The problem is that in the last few years, we’ve had an influx of movies that were incredibly good at just being entertaining (Transformers, Star Trek* and pretty much any Marvel movie comes to mind). The quality bar was raised, and that, for a while, was enough. It’s fine to have movies like that every so often (I still really enjoy them), but now that there’s so many of them, it’s starting to grow stale.

*This article by Rohan Harris describes a similar problem from a very different angle in regards to Star Trek in particular. It’s well worth a read.

Unfortunately, the same trends are true of games. In some ways, our industry is more problematic than film. The mobile sector is completely obsessed with the idea of simply capturing attention for the sake of doing so, and there’s an insidious and pervasive notion amongst developers that if your first goal isn’t ‘fun’ (whatever the hell that means), then you’re automatically a bad developer and your game is going to suck. What results is shallow games, whose existence is fine, but whose sheer numbers are really quite demoralising.

So today I’m going to talk a bit about ambition and depth: specifically, a quick test I’ll make for any project to make sure that it’s going to be interesting.

When I was at university, I spent the better part of 4 years writing and directing sketch comedy for the Sydney University Science Revue. When you do this for 4 years you both see and write a lot of sketches, and you develop theories on what makes a good sketch. For me, the biggest thing that delineated a good, but forgettable sketch from a truly amazing one was what I’m going to call the ‘Triple Threat’ test. It’s a pretty simple test, but it’s really quite powerful and easily translates to other media.

The Triple Threat test is simple. To pass the test, the thing that’s being tested must very simply do 3 distinct things well in an integrated way. Being funny is one thing. If you can do more than 3 things, all the better.

This is a pretty vague definition, but that’s by design. By being vague, it allows you to be creative about what a ‘thing’ is. It also allows you to measure how well something passes by just how distinct the things are (generally, the more distinct, the better). Generally, if you’re not sure if two things are different enough, they probably aren’t.

Here are a few examples from my time in Science Revue:

• One of the most successful sketches I wrote was a matrix parody, had video->stage interaction, had some great physicality (through a feng-shui fight scene) and involved a pre-recorded parody of the song “Kung-fu Fighting”. Oh, and it was funny. While it wasn’t really well directed or produced (this was in everyone’s first year), it’s a sketch that people remembered for a long time afterwards.
• One of my favourite sketches was of a group of Titanic survivors, speaking seriously about their harrowing experiences. It completely changed the mood of the theatre, was moving, tense and shocking (when the drop finally came), topical and funny.
• Climate change, topical, song parody, boy band dance, funny and the freaking CSIRO

When applied to games, the Triple Threat test pretty much remains unchanged (except I’d probably change “being funny” to “being fun”, before banning the word fun and changing it to something more useful like ‘engaging’, ‘challenging’ or pretty much any other word).

In terms of our games, we have the following:

• Flatland: Fallen Angle had an unusual mechanic, was an adaptation of a novel, created a sense of danger, had an engaging story and created an interesting 2 dimensional world
• Unstoppabot is a mash-up of two genres, is a challenging game and is funny.
• Particulars creates a unique feeling of partial control, is frustrating in a good way, teaches you something about particle physics, has a wry sense of humour and has a personal story about co-dependence

I think it’s important to point out that passing the Triple Threat test isn’t a guarantee of success, or that your game is actually good. It generally means that, assuming decent execution, your game will be somewhat interesting and memorable. Flatland: Fallen Angle was too short, and Unstoppabot was too hard for the mobile market. Flatland was also much more memorable than Unstoppabot, simply because it did more things and was better integrated.

Which brings us to integration. It’s very possible to make a sketch, movie or game that does a lot of things, but simply falls apart because they don’t fit together. Particulars could do everything we’re talking about as a flight simulator which randomly spouted off physics facts, but that wouldn’t work quite so well. My main complaint with Bioshock Infinite so far (I haven’t finished it yet, and have thankfully avoided spoilers – yes, I’m quite late to the party) is that Irrational Games (or possibly their publishers) have decided that ‘fun’ means ‘shooter’, but haven’t truly integrated the shooter parts of the game into all the other awesome stuff they’re doing (they’re done a pretty good job, but against the excellence of everything else it really sticks out).

And with that, we finish. The Triple Threat test is pretty simple, and to be honest, it’s pretty easy to pass (3 is a pretty low bar – the best stuff generally gets to 5 or more). I hope that it’s something that more people start using to think about their media, just so that we get more interesting things.

I think that this week, more than ever, has taught me that getting your narrative right is about getting a tonne of things to line up properly. Most of what I worked on was getting a document which outlined what each episode and chapter contained, how it would move the story forward and how it all lined up.

It’s also taught me that house hunting in Sydney is painful, but that’s another story.

So out of this week, I’ve gotten a list of 7 different things that need to “fit together” in a game story. This is, by no means, an exhaustive list – I’d love to hear any extra things you might have to add.

1. The Gameplay Meaning

To me, this is the most important thing. No matter what else is happening, you want to make it so that the player’s actions are doing some of the heavy lifting. Is the player desperately trying to survive? If so, that should mean something in the context of the story. If the game is forgiving and/or slow-paced, maybe the story should be as well.

The gameplay of Particulars, for instance, can be looked at through a number of lenses. It’s all about relationships between people, the push and pull of those relationships and somewhat about codependence. It’s about complexity within simplicity (simple rules that create complexity, but also rules that seem complex because they aren’t what we’re accustomed to). It’s about opposites being both alluring and destructive. It’s about balance, both perfect and imperfect. And it’s about danger and mastery, and small failures spelling disaster.

2. The Gameplay Potential of concepts

I was going to call this one “introduction of new concepts”, but I think this fits better. The gameplay potential of a concept is how long (in levels, stages, etc.) a concept can be interesting for before you need to add a new one. For instance: the gameplay potential for up and down quarks that only utilise the EM force on a single screen is approximately 1 chapter (or 25 levels). Any longer, and I’d have to add more elements to the game to keep it interesting.

Ideally, a concept uses up the entirety of its gameplay potential before you add a new one. I’d generally err on the side of giving a gameplay element less time than more, however. This timing is important, as each new concept changes the gameplay meaning that you’re playing with. In Chapter 2 of Particulars, we’ll be adding some features that really expand the scope of the game. The game will automatically become more exploratory while giving the player more agency, and the story has to reflect this.

3. The Plot

This is essentially the things that happen in the story, both inside and outside gameplay. The two most important things about plot is that it has to keep moving, and it has to make sense. We’ve currently got a scene at the end of Chapter 5 where our protagonist (Alison) has to get out of a room. In the current iteration of the narrative, the method by which she does so doesn’t make that much sense (Saul’s comment on our google doc reads ‘seems unlikely’).

The nice thing about plot is that you can, at least at first, figure it out in broad strokes and fill in the gaps later. The aforementioned scene can likely be fixed just by adding in a frame or two to set the escape up – people can usually deal with something unusual if it has a simple, mundane explanation. It might, on the other hand, fundamentally change the scene. But the purpose of the scene in terms of the plot will likely stay the same.

4. The Emotional/Character Arc(s)

This is the heart of the game’s story. It’s the journey that the game characters go on, and how they change based on what they experience. If a character doesn’t change throughout your game, you’d better have a good reason for it. And the most important person to plot an arc for is the player. Part of that is figuring out what kind of range of experiences you want to allow for them: how changeable is this emotional arc?

In Particulars, we’re looking to delve into a single person’s psyche and to examine concepts of obsession, agency and emotional growth. There are other characters (well really only 1), but we’re making a concerted effort to ensure that they are more reflections of Alison (the words ‘spirit guide’ have been tossed around more than once).

Another way I like to think about the emotional arc is ‘aboutness’. What is the game, at the end of the day, about? What is the chapter about? What is this particular level about? One of the most important things I did in this outline was to explore what each chapter was about for Alison. If we had more characters with arcs, we’d likely have to do the same for them. For example: “Chapter 3 is concerned with the question of just how far Alison will go, and how deep her obsession will get”.

5. The Gameplay Style

The gameplay style is the way in which gameplay is presented: it’s the structure of levels, the specific goals and the progression mechanics. It puts the gameplay concepts and their meanings into context, and has a great impact on pacing and tension.

In Particulars, each chapter has 25 levels that you complete in order. Different levels have different objectives: this is designed so that there is always variety, so that you get to play with new concepts in a number of ways, and to give us more scope to surprise and challenge the player. At some points, however, we’re looking to change this formula. It no longer serves the arc, and it makes little sense in terms of the gameplay we’re introducing.

6. Sub-plots and climaxes

While you technically can have a single, overarching arc without any subplots, its usually not a good idea. You want to have a few moments of high tension throughout your story, and it’s usually good to have subplots that resolve themselves as the game progresses (this usually works very well with the normal level/mission structure of games).

Our plan for Particulars has 4 episodes, each of which has 3 chapters (note that we’ve hardly planned episodes 3 and 4 as their existence entirely depends on how well the game does, which is another reason why sub-plots are important – the first two need to stand alone). Each chapter has its own, quite simple arc, and each episode ends in a climax. Note that these climaxes can be very different in nature: in episode 1, the in-game climax is pretty epic, while episode 2 is more concerned with an exciting out of game climax that interferes with the game world.

7. The Delivery

The how. Do you have voice actors? Is everything in game? If so, is it using text? How are you going to keep the attention of the player? How much does the text move? How much do you use atmos and music? How sharply in focus are the sounds of the world around you?

What colour is the background?

All of these and a whole lot more questions come under Delivery. It’s in some ways the biggest aspect to keep track of: so much is wrapped up in the skills and timeline of your team. For instance, I snuck a little bit of voice acting into our game when I wrote the last outline. It made total sense to do so for the narrative arc. The question of whether we can actually add these things into the game is still up in the air, and so the voice acting is up in the air. If it has to be cut, it affects the emotional arc of the game… and so on.

8. Bonus Particulars Extra: The Science

If you’re making a game about something that’s ‘real’ in any way, this is the extra thing: that it’s gotta line up, at least in approximation. I’ve spent a fair chunk of time this week looking up CP-asymmetry in the Weak Force (for non-physicists: ‘rule-breaking in the force that makes nukes work’) to figure out how to integrate it into the game. The science is incredibly subtle, and I’ve gotta be really careful to design the game rules to ensure that the concepts are understandable and not too misleading (I’ve learnt that when it comes to science, the only thing that isn’t misleading is the base equations, and they’re really hard. You’d be surprised at how many times a physics lecturer will say the words “so remember this thing you learnt last year? Well it’s just an approximation, – here’s a better way to think about it”).

The fact is that particle physics is a very big field, and we could have chosen a very different aspect as the game’s central question (we’ll be exploring baryogenesis – why there are more particles than antiparticles in the universe). If we’d chosen a different direction (the Higg’s boson, for instance), the game would be a very different beast. At the end of the day, the choice of baryogenesis could be problematic (as the science is somewhat tricky and it’s an unsolved problem), but it is possible and fits with everything else so well that we’ll just have to work through it.

And that’s it! 7 (+1) things that I look at (often without thinking about it) when trying to work out story.

Does this fit with your ideas of what’s important in a game’s story? Does it track with games whose stories you love? Let us know!

After this experience, I’m pretty convinced that soft-launches are the best thing ever.

Why, you might ask? Find out below in a 4-act morality play*.

*replace ‘morality’ with ‘practicality’ and ‘play’ with ‘blog post’. Yep, that’s probably more accurate.

Act 1: The Fallen Angle

Sydney, Australia. April 2012.

The launch of Flatland: Fallen Angle.

The launch goes pretty damned well. We get coverage on Rock Paper Shotgun. We make a few hundred dollars on the first day. Then, the other shoe falls.

The important thing about this failure is that due to a lack of experience and a lack of time, it was pretty likely that we were going to get the wrong payment provider. And having the wrong payment provider, it would only be after selling the game a few times that the problems would actually arise.

Act 2: The Stopped Bot

Sydney, Australia. March 2013.

The launch of Unstoppabot.

Two things went wrong with our Unstoppabot launch. First, we accidentally launched the game two weeks early, obliterating any chance of getting noticed for being ‘new’. Second, we seriously screwed up the mail-out of our press release (to the point where we’re not even sure how many people got it).

Before we launched, we’d heard that studios sometimes do a launch in a smaller country (Australia or Canada usually) before going worldwide. We dismissed it, as we wanted to get the game out. While taking this strategy might not have fixed the first problem, it certainly would have highlighted our press problems before taking the game to the world stage.

Act 3: A Particular Problem

Sydney, Australia. April 8, 2013.

The Soft-Launch of Particulars.

“But wait”, you might cry. “You only launched on the 10th!”. Ahh, but that’s where you’re wrong. We did a ‘super-secret early alpha’ launch 2 days earlier, by sending a special link to our mailing list and those who had filled out the Particulars survey, and giving them an even higher discount.

It turns out that this was probably a good idea. It turns out that there was a pretty big problem with our purchase system.

If someone had bought a game (ie. Flatland) from us before, they already had an account. If they didn’t login before purchasing, they wouldn’t be able to make a new account with the same email, and by the time they logged in, the purchase information would be gone. We could fix this for individual people, but I was sure glad that I only had to do 8 of these, rather than having to deal with all 100 or so people we already had on our system.

By the way, the solution to this was to put messages everywhere telling people to login. A tech solution is much harder (and possibly impossible), and I can deal with the 1 or 2 people who slip through the net.

The super-secret early launch also told us a plethora of details for our website design that made it hard for people to get to their purchased game. We also realised that unless we made it clear (and in bold, and in teal), people wouldn’t know what platforms the game was on. While this sort of thing would have survived the soft launch that we’re in now, I’d shudder to think what would happen if we waited till hard launch to try all these systems out.

Act 4: The Soft Launch

The SeeThrough Offices. Right now.

I think what I’ve learnt from all these experiences is that new things usually break. It often takes a couple of goes to get something right, and you simply don’t know what’s going to go wrong until you put something into the wild.

So soft-launch. You can spend forever trying to think through everything that might go wrong, or you could just get some people interacting with your system to find out what’s actually going wrong. You can then fix it, and fix it quickly, while there’s only a few people yelling at you about how broken your game is.

A second, less obvious reason for our soft-launch alpha is that we’ve never successfully run an alpha program before. We have no idea how to keep a user base engaged, and to ensure that they are continually upgrading the game and giving us good feedback. So we want a few weeks and an update or two with a smaller group, to learn a thing or two about keeping that engagement before we throw this game out to the world.

Bonus Act: That ‘rising cost’ thing

This is the final thing I kinda like about soft launches: I get to try crazy things with little risk. I think that by having a countdown of number of sales till a price increase, we can probably accelerate sales. I’m interested in comparing that to a simple timed countdown (which is what we’ve done with the super-secret early alpha – less than 6 hours to go guys!). So far, the timed countdown is winning, but it’s pretty early days for the number of sales model. I guess we’ll find out in the days to come.

Your Act

I’d love to hear about any launch issues you might have had, whether it be game related or otherwise. Also any feedback on our Particulars launch is very much appreciated!

I rejoined SeeThrough at the beginning of this year to work as a game writer and somehow* wound up as Social Media and Marketing Coordinator**. While I have worked in marketing and client-side relations before, I had never actually marketed a video game, and just to add more pressure into the mix, the Unstoppabot launch was less than two weeks away!

So check below the cut for a 17 step process on how not to market a game during your first two weeks in a job.

 Disclaimer: My marketing was not as poorly thought out as this

*I noticed our online presence was lacking and offered to help. Things kind of snowballed from there.

**I may or may not have given myself a fancy title, fancy titles are the best.

STEP 1: Arrive at work thinking you will be in a one off three person meeting about plot development. Find yourself in a nine person business meeting for which there was apparently homework you didn’t do.

STEP 2: Quietly bring up the idea that maybe you could help with social media posts. Especially tumblr, cause you have a tumblr full of Avengers gifs that people seem to like.

STEP 3: Realise that the studio has taken you up on your offer. Have a meeting with the CEO in which he will detail a long list of things that need doing. And it would be totally great if they were done this week.

STEP 4: Panic

STEP 5: Obtain log in data for all social media services. Make your first post on Facebook. Feel temporarily elated.

STEP 6: Be reminded that Unstoppabot releases in about 10 days. Realise that as you only work one day a week that you essentially have 1.2 days left to prepare.

STEP 7-10: Panic

STEP 11: Reject the idea of any kind of coherent marketing plan. Instead, focus on having release day messages ready. Come in for a new work day and be an absolute dynamo getting tasks done.

STEP 12: Release the game. Check announcements have gone live. Cease panicking.

STEP 13: Miss launch drinks because you are busy working your second job.

STEP 14: Be moderately satisfied with game related marketing. Focus on your general studio marketing progress.

STEP 15: Actually write a full marketing plan for your next game. Bless you marketing plans.

STEP 16: Panic, but only because you now KNOW how much stuff there is to get done.

STEP 17: Write a blog post detailing your first two weeks on the job to procrastinate working on marketing for your next game

There you have it. 17 simple steps on how not to market a game. Take home message? Marketing plans are your friend. Make one. Use one. And force everyone else in the studio to post tweets no matter how much they hate twitter.

I think it’s also fair to say that I’m both a little addicted and a little over that particular pun.

So I’m pretty excited to say that this game is almost out of Pre-Production and will be, as of next Monday, in Production.

So what does that mean? Click below for a quick run-down of what we call Pre-Production means and some sneak-peeks on what we’ve made so far.

This is an overview of the preproduction of the game, and at some point the ordering becomes a bit moot as we do many of these simultaneously. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

STEP 1: Make a Prototype. Or 3. You probably only need 1 though.

STEP 2: Prove that there’s a market. Or, in our case, apply for and get funding over a 10 month period (in general, this step should take less than 10 months. But if it does…)

STEP 3: Figure out the Pillars of the game. These are the things that your game couldn’t do without, and they form the basis of everything else you do. Note that they can, and likely will, change during development.

Particulars is a Minimalist Meditation on Chaotic Flows

(importantly, each of those pillars have a separate, 2 sentence definition that explains what they mean in the context of this game)

STEP 4: Figure out a plan for the rest of Pre-Production. This includes timelines and deliverables, coz the pre-production deliverables for each game are different. The first time you do this you’ll miss things and/or put too much in. But that’s how you learn.

STEP 5: Build the basic game engine. Hooray! You should also draw a UML diagram at this point, rather than waiting till you’re doing a final pre-production code review (whoops).

STEP 6: Make some Technical Prototypes. Oooh, pretty… (yes, all our tech prototypes were around graphics)

STEP 7: Make a game development timeline. Ours is full of “Holy crap that’s not a lot of time” bits.

STEP 8: Budget. This is a ‘set up once, tweak forever’ thing. Where possible, make sure you take into account when money comes in so you don’t run out of cash.

STEP 9: Realise you should have made design doc already. This project has made me realise the incredible value of a design doc. It’s just so much easier to get people up to speed. Our one opens with your pillars, and shortly afterwards has 2-3 paragraph descriptions of the Core Mechanics, Designed Progression, and Look/Feel/Theme of the game.

STEP 10: Oh, there’s a marketing plan as well. Really important. We made a fair effort to outline what assumptions we were making here, so that we can actually compare that to reality once the game releases.

STEP 11: Make your level design tools. Love me some good level design tools.

STEP 12: Get some Concept Art, Audio and Narrative. Make sure you cover all major styles. Also get some UI design done as well.

STEP 13: Make some sample levels. This part can be lots of fun. Ideally it tests your ability to teach the game as well. Get people to play it. You know, that playtesting thing.

STEP 14: Figure out the Progressions of the game. Narrative, Level, Chapter, whatever you have. Just have a draft of them.

STEP 15: Pipes. Lines. Procedures. Asset/Feature Lists. Have them. All of them will evolve, so its mostly about having a starting point. Don’t forget to have a testing plan, and a procedure around versioning.

STEP 16: Realise that some of this is going to bleed into production. Oh noes! Some of the audio and art is still being worked out. You have enough to go into full-on ‘code/make levels/make assets’ mode for everything else though, so you can still be in production. And the audio for this project is being deliberately simple, so you can afford to lose a week on that. It’s not a blocker. (Note: Audio may be a blocker for your project).

STEP 17: Write an article about your pre-production process. Hopefully it’s in a nice, simple, stepwise format, and it doesn’t lie about how many steps there are.

I’m currently at my desk with a pile of work to do on Particulars (you’ll hear more about that next week!), but i’m constantly checking Facebook and Twitter for new mentions, checking our analytics for new plays, and googling ‘unstoppabot’ for new press. I keep getting that feeling that ‘I can do more’, but I know that in the end, certain things (like some of the press) will simply take a few days to take hold. Right now, I’ve gotta go design the UI for our next project, but instead I feel the need to write about this moment. Because once Unstoppabot starts doing better (and I’m fairly confident that it will), I’ll likely forget what I’m feeling now. And if we go through this on another game, I would like to remember that this is just a part of the process.

We’ll be doing a post-mortem on Unstoppabot in the next few weeks, and you’ll be sure to hear more about the launch, what went wrong, and what you should look out for if you’re launching your own game. I’m also going to write something about the procedures we’re putting in place to ensure that the development of Particulars is a much smoother ride than this bot that just won’t stop… unless it does and then you launch it (or something).

I’d like to take the time to thank everyone who’s shared the game so far: we had 127 download of the game and over 20 reviews in the first day, which was pretty damned awesome considering that the vast majority of the downloads were from social networks (we didn’t show up as ‘new’ for anyone, but more on that later…). If you haven’t played the game yet, please do! If you haven’t rated/reviewed it, please do that as well – it’s one of the most important things for the game at the moment, and our best hope for getting it to break through.

In saying all this, I don’t want to give the impression that this game has failed. We’re a little down, but definitely not out, and we’ve got some plans that could really turn this ‘never stop unicycle’ around.

Out today on iOS, Unstoppabot will make you giggle between sessions of frustration and delight as you maneuver the ludicrously misnamed and fragile Unstoppabot through a gritty post-apocalyptic environment that you can mostly ignore, because holy balls ROBOTS.

An intriguing blend of physics-based logic puzzles like The Incredible Machine, and fast, twitchy infinite runners, Unstoppabot provides an entirely new experience to mobile gaming by making you feel both dumb and slow while you’re on the bus or pooping.

“I like it,” says Game Designer Nick Kolan, who also wrote this thing, “and I have absolutely no reason to be biased.”

“I found other mobile games to be lacking in both the robot and infinite-running-puzzle-game department, and I also felt we should stick it to famously quotable people. So we slapped some quotes haphazardly in there and made fun of them. I am confident you will agree that Zig Ziglar had it coming.”

Unstoppabot features: 
-An adorable, hand-drawn art-style
-14 chapters of increasing difficulty
-More than 70 puzzles
-An endless “Infinite Mode”
-ROBOTS!
-Famous quotations and dumb jokes mere moments apart
-Game Center integration
-More modes, bonus stages and unlockables to come very soon

Take a gander at the Unstoppabot trailer on YouTube!

Unstoppabot is available right now on iOS for the low, low price of nothing. For comparison, buying a house is infinity-percent more expensive, requires you to fill out forms, and will feature little to no robot activity. You decide.

For screens, please head to www.seethroughstudios.com/press 

SeeThrough Studios is an independent studio based in Sydney, Australia. Last year SeeThrough released the prize-winning Flatland: Fallen Angle, a game about the dangers of being a triangle.

For questions or interview opportunities, please contact press@seethroughstudios.com.

“But it was free before!”

Yes, but this version is better. Also, we want to make more and better games, and to do that we need money. If you haven’t played Flatland before, try out the free demo. If you have played it, we’d love it if you could head over to the Desura page and rate the game.

“I already paid for the last version because I am a great human being and everyone loves me and my life was vastly improved because of my kind gesture towards SeeThrough Studios!”

Well, wonderful Sir or Madam, please be patient. We’ll get you a Desura code very soon. You deserve it for being the best.

I want to see other developers.

Wait! Baby, don’t go. We’ve just being going through some stuff is all. We still love you. Here, to prove how we feel about you, have a nice, juicy update.

Iron Dev

Our deadline has come and gone. Twice. And yet still no finished games. Well, that’s because we realized that we actually want our games to be really good, to the point that more than the seven people who read our blog would want to buy and play them. So we have let our deadlines slip and have united our once-divided studio to focus on…

Unstoppabot

Our robot-themed Iron Dev game Unstoppabot (previously Rolland (previously “the robot game with the robots and stuff”)) is progressing nicely. All the important stuff is mostly done, and we’re currently doing some quality-of-life stuff like menus and user-interfaces, and really making sure the mechanics make sense at a glance. It’s basically a vast amount of little stuff that should hopefully push Unstoppabot from being a fun game to a great game.

To that end, we’re opening up beta testing to ensure that it isn’t a broken mess when we eventually give it a wide release. If you’d like to be part of our beta testing community, we need you to fill out a very short, very simple questionnaire. There are no wrong answers unless you say you hate our game. That is a wrong answer.

Robots!

The 3D Roguelike Thing

The other Iron Dev game is on hold for the time-being while we finish up Unstoppabot. The current feeling is that the roguelike has some cool mechanics but is missing a gameplay element or two to really sink your teeth into. Rather than shove it out the door, we’re going to revisit it down the line, soup it up, and throw it in your face like a stray basketball.

Flatland

Our game about angry triangles is being polished up and relaunched, with the more frustrating stages totally revamped and the awkward mechanics adjusted for less awkwardness. We’ll actually be charging for it, too, because we like making games but making games costs money sometimes.

You’ll be able to pick up Flatland here or on Desura. We still have a sequel on the cards for the near future, because watching shapes break apart is neato.

It’s dark because it’s night time!

Particulars

Paul is screwing around with his physics-themed physics-based physics game about physics. Currently he’s doing tech tests to see what is and isn’t feasible for mobile platforms when a game is as crammed full of  physics as Particulars is. Paul says “not a whole lot” but plans to squeeze out every drop of processing power that he can.

Physics.

The genre ‘Roguelike’ has been undergoing rapid changes over the past few years, and with some recent additions like ‘The Binding of Isaac’ and ‘Spelunky’, the genre has been quite loosely defined. I defined a ‘Roguelike’ as a game with procedurally generated content, learning through death, and progress defined by how far you get before dying. This encompasses Isaac, Spelunky, Dredmor, Dwarf Fortress, and the traditional roguelikes. At this point Tom jokingly made the observation that if that is how you define a Roguelike , ‘Infinite Runners’ are Roguelikes. This observation went full circle back to what we wanted to achieve, an accessible pick-up and play (PUP) Roguelike.

If we could take the simplicity of an infinite runner and the incredible depth of a Roguelike, we could be onto something very special. Based on this observation we tried to see if we could take the really cool parts of Roguelikes and repackage them in a more accessible form. By doing this we would be exposing casual gamers to something that normally only hardcore gamers would experience. In other words we decided to make a Roguelike for casual gamers.

So then Ludum Dare came along, Tom and I both decided to make two games inspired by our conversation. Tom made a cool minimalistic Roguelike dungeon crawler called ‘Vol’. I went in the other direction and actually made an infinite runner with some RPG style elements called ‘Unnatural Selection’. Both games then went on to inspire Team 1′s next game…

Here is a little teaser to keep everyone occupied (PS this is on mobile):