I contributed a chapter to EXPERIMENT 12, a collaboration with 11 other designers, started by good friend, Terry Cavanagh. We each made a single chapter in a specific time period over several weeks, my chapter is the final experiment, #12 in fact. May not be what you expect.
I hope you enjoy the game!
Get it: http://www.geocities.ws/experimenttwelve/
(Mac + PC.)
I’ve done so much work on it, constantly for the whole of this year. It’s bigger than I ever expected to be.
There are hundreds of tiny little changes and improvements. It has a lot of new hidden, dark corners. It even looks and sounds pretty different. It is playing great on the Playstation Vita and PlayStation 3, and Curve are doing a great job on the port.
It has become a new thing.
It is for this reason that it is now called “Lone Survivor – The Director’s Cut.” And I’m so excited and proud to share it with you guys.
1080p wallpaper for your pleasure
(I’m sure this is a fairly common combination.)
Just a quick note to say, I’ll be in San Francisco from tomorrow, until the 4th of next month. I’ll be at GDC, hanging about, eating tasty foods, showing NG+ around (contact me if you’d like to play, as I’m going to try and arrange a 4p session, even if it’s in the hotel lobby! Also there to meet virtual friends ‘IRL’, some of whom for the first time, and cheer on Terry and Cactus and other friends at the IGF awards (best of luck to all nominees, of course!)
Be sure to leave me a message via email or twitter if you want to link up, due to the crunch I’ve not been able to make any plans except my flight and hotel so far.
Talking of crunch, I’ve barely slept this month while adding even more new things to Lone Survivor for the PlayStation consoles (and have even seen it running in a early state, yay!) As well as the stuff I mentioned before, there’s now another new piece of music, more new items (taking us up to 22 new ones, for bullet-point fans), new sound effects, another new ending (there are now five instead of the original three), another large and complex location, a new enemy type, lots more new dialogue, new lighting effects, even a new portrait of You (hopefully it’s not too much of a spoiler, I’m trying to keep all this stuff nice a surprising for you guys, but…):
(See if you can find out how to unlock it!)
Also note that Lone Survivor is currently 50% off in the spring sales on Steam! Go, tell your friends etc! (It would be much appreciated.)
Extra secret bonus stuff And stuff…
Making a “Soulsian” game is very enjoyable to me. I was thinking about this a lot the other night at the pub with Terry Cavanagh and another rabid DARK SOULS fan, during a five hour discussion about the game. Having spent four years fighting to get a narrative-heavy game to work well with its mechanics, and replaying the same bits of narrative again and again until they worked, it’s refreshing to do something more design-focussed. Of course, the theme is still really important to me (perhaps one of the things I value the most), but as with Lone Survivor I’ve decided not to share any details of the story until the game is released. The games I make tend to come from the theme, rather than the mechanics, even with NG+, but this time its focus is more a blend of the two aspects.
So, the nice thing is every game is different when you have this many mechanics and styles of play… It means I have to devote a lot more time to balancing and playing the game, but that’s turning out to be a lot of fun with four players anyway, and giving me a lot to take home after each event I take the game to (I’ve been starting to ‘hit the road’ with it recently, now I have four quite different characters and the stats and weapon systems fleshed out, as well as the coop and VS game modes implemented. You can switch modes at any time during the game now via the ‘+ Altars’.)
I’ve begun to build more of the world (which I’m trying not to show too much of because *spoilers*) but I can say that there are now multi-level areas working, like Dungeon Master, one of my all-time favourite RPG’s, you can fall down pits and the enemies can even follow you down there, or be found lurking when you reach the lower level because you lunged at them and sent them flying off a ledge.) I want to make a lot of use of the grid-based nature of the game, and have Dungeon Master-like traps, pressure pads, all those things that require you to be a little observant when moving forward. You can throw whatever you’re carrying, in either hand, not only to land in monsters’ faces stunning them temporarily while you make your escape, risking a valuable weapon or shield, but perhaps also to set off these fiendish traps before they find you instead?
As it stands, I’m planning to have no inventory except for the armour and helmet you wear, the two things you carry in your hands, and one support item. Designs can be subject to change of course! But I want to try and reduce and RPG to the fewest elements I can while still being able to feel like an RPG. That’s a key thing in what I’m going for mechanically, I think? And with up to four players on screen the GUI has to be as simple as possible, so my intended solution is to practically show all of it on the player, one of the reasons the animation takes so long, because the player must be able to use every item, in both hands, with four facing directions, in every suit and helmet!
So the game is still a long way from being finished in terms of content, but the gameplay is definitely getting to where I hoped it would be, and people seem to be having a lot of fun with it when I play with them. I really look forward to sharing it with you all! Just don’t expect it this year (unfortunately.)
One two a few more thing(s)…I’m off today for a couple of weeks to work on a secret project. So if I’m fairly quiet on email or twitter, that’s why! I’m basically going to be internet-less for this time while I buckle down and get it done, but suffice to say it’s something exciting that I can hopefully announce soon!
- There’s no comments available at the moment just because I couldn’t hold back the spam any more. Planning a website overhaul soon, I promise!
– I’ve also been doing some exciting music projects too, at least two new games will feature some of my guest tunes. Hope to get into this more after NG+, if such a time ever exists.
– I’m finally going to my first IGF / GDC this year! I’ll be in San Francisco for the whole week and a few days either side. Hope to catch some of you there…
– Hope you’re all having a wicked 2013!
It’s back.
I am going to finish this, after all. It may just take a while.
Happy new year, everyone!
Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I last wrote, mainly because I’ve had to be absolutely sure I was going to post what I’m about to post.
There are two things I’d like to share with you… Some good news and some not so good news. If you’d prefer the good news first, skip to the later section!
NEW GAME+, the dungeon crawler I’ve been working away on for the last six months (I realise I never officially announced the name), is no more.
I have decided to abandon the project. It’s been a very tough decision to make, quite heartbreaking really, but it IS the right thing to do. It was too big for a single person to make. This is the root of the problem. It wasn’t that I fell out of love with the idea, just that I can’t physically do it.
The good thing about being a self-funded, one-man team is that I can drop a project without hurting any co-workers, without feeling pressure to complete something that isn’t working, and without being somehow responsible to investors. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to remain a solo game creator, so that I feel less pressure to try and force something that doesn’t want to be forced, to remain agile so that I don’t need to flog an already dead horse.
I reached a point where it was getting very frustrating: the game demanded a lot of animation, very detailed level design, and a huge amount of gameplay code, all of which were taking so long that it felt excruciating.
I’d like to say sorry to any fans who were looking forward to it – it’s still a game I’d love to play, and should I ever have a team to work with in future, it’s definitely an idea I’d like to come back to. I had an incredibly detailed story worked out (it’s not what it appeared!), which I won’t share in case the idea ever resurfaces.
For now, let’s take a minute’s silence and look through the work in progress shots, leading up to the first build that I shared with a few friends a week ago…
Initial mockup
First engine tests
First bits of level creation, writing the editor, figuring out the perspective etc…
Working out what sprites might look like…
Adding gameplay, weapons and AI…
So this is as far as I got with it. It still had a long way to go before it was going to be fully playable, and yet it had taken so many months to reach this point. I realised, not for the first time, that I’d been too ambitious. If you’ve followed Lone Survivor’s creation, you’ll see that there were quite a few failed versions of it in its wake.
So that is the story of NEW GAME+. When considering my decision, I received this excellent piece advice from Stephen ‘The Catamites’, something it really helped to hear…
“there’s no such thing as a trashed project, it always just gets subsumed into something else where you least expect it, so i won’t mourn new game +, even though it looked really cool. i am eagerly anticipating when the idea / images behind it suddenly appear in an unrelated dating sim or something some months hence…”… and I think he’s absolutely right.
That’s right, something wonderful has also happened in this time period. I have something I’m very excited to announce:
LONE SURVIVOR is coming to PS3 and PS Vita!
It’ll be re-coded from scratch by Curve Studios in London, creators of a number of great PS3 games like Fluidity, Hydroventure and Explodemon. It’ll be super-smooth running, and better yet (for my European cousins, at least) the plan is to include translations into French and German.
I’m greatly looking forward to this, as it’s been a dream of mine since childhood to release a game on console, and especially the Sony ones as I love what they do most of all. Anyone who follows my twitter will know that I don’t tend to play games on PC, I really am a couch gamer, most happy on my PS3! Lone Survivor was designed as a console game (in my head, anwyay.) In fact, all the games I work on I really imagine being on console, or fantasise about, anyway!
So there is is… With one door closing, another opens.
I’ll be sure to let you guys know when I figure out what my own next project will be. Who knows, it might end up being the dating sim The Catamites suggests…
… For now there’s just a glorious blank sheet of white paper in front of me.
I think I have a good idea of what it is I want to work on, finally. It’s very rough and sketchy and won’t look like this exactly… but…
Basically it’s a combination of all the ideas I’ve been shooting around since the later parts of making LONE SURVIVOR, from dungeon crawler to sci-fi head-messing to whimsical platformer… or another way of looking at it may be Zelda x Demon’s Souls? The story is a little weird, though. I have a prototype (using more basic top-down view a bit more like this):
It has two-handed combat, equipable weapons and rolling (I love rolling), but I’m now writing an engine to make this sort of Zelda-Phantom Hourglass type projection to try and make the environment more exciting, but unlike that game it will use sprites to convey the characters. I still have a good way to go before I can get this sort of look in-game, a lot of tools to write and art to draw.
It’s been through various prototypes and art styles, a bit like LS before it… Does that mean it bodes well? I guess we’ll see…
Original mockup
Various 2D & 3D prototypes for “New Game”
Fantastic Arcade
I’m looking forward to finally meeting a bunch of indies I only know from their online personas! Seems like fellow Poppenkast, Vlambeer & cactus will be there, as well as fellow Cambridgian and fine friend, Terry Cavanagh, and a bunch of others from the US and EU. Look forward to checking out the event, and I’ll be doing a ‘live director’s commentary’ on the Sunday afternoon, so I’ll catch you down there if you’re about.
First Aid Edition Art Card Update
I’ve had a bit of back pain in the last couple of days which was when I planned to finish off the art card pile (signing and numbering) and get at least the first half sent off, but unfortunately I am going to have to delay a little longer until I get back from Texas. The selling of a game and setting up of a business never fails to take longer than expected, I’m hoping to get back into full-time work on a new game towards the end of the year. Which leads me onto…
Hello, my friends. It’s been a fair old while since I wrote, and I’m sorry for that!
Things have moved very fast this year, it’s hard to believe so much has happened. In the last few months I’ve been doing various things, in amongst the continued support for LONE SURVIVOR. I guess I should start with that…
So first of all I’m really proud to announce that LONE SURVIVOR has been nominated fora Golden Joystick in the ‘Best Downloadable Game’ category! This really is the greatest honour, something I never believed I might ever achieve. Actually, this award is voted for by the public, so if you like you can head over to:
http://www.goldenjoystick.com/awards/best-downloadable
… and even though I probably don’t have any hope against some of the amazing games selected, your vote would definitely be appreciated! 
… As well as this, the game has been selected to be exhibited in Fantastic Arcade, and I’ll be in Austin, Texas this month from the 19th-26th to meet some of my US / Canadian brethren, eat BBQ, and generally enjoy the Southern hospitality!
http://fantasticfest.com/news/entry/fantastic_arcade_official_game_selections_announced
If you’re going, let me know and we can meet up! The show itself runs from the 20th-23rd.
I’ve also been getting the art cards finalised. It’s taken quite a few print runs to get them right (including throwing away a whole batch which got cropped wrong.) Anyway, they arrived with me the day before I came on holiday (where I now am, in Spain.) I plan to get these out as soon as I return, and I’ll be sending a final email to all the supporters when I do, in case of any final address changes.
Besides that I’ve had to do a lot of business stuff, setting up Superflat Games as a Ltd. company etc, stuff I don’t really understand, which scares me a lot, but of course I have to do.
I’ve also been doing a fair bit of music. I’ve put some love back into my studio space and made it a much more pleasant place to work. I made a couple of tunes for my good friend and idol, Jonatan ‘cactus’ Söderström, for his new game, Hotline Miami (also selected for Fantastic Arcade, so hopefully we finally get to meet), which seems to be blowing up right now, and I can tell you guys, from watching it develop, that it lives up to the hype in every way!
Been doing some 140bpm tunes under the North Base moniker too (which mainly consists of four other friends from Manchester, one of whom, Silver, was my drum’n’bass partner for about ten years) … some of which have been signed, others still in the works. Really enjoying making music for the sake of making music again.
One I did a few months back with them, called Acid Flashback, has recently come out on Wheel & Deal records: http://www.beatport.com/release/ruffneck-acid-flashback/904623
And then there’s the games which aren’t LONE SURVIVOR. Well, I’ve started about four different games now (none of which have names yet besides XO3D), and all are currently on hold while I work out what it is I really want to spend the next few years doing. I just don’t see myself making shorter games, they always end up large in scope somehow. So I want to be absolutely sure I’m making something I’m still going to enjoy in a couple of years!
I may choose to enter LS into IGF again this year, I guess I figure that it was only half finished last year, or at least the beginning was not in a good shape, so now it is final, I figured I’d give it one more shot?
Anyway, that about brings it up to date. Thanks once again for your support, and all the kind messages you’ve sent. I really never expected it to reach so many people, and as I’m sure I’ve said before, I’m awed and humbled.
Hello everyone!
I’ll be mailing out the art cards soon… but there is one final decision to be made.
I’ve looked at various treatments for producing the thing. Fine art papers (wrong texture, needed to be smoother), highest quality photo papers (very nice print, but still like a photo and quite thin), and lastly actual postcard printing (haven’t seen the sample, but I imagine the print quality is less fine, but it’s a nice card that you can put up somewhere.)
It’s a toss-up between the photo print or the postcard print, so I’m really calling for all you First Aid owners to suggest what you’d like! Either way, I’m going to submit it for printing next week, so if you have a strong opinion, chime in now!
I personally feel, even though I haven’t seen the postcard sample, that the lower dpi won’t matter that much, I’m assured the colour balance should be identical, though.
So, would you rather a super sharp but photo-like print, or a physical postcard, sturdy but less detailed? Answers on a … er … comment down below!
Have you moved house recently, First Aid Edition owner?
As per the title, and if you’re a proud owner of 1 of 200 ‘LONE SURVIVOR – First Aid Editions’ ever made, have you moved house recently? I’ll be needing your new address, then, to mail this lovely card! Please write to:
support (at) lonesurvivor.co.uk… making sure to use the subject line “First Aid Move” or something pretty obvious so I can tell it’s not an update request etc, including your new address.
Thankyou all for supporting the game when it first launched, it’s been an unbelievable few months since then! Thanks also to those who’ve recently got it through the Steam and HIB sales, and welcome to the world of LONE SURVIVOR.
In other news…
I’ve been working on this for a while, but just recently decided to abandon it, for no other reason other than it didn’t get me super excited. I may return to it and add what I planned to, and it may become something exciting because of that, just not right now.
So I started working on this – although it’s nothing more than a few bits of art and some vague ideas at present. For some reason, and maybe it’s just the the UK summer finally decided to show its face, a couple of months late, that I really want to explore some nostalgic Blue Sky™ right now!
Who knows where it will take me…
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