This Tuesday night, Josh and I (and maybe some of the Good Robot development team) will be streaming Good Robot. If you want to see the game in action, ask questions, or just get on Josh’s nerves, then this is a great opportunity to do so.
The stream begins at 11:59pm GMT.
As always, the stream will appear at twitch.tv/spoilerwarningshow when the time comes.
Only Bad Robots would miss this one.
This is it. It’s time for the brigands to attack the town of Archet. No matter who wins, I have to say they’ve been very sporting to wait this long.
During the attack we’ll be in a special instance version of the town, so there won’t be any other players around. (Not that there are all that many in the newbie zone anyway.)
Jon Brackenbrook decides that we should wait at the lodge until nightfall. I don’t know why. The lodge is not in town, and we’re supposed to defend the town. I suspect he wants to secure the lodge until the last of the stew is gone, but I don’t say that out loud.
Night arrives, and I find myself on a hill with Jon.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Lord of the Rings Online #5: Shadow and Flame”
Here it is, as promised: the original Good Robot script I sent Shamus in October of 2013. It was never revised, so expect a bit of roughness, but since it was never meant to be paired directly with scripting or in-game events it should be reasonably coherent.
You ought to know that this draft “spoils” a plot point from the current version of Good Robot…except the current game doesn’t have much of a plot, more like a tone and texture? Nevertheless, if you like to experience things completely blind, it’s possible reading this will negatively impact your playthrough of new-hotness Good Robot. The rest of you might find your experience improved; should you enjoy the critical approach, you might find it interesting to compare this script’s structured plot-reveal-conclusion nature with the current Shandified version. Take your best guess as to which kind of player you are and make your choice: click “read more,” or skip it and inevitably get lost in a MrBtongue archive binge.
One more note slash reminder: back then, each level had two or three story nodes scattered around between the entrance and the exit. My notion was there’d be one at the beginning, one sort of hidden, and one behind the boss fight (boss names marked with placeholders “A,” “B,” etc). Keep that in mind as you read through. Now, if you’ll excuse me, MrBtongue is about to explain to me why Morrowind is awesome. Again.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #47: A Script Reading”
Link (YouTube) |
So it’s about 100 years in the future and computer security boils down to typing in the four-digit number that everyone wears openly on their nametag. I’d love to denounce this as ridiculously goofy and unrealistic, but… I’ve heard worse.
The com center has an interesting little activity for the player. You call all of these different stations. Sure, the game could just list them all is UNAVAILABLE or whatever, but instead the player is allowed to call each one in turn. This is the equivalent of the slow camera peek around the corner in a scary movie. Information is gradually revealed.
It’s the kind of thing that polarizes the experience. If you’re into it, the suspense, curiosity, and anticipation will heighten your enjoyment. On the other hand: If you’re not into it, it makes everything worse. If you know there’s no monster around the corner (because, being genre-savvy, you know this isn’t the right point in the movie for a reveal) then the agonizingly slow reveal of nothing will try your patience and make you want to shout snarky comments at the screen.
EDIT: This entire comment thread of psycho-analyzing Mumbles is some outrageous bullshit. It’s fine to say something makes you uncomfortable. It’s not fine to get judgmental. Comments closed.
It has been one year since Good Robot went up on Greenlight, and we are due to launch in about a week and a half. The game has evolved an immense amount in the intermediate time.
Visual changes are easy to show using videos and screenshots. Game design changes, not so much â€" this is a process of formulating systems, talking to your team, tweaking your design based on feedback, convincing your team why a certain system is the right fit, and then overruling their complaints with an iron fist.
I thought the best way to show just how much Good Robot's design has evolved is to talk about some of the bigger changes in its design, from when Pyrodactyl started working on it to now. First, I'll describe the old system, then the problems with it, and then what we did to fix it. Here goes!
Note: Game design is a collaborative process, which is why I use “we” from here on out, even though I did all the work.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #46: Game Design Changes”
Link (YouTube) |
Let’s talk about these health sphincters. I think it’s really telling that 60% of the Spoiler Warning cast all came to the exact same wrong conclusion, and saw the healing icon as a D-pad symbol.
There are a lot of problems here. One is that you don’t have a health bar, so you can’t see any change when the device heals you. The only way you can tell if you’re injured is if the screen is glitching, which:
After using the device Simon remarks that he feels better. But again, if he wasn’t injured you might assume he’s talking about his emotional state. And that’s assuming the player chooses to interact with this huge writhing black sphincter dripping with scary black goo. It’s reasonable to imagine most players would stay clear of that thing. There’s certainly no in-universe reason for timid Simon to go jamming his digits into it.
Later revelations clear up what this thing is and what it does (sort of) but by then you’ve passed a half dozen of these gizmos. That’s pretty late in the game for it to finally get around to making the mechanics clear.
So the player doesn’t know what this thing is, or what it does, and it’s directly connected to player health, which is another system they don’t yet understand yet. The icon it uses is easily confused with standard interface symbols, which only makes things worse. I suppose it would help if the symbol was a fat green or red plus sign, and not the broken, narrow white symbol we see here.
The only reason this doesn’t ruin the game is because SOMA is usually pretty easy (especially in these early stages) and the player can still muddle through without understanding the health mechanics.
It’s not a serious problem with the game, but it is a pretty good illustration of a situation where things that seem obvious to the developer can be badly misinterpreted by the audience.
Over the past few entries I’ve brought up the fact that Cerberus has, somehow, become a galactic superpower with armies armies and fleets.
Shamus, according to the Codex Cerberus has trillions of credits. And TIM has stolen the plans to all of the Alliance warships. So it’s totally explained and you can’t complain about it.
Okay. The hand-wave for money and intelligence are massively improbable and stretch my credulity to the limit. The codex mentioned Cerberus has corporations and “shell companies”, which makes them sound big and impressive, but it doesn’t actually justify their wealth or power. “Shell companies” is just financial technobabbleFinancialbabble? in this case and doesn’t begin to explain things.
Humans are still a small power on a galactic scale. (Or were, according to the earlier games.) Yes, Humans were doing well… for a newcomer. Humans were promising. They had potential. They weren’t gods.
The other races have multiple worlds with dense populations, while humans are mostly on Earth, with a few scattered colonies. On a galactic scale, the other races are the United States, China, and Germany, while Humans are (say) Iceland. Awesome, skilled, and empowered by good home resources, sure. But there’s no scenario where, over a single generation, Iceland becomes so powerful that a single fringe group within Iceland can become a standalone superpower capable of conquering the capital city of one of the major nations.
In any case, trillions of dollars of income are hard enough to conceal on their own. If you’re a ten-year-old you might imagine that companies just have all their money in a big vault like Scrooge McDuck. But the truth is that a great deal of time and effort goes into making sure the money is accounted for. Imagine if Apple and Google tried to team up and funnel billions of income into some extremely illicit and clandestine activity. Yes, they have billions of income, but they also have billions in expenses. Without that money to run your company, your business will suffer. Without that money to pay your shareholders, people will dump your stock. Also, governments like to collect taxes, which means they’re pretty damn good at figuring out where the money goes, because the people who PAY you money file taxes. And even if you can somehow hide all that income, it doesn’t do you any good unless you spend it. And I have no idea how you can secretly spend trillions of dollars.
But fine. Cerberus has limitless money and intel. I’ll humor the writer. Throughout this series, I’ve been talking about why the first game was so good at world building, why that was important, and how these latter games failed at it. As a way of illustrating the point, let’s take a break from talking about Mass Effect and do a little worldbuilding ourselves with this thought experiment:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 40: TIM Island”
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