side, and if heavy rain can look this cool, it’s definitely worth it.

Despite the ridiculous level of talent here, I’m pretty close to a decision. I’m just waiting on a couple of samples to see how certain styles work with certain elements, and I’ll know once those are in.

In the end, it’s come down to style much more than quality – quality just isn’t an issue when so many are so good. Any of these styles would make an awesome looking game, so I just have to go with whoever happens to click with the style and tone of the aspects of the game I’m doing on my end.

The best result of this is that a whole load of really talented people have offered their services, and many have already done great samples. There have also been a lot of very reasonable questions that made me realise my last post didn’t adequately define what I’m after. I called the current art a ‘rough guide’ without saying what about it should guide and what should be ignored.

So here’s a bit more about the idea for Gunpoint’s setting, look and mood.

Gunpoint is set in a big, largely empty city – or at least a largely empty part of a big city. It’s only about 20 years ahead of present day, so most technology is the same.

You’re a freelance spy. You get jobs from a site that lets agents choose from briefs written by anonymous clients. You wear a long coat and hat, and because you’re a spy, I would rather your face is either not clearly visible or has no recognisable features.

You’re the sort of person who acts very relaxed until he really needs to do something quickly, at which point you’re a flurry of motion and then back to trying to look nonchalant. I haven’t finalised your movement yet, but there’s a chance you may need to go from a casual shuffle/saunter/mosey into a semi-urgent run as you accelerate.

Through the agency, you buy a few rare high-tech gadgets to help with your work.

Hypertrousers: I always forget to tell people about the Hypertrousers. Compressed air actuators let you jump ridiculously far.

Gluon gloves: let you climb on any wall or ceiling. Adhesion does not actually use gluons. Gluon is a trademark of GluCorp and quantum physics is now a patent violation.

Crosslink: lets you connect any two electronic devices so that one triggers the other. Actually a cheap, widely available app for your phone, but so poorly marketed that only a handful of agents know it exists.

I want Gunpoint to have laughs, but it’s not set in a crazy world of whacky characters. People die suddenly and undeservedly, there are truly nasty people about, and justice is not always done. If you’ve seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, that’s the kind of tone: there are funny people in it, but they’re out of their depth in a dangerous underworld.

Every mission takes place at night. It’ll also rain a lot. The main visual motif is meant to be the warm orange glow of a lit office block in the cold blue of a city at night. I have done a pretty lousy job of capturing that.

I’m fairly easy about style, but guards shouldn’t have too much individual personality, because there’ll often be a lot of them on screen at once.

The main restriction is that people have to be between 20 and 30 pixels tall. I said before that they could go over 24 if it’s part of a whole makeover for the scale of the game, but looking into it, even a makeover wouldn’t work with a 50 pixel tall character. Here’s the problem:

It’s nice and clear, but where the hell is my jump going to land me? The character needs to be small so the jumps can be big. And I want Gunpoint to work on a typical netbook res, 1024×600, all the way up to 1920×1200. The art challenge is to make a low-res character clear and appealing.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s put effort into the awesome samples I’ve seen so far. They’re giving me ideas already, so even the ones that don’t go in will have an effect.

I’ve learnt to do a lot of new things while making this, but art always takes me ten times as long as it should, and ends up… well, look at it. So I’d like to find someone who’s willing to help out with the visual side, particularly with animating the characters. There are only a few, it’s pretty simple.

In case anyone is interested, I thought I should talk you through what the game’s actually about so you can see if it’s something you’d want to be involved in. And for everyone else, I’d just like to give a better idea of what it does. I will probably regret this.

Here’s me, talking you through a very early prototype of the game as I play it. This is also my first stab at making a video, which is why it’s barely visible at anything less than 720p, everything’s tiny, I’m really quiet and the game sound drowns me out a few times. Enjoy!

YouTube (HD) – Direct Download (80MB .avi)

The e-mail address is pentadact@gmail.com. Let me know what you think in the comments, and fling the link around if you found it interesting. This is a lot more than I’ve shown publicly before, so I’m interested in whether it seems appealing.

The catch is I can’t pay you – I’m making this in a small portion of my free time, it’ll be free when it’s done, and my budget is zero. So I’m looking for someone who wants to help out for fun, practice and experience.

I’d love to see what you want it to look like. You don’t have to have any experience or qualifications, but if you could do a mockup of one character and their walking animation, that would be awesome. You can post it in the comments here or e-mail me.

Characters are about 24 pixels tall currently, but you can stray from that if you want to give the whole game a makeover – all the level objects and stuff.

There’s a pretty good chance no-one’s going to be up for this, in which case I’ll just do it myself once the rest of the game’s done, but it’s worth asking. I’ll still finish it, it’ll just be later and uglier.

The art that’s in there right now is a vague guide at best: I want the main character to have a long coat and a hat, but everything else is up to someone with actual ideas in their brain. The guards aren’t supposed to be grey – this guy was originally a deranged civilian but I cut that role.

To be clear, here’s what’ll ultimately need doing:

• Walking, climbing and ceiling-climbing animations for the main character.
• Walking and running animations for guards, armoured guards, and professional killers.
• Walking and running animations for some kind of civilian dude, and slight variations of him.
• A few miscellaneous combat interactions.
• A bunch of stuff I’ve forgotten.
• Optionally, any environment and character art you can improve on. Lord knows it sucks right now.

The very loose time frame is about two to three months. The game may end up taking longer than that – I’d like to have it out by the end of July, but even that’s not a hard deadline. Yay development!

I typically only work on it about one weekend a month, and I forgot about it completely for two months last year. The two days I spent on it during the holidays shot it forwards to a really exciting point, and the feedback from testers on that version was amazing. So lately I’ve been spending about a third of my spare time on it – what we in the lazy industry call ‘crunch’.

Things are going so quickly partly because I’m excited, but mostly because I’ve figured out a good way to work. Some of it is obvious stuff that you know but don’t actually do until you learn it the hard way, some of it is specific to making a game, some of it is just generally useful. Here’s what I’d tell the Tom of May 2010 about getting shit done.

• I am from the future. Your local lib dem MP will turn out to be a supervillian, but there isn’t really anything you can do about it.
• Staying excited about a thing is a question of having a really attractive and friendly to-do list. Use bullet-points and shit. Put spaces between clusters of things that it’d be easier to do together, and split them into “This month”, “Next month”, and “Final features”. Five or six things in each, don’t make it scary.

  This thing is the focal point of everything you do on the project, and how it makes you feel is usually the deciding factor in whether you work on it or watch another episode of Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey is fucking superb, but there’s only like seven episodes so you really have to pace yourself.

• Nothing is hard to do. If something seems hard, give up. You’ll come back in two days and solve it with three lines of code.
• Some things are hard to fix, and fixing isn’t fun. If you don’t fix something immediately, give up. Move back to diagnosing the problem better by setting up little bits of debug text and disabling chunks of code. Almost every hard problem is solved by a tiny and easily attainable piece of knowledge.
• Don’t write. Every word of fiction you type before making the game is a poison that will warp and deform it in ways that have nothing to do with fun. Make the game, see what’s fun, zero in on that, then write only what it needs to tie it together.
• Don’t tweak. Get something working, then move on to getting the next thing working. Instead of spending three hours now fine tuning a few values, you’ll be playing a better game three hours later and suddenly know how that thing should look, feel and fit in. Or better yet, testers will complain about it in useful ways.
• Talk about it. It’s worth the risk of boring your friends. I was planning to cut the ‘gunpoint’ mechanic from my game ‘Gunpoint’, until I explained my thought process to Graham. He said I should do the hardest version of the options I’d planned, I looked at it again, and realised it easy. Three lines of code.
• Work towards a build, not the finished thing. Having a working build you wouldn’t dream of releasing is massively more useful than having nonfunctioning tatters of a game you probably would. Making Scanno Domini in a weekend taught me how finishing what you can often shows you that some of the other stuff you had planned isn’t necessary anyway.
• When you’re done with something big, or well ahead, it is time for scotch, rain and smooth jazz. Sometimes it is that time anyway.

Before I go any further, if you signed up to test the latest version but haven’t played it yet, I’d really like you to play it before you read this. The reason I haven’t mentioned it before is that I wanted the first people to play it to do so fresh, to see if it makes sense without any external explanation.

It’s a tool called the Crosslink, which lets you rewire any device in the level to any other. So if there’s an electronically locked security door you want to open, you can use the Crosslink to wire a light switch to it, then press the switch to open the door.

But you don’t have to be the one who presses the switch: guards will use security hand scanners to open those doors, and hit light switches if they find themselves in the dark. So you can rewire those things to screw with them: a guard tries to turn the lights back on and finds it slams a door shut and traps him in the room. Trying to open it unlocks another door halfway across the level, letting the player into the building.

The idea is to give the player a lot of freedom to tinker with their environment and fuck with people. I wanted a system that gives you enough power that you can be creative, think of approaches that I hadn’t considered, and come up with your own way of playing. And I wanted a game where killing a guy is not the most interesting thing you can do to him.

Games that funnel you down a single path seem to be made from a perspective of, “What if the player is stupid? How can we make sure he can complete this?” I wanted to start from the question, “What if the player is smarter than me? How can I make something even he’ll enjoy?” I still want the barrier to entry to be low, but I don’t want it to double as a ceiling on the intricacy of what you can do.

The results are making me very happy. I built a crude demo record/playback function into this prototype, so testers can send me a replay of their first attempt at the game, and I can watch how they dealt with each level. My plan was to see where the stumbling blocks were, what players tried to do but couldn’t, or didn’t try but could have. But it also shows the awesome solutions they came up with.

In the last one I watched, the player seems to rewire a building all wrong. I’m scratching my head when he hits a lightswitch, which isn’t connected to anything more interesting than a light. But a guard on that floor is by another switch, which he hits.

Instead of turning the light back on, it turns off the light on the top floor, causing the guard up there to open several security doors on the way to turn it back on. When he finally presses it, instead of the light coming back on, the door slams and locks behind him. The player just shuffles up the stairs and hacks the terminal he was trying to get to, while every guard on the level is trapped in a different darkened room.

That’s not the quickest or easiest way to do that level, nor one I’d ever tried, but it’s awesome to see people come up with their own plans. Early on, I’m happy for them to do that in a sort of sandbox context: it’s not necessary but it’s fun. Later on, I want to complicate the mechanic slightly so that this kind of ingenuity is actually necessary – putting devices on incompatible circuits so you have to trick the AI into bridging the gap for you.

Before I started thinking about this stuff, Irrational Games’ Steve Gaynor posted a great analysis of what leads to emergent game experiences. His conclusion is that meaningful state change is at the heart of it.

I totally agree, but I also wanted to come up with a more comprehensive list of the elements that make a game like Deus Ex so endlessly entertaining to me. Whether you want to call it emergence or something else, I decided on the components a game needs to have that kind of excitement:

1. State change. I must be able to change the state of important elements of the game between more interesting conditions than ‘alive’ and ‘dead’.

2. Connectedness. Elements should be able to affect each other, not just me.

3. True obstacles. The most direct and simple path cannot be viable, at least not for the ideal outcome.

4. Significance. Some elements must be obviously powerful, valuable, or consequential.

I’m satisfied I’ve covered 1 and 2 in Gunpoint now. 3 is sort of in there, in that you can’t open most stuff directly, but the simplest Crosslinks are usually viable solutions right now. That will change when I make incompatible circuits. 4 is less nailed down – it might come in the form of your objectives, VIPs and the like, it might be to do with the cops or rival agents showing up, or it might just be about guns and who has them.

The nice thing about the Crosslink mechanic is that it adds a lot of value to whatever else I put in, so it’s easier to justify spending some time on a new device. I’m always open to ideas for those – I’m planning some kind of metal detector or security camera, something triggered merely by presence, and an alarm that’ll summon guards to a particular floor when triggered. Any others?

Okay, so neither of us have quite mastered the door technology yet.

I’ve gone back to working on the infiltration-themed platformer I’m making, Gunpoint. I’d planned to take two days out of the winter break to binge on it, but after a few interruptions I’ve decided four half-days might be more doable, and less exhausting.

The plan is to rapidly impliment the last few features it needs before the main mechanic can make sense, without slowing down to fine tune their operation or tweak the look. So far I’ve got security doors and light switches working, and I’ve almost got the AI interacting with them correctly: only guards can pass through security doors, and they’ll turn on lights if they find them off. Next it’s the main mechanic, then a few last fundamentals that may end up being important.

It’s fun to be making fast progress again. It was a huge mistake to bother putting elevators in before the rest of the basics were working, and the ridiculous time that took added to the ridiculous time AI took is the main reason I ground to a halt on the whole thing.

I now have a game that is ugly, broken and crude in every way except the lifts, which are the most magnificently smooth, reliable and satisfying vertical transportation in the history of interactive entertainment. And I’m about one month behind where I would have been if I’d stuck to stairs. It started to feel hard.

It isn’t, really, but a few things do trip me up repeatedly. I want to make a note of them here on the offchance it gets any of it through my skull, so the rest of this post will make no sense to anyone who doesn’t use Game Maker (the tool I’m making the game with).

• When you store an instance in a variable – remembering which wall I’ve just collided with, for example – don’t. Store its .id property. Sometimes, even though what you want to reference is a property of that thing, you have to pretend it’s a property of that thing’s id, even though that makes no sense. Otherwise, you get shit like light switches that toggle their own existence on and off instead of changing the light level.
• The Create event is a handy place to put any code that should be executed when the object is created. DON’T EVER FUCKING USE IT FOR THAT. Why? Because the objects in the game at start up are created in an arbitrary, unreadable, undeterminable and randomly changing order.

  You have no idea what code has already been done and what hasn’t when any given Create event is executed. So when one tiny change to something suddenly breaks everything in your entire game, including a bunch of stuff it had absolutely nothing to do with, it’s because the Creation order has changed arbitrarily.

  Only ever use Create to set initial variables, then use Alarm events to trigger actual code. That way you can set those alarms to go off in the order you specify.

• Often you want one object to ‘trigger’ an event for another object. The reason the method you just tried isn’t working is that it’s getting re-triggered repeatedly sixty times a second all the time that the conditions are fulfilled, usually reversing the effect and/or delaying alarm events indefinitely.

  The best way I’ve found to do triggers like this is to have it set an Activate property on the target object. The target object checks this Activate property every step, and the moment it’s ‘true’, it sets it to false, does its work, then tells the trigger object not to bother it again until it needs to.

• Relatedly, attach code to the object it affects, rather than the object that executes it. A button shouldn’t open a door, even if that’s the only thing it’s ever going to do. It should just say “Open!” to the door, and the door itself should contain the code for how to do that. That way, if you ever need other objects to open the door, they can just say “Open!” too and it won’t cause any conflicts or require any repeated code.

Pretty goddamn fascinating, I think you’ll agree. The truth is that most of the problems you encounter creating a game aren’t as frustrating as playing the average shooter. You don’t expect to succeed. You’re wrestling a ridiculous tangle of logical statements into something that functions as a comprehensible world, which is an insane and extraordinary thing to do – even when the results are drab, glitchy and artless. In other words, I’m enjoying it again.

By the end of this sprint I plan to at least be able to show you a video of it in action, and possibly send out a new prototype version to testers. If you’d like to try it when the next version’s ready for testing, and haven’t already mailed me about it, mention Gunpoint in a mail to pentadact@gmail.com.

It’s gamey in a way that Gunpoint isn’t, in that it’s really just a few basic systems: no context, story or even content would be necessary for it to work on a basic level. And it might actually appeal to people outside of my skull, in a way that Gunpoint probably won’t. No logic or thought went into my choice of a jumpy platformer about a private detective for my first game, it was just the first idea that interested me. The RTS feels like something worth making, and something that someone else will probably make if I don’t.

In other words, everything’s been telling me to just stop making Gunpoint, learn Unity, and switch to this newer, better, more potentially successful idea.

I’m not going to. Abandoning an old idea doesn’t solve the problem of forever having newer, better ideas. They’re always going to come faster than you can make them, and for a while, they’re always going to make your old ones seem less exciting. Whatever you do in response to that is what you’re always going to do, so if I ditch Gunpoint to make this RTS, I’d ditch the RTS to make the RPG idea I’m inevitably going to have in six week’s time.

But going back to Gunpoint is harder now. Not because it’s an unexciting idea – the thing at the heart of Gunpoint, which I haven’t really talked about yet, still gets me totally fired up. But looking at it after this gleamingly simple, efficient new idea, it looked incredibly flabby, unfocused, and most of all daunting. I just don’t know how I’m going to do half this stuff, and some of it doesn’t seem very connected to what I’ve done so far.

I’ve tried to simplify Gunpoint lots of times, but I’ve never really questioned that it was going to be story-driven. It couldn’t just be missions, it had to be punctuated with scripted sequences, major characters and predetermined developments.

But that wasn’t really a design choice. I just automatically included it because I’d already written a bunch of scenes, dialogue and characters to flesh out the world in my head. It’s instinctive to write that kind of stuff when you’re thinking up a new world, and useful too. But I should have taken an extra step back and thought, “OK, why do I need to tell these stories to the player? And how much work is it going to be?”

I don’t have any new screenshots to show you. Here are some horses.

Now that I take a more squinty-eyed look at the roadmap ahead, I start to see just how much coding each one of these things is, and how little it adds to the game as a game. Making non-interactive scenes on top of your interactive ones is like making a second game – a shitty game no-one can play. And I know from editing GTA IV movies that I’m an obsessively redactive director: I’d never quite be happy with the way they played out.

So I’m scrapping all the non-interactive stuff. There’ll still be story context for each mission, but it’ll be the text of the briefing you choose from some kind of job listings site, and text message conversations with the client.

Oddly, since restricting myself to this for practical reasons, I’ve found it also makes more story sense: you’re a private agent specialising in illegal activities, so you probably would get your jobs from an anonymous site rather than walk-in clients, and communicate by text rather than in person.

It was an easy choice to make – I don’t have to delete anything, because the stuff I’m scrapping is stuff I haven’t made yet. I probably would have given up on a lot of it when I did come to build it. But what the other game has helped me do is clear it out now, while I’m working on the cool stuff. I had to make Gunpoint a more appealing thing to work on, and that meant cutting reams of big wibbly translucent flab until I could see the route to completing it. It clears the head, brings the game into focus, and makes it feel achievable.

Shrug.

I’m always asking developers what they’ve learned from previous games, and sometimes they draw a blank. So I might start ending my Gunpoint diaries with a summary of what I’ve finally figured out.

Writers shouldn’t write games. Designers should give them a little box to write in, and they should write in that. I left my writer hat on way too long after coming up with a vague idea for the world of Gunpoint, and started writing the actual game. “This happens, then this happens, then you get this item-” Shut up! Games aren’t just first person movies, Tom. Design a thing that is fun, then write whatever story context that design needs.

‘Hard to do’ and ‘easy to do’ are irrelevant, ‘good value’ and ‘bad value’ are what matters. I say the story stuff was going to be hard to implement – it wouldn’t be, really. Not as hard as the central mechanic I’ve yet to start on. The difference is, if the central mechanic works, it’ll lead to dozens or even hundreds of fun interactions for each player. The story stuff would be fun a maximum of one time per player, likely not even that. It’s phenomenally bad value. If you’re Valve, and there’s some reason you really want to push this stuff, you can afford that. But if you’re one guy with no experience making games, you can’t.

Unrelatedly: Machine of Death day is in about eight hours. I’ve put together a post about how you can get it, what the postage will cost, and what other forms it’s going to be available in. That’ll go up once it’s officially MOD-Day.

People coming to investigate, in fact, seems to be the core rule in the most enjoyable deceptive play – whether it’s in Deus Ex, Thief or Hitman. So that was my one requirement for Gunpoint AI: you must be able to knowingly misdirect the AI. The fact that investigating suspicious noises is also semi convincing, semi effective behaviour for a guard is just a nice bonus.

I had a feeling this would be hard, and I knew it was probably a little too involved for a first project. But I was looking forward to trying, because AI is one of those nice juicy problems that’s too big to tackle. You have to break it down, and breaking things down in ways that make sense is one of my favourite things to do. I took philosophy and maths at university, so it’s about the only common thread in my voluntary education.

I wanted guards in office blocks to head to the source of suspicious noises, like gunshots or glass breaking, even if they weren’t on the same floor. It sounds dangerously like pathfinding, a famously sticky area, but I didn’t think it would come to anything like that. I can just break it down into a) how do I get to somewhere on my floor? and b) am I going to the sound itself or the stairs?

What I’m learning, increasingly, is that conceptual stuff is not the hard bit. Every high-level idea you have for how to translate a design concept into chunks of algorithmic code will probably work, and in fact is pretty easy to write. The hard part is a part I didn’t even realise was a part: order.

“I wanted guards in office blocks to head to the source of suspicious noises” – really? Did I want dead guards to respond to suspicious noises? Did I want guards to walk right past the player himself on his way back from breaking a window, in order to investigate the breaking of the window? Did I want guards who are being blown out of a window by the force of an explosion to stop, mid-air, and tell the others: “Oh hey, I’m closest to that broken window I was just flung through, I’ll go check out what caused it”? Did I want the guard who just shot you to run to your dead body and try to solve your murder?

Actually I kind of do, but that’s probably another game.

It’s easy to code what you want. But you don’t really know what you want until you’ve tried to explain it to a very, very stupid person. That was Socrates’ thing, in fact: he acted like an idiot to make people explain themselves to him on the most basic level, which usually revealed they didn’t truly understand their own beliefs. These days we have silicon hyperidiots to explain things to. They’re able to be much more stupid, many more times a second, than Socrates ever was. Coding is the Socratic method as an extreme sport.

Because the concept behind my AI system was simple, scripting it was getting increasingly complex. Every time I said something like, “Set this guard’s state to ‘alert’,” I had to first check that he wasn’t dead, or stuck, or in a lift, or being punched. And it wasn’t going to get any less fiddly: every time I added a new situation, I’d had to go back and add new exceptions to every line of code it could influence.

The only way I could make it simpler to code was to make it more complex to think about. It turns out that the nitty gritty of how an idea works in practice is a much more unwieldy beast than the high concept of what you want it to achieve, and it’s the former you really need to simplify.

So now I have an intricate system of connected timers, tracking five or so independent properties of the AI’s mental and physical state, and it’s a mess to think about. But in code, it’s remarkably straightforward. I’ve turned every sub-problem into a separate function with a human-readable name, replacing stuff like:

if ((sprite_index=sGunman && oPlayer.x > x) or (sprite_index=sGunmanLeft && x > oPlayer.x))

With: if HesInFrontOfUs

The top level code is now just this – the pink things are functions I’ve written that call in other chunks of code:

And after a lot of tinkering, and a few maddening variable-definition errors I never really got to the bottom of, it actually works. You can lure guards from their posts, hide the other side of the stairs and jump them when they come out. Or you can make a noise on one floor, then travel to another while the guard there runs to the one you just left. It’ll get more interesting once you have more of a toolset: right now all you can do in Gunpoint is jump on people and whale on them. But it’s already actual fun to screw with the AI, so I’m pretty excited about what I can do with it from here.

By the way, Spelunky creator Derek Yu put up a great guide about what stops people finishing games, and how to avoid it. Since he inspired me to start this, it’s nice of him to also inspire me to try and finish it.

Lastly, I need opinions: man-sized air vents are a cliche. But are they an annoying one, or just a tool that ultimately makes a game more fun? In some ways they’d fit with Gunpoint’s movement system, since they wouldn’t have to be floor-level for you to get to them. But I don’t know how sigh-worthy people find them these days.

I had a chance to work on my game in my week off, the one I was going to call Private Dick. That name is increasingly pissing me off, so I’m calling it Gunpoint for now. How relevant that title becomes will depend a bit on how much fun it really is to be at gunpoint, or have other people there, and what kind of options I can reasonably code for those situations. Currently everyone with a gun shoots you in the face the instant they see you, and there’s a certain comforting reliability in that.

I’m almost at Milestone 2 – they’re really yard stones, these things, because I can’t have spent much more than ten hours on this thing since Milestone 1. Here’s the plan:

Milestone 1: movement fully working, however horrible it looks and shitty it feels.
Milestone 2: one hostile who shoots on sight, and can be pounced on and beaten unconscious.
Milestone 3: two devices that are interactible. I’ll talk about devices once I’ve got them working.
Milestone 4: one fully working level that’s fun.
Milestone 5: a dialogue system why not?
Milestone 6: narrative reduces grown men to hopeless fits of sobbing.
Milestone 7: the Citizen Kane of games.

So I’m not really thinking clearly more than two or three milestones ahead – my plans change too much with each one for that to be worthwhile, and anyway it’s kind of daunting.

About ten of the people who signed up to test my game played Milestone 1 and told me what they thought of it. This was awesome. Not least because most thought it was a lot less horrible-looking and shitty-feeling than I was expecting.

It’s also a really exciting and eye-opening thing to have people interact with something you created, and have reactions you didn’t expect. People overwhelmingly wanted a certain move added that I’d intentionally left out. And they were right: I’ve added it now and it profoundly improves the feel of the game.

That milestone was all about the jump: the tiny freelance agent you play can leap preposterous distances in any direction, and cling to anything he hits. This milestone, number 2, is about using that jump to pounce on angry gunmen while they’re not looking, then punching them in the face while you have them pinned to the ground.

That part took minutes, really, and is immediately and profoundly enjoyable. I hadn’t really thought about it before I coded it, but there’s no reason to force the player to let the gunman go after he’s hit him in the face once. I just made the mouse click smack him in the face, then return to the about-to-smack-him-in-the-face pose. You can jump off if you like, but in a survey of playtesters called me, 100% felt the need to beat him again and again and again, sometimes tapping out semi-musical rhythms with their facebeatings.

What was trickier was making the jump good enough that you could bet your life on it. One of the biggest complaints from the first test, even without any threats, was that people had trouble judging where their jump would go. I hadn’t even put a charge-meter in, and the strength of your jump increased quadratically as you held the button. A player’s instinctive grasp of basic movement mechanics doesn’t necessarily model quadratics effectively.

This was not a surprise. I knew what I wanted, ideally: a visual projection of the exact arc your jump will take. But like most of my plans, I had a few much easier back ups that wouldn’t work as well. Any kind of charge meter, I thought, would probably do.

The reason I’ve only spent ten hours working on this since the last milestone 5 weeks ago is not actually free time. It’s guts. Doing everything yourself is sometimes daunting.

The fun stuff: design, requires some less fun and harder stuff: coding. And the still quite fun stuff: coding, requires some much less fun, much harder and miserably unsatisfying stuff: art. When I’m not working on my game, it’s because I’m exhausted or distracted or just not in the mood to take on something that may, at any time, kick my ass.

What I’ve learnt from the whole process is this: guts. I’m not accustomed to putting time and effort into something and having it turn out shit, but I’ve found that when I actually get down and do it, it doesn’t take that much time and effort and not everyone thinks it’s shit. Just do it. Accept that not everything you do is going to be met with a steady stream of praise, venture outside your comfort zone and grow up.

That’s true enough for art, but it’s particularly true for coding. Predicting the arc of a player’s jump meant simulating the engine’s own internal vector analysis precisely, so that I could do all the calculations involved with it in a single frame. In other words, the game would have to play the jump out in its head thirty times a second, exactly the same way it would happen at normal speed. It seemed like it would involve an awful lot of trigonometry, which is tricky to code and tricky to compute. Having the game do it thirty times a second seemed like it would destroy performance.

Long story short, it was easy. If you’re smart about it, no sines, cosines or tangents are needed, just basic multiplications. It’s high school mathematics to model a rigid body under acceleration and derive a generalised formula for its position. And once you’ve got that, you just plug increasing values of time into it and create a dot at that position until you hit something. There are ways to make it more precise and reliable, but it already works so well that it’s completely changed the way I play.

I still don’t have a charge meter – I changed the system so that if you want to go further, you just click further away. It means you can make small, precise jumps without time pressure, and great long arcing ones without delay. And it feels great to leap six stories, through a window, and into the back of someone’s head. Then punch them to the beat of Seven Nation Army.

I whined a while ago about wanting to get to the point where the question is “Is this fun?” rather than “Why doesn’t this fucking, fucking work?” I’m there now, and from here until I’m done with the game or give up on it, there’ll always be “Is this fun?” questions to answer. There’ll still be many more things that don’t fucking, fucking work, but I’m tantalisingly close to having most of the building blocks to make real levels out of. Once I’m there, it gets really interesting.

Edit: just as I finish this, Sophie Houlden posts the text of her talk at World of Love, and it’s basically telling me to realise what I just realised.

Edit 2: Once I’ve tweaked it a bit, I could use some more testers to help me figure out if this iteration is fun yet. Any more volunteers? Mail me if so.

Edit 3: Now with animated gif.

I am not an art guy. I feel visually dyslexic when I try to draw: I know the right shape when I see it, but I can’t visualise which pixel I need to change to make this deformed mess become that – even when it really is just one pixel. So I really struggle to depict what’s supposed to be going on under that trenchcoat. I have drawn Conway’s head big, monstrously big, a hangover from when he was to be a horrible space robot ineptly disguised as a human. Are his limbs similarly bloated? Can I really draw a head of that size without disguising it beneath a stylish hat? Can I balance a head of that size on a human body? Can I just set my game in a world where it’s considered indecent not to wear a trenchcoat?

All these things are problems because they resulted in this:

An armless, morose John Hodgman who just looks fat, awkward and wrong. Despite general murmurings of support on Twitter for the idea of a nightmarish Being John Hodgman world, I could see this wasn’t going to get good any time soon, so went in a completely different direction:

This would be a complete rethink, requiring a new treatment of the main character (not this douche), and a much more realistically-proportioned look. It might seem like more work, but stuff like this can be done pretty easily from photo reference. In fact, the fewer pixels you have to work with, the more artistry it takes to evoke something with them.

The trouble was Conway. Just as it was hard to extract a convincing human from the murky depths of his coat, it was almost impossible to drape the murky depths of his coat on a convincing human. Several takes ended up looking like Rincewind. And losing the outlines seemed to make every camel hue I picked for him look more and more like some kind of awful beige velour. I got as far as this before declaring it hopeless:

Doing a realistic-shaped guy from photo reference confirmed something I never realised about game art before I tried to butcher some myself: proportions, shape, size, colour, detail and expression are almost completely irrelevant. The thing that defines the feel of a character is pose. That’s why I haven’t been able to get rid of that lame original Conway sprite: everything about it is feeble and misjudged except the fact that he has his hands in his pockets.

Even that was a mistake: I just hadn’t got round to drawing his hands yet. But as soon as I saw it that way, it looked like the character I had in mind. Hodgman failed not because he looked like Hodgman – Hodgman is great – but because he was standing like a mannequin. I eventually solved my art style problem by realising art style doesn’t matter: the most basic possible shape would work fine so long as I could pose the limbs. So I just copy and pasted the original Conway, trimmed him a bit, and I had his first friend:

The relationship lasted as long as it took me to remember that the first character is meant to be an incensed gunman trying to kill you.

One or two people have very kindly offered to lend me their artistic talents. This is appreciated and noted, because if this gets anywhere I will almost certainly ask someone who knows what they’re doing to pretty it up. The reason I’m putting some effort into coming up with the basics myself is not because I expect them to endure, but because I need to decide on a tone. If I’d stuck with those slender realistic characters, the ludicrous super-jumping I’ve got right now might have needed rethinking. Now I know the game is allowed to be a little more cartoony, clean and simple.

Obviously now that there’s more than one person in the game, I’m thinking more specifically about combat. All my ideas for stuff like this have different modules: there’s a basic version I’m definitely going to try, then progressively fancier systems I could stack on top of it if it turns out to be interesting and fun.

That goes for the game itself, too: level 1 doesn’t need a combat system, level 2 doesn’t need a hacking system, level 3 doesn’t need a dialogue system, and none of the adapting plot stuff is relevant till after that. If one thing turns out to be cool enough to focus the game on, I’ll scrap whatever I haven’t made yet. That’s why I’m not worrying too much about the warnings about biting off more than I can chew: I haven’t bitten anything off yet, I’m just scoping it out.

The last thing I did was code the new guy to shoot you dead on sight, and already I’m liking him.

This bit of game logic, for instance:

Is impossible. I don’t mean hard, it’s just not the way algorithms work. You have to pretend it is, though, and the intricacies of that are what’s taken up most of my time.

The issue is that time progresses in discrete chunks in games, so just the word ‘when’ is problematic. Real life doesn’t really care if it’s not at exactly 1 second or 2 seconds that a man walks into a door, he just stops when he hits it. Code isn’t smooth, it has to re-examine and re-create the whole world sixty times a second, and there’s nothing in between these frames. Unless you want everything to move very slowly, some things are going to have to move more than one pixel at a time. That permits a nasty possibility: after 1 frame you haven’t hit anything, and after 2 you’ve already gone through it.

So collision logic fudges it one of two ways: the game either waits until you’ve already gone through something and pops you back out, or it looks ahead to see if you’re going to hit something and pretends you already have. The effect can be seemingly perfect, since these precautions are computed before the result is drawn on-screen, but it makes the underlying logic fiddlier than it ought to be.

Generally, though, it’s all fine so long as your character is a solid unchanging block.

Old-school platformer protagonists versus actual human proportions. Chick proportions not pictured.

That’s why a lot of 2D games have very compact, boxy characters: the game can treat them as a simple rectangle regardless of what animation they’re playing. Real people change shape much more dramatically when they run, jump and hit things. If you want a human-like character to dive headfirst into a wall – and I do! – you have to solve this insoluable problem for a thing that keeps instantaneously and dramatically changing size and shape.

I won’t get into why this is even more complicated, difficult and annoying than it sounds, but suffice it to say that the next time I fall through the ground in the latest FPS and plummet into the infinite grey limbo below, I won’t be thinking “Why can’t these idiots fix shit like this?”

I will be thinking “Why don’t these idiots account for shit like this?” though, because it only took me a few days of tinkering to realise a fundamental law of coding.

So early on, when I had so many collision bugs to fix that it seemed daunting, I spent some time on an “Oh fuck, I’m stuck” subroutine. It’s a little spiralling algorithm that searches with increasing desperation for a nearby space to teleport you to, should you somehow get stuck in solid matter. I know I’ll never solve all the minor or rare collision glitches that could happen, so I feel I should at least try to make sure they don’t break the game when they do.

Getting collision logic stable and robust was the hardest thing I’ve had to do so far, and the most intricate stuff I have planned for the game now seems trivial by comparison. I’m looking forward to the point when I’ve done enough of the coding that the question becomes “Is this fun?” rather than “Why doesn’t this fucking, fucking, fucking work?”

I’m doing it because Spelunky, one of my favourite games ever, was made by one guy in a program called Game Maker. Obviously it doesn’t follow that “If design/coding/art genius Derek Yu can do it, I can too!” But it does make you realise that game-making programs aren’t just for shitty test games. Since that was pretty much my last remaining excuse for not doing this thing I’ve had a constant urge to do most of my adult life, I started doing it.

My game is about a little dude in a trenchcoat who sorts out – or completely screws up – delicate problems like hostage situations, with a few pseudo-science special abilities. He’s sort of a drunk, asshole Inspector Gadget – hence the working title, Private Dick.

I wanted to see if, with little time, less talent and no experience, I could make a game that would achieve some of the things I’ve always wanted from the games I play. I want a game where:

A gun going off is a big deal. Existing games tend to be divided into ones where guns go off constantly, and ones where guns don’t exist. The latter don’t have enough guns for my tastes, and in the former guns become meaningless. You shot a man in Reno? I shot 384 men 7 times each in Vegas, and I still didn’t complete that game. The reason guns are an exciting element in a thriller is that they can enact sudden, massive, shocking, permanent change. I want to see them play that role in a game.

Failure isn’t terminal. In most games, you do what you’re supposed to or you die and retry. Even if you don’t physically die, failure means a restart. I want a game where life goes on if you fail the mission, and most of the ways you can fail don’t kill you. The story adapts to the outcome of your missions, and death is a rare, shocking, worst-case scenario. I don’t want anyone to have to repeat anything unless it makes no sense to continue. Edit: More on this in the comments.

You can change things in non-destructive ways. You can change them in destructive ones too, but that comes as standard in gaming. I don’t know if I can make anything you could meaningfully call emergent with my resources, but I want to make a game whose levels you can tinker with, reconfigure to your liking, and see those reconfigurations interact with each other – not just with you.

Movement is superhuman, but constrained by physics. I need it to be superhuman because I want getting around to be quick and satisfying, but I want it to be physically coherent. Most games don’t do this: almost all platformers let you move your guy around while he’s in the air, by some unexplained force. I’m not going to do anything fancy with physics in my game, and it’s not going to be primarily about movement the way platformers are, but I want the movement to make physical sense. Anything that doesn’t isn’t convincing to me, and that hurts a game’s feel.

It’s this last thing I’ve been working on so far, a few evenings a week. I’ve nearly got it FYS – Functional, Yet Shit. This is my standard for implimenting a mechanic before moving on – there’s no sense fine tuning or fully animating until I know how it fits in with everything else. Getting movement to that point will put me about 10% of the way to a playable level that includes all the main elements I want in this game. I’ll be surprised if it takes less than six months, sad if it takes more than a year, and amazed if I stick with it that long.

Writing about it here is one way I’m trying to improve its chances of reaching a playable stage. Explaining it to someone else forces me to keep my thinking clear, explaining it to you guys might be a good way to get feedback, and explaining it publicly makes giving up all the more embarrassing. So far I haven’t told you much, but if you’ve ever worked on a game I’d love to hear any general advice.

I’m already ignoring the golden rule: focus on one thing and do it well. I don’t know what I can do well yet, or what’s worth doing well, so I’m roughing out everything that might work and I’ll focus from there.

My plan is to talk more about what I’ve done so far than my future plans, so I’ll write about movement once it’s FYS.