A bit of background first. There’s a dude named Chris Taylor. He made a real-time strategy game named Total Annihilation, released a bit after Starcraft. Now, obviously Starcraft was just a teensy bit more popular, but TA was interesting because it was a somewhat different style of RTS from the standard. Most RTSes have very flat tech trees, with at most an order of magnitude power difference between the biggest units and the smallest units. TA had a deep tech tree, with the most expensive biggest units able to take on moderate-sized armies of the smaller units. Blizzard’s real-time strategy games love loading up their units with crazy special abilities, requiring massive micromanagement, while TA was more about building armies of military units and sending them against each other in bulk. RTS games rarely provide UI features to automate dull repetitive processes, and yet TA was (for its time) full of them - a thorough waypoint system, the ability to set factories to automatically build units and even automatically give orders to newly-built units, and some controls on unit behavior that were, strangely, actually useful.

The company that made Total Annihilation, Cavedog, was eventually reabsorbed into its parent company, and any hope of Total Annihilation 2 vanished with it. Chris Taylor went on to form a company called Gas Powered Games (I bet you are shocked by that, given the subject of this entry) which made a few dungeon-crawler games and eventually announced Supreme Commander, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation.

Everything that TA did well, SC was meant to do better. A larger tech tree, with humongous, army-crushing ultimate units. More automation, less micromanagement. Supreme Commander was advertised as a strategic game, not a tactical game - a game where you would direct the flow of battle and not micromanage every unit in a skirmish. In a genre where “large battles” consisted of perhaps forty units, Supreme Commander advertised battles consisting of four hundred units, spread out across five hundred square kilometers or more.

So there’s the background.

Supreme Commander was not a great game on release. Many of the features that had been promised were simply missing - the automatic base construction, joint attacks . . . even the pathfinding was hideously flawed, frequently turning your base-crushing attack into a five-minute-long trickle of easily-destroyed units. Multiplayer was imbalanced - not painfully so, but significantly so, and enough that many units were almost entirely unused. GPG promised improvements in patches, so we settled down to wait and see what improved.

Now, if you’re changing the game substantially, there are things you have to do. You have to talk to the playerbase, for one thing. You have to give them some idea that things are being worked on, that their opinions are being heard, and that the game is actually getting better. GPG did none of these. Patches were released with changes - usually either minor changes, or gamebreaking changes - with little explanation or warning. Gamebreaking bugs remained unfixed. The balance was tweaked one way, then the other way, with no particular rhyme or reason to it, and little-to-no developer feedback.

There are a few events which, together, made me give up on the game and its developers.

GPG started a series of advertisements on their multiplayer application. “They’re coming!” “What you asked for!” With a countdown - a month-long countdown. Surely this would be important, right? What we asked for - well, those are bugs fixed, pathfinding improved, and all those features we were promised originally! This could be awesome! And they’re working on it for at least a month!

What we got were three units. One unit per race. Two bombers, and one hideously, hideously unbalanced guided missile, which seriously damaged competitive play since only one faction was now competitive.

People were pissed. People made threads on the forum talking about how pissed they were. A month! A full month of countdown, for three painfully unbalanced units! What were you thinking?

The threads were immediately closed and frequently deleted.

As a brief drop out of the timeline: THIS IS A BAD IDEA. NEVER DO THIS. People want to feel like they’re being heard. People want to feel like their opinions matter. Take a look at the World of Warcraft forums, in comparison - the forum mods rarely delete threads and rarely censor anything. Want to talk about how the game sucks and they couldn’t balance a scale if it came with marked weights? Go for it! It’s allowed. People even argue GM decisions on the forums. (Unsuccessfully. But they do.) Back to the timeline.

Then the expansion showed up. With a full rebalancing of all the units, a huge modification of gameplay . . . and a complete abandonment of the original, non-expansion game. And an entire new set of bugs. A new set of balance issues. A new set of problems.

I gave it a month or two, the biggest problems weren’t fixed, and I left.

I haven’t written this just to vent about a game being screwed up by crummy customer service. I mean, it does still annoy me, and I do still want to play a working version of the game. But the real point is: your customers are fickle, capricious beings. They will leave if they think they’re not being respected. They will leave if there are gamebreaking bugs. And they will leave if there is no evidence that the bugs will ever be fixed.

Contrast GPG’s behavior with Blizzard’s behavior. Blizzard’s beta process is open and transparent. Blizzard employees talk about their balancing efforts, talk about what’s coming up in future patches, and listen to customer feedback - or at the very least, read enough of it that they can pretend they’re listening to it.

The second thing any game studio needs is a good game - but a good game won’t help if you don’t have people who want to play the game. And if you have people who want to play the game, and they give you suggestions on how to improve it? A lot of those will be terrible - but you still have to listen, because chances are they’ve played the game more than you have, and some of them will be good.

If you pay attention to your customers, you’ll get more.

Developer: Sony

Completion level: Not even close

Spoilers: I’m not sure how this would be possible.

I just got a PS3.

What this means is that you may be bombarded with short dissections of short downloadable games. I might eventually make a post about the PS3 in general (summary: it’s pretty dang awesome now and Microsoft’s lunch is about to be eaten by Sony) but I may not.

The thing about small short games is that some of them are really really weird. Cocoreccho is an exception to this, mostly because I’m not entirely sure it’s a game.

LocoRoco was originally a PSP game. You played the Earth, and tilted your surface to help a bunch of singing blobs defeat a small army of flying dreadlocked heads. I swear I am not making this up. If you think the gameplay sounds distinctive, the art style was even more so, consisting entirely of deformable solid-color 2d cutouts - on the PSP, no less, where most people were expecting gore and explosions. Add to that one of the most catchy and cheerful soundtracks I’ve heard in a long time (keep in mind your blobs sing along, with lipsynched animations, in chorus) and LocoRoco made Nintendo games look dull, stodgy, and moderately depressed.

It’s a great game, and I highly recommend it. It’s also a near-natural fit for the PS3’s tilt sensor. All they had to do was port it over, add a bunch more levels, bam! Game!

What they actually made was, in the words of the lead developer, an “interactive screensaver”.

You still have a large number of singing blobs (it wouldn’t be a LocoRoco game without singing blobs) but instead of getting from one side of the linear level to another, you are instead exploring what can be best described as a humongous Thing. Its behavior will be familiar to anyone who’s played the PSP game, as it includes spinny things, bouncy things, sloped things, things with holes, and every other joyous device that we’re used to from the PSP game. Your goal is to move a magical butterfly around which attracts singing blobs, use that explore the Thing, find more singing blobs, and wake them up.

That’s the game.

Unlike the PSP game, your little blobs have more autonomy than they did before. The Thing has several large “loops” of behavior in it, where the blobs will naturally wander down slops and jump into new areas with wind blowing them back up to the beginning, and your blobs will generally follow the loops on their own, meaning that even if you’re not really paying attention they’ll be wandering around the level without any help required. This is pretty dang neat - in many places you can just point the screen at a segment and let it sit while blobs fly through it. I’m pretty sure this is where the whole “interactive screensaver” part comes from.

Unfortunately, as a screensaver, it’s a bit of a failure. You see, the screen itself doesn’t move around. Wherever you leave it, that’s what you’re going to be looking at until you move it again. And while the blobs are largely self-motivating, the areas they travel through automatically aren’t really particularly interesting. In order to make them do anything of interest, you have to not only control the butterfly manually, but you have to know where the interesting things are - making it impossible to just sit down and poke at it for a few minutes. Getting anywhere really interesting can easily take fifteen minutes to half an hour of work.

Which is a pity, because I think the idea of an interesting interactive screensaver that could be left on is a really cool one.

I’m going to diverge into philosophy here for a second. Games started as a thing that was Not Business. If you were using a computer for it, it was either Business or Games. It took quite a while for computers to be used seriously for any other sort of recreation (like reading blogs) and even then, it pretty much came down to Business, Games, or Communication.

We’re finally moving into using computers for other things. Cocoreccho is something I would consider Art. It’s clearly meant to be art, on some level. Unfortunately, it’s art jammed into the mold of Game. The artistic things they could have done have been hampered by their desire to make something that should be both played and won. Which is, I have to say, sad. It could have been something More - but it isn’t, and it won’t be, because it’s a game and it’s proved unable to break out of the template of Game.

Cocoreccho is interesting. I’m not sure it’s good. But it’s interesting, and if what I’ve been talking about intrigues you, and you have a PS3, you might want to check it out.

Developer: Capcom

Completion level: Finished game

Spoilers: Plotline may be spoiled. Sorry. Finish the game first.

Many many years ago, there was a developer named Sierra, who made adventure games.

You played a character (and oh boy, some of them were Characters) who wandered throughout a world, usually a strange, bizarre, twisted world, generally with some goal in mind. (Not always with a goal in mind.) You collected random items as you went and jammed them in your inventory. There were puzzles. You solved puzzles, frequently using your inventory, the “plot” continued, and the games were well-received and quite enjoyed at the time.

In retrospect, most of the old Sierra games were terrible.

I don’t mean the graphics weren’t up to our current standards, because obviously they weren’t, we’re talking really old games. I mean the gameplay was atrocious. The games penalized you for exploring (by dying), they penalized you for logical deduction (by dying), they penalized you for taking a reasonable approach to the problems (by dying), and even if you somehow managed to pass all the hurdles and read the developer’s mind you would still frequently end up in a spot where you couldn’t possibly finish the game . . . with no way of knowing that you were stuck. And when I say “read the developer’s mind”, I really do mean “read the developer’s mind” - puzzles were byzantine at best, and at worst they were an exercise in surrealism that has rarely been matched since.

Adventure games got more and more complicated, increasingly weird and unsolvable, and nobody realized it. Hell, I didn’t realize it at the time - I loved those games, and it’s only looking back on them that I realize how much sheer frustration and guesswork went into playing them. People stopped buying them, they died a grisly protracted death, and considering that Sierra was responsible for much of the genre at that point, I place most of that responsibility squarely on Sierra. Adventure games became entertainment non grata in the industry, and roleplaying games sort of awkwardly shuffled into the niche that adventure games had previously filled.

Many many many many many years ago, there was a developer called Infocom. They made “interactive fiction” games. You had an inventory, you solved puzzles, the puzzles got increasingly complicated and byzantine over time . . . you see where this is going?

Infocom doesn’t exist anymore.

Yeah, I bet you did see where that was going.

Phoenix Wright is a game about a defense attorney.

Each game is broken up into four or five independent cases. At the beginning of the game, someone is murdered. Someone else will be accused of murder. You defend that person.

The gameplay consists of two segments, which often repeat several times within a case. Occasionally, you’ll be in court, picking holes in the witnesses’ testimonies, using court evidence and their own words to ferret out the truth. This is amazingly fun. The developers did a wonderful job of making it suspenseful, through music, dialogue, and fabulous art. Alternatively, you might have to inspect the crime scene, interview witnesses, interview people who you can call to the witness stand, etc etc. This part isn’t quite as fun, for me at least, but it’s still damn entertaining and it makes the first part all the better.

“I’ve never held any sort of weapon. I’ve never even touched one!” “OBJECTION! Why are your fingerprints on this sword, then?” “Where . . . where did you get that? That . . . it must be a mistake!” “From a broken locker . . . behind your car. With your fingerprints on the lock!” “Nooooooo!”

Phoenix Wright puts a lot of work into ensuring that you can’t get yourself stuck. For example, there’s no “I’m done, go to court!” button - if there’s stuff left to discover, then you keep wandering around until there isn’t. If there isn’t, you go to court immediately. The same philosophy works its way into the entire game. If you’ve discovered all you can from a witness, the cross-examination ends. If you haven’t, it doesn’t. At all points, you know you have what you need to finish the next segment, because if you didn’t have it, you wouldn’t be here.

The end result of this is that, generally, it’s obvious what you’re supposed to do. Either you need to wander around the game world a bit more and look for more clues, or you need to find a contradiction in what the witness is saying right now. The upside to this is that it pushes you along in the game at a reasonably nice clip. The downside is that the game becomes rather linear, which exacerbated by the occasional “false choice” - you’re given a choice, yet all the choices lead to the same path. Still, the writing is skillful enough that you usually don’t notice these unless you’re watching for them or replaying the game (and, let’s be honest here, these games have zero replayability.)

The game almost pulls everything off flawlessly, and if I was writing about the first game in the series, I’d say it did - because the first game did. I ran into some trouble in this game, and it worries me.

Basically, the cases are getting more complicated.

There’s more stuff going on. There’s more surrealism. The puzzles aren’t byzantine yet . . . but they’re sort of nudging around the edges of it. They’re considering it. If I was a history major you’d be getting a cute historical joke involving “not being byzantine yet”, but I’m not, so just pretend there’s one here.

This creates some issues with the linear Phoenix Wright gameplay - namely, that you can occasionally logic things out better than Phoenix did, and you get penalized for it. And sometimes, even though you know exactly what you want to say, you can’t figure out how to say it within the confines of the game.

I’m going to spoil the hell out of the third case here, so, y’know, consider yourself warned.

The third case takes place in a circus. The ringmaster was found dead, the magician is a suspect, you’re defending the magician, blah blah blah. The real criminal is the acrobat, and at a late point in the game you’ve figured out that he had both motive and opportunity, but you’re still pinning down the details on how it happened.

Well, I wasn’t pinning down the details. I’d figured it out. His pet monkey helped him. (This is not abnormal in a Phoenix Wright game.) So when the judge asked if the acrobat had an accomplice . . . well, yeah, he did. It was the monkey. Duh.

But you’re not supposed to realize this at that point in the game. Despite being right, that was the wrong answer. I was not conforming to the exact pattern they wanted, and the game penalized me for it, and I had to work gradually through the guesswork they wanted me to guess at . . . eventually coming to the conclusion that, hey, the monkey helped him. The entire process was extraordinarily difficult, as it’s very hard to figure out what they want you to say when, in fact, you know the right answer but aren’t supposed to.

In a game like this it is vital to playtest thoroughly - ridiculously thoroughly - so you can see where people get stuck, and where people think too much and come up with an answer they’re not yet supposed to have, and figure out how to design the game so that neither of those are a problem. And this is really really hard, especially when you’re trying to make a game which is essentially linear.

There’s two more games in the series that I haven’t played yet (okay, the most recent one is Ace Apollo, not Phoenix Wright, but it’s still the same series) and at least one spinoff being produced. It is entirely possible that they’ve recognized and fixed the problem by then.

But it’s also possible they haven’t. And this worries me, quite a bit. We’re finally rejuvenating the old adventure game genre, after Infocom damaged it and Sierra did its best to finish the genre off. It’s a good genre. There’s a lot of fun to be had, there’s a lot of entertainment, and I don’t want to see it gone . . . but it’s also a genre that’s very easy to do badly, and very hard to do well, and painfully hard to tell the difference.

Still, I’m looking forward to the next game. We’ll see.

Therefore, this release includes a few things:

• A little codebase cleanup
• The EMP weapon’s glory device resistance has been increased significantly, and I’ve added a visual effect to show it
• Small UI improvements, including a note to emphasize the glory device resistance a little further and some improvements to gamepad setup
• I’ve heard that some people might have found that the game just didn’t run. Obviously this is impossible since I never make mistakes but, you know, if you did have an issue running the game . . . you, uh, might want to download this version.

Windows, Linux.

Version 0.1.4.0 is now here, with two new exciting features.

First: Linux support! I’ve done my best at getting a functional Linux package together, and I think I have one. This ought to plug straight into a vanilla Ubuntu installation. If you want to install it on any other distribution . . . well, hopefully you can figure it out. Is there a better way to package it? Maybe. If so, please let me know, since I’m really kind of in the dark here. You will need some kind of 3d acceleration support, just to warn you - software rendering is, shall we say, slow.

Second: Editor support! I’ve included the level editor I use for all the levels and much of the 3d geometry. It’s undocumented and largely unsupported, and there are many issues with it (such as the lack of copy/paste) but it does work, and it is usable. If you want to make your own levels, or edit the existing levels, now you can. I’m certain there are ways you can make invalid levels that will cause the game to crash, but I’m OK with that because invalid levels should really be spitting out useful error messages instead of just crashing.

As for the game itself, it’s mostly only been changed with a few small bugfixes and usability fixes. Finally, though, I’m moving onto actually improving the game itself, so with luck it’ll get more exciting soon.

As a side note, I’d love to make an OSX version. However, I don’t have a Mac. If anyone has an ancient OSX-capable Mac system that they’d be willing to donate or loan, I promise I’ll get an OSX build working just as soon as I have a platform I can run it on :)

Download the Windows version and the Linux version, and if you’re getting the Linux version, please tell me if it works!

Developer: Pyramid

Completion level: Finished game, not 100%

Spoilers: I am not going to spoil the plotline. I will be spoiling the gameplay mechanics. If you’re planning to play the game, however, you may want these spoiled for you.

I swear, it took me a week to figure out what I wanted to say here.

I keep notes on games as I play them, y’see. Anything that annoys me, anything that impresses me, any thoughts I have, it all goes into the notes. Eventually I finish the game, and I write up a dissection based on my notes.

Patapon has more notes than every single dissection you’ve seen so far put together - as well as two you haven’t. To say that I am divided on this game would be an understatement.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Patapon is a sidescrolling rhythm game. You control a bunch of little mobile eyeballs with weapons named Patapons, and you “control” them in a moderately indirect manner that takes the form of a rhythm game. You have a set of “commands”, and if you punch in the commands with the right rhythm, your little eyeballs do things.

Once you finish a level - whose goals are virtually always either “get to the end of the level” or “kill a boss” - you are returned to the Patapon Village, where you can play various minigames, buy and upgrade Patapons, and go out to a new level.

That’s the game.

First off, the game is pretty - I mean, look at that picture up there, that’s almost exactly what the game looks like. You fight giant enemies, ten times the height of any of your warrior eyeballs, weapons visibly stick in them as you fight, the animation is brilliant, etc etc etc I don’t really have a lot to say about the graphics besides “yum”. It’s worth buying just for the awesome visuals.

Besides that, though - Patapon has issues. Big, humongous issues. And it took me days to figure out why.

First off, your units do not have a vast repertoire of abilities. They have, for example, “move right”, and “attack”. They can also “defend”, “run away”, and “charge up the next attack”. You’ll never use “charge”. You may notice this gives you four useful abilities . . . in the entire game . . . and you would be exactly right. You will be doing those four things over and over again. There’s one more ability - “magic” - but to be honest you’ll use that one perhaps twice in the entire game. You see, it ends Fever Mode, and that’s something you never want to have happen.

So there’s the first problem - there’s no variety. Fundamentally you just don’t do many things in the game, and you do them over and over again.

The next problem is Fever Mode.

Patapon is, as I mentioned, a rhythm game. Each of the abovementioned “attacks” is four drum beats, which you press in rhythm. If you get the rhythm right, consistently, then your Patapons eventually enter “Fever Mode” and become useful.

Yeah, read that again. If they’re not in Fever Mode they are basically useless. Archer units fire three times as many arrows in Fever Mode and I think each of them does more damage. Mounted units gain the only ability that makes them worth bringing along. Units run away faster and go further - without Fever Mode they kind of run away, a bit, and then get stomped by the huge range of the enemy you’re currently fighting. Their defense gets stronger, their speed goes up, everything your units do is vastly improved, with the end result that your performance is directly correlated to how long you can maintain Fever Mode.

And Fever Mode is a fractious, unruly beast-queen. The manual is unclear on how it starts and ends. Sometimes you’ll enter it after a mere three commands, sometimes it will take ten. Sometimes you’ll have no trouble staying in it for long periods of time. Sometimes it will end for no obvious reason, even when the commands seem to have been input correctly. A frustratingly large amount of the time it will end on the very next command after you enter it. The timing that you need to push buttons is extremely tight, and there’s no visual or auditory clue as to whether you’re too early or too late. There is an auditory clue as to how close to the beat you are, but it’s subtle and if you start concentrating on it you’re almost certain to miss your timing a little bit - which sort of defeats the point of concentrating on it. On top of that, the mechanics involved with Fever Mode are byzantine and complicated, and never explained anywhere. More than once, especially at the beginning of the game, you’ll be fighting a boss, and you’ll think “oh, maybe I will beat him this time!” and then you’ll drop out of Fever Mode randomly and get slaughtered.

Yes, there are bosses that will one-shot your entire army.

Unless you’re in Fever Mode, of course.

And to cap things off, there’s the Patapon Village. You can buy new Patapons, but apparently randomly you’ll get a different kind of patapon - maybe one with bunny ears that can’t use armor? Maybe one that looks like a hedgehog! Or, hey, this one has angel wings. Unless you’re extremely observant you’re just not going to figure out what causes different Patapon types until you - like me - go and check a walkthrough.

It took me about a week to figure out what the underlying cause to all of this annoyance was.

There’s a concept I’ve heard of which is occasionally called an “expert interface”. The idea is that it’s an interface designed explicitly for experts to use it - not for novices. A lot of professional 3d software has this sort of interface - it has a grueling, brutal learning curve, but once you learn it you’re able to work incredibly fast - far faster than you would be able to work with a “novice interface”. Often these interfaces include many byzantine and inexplicable key combinations, and every aspect of them is chosen for speed of work rather than intuitiveness.

Patapon is an expert game.

The game isn’t designed for newbies. It isn’t designed for casual gamers. It’s designed for people who are willing to sit down and absolutely master the interface, and it’s designed to still give them a good gameplay experience once they do so. Experts don’t need to be told whether they were just a little too fast or a little too slow on a button-push - they just know. Experts know that dropping Fever Mode is probably death, and they just won’t drop it. Experts will understand the nooks and crannies of the interface and, honestly, probably won’t even notice them.

Patapon does a really good job of being an expert game.

Once you figure it out - which takes quite a while, admittedly - it has amazing flow. Yes, there’s only four things you’ll realistically be doing, but it like you’re coordinating the movement of all your little suicidal patapons rather than simply giving them orders. Enemy ahead! Pata pata pata pon! Attack! Pon pon pata pon! Keep attacking! Pon pon pata pon! Dodge, pon pata pon pata! Pata pata pata pon! Pon pon pata pon! Chaka chaka pata pon, pon pon pata pon, pata pata pata pon, pon pon chaka chaka, pon pon pata pon!

(Don do-don do-don.)

And that’s when the game shines - when you’re no longer fighting with Fever Mode, when you’re not trying to decipher what the hell a “Mofeel” is and where it came from, when you’re just assaulting these ridiculously gigantic and fantastic monsters with your army of little eyeballs.

It’s worth talking about Expert Games a little more, because I expect that this is going to come up again. I don’t think the people who made Patapon intentionally made an expert game, because if you intentionally make an expert game, you generally think to include a good detailed tutorial.

Accidentally making an Expert Game is unfortunately easy. It’s a common trap to fall into in game design. The game is yours, therefore you know everything about it. The mechanics are clear to you (since you know them all by heart) and therefore you see no problem with learning them. You can make a game which is fun, balanced, and polished, and then release it to the world and . . . nobody can figure out how to play it.

This is, incidentally, sometimes I’ve tangled with constantly in Devastation Net. Devastation Net is an expert game. You’re meant to get to the point where you fundamentally know the weaponry, and where you fundamentally know the abilities of tanks, and that is when the strategy takes place. Partially I’m trying to solve this by making all of the game balance numbers available to you, and in your face - move the cursor over a tank, you instantly see how tough it is and how fast it is. Choose a weapon and you should quickly see how it works. Partially, though, I’m having trouble with the learning curve, because teaching people things is hard, especially when it’s an uncommon game style.

Unfortunately it’s really not something game designers have much experience with in multiplayer games. Generally, the way you teach the game to someone is you lead the player through a single-player campaign that unlocks things one step at a time. That just doesn’t work with a multiplayer game.

I’m still trying to find a good solution, to be honest.

I’ve rambled on long enough at this point.

Patapon is a beautiful game. It is also a fun game, once you get past the initial learning curve. Don’t be afraid to check a walkthrough on this one - read everything except the mission descriptions, and you’ll be thankful.

I have to say, first off, that this is going to be one of the least interesting releases ever. There’s basically nothing changed that you’ll notice. What there is, though, is quite important.

First off, I rewrote the build system entirely, in scons instead of make. This is entirely meaningless to the end-user, but it means that modifying the build system in the future will be much easier. This is a good thing. It makes Zorba less stressed.

Second, I added a small intro screen explaining what exactly you can expect from the game. If you’re reading this, you probably already know what to expect, but the average dude coming in off the metaphorical street probably won’t. So while that’s not exciting either, it’s important.

Third - and most importantly - I finally have a good crash reporting system. If the game crashes, it will beg permission to report the crash dump to my servers, and if given permission, give me information on what went wrong. I actually have no idea if it’s been crashing for people - with luck it hasnt been - but the reason I don’t know is because, fundamentally, nobody ever reports crashes, they just roll their eyes, say “oh, indie developers” and delete the game.

Which is not ideal from my point of view.

There’s a lot of subtlety in a crash reporting system. For example, I’ve got mine rigged up so I can return messages, based on the game version, before the potentially large crash dump is sent. So if I start getting flooded with crashes that I’ve fixed, I can tell people to go download the new improved version, please, and stop bothering me with things I already know. (Perhaps not in those words.) Not only that but I can also return messages after the crash dump is sent, so I can analyze it server-side and return things like “your graphics card sucks” or “your RAM is bad”. And it transmits the data in a compressed form to save on bandwidth, and it records as much information as I can without violating the privacy of my users.

Oh, yeah, that too. I don’t violate user privacy. I don’t send a single byte before the user has said “yes, I am fine with sending my debug log to Mandible.” I’ve carefully checked the debug file to make sure I don’t include anything that’s identifiable (and removed a few debug printouts that went a bit too far, in fact) - the worst I can do is tell you what kind of graphics hardware you have, and what kind of joysticks you have plugged in. Which is obviously kind of important for debugging. I do not feel bad for including this.

Any kind of reporting of this type, of course, has to be agonizing careful about privacy issues. And, inevitably, someone is going to get annoyed at what I’m doing.

At least this way, I can tell them to just click “no”.

The Wii, of course, has a novel control method and a good number of interesting family games built around that method.

The XBox 360 has XBox Live Arcade, an increasingly solid game lineup, and the industry’s best multiplayer.

The PS3 has a Blu-Ray player and, as far as I am concerned, four games. Those games are: Ratchet and Clank, God of War 3, Flow, and Everyday Shooter.

However. God of War 3 isn’t out yet, Flow is a small game at best, and Everyday Shooter is not only a small game but is now available on Steam as well.

I am being completely honest when I say that Everyday Shooter is one of the reasons I was looking forward to buying a Playstation 3. And now it’s on my computer, and I have one less justification to buy that Blu-Ray player with a few games attached to it.

I swear, every time I have a reason to get excited about the Playstation 3, Sony does their absolute best to nullify it as quickly as possible. I have no idea what’s going on with Sony right now, but this is one of those cases where they should have offered an extra chunk of money just to get exclusive rights. Of course, if I were Jonathan Mak, I wouldn’t have taken it . . . so there we have it.

Yes, there will be a dissection, and yes, I am hard at work on another version of D-Net. Right now I’m off to play Everyday Shooter though.

What’s different? Not a lot. There’s an installer, and that’s it. I haven’t gotten any bug reports, so I’m calling this a release.

But there’s a new site feature - I’ve added a site forum for discussions. Take a look, start a thread, talk about D-Net. It’s still under very heavy construction, so beware that the layout and look might change drastically as you browse. But it’s officially open. As always, I’d love to hear any commentary you have about D-Net or the site, and if you can’t find an appropriate thread to post it in, head for the forum.

This is probably not the most exciting post you’ve ever read, but there’ll be more coming. Not to worry.

I’ve told you about the interface issues. Those were problematical. Once I finally figured out how gamepads should work, I had to figure out how keyboards should work, and that was another issue. Pretty much every interface element has had to be redesigned at least twice as I gradually understood what I needed better.

This behemoth is finally in a good state to be released.

Download Devastation Net, version 0.1.0 Release Candidate 2

(Note: download removed since it was technically not complying with some licenses. Check Mandible Games for the most recent release.)

Now, just to warn you: this is not a final release. It’s not even an alpha release. It’s an alpha release candidate, and you’ll notice it’s Release Candidate 2. There’s no installer either - you’ll have to just decompress it to a directory yourself. (Installer is one of the next steps.)

I’m releasing this, probably a day or two at most before the actual alpha release, only to people who read this dev journal. I’m hoping people will download it and give it a try. If it crashes - and it’s entirely possible it will - I’m hoping to fix problems before the official alpha release.

But this is, of sorts, a release. It’s playable. There’s AI you can play against, and there’s enough support for multiplayer on a single computer (which, incidentally, I highly recommend.) The AI is terrible, and I know it’s terrible, but it should at least give a sense for the game. Some of the interface is unfinished, still, but it’s generally good enough to figure out what you should be doing.

Let me know in comments, or in emails, if it works or not (and, for that matter, how well it works.) Your feedback is very appreciated on this one.

As for why this has taken a while:

My unofficial goal is to post here weekly, at least. But, as always, problems crop up and things get delayed, and unexpected opportunities arise. In this case, the unexpected opportunity was this thing:

That’s a small part of the Babbage Difference Engine. You might think it looks pretty cool, but you’d actually be wrong - it’s far cooler than that. I had the opportunity to watch a good deal of the setup and tuning process, as well as stay out of the way of the people working on it, and honestly even staying out of their way was quite an honor. If you’re in the Bay Area, I recommend coming and taking a look at it once it’s officially open - although needless to say, the exhibit launch is likely to be packed beyond all comprehension.

Hopefully the delay is understandable.