Project Announcement, Free Demo & Narrative BTS: 'Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes'

 

It's been some time. So it goes (I'm re-reading Slaughterhouse-5, top ten books of all time IMO). But now I have a new project to announce!

Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is (in my words, not the marketing department's) a narrative-forward TBS with pausable, tactical-scale RTS combat, which takes its cues from FTL, Reigns, Asteroids and, of course, developer Alt Shift's own Crying Suns.

In fact, they have just published a handy narrative BTS over on Steam.

I was consulting on this one through the early design phase, in addition to contributing a handful of text events.

What I argue is cool about Scattered Hopes is the design of the basic systems around the core vibes of the TV show, instead of trying to smash a triangle peg into a quadrilateral hole. Combat aside the core game loop is worker management, but as in the show every decision has potential to trigger a cascading sequence of deeper narrative and mechanical crises, each of which can interact in both directions with the personalities, wellbeing, capabilities and interpersonal dramas of your named crewmembers; not to mention the relative strengths and behaviours of the military, criminal and civilian factions onboard.

I'm proudest however of the Cylon system. I jumped on this design task early doors because it's obviously the coolest thing, and although the final version is most definitely the work of the core team I don't think I lie when I say it bears non-zero similarity to my original vision.

Here's the necessary conditions of an authentic Cylon system I laid out on day one, back in May 2023:

• Discovering a Cylon's identity (or missing important clues) should be a thing

• Cylons are always Cylons, NPCs don't get their histories rewritten when a Cylon event triggers

• Undiscovered Cylons on your ship is bad, discovering them is good/exciting/dangerous

• Interrogating Cylons is a thing

• Not all Cylons are murder-machines, some are smart and strategic, some are friendly to humans

I went on to describe a system wherein 'You can arrest and interrogate an NPC at any time'; 'Connected events can trigger at any stage (the prisoner's lover could break them loose and steal a viper)'; and ultimately:

This system is about gambling insight into an NPC’s trustworthiness against all sorts of unpredictable negative effects[...] but never really knowing who you can trust.

I believe the final system delivers on all of this, albeit in a more implementable form than whatever crazy shit this writer dreamed might be programmable.

Grats to the team at Alt Shift, to writers Martin Ringot and Anthony Jauneaud, and you, the discerning public, for the remarkable achievement of being able to download the demo right this second, and play the full game in Q2 this year.

Project Announcement: The Door Game

I left my job on Subnautica some months ago now, and I've been enjoying the peace.

But I got to the end of my todo list then spent 3 days building this game. It's simple and silly, but it's complete and I love it.

What is The Door Game? And how do you win it?

Announcing the FREE release of a silly new philosophical competitive door opening rogue-a-like, from the writer of @Subnautica and @TalosPrinciple!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/door-game-36578117

Also I have a Patreon now.

After you. I insist.

Irrational Investigator Demo Released!

I stopped development on the Irrational series some years ago, because I got sick of designing logic puzzles. However, I was very proud of the demo we put together for Investigator. It moves the gameplay of Redux into a more graphically and world-driven environment, and massively polished the accessibility. I genuinely think it's worth a play.

Thanks again to my contributors, Mikko Tarmia, Martin Camargo and Chris Burrows.

It's my hope over the coming years or so that I can turn out some new indie games of my own. I currently have a functioning demo of a school management sim, and I'll keep you posted as things develop.

It's here if you fancy playing Investigator it's at: https://t.co/WyG4Fv9GDW

Quick Update

Here is what has been happening for the past couple months.

Yesterday I did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Last time I did one was three years ago, and I'm pleased to say the number of questions fielded this time was roughly triple, and ran the gamut from the usual 'How do I do your job?', through practical questions about the future of Subnautica, all the way to rather sillier ones. Here's a quick excerpt:

Tom, it turns out that I love every game that you and/or your pal Jonas Kyratzes have worked on. So, I have to ask...

Which would you rather fight: 100 small, brightly colored, six-legged, horse-like animals, or one horse-sized mantis with max ranks in combat?

• perma-link
• save
• report
• give gold
• REPLY

[–]tjubert[S] 3 points 16 hours ago 

I've waited my entire life to answer this question, and I'm afraid it's easy. I would rather fight 100 small, brightly coloured, six-legged, horse-like animals than one horse-sized mantis with max ranks in combat because a horse is a horse and a horse is not a threat, especially when it is small, even if it is six-legged and brightly-coloured and there are one hundred of them; however regardless the size or the species of the horse-sized mantis it still has max ranks in combat, and I always specialise in INT, CHAR, WIS.

In other news I am continuing to develop the general plotline for Subnautica (which will likely be true until a couple months before it ships), and next week I'm hoping to move back onto doing a proper redesign of the intro sequence and first 30 mins of story. Should be a big jump forward for the next update.

Finally, let's have a quick celebration of the fact the UK for the first time in decades has a prominent left-winger leading one of the two main parties, who believes in things like thinking before shooting, abolishing the monarchy and giving everyone an equal share of the things in life that really matter: health, education and political involvement.

Project Announcements: The Masterplan & Talos: Road to Gehenna

Okay, so both these projects were already announced but I was too busy writing them to say anything about it.

The Masterplan
I played The Masterplan in early access six months ago, and instantly bought into its world. It's a top-down heist game with real-time pause and a tactical stealth focus, and central to the whole thing is the hostage-taking mechanic which enables you to control rooms and implement on-the-fly tactics like having the bank manager rob his own bank, or having the clerks form a human shield between you and the cops.

I ran into the Sharkpunch team deep in the snow at PAX East, and couldn't resist the chance to offer them some help with the writing. It's such a charming little game, it deserved better than second-language English - plus the entire script is less than 10,000 words, so it's not a great time sink.

Since coming onboard I've tried to make the world feel more consistent. A simulation game like this, where most of what happens is player-driven, turns not on the cinematics or the linear text, but the authenticity of the world you are interacting with. It doesn't need to be real, it just needs to make internal sense.

To that end I've been using flavour texts to build out the sense that you're in a 70s crime caper, recruiting a team, scoping joints and pulling off the impossible. Right now we're working on implementing more dynamic in-game speech. It's silly stuff, but the world comes alive when the characters in it react in unpredictable but logical ways.

Finally, the whole game is bookended with some more traditional linear plotting which was already hinted at in the original teaser. This is not a story-heavy game, but it wouldn't be a crime caper every detail went to plan.

The Masterplan releases on 4th June 2015.


Road to Gehenna

Having gotten Talos out the door in December last year I was all ready to take a bit of a break, and then come back and start something completely new. As ever, things did not work out that way.

Croteam collared me in January. They'd been working on extra-hard Talos DLC puzzles for who knows how long and contrary to their intentions throughout that development they decided the DLC needed some kinda story.

Not blown away by the thought of churning out more Milton, more Elohim Jonas and I immediately set about generating plot pitches which would  expand on the original world without simply following in its footsteps. We wanted a new challenge.

Pitches we discarded included the game being set in the distant past when the system was still being developed, with researchers commenting on and interpreting your every action; a secondary server with all the same rules, but completely different archive information, resulting in very different versions of ELOHIM and Milton; and one where far future beings discover the system and begin to explore it.

Without spoiling anything, the pitch we went with provides us huge flexibility in terms of the sort and tone of material we deliver. It gives us a world that fits within the original game's religious and science fiction mythology, but which resolutely has its own identity. Most importantly for me, it lets us explore completely new ideas about how to interact with the game.

Road to Gehenna is ambitious (overly so: the script is around the same size as that of the original game). I haven't undertaken a follow-up to one of my own games since the Penumbra series eight years ago because I want to keep moving forwards (the same reason, more or less, that I didn't work on Amnesia), and so Gehenna we have consciously designed to be experimental. We wanted to explore new ideas in a safe environment so that when we inevitably come to Talos 2 we will be able to raise our audience's expectations once again.

Story was fully implemented a week or two ago, and we are now in final bug-hunting. Road to Gehenna will arrive for computers and other toys in the next month or two.

Talos Principle Coming Soon (+ Games You Can Play Now)

Okay, congratulations me for failing to write anything here for ages. The reason I will give for this is that I am somewhat Autistic-spectrum inclined and I only have enough room in my brain for one obsession at a time.

Nevertheless I shall endeavour to formulate some form of update. 

The Talos Principle is almost done. The guys in Zagreb are applying final polish, and next week we complete the voice work. Sigils of Elohim, the Tetris-like minigame we're dishing out free, is out now. In case you're not familiar with the game, it's a first-person philosophical puzzler, set in a synthetic world. Or, as I've been selling it to my non-gamer mates, a game where you get to argue with the devil.

This is usually the part where I put my money where my mouth is and try to predict how the game will be received. I'm happy to say that, like The Swapper, Talos is at the very least a sound puzzle game. I'm not worried about scoring sub-70s. Beyond that, well, I'd say this is a looser game than The Swapper - it's a much bigger world, so that's only natural - but it also does something that none of my previous games have: it lets me write an involved interactive dialogue. It is my great hope that that dialogue will excite people. It is, I think, fairly unique.

A 2014 release date should be confirmed very shortly, and it'll release on Win, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Shield Tablets.

In other news, my brain has mostly been consumed with political philosophical research.

I have gone through a bit of a journey over the past ten years: from not really thinking about anything very much, to realising that and embracing philosophy. I searched frantically during my BA for solid ground on which to base my moral assumptions, and found none. Perversely this left me right back where I started: an individualist, who recognises that the system we live in is broken and resolves to do everything in their power to get the better of it.

Now I'm not ready to say yet that my ethical outlook has changed. I am still dubious of absolute moral systems, dubious of anyone who claims there is some authority outside of ourselves. What's changed is that I'm now better aware of the broader picture, politically and (most importantly) historically. I never understood the value of history in school; now I understand perfectly that history provides us an irreplaceable point of reference for how human existence can be - it enables us to identify the assumptions, the invisible shackles, that underpin our way of life today.

Supposing there is no absolute morality, the need for a sound political framework becomes even more pronounced. We are all, more or less, rational animals. It may only be our own sense of reason that provides authority to claims about how we should behave, but that needn't mean the output is any less authoritative.

So my next project is going to be aimed at replicating this journey on a massive scale. I want to pull our perspective out from the subjective, close-up one we take in every day life, and show how our political society is shaped by usually invisible forces on this grand scale. I want to explore what happens when we are all individualists and consumers who give in to these forces. And I want to construct a framework for how individualists might nonetheless find value in working towards a fairer society. And that is what I have mostly been thinking about.

Now, to lighten the mood, some excellent games I played recently.

The Escapists - Excellent isometric prison-break sim in Early Access. Plays like a minimalist, freeform Prisoner of War. Keep up appearances by attending exercise, rolecall and jobs; while simultaneously preparing for your escape by gathering weapons, digging tunnels, forging alliances, stealing uniforms etc.

Invisible Inc. - I was always going to love this one. The new isometric, turn-based stealth game from Klei, it boasts their usual high level of support, and I think is now my favourite of their releases.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - A lot of positive things already said about this one, but they're worth re-enforcing. It's a uniquely beautiful world, not only for the fidelity of the graphics, but the architectural design itself. The plot is shamelessly pulp fiction, and somewhat predictable for it; but the real narrative punch is delivered by the mechanics themselves and the inventive ends to which they're put. This game takes you on a journey like no other.

The Tom Jubert Blog Bi-Annual Update Extravaganza...

...or 'What I have been doing instead of writing this blog for the last couple of months'.

So the main pull on my time has been the two new narrative design projects I took on towards the end of last year. Both are now nearing completion (there's a first draft script, at any rate, and alpha builds are on the way) and should be officially announced in time for E3 in June.

nDreams VR Adventure
The first project is with UK firm nDreams. Their recent resume includes a lot of Playstation Home dancing avatar stuff which probably isn't going to blow anyone's narrative socks off, but their extended background covers ARGs, as well as a large portion of Eidos' back catalogue in the form of ex-Creative Director and nDreams studio founder Patrick O'Luanaigh. The project we're working on is a first-person virtual reality adventure, and it's the studio's first foray into what I guess I'd call traditional games development. It's by far the most commercial project I've worked on since, I don't know, something that didn't get published, probably, but that's something I've found time to enjoy. As with most of my games, I don't know if this one will get ripped to shreds or not, but for once it won't be because it's too pretentious, or too cold and academic. In this one I get to show off some dialogue skill, develop a more traditional, emotional, present tense narrative, and that's a surprisingly rare challenge that I rather relish. I also feel more like a real writer when I'm not just copy and pasting other people's philosophical ideas - and I promise you there's no room for treatises in this one.

Croteam's First-Person Puzzler
The second project is Croteam's new first-person puzzler, on which I'm leading narrative development in partnership with another indie writer, whose previous work I think everyone's going to be excited about. If you're into philosophy and video games, I have got for you the partnership of the century. In terms of what we're actually doing, we've both developed the overarching world design and (minimal) plotting, and then split characters between us. I lucked out and landed the interactive script. A word count scares me, but I expect I've turned out around half a novel's worth of dialog trees over recent months. It is without a shadow of a doubt by far the most complex interactive dialogue work I've done, and I can't think of anything quite like it in another mainstream game. I am excited to see what people make of it. Mass Effect this ain't.

I think since we informally announced the project some weeks ago there's been a bit of misinformation floating about as a result of some of the things I said, so just to clear up:

• It's a first person puzzler
• Visually this is recognizably a Croteam game
• There is no shooting
• This is not a comedy game, but you can bet I snuck a few dry jokes in there
• If you enjoyed The Swapper I think you'll enjoy this
• If you enjoyed Serious Sam I hope you'll enjoy this
• I have rarely worked with a team as keen to help as Croteam

So that's that. More details as they emerge.

Any Other Business

In other news I completed my Philosophy MA at King's College, netted a Merit overall and a 70 in my dissertation, which I'm happy with, but which does mean I'm around 4% less intelligent than I was 10 years ago.

I've had some press coverage as well, so I may as well do a quick roundup of that:

• I was picked for Forbes' 30 Under 30
• I appeared on Guy Cocker's podcast with Olli from Facepalm to talk about The Swapper's Playstation announcement and my new projects
• If you speak French or can handle google translate I did a more-interesting-than-usual interview with Rage Mag

And that's about it for now. I've got a number of discussions ongoing for new projects when these ones finish up over the next month or so, but as ever I'm keen to discuss anything cool. For what I think is cool, see the rest of this blog.

Hopefully next month I can follow all this up with some real details.

Questions, interview requests, offers etc - comments or email are waiting for your words.

Thanks for sticking with me despite the dearth of new content recently!

Plot is Gameplay's Bitch: Most Popular Posts

So here, because I saw another, better blog do it and it seemed like an easy way to generate content, is a quick rundown of the most popular posts on this blog from the last year... or so. This said, I've just noticed that when RPS does it it's a collection of other people's writing on their blog, which now makes me feel a bit self-conscious. I guess I'll just throw some classic interviews to help assuage my guilt.

2013

1. FTL Advanced Edition Announcement - In case you missed it, more FTL, more Chris Avellone, more platforms. I have been playing this for the last four months. Out of fairness, I should mention this post is at the top mostly because Subset linked here from their announcement, so don't expect rocket science.

2. The Swapper Postmortem: What Went Right - The second part of this is still coming at some point. There are some announcements to make before then.

3. Little Inferno & Plato's Allegory of the Cave - I was hot off a Greek philosophy module and raring to go.

All Time

Technically the Ir/rational Redux walkthrough is the most popular post on this blog, but that's mostly newgrounds traffic.

1. What I did on Which Projects - I have literally no idea why this is the most popular post I have written. While I think a large part of my audience is probably people interested in the trade, I wrote other posts far more cynically targeted at you guys. Maybe if you clicked that link before you can tell me in the comments why? My best guess is it got picked up somewhere high traffic largely at random.

2. 10 Tips for Becoming a Games Writer - Like this one, right? I wrote this fully hoping it would pull in some hits (and do some good, naturally), and in fact most months it still nets more clicks than any other single post - but still not enough to pip the top spot.

3. A Voyage to Ice-Pick Lodge - I think the odd times that RPS picks me up probably contribute about a quarter of my all time clicks, and this was one example. It is, also, one of my favourite stories.

4. Top Indie Stealth Games - This is a bit out of date now, but it's still a sound list of 7 great stealth games you can play right now, despite what some of the text may tell you.

Top Interviews

1. Brian Mitsoda - He of 'Vampire Colon The Masquerade Hyphen Bloodlines' and Dead State, which is almost upon us despite being only just announced via the medium of time travel available to you by clicking the link.

2. Zachtronics - They of SpaceChem and Ironclad Tactics.

3. Chris Avellone - Enough said.

Honourable mention: Brendon Chung on Quadrilateral Cowboy. One of my absolute favourite developers, a fantastic game that's almost out, and this deserves your clicks right now.

Project Announcement: Organ Trail Director's Cut

While demoing The Swapper on the Indie Megabooth floor at PAX last year I met the delightful people behind indie dev, The Men Who Wear Many Hats. I'd played through their Oregon Trail remix, Organ Trail, on my iPhone earlier that year, and have felt old every time since that someone younger than me doesn't know what Oregon Trail is.

A few months ago the guys got in touch to ask if I'd produce some new events for the Director's Cut, to coincide with its release on new platforms. It's already out on just about everything from Android to Ouya to Steam, and I have no idea what the new platforms actually are, but I suppose the only possible options are further mobile/tablet platforms, or a console-based digital distribution store. The breakdown of the job was 30 events at 300 - 400 words per event, which is a good couple of weeks' work, but also constitutes a significant increase in the variety of events offered by the main game. At any rate, I said yes, and the results should be available at some indeterminate point in 2014.

The work is obviously quite similar in nature to what I'm doing on FTL, but it was interesting to be able to directly compare the different tones of the games, and how the subtleties of gameplay in each dictated unique structures for the events themselves. For instance, the core gameplay in FTL is quite detailed - you directly interact with your systems and crew - while in Organ Trail your buddies have no visual presence in gameplay, and the resources are limited to car parts, food, cash and bullets. In one way this limits the story, because there is less variety in what you can deliver gameplay-wise as the outcome to an event. You can't introduce a character in the story and then see them in gameplay during the next combat. However, because both combat and text events are relatively rare in Organ Trail, the narrative is freed of FTL's constant pressure to keep the word count to an absolute minimum, and to push towards combat-based outcomes. Every event in Organ Trail is as involved and varied as the 'big budget' events in FTL.

The tones differ as well. Justin set the style in FTL, and it's what I'd call a matter of fact attitude. Events are generally described in an objective way, without florid details or in depth character analyses. Organ Trail has a darker tone, and more room for detail. What's a zombie apocalypse without a little gore and despair?

So, you can grab Organ Trail right now for £2-£4, depending on your location and platform, or you can wait for the new platforms to be announced, along with the release of the new content I've been working on.

Here's a trailer.

The Swapper Sort of Postmortem & Game Key Give Away!

PHEW.

That's what I felt when the first review came in. Admittedly we'd had some indication from the press that The Swapper's reception would be warm, but I don't believe anything until it's in front of me, hence the non-committal tone of the pre-release post.

As it turns out, things went well. In fact, I think we've all been blown away by the game's reception, and by the fact that everyone is now paying their bills. Certainly I have never read kinder words about my work, and I'm thrilled that it's on a game I was so heavily involved with, and which reflects my particular philosophical passions so well.

So I was going to write this piece as a sort of round-up of some of the criticisms made in reviews, and look for where we went wrong. I'm certain there are places that we went wrong, but it seems the reviews are not going to tell us where. Instead I'll just delay it by telling you about some of the nice post-release stuff we've got going on.

First off, the Steam forums have developed into an active little community:

• Fans are racing our level designer, Otto, for speedrun times. Otto currently has it with 29m24s, and if you've played the game you should check out his vid for sheer elegance, and to wonder how even the guy who built these levels can keep track of who he is when he's hurtling through the game at this sort of pace.
• People are discussing the story at great length.
• I have deviously persauded people to read more about philosophy of mind.
• And, okay, there's also a four page contingent of people with Intel HD graphics waiting for a fix. It's coming, but until then be warned: this game probably doesn't work with Intel HD graphics.

Second off, I have two Steam codes for The Swapper to give away. Would you like one? If so, write your most convincing three word argument for the existence of god in the comments and check back in about 5 days. The two I like the most will earn themselves a Swapper key!

Finally, expect a fuller analysis of what we did in the game, why, and how we could have done it better at some point soon.

PAX East & GDC 2013 Debrief

So that whole thing happened, and I am still reeling. I've been trying to think of an angle from which to write up the trip, but have failed, so instead you get the pictorial highlights reel. Lucky old you.

This is our hostel in Boston. It doesn't look it but it was quite luxurious. So much more space in US cities. Also full fried breakfast in the price. Lush.

This is our booth. It's got a rather sleeker black vibe going on compared with last year's, and four HD tellies. We were blaring out the trailer on the big screen, but after a while we started hearing the same two lines of dialogue over and over in our dreams and we had to turn the sound down.

Klei Entertainment are awesome. Play Mark of the Ninja and Don't Starve immediately. As Alia (software engineer, above centre) pointed out to me, they're somewhere in between being a small indie and a pro-developer, and that's a theme that continues throughout the conference. So many people from so many different areas of development all with their own ideas about who's doing important work - and me, somewhere bang in the middle.

PAX was fantastic for us. Quite apart from hanging out with excellent indies like Klei, The Men Who Wear Many Hats, and Blendo Games we secured some lovely coverage for The Swapper. Head to Game Informer, IGN or the New York Post for more.

Also massive props to Kelly and Megabooth for everything and being excellent.

So then we hit San Francisco. Neither Olli (Facepalm Games) nor I had full conference tickets, so this was basically the start of our holiday. I immediately went to Golden Gate Park and was attacked by this gopher thing.

The cab back to the conference hall was surreal. My first time out and about in a city I've written for in a game, and here I am sitting in the back of a cab driving through those iconic streets, listening to a game developer conversation that could have been straight out of the game. I was having fun.

The following days involved avoiding the infamously overcrowded / crap GDC parties, hanging in the indie hostel, and seesawing between horrendously overpriced beers and entirely free ones. The indie hostel was an experience in itself - and entire building taken over by everyone from Zachtronics to Vlambeer. Keeping as I do various fingers in various pies, the whole thing was a slightly different world. Olli knows every game and every person in the room. I can't tell the difference between a student and someone putting out a game everyone else in the room evangelises. At the same time, the writers are a few blocks away on the 40th floor of the Marriott hotel drinking $7.50 beers. I'm getting a bit bored of the stale pizza-by-the-slice, so it's nice to have both options available.

We hit the Humble Bundle party that night, which is a most civilised affair in an old mint building. It of course ends with champagne and scotch being snaffled before the free bar closes, but it's a good crowd, and I manage to pin down John Walker and secure Ir/rational investigator a playtest and some coverage.

The next thing that happens are the IGF awards, in which FTL is nominated, which seem to take us all by surprise. I find my way to our table and meet Justin's parents and assorted family - there are only four of us who credited on the game, but from what I understand it's very much a group endeavour. I can't imagine bringing my parents to an awards show, but Justin's dad was in the industry, and they are awesome and well into the swing of things. We win three awards, I get up on stage once, look very nervous and forget to thank my girlfriend, then we eat tacos and go to the Steam party.

The parties later that night are yet more surreal. We go to the Wild Rumpus, and pretty much everyone I've met in the last week is there, and has been watching the awards. The Subset guys aren't really much part of the indie scene - they're out of AAA, they want to keep their team small, and they want to make the games they love. The limelight is perhaps not their territory. Still, for one night we are minor celebrities. It's quite strange.

The following day I lend a hand on the booth, which really just involves shaking peoples' hands and awkwardly taking credit for Justin and Matt's work. Everyone's played the game, so they just want to come over and say thanks. I love the picture above, because Justin (2nd from right) and Matt (3rd from right) are talking to a chap who worked on the old X-Wing vs Tie Fighter games, which are one of the guys' core inspirations. For once on this trip they get to be the ones meeting their industry heroes.

It was a thrill to spend time with Subset, with Facepalm, and with all the other devs I met out there. I really am lucky to work on the fantastic games I have done, and there's nothing like seeing a bunch of other people making fantastic stuff to make you want to go home and do some more of your own.

As ever, I'll keep you posted on that front.

New Release - FTL: Faster Than Light

As of today (and until 21st September) you can buy FTL direct from the developer for the low, low price of about £6.50. I strongly urge you to do so.

With the cash they raised from kickstarter, the chaps at Subset have dramatically increased the scope of the game. I've helped them to develop a galaxy full of alien rogues, fast talking Slugmen and drunken pirates. They've added a host of new player ships, weapons and gadgets, and have been honing the product to perfection over the past 6 months.

I think it really is quite a game, and I hope you do to.

You can also pick up the game on Steam.

Project Announcement: Ir/rational Investigator

This is probably the biggest day in my career to date. It's certainly the most exciting. Today I'm announcing (and bringing to Steam Greenlight) Ir/rational Investigator, a commercial follow up to Ir/rational Redux, arriving (with any luck) on iPhone and PC in 2013.

Right now I'm sending out blurb and trying to get the game in front of as many people as possible - in the future I'll be documenting development a bit more and talking candidly about using drag and drop packages to develop for iPhone, the approach we're taking to the story and writing and the perfect storm that allowed us to start work on this game.

In the meantime, for the main info, trailer and screens you can visit Greenlight. I hope you like what you see.

I'm on the Unlimited Hyperbole Podcast

This week another brave soul has sat me down for an hour and grilled me - this time it was Joe Martin's turn.

The topic of this season's Unlimited Hyperbole is horror in games, and Joe's cut down about 60 minutes of me going on about just about anything, to just over ten minutes of fairly sensible chat about the development ethos on Penumbra, my favourite horror game (L4D2), and what I'd like to be doing with interactive narrative (more and less at the same time).

Do take a look.

Project Announcement: PAX10 Nominee, The Swapper

This is one of my favourite parts - getting to talk about something new. When that something new is already winning awards and is looking in good shape it's even better.

The Swapper is a 2D puzzle platformer with a certain sort of psychological, thinky tone that should explain why I'm working on it. More than that, the found-object-based visuals (clay, bits of bicycle etc) are just beginning to come together after months of narrative design work. It's Helsinki-based Facepalm Games' first game, and it's as solid a puzzle explorer as I've seen.

Another major reason I got involved was The Swapper's enviable status as one of the seven games to be backed by Indie Fund. I can only figure that those guys know their stuff, and that they conducted a far more thorough due diligence than I ever could.

It's been a lovely, tight script for me to have a crack at. At around 6 hours playtime we're only shooting for about 3,000 words of short, high-value text logs and dialogues. Combine that with a game editor that lets me  redraft text and test it on the fly and there's just no excuse for every word not being right. The game's concerned with the metaphysical and ethical ramifications of a device that clones people and lets them swap between bodies. I like that sort of thing, don't you know.

We've just begun the writing process, and the game world is taking on detail and meaning. At the end of the month the game's won us an exhibition spot at PAX Prime (31st August 2012), so we'll all be jetting off to Seattle to show the thing off. It's going to be my first experience of the US show circuit, and I'm looking forward to - for once - being able to come face to face with the people who play our games - and with any luck watching them have fun.

The game is due in 2013, and you can read more and check out screens & trailers in the official press release over at the Facepalm blog.

ir/rational Redux - Postmortem

My word. It's done better than I expected.  In under a fortnight...

• ir/rational Redux is just about to hit 100,000 plays on Newgrounds
• 300,000 plays web-wide
• 4.11/5 stars user rating on Newgrounds
• 6th highest scoring game this month
• 40 pages of user reviews and comments

Play Session Stats
But let's look at some play stats rather than a bunch of self-congratulatory ones. Just under 50% of everyone is quitting out in 1-5 minutes. This sounds high, but doesn't particularly surprise me - I know the second I saw a massive page of text in a Flash game I'd consider quitting out; and if you make it past that to the second or third puzzle you're going to realise quickly enough whether or not the game's for you.

Once past the 5 minute barrier, though, there's a dip in the drop out rate and if you stay longer than 5 minutes chances are you'll stay longer than 10 too. I've got you hooked.

The average playtime for those that play past the first couple of puzzles is 15m-26m. This is great, because it means most people who play on, finish the game, or at least spend 20 minutes trying and then rage quit on level 7 or level 9 (difficulty spikes, bad design).

- 28% of everyone who lasts more than 5 minutes spends more than half an hour playing the game.
- 3% of the same take about an hour.

This are invaluable numbers when it comes to thinking about what's next for the concept. The biggest and most obvious hurdle is this - when you can't just adjust a value and give the bad guys twice as much HP, how do you manage the difficulty curve for a game which takes some people ten minutes, and some people 5x that?

Flash Marketing
I've learnt very quickly about flash game marketing during the last fortnight. Reddit is your friend, lover and guardian angel. My day 1 post on there - no doubt aided by my shameless credit name-dropping - immediately put me about 10,000 clicks ahead of everything else on the site. This in turn got me a daily prize and into the Hot New Games list. The clicks and good reviews I scored from there got me onto the front page. I'm now off the front page and the hot new games - and clicks have dropped off quickly - but the game should pick up again any day when it makes it onto the Best Games This Month list.

Netting some good website write-ups helped, especially when they came in the first week. Due to the way the portals feature games, you're better off with 50,000 plays in week 1 than with the same (or even more) spread out over a number of weeks.

"[I]t contains nifty logic puzzles, darkly amusing writing from Penumbra scribe Tom Jubert and has been reduxed so hard it looks and sounds brand new."Rock, Paper Shotgun 

"No doubt the central premise of ir/rational Redux could have come off as incredibly dry, but overall this is a supremely engaging work. A unique brand of dark philosophical humor is present throughout, and the puzzles manage the right balance of posing a challenge to advanced logicians, while remaining welcoming to the novice."JayIsGames

"The conclusions you have to reach are sometimes obvious, but the challenge of the game is figuring out how to reach them. While the game does take a brief, stupid side turn into the politics of video game censorship, most of the puzzles are amusingly high-minded."
Gameological 

"I can guarantee you've never played a puzzle or escape the room type flash game like this before so you are in for a treat."
FlashMush

A special shout out also needs to be made to Jay of JayIsGames for buying me the full version of the Clickteam game maker package so I could release the game unbranded. Massive compliment - that man knows his flash.

What I Learnt About Designing Games

(Or a list of all the crap I did wrong)

Difficulty & Designing Logic Puzzles

I approached the puzzles from the wrong direction. I started with a story, and tried to come up with logic puzzles that fed into it. As a result they feel crowbarred in - while they sit nicely with the story, the difficulty curve is all over the place, and worse: what makes those puzzles difficult is the way I've programmed the solutions, rather than the logic itself.

In the next game I'll begin with the logic, building complexity slowly, and set the game in a scenario more flexible in the opportunities it provides for puzzles.

Art is Important

I know, obvious, but I've been genuinely surprised by how polished people are finding the game - because behind the scenes, of course, it's all over the place. What's key here is this: this is essentially the same game I released three years ago, only with pretty pictures. The difference in response, though, has been massive. Good art is important.

How to do Flash Right

I've learnt a bit about the nitty gritty of Flash development as well. Don't get me wrong - I know nothing about Flash itself, but I know a bit more about alpha transparency and file compression and in-game ads and analytics. 

• I know how to make a Flash game that's less than 18MB now (use as little alpha transparency as possible, use a non-lossy image format, don't store your text as image files, compress everything!). I also know you can make a successful Flash game at more than 5x the usual file size.
• Implement Mochi for ads and analytics
• Don't release buggy games
• Don't use drag and drop software unless you really can't program (in which case do use it)
• Do come up with a great idea and implement it to at least a mediocre standard.
• KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

And What I Learnt About ir/rational as a Concept

The single most positive part of this whole experience is the sheer volume of player discussion and feedback. There is something fundamentally strong about this gameplay concept - it makes people feel smart, and it makes people want to talk about the game. I'm certain it's performing far better than it otherwise would simply because people are talking about it so much. On Newgrounds there are games with 3x as many plays as ir/rational, but with less than half as many comments. This game is a viral marketing gift. End of.

The other thing that players are really appreciating is the originality of the thing. I remember being in my early teens and discovering PCGamer magazine, and a new value in games: 'innovation'. Nowadays it feels a bit old hat to talk about it, but if I had a penny for every review along the lines of "I've never played anything like this, 5 stars" I'd have... well, more than the $100 dollars the ads have earned so far. There's a lot of clones and fluff on Flash portals - doing something smart and different picks you out from the crowd, even if you don't implement it that well.

What's Next?

I'm currently working on a development of the ir/rational DLC concept. Only very different. I'll know if it's going anywhere in a month or two.

You can play ir/rational at these fine places:

Newgrounds
JayIsGames
Kongregate

'Ask Me Anything', Monday 9th, 8pm EST

In the wake of ir/rational's modest success on newgrounds, and a sprawling reddit post that's mostly far too complementary, I was asked by the community to turn up for an AMA. I agreed, and then googled 'AMA' and was relieved to find out it's just reddit's term for a Q&A, and not some kind of perverse internet webcam thing.

As such, I shall be online for an hour or two from 8pm EST, Monday 9th July (that's tomorrow, and it's also 5pm West Coast and 1am UK). If anyone turns up I'll be answering questions on six years of games writing, ir/rational, Driver: San Francisco and other past projects, and just about anything else anyone cares to ask.

Hope to see you there.

UPDATE: You can find the AMA here.

Binary Domain is Out Now! (And This Post is Late)

Very, very late. But anyway, Binary Domain - the new Gears-style shooter from the Yakuza team - is now out for 360, PS3, and has been announced for a PC release later this month. It's a post-apocalyptic robot shooter, with voice communication that lets you boss about and impress/piss off your AI team mates.

Under direction from Dead Space's Anthony Johnston, and working with a team from Sidelines, I reviewed 5,000 lines of in-game dialogue, rewriting as required. The material was mostly part of the NPC relationship system where the characters harangue the player, and the way he responds affects their standing, and it was nice to take on some interactive dialogue for a change.

I've played through the game (now, sadly not at the time) and I can confirm it probably is indeed a Metacritic 74%. The pew-pew bang-bang is solid, if not a Gears beater, but the game is lifted by its mechanical antagonists. All the robots in the game work according to a consistent armour/electrical underbelly framework where metal plates must be chipped before damage can be wrought, and a full damage localisation system where limbs can be removed tactically. Fast enemies need leg shots (reducing them to crawling or, more sinister, hopping towards you). Score a headshot on a powerful type to destroy their central processor and have them attack their buddies. It's a lot of clean fun.

Beyond this, certainly the narrative co-designed by Anthony and Toshihiro Nagoshi reaches beyond the kill-nasty-aliens plotting of its obvious competition. While the relationship system is somewhat blunt and broken, this is still a game which prioritises story, and it shows in every bit of banter and twist in the tale. This is not to say I'm entirely onboard with the script - we worked hard on eliminating the stereotypes, but this is still a game where characters are projections of their nationality.

All told it was good to be involved, and nice to have another game to add to the growling list.

If you do want to pick up any of my back catalogue you could do worse than hitting these links.

Binary Domain - £29.99
Driver: San Francisco - £19.99
Penumbra: Collection - £15.98
ir/rational - FREE!
Cargo: A Quest For Gravity- £14.99
Evil Dead App - £0.69
Lost Horizon - £14.99

Demos available of most, I believe.

Just to complete this month's run of shameless self-promotion, don't forget you can connect in all these lovely ways:

@tomjubert
LinkedIn
Formspring
www.tomjubert.com
GiantBomb
Mobygames

Some Arty Stuff From My Girlfriend

I have two tags for when I'm doing some shameless plugging - one I use for when I'm plugging my stuff, and another for everything else. I've been trying to work out, when I plug my girlfriend's new blog, which one I should use.

At any rate, Rox Herve is a French artist and film-maker, and you can tell she's good because whenever she takes a photo of me she does so in black & white. This is an artist's euphemism for "you're not pretty enough for full colour".

She also writes screwed up things about screwed up films, makes marginally less screwed up films at the parties we're not supposed to have, and paints things that I find entirely incomprehensible. I ask her what the point is, she tells me that that's exactly why I've missed it, then I screw up my face in confusion and she takes another B&W snap. (Incidentally she hates having the camera turned on her, so by all means desecrate her anonymity by visiting her Facebook page.)

More importantly, though, judge her stuff for yourself.

'GAMESbrief: Traditional Games, Transition and the Power of the Free' is a Book I Helped Write

One of many differences between Plot is Gameplay's Bitch and GAMESbrief is that GAMESbrief sells books with intelligent, marketing-led headers like:

"Buy GAMESbrief Unplugged Volume 2 for 40% off"

GAMESbrief also doesn't having swearing in its name.

At any rate, GAMESbrief is an industry analyst blog run by industry analyst, Nicholas Lovell. We used to work together for GameShadow, and I sometimes write stuff for his blog. Sometimes that stuff gets polished, supplemented and printed up in a lovely coffee table book called GAMESbrief Unplugged.

In the words of its author, Vol.2 features 'lots of insight from you', where 'you' is referring to me. Also:

• If you want to know what really happened at Realtime Worlds, and how to avoid the same thing happening to you, you need to read this book.
• If you want to understand what role publishers and retailers will play in the future of the games industry, you need to read this book.
• If you want to be prepared for the next decade in a fast-changing games industry, you need to read this book.

So, that's enough shameless plugging for one month. Go buy for anywhere from £8.97 - £60.