That was perhaps the cleverest ‘demo’ I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.
To be frank I’m not entirely sure if I can classify it as a ‘demo’ in the normal sense of the word. The developers have created an entire mini story in order to bring you into the world of the Stanley Parable without giving away any of the actual game.
I love the premise behind the Stanley Parable: A critical look at traditional game tropes. The narrator specifically makes fun of a great deal of these during this demo. Everything is surprising as it takes what you know and flips it on its head. Non euclidean architecture that could rival even Antichamber was one of my favorite things in the demo.
I’ve been following the Stanley Parable for a good while now and I was most pleased to see that emotion booths are in fact there to be used in the game. It was an amusing nod to the Raphael trailer that myself and Alex have on loop during game jams.
I’m really happy that they’ve managed to invoke the same feelings of mischief that I felt during the original mod. I continued to want to fight the rules and do the exact opposite of what the narrator wanted – and his reaction to this never disappointed me.
All I can say is that the demo was great fun and I really am looking forward to playing the full game. I can’t wait to have my preconceptions of games challenged once again. And I’ve missed Stanley… he must be awfully lonely in his office, pressing buttons all day.
Also: I love that narrator’s voice… it’s smooth as butter.
I have a confession to make: I never finished the original Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
Why? Because of several reasons:
I was a great deal younger and therefore my ability to man the fuck up was severely hindered.
I was playing the game in the dark and with my best friend Mark, who was also unable to man the fuck up. In fact his jumping and breathing down my neck made things worse for me.
We saw the first gatherer and after jumping out of the chair and yanking the mouse out of its USB port decided we’d come back and play it again later.
We never came back to play it again later.
But I did get around to watching Jesse Cox’s wonderful play-through of it. So I didn’t miss out on the story or anything like that. I respected the fear inducing pursuits of the monsters and the creepy warping of the insanity meter. I loved the large levels with multiple rooms and paths.. and I really hoped that they’d make a new one.
So when I heard The Chinese Room were making the new one my first thought was “I don’t know if it’ll be as scary… but it’ll be damn pretty.” When I saw it had a steampunk Victorian vibe I was pretty excited (I have a distinct love for steampunk…)
I’ve played it through now from start to finish. So I’m going to list my thoughts on it below – I’ve separated them into good and bad points to make it easier for anyone who reads this:
Good Points
I really liked the story (despite having guessed where it was going very early on…) It was creepy, sickening and macabre – it was definitely what I wanted from an Amnesia game. I’ve been told by a few people that they don’t think the ties between this game and the original are strong enough – but I think the references to the original game were just right without being too annoyingly in your face. I liked how they dared to be perverse in their storytelling when so many games don’t dare to get anywhere close to that. I was engaged by it from start to finish and I liked the ending a great deal.
The setting of the game was beautifully done. I wouldn’t have expected any less from The Chinese Room, though. They really brought grimy industrial London to life. The levels were sufficiently terrifying and I was constantly impressed by the attention to detail in their grand design.
Enemy design was wonderful… the pig men were gross and their effect on the lights always made me think twice before going down a small corridor. There was one particular enemy type close to the end that REALLY caused me to panic in utter terror.
I liked the removal of the insanity, oil and health meters – it allowed to me focus more on the world and the issues at hand instead of fumbling around inside an inventory. Come to think of it the lack of inventory in general really helped to immerse me deeper into the game.
Bad Points
It was too damn short… I was surprised how quickly I managed to plow through it. I was even taking regular Facebook and food breaks to ensure I didn’t die from a heart attack or something.
The really terrifying enemy type I mentioned earlier is only used right at the end of the game for a few encounters. This is a real shame because it was a damned good heavy hitter. Now I know that using it more might have made it lose its impact… but it seemed a shame that it came and went so quickly.
The levels in the game were far too linear… it lacked a great deal of the exploration that made the first Amnesia so interesting. This linearity made the puzzles exceptionally easy too as the solutions to problems were normally a room or two away instead of far on the other side of the level. Hiding from the pig men was something that I would only have to do in order to progress past a certain location instead of in the original Amnesia where they were an ever-present threat. I think this made the game less scary as I knew there was always bound to be an obvious way past the creatures because I needed to get to the area behind them.
Man pigs raping small children is never going to be okay. You hear me? Never.
This Little Piggy Had A Conclusion
A Machine For Pigs is a most excellent game, I enjoyed it thoroughly. It was genuinely terrifying at some moments and thats what I expected from the game. The story was most interesting and enthralling and was played out quite nicely through the use of notes and voice recorders. I would definitely say it lacks some of the things that made the original Amnesia so nerve-wrackingly terrifying but it does a good job of making you jump once in a while. It feels like a decent successor to the first and in an age where sequels never live up to the originals it does hold itself quite well. Nice work The Chinese Room… nice work indeed.
So its been quite a while since my last blog post… theres a good few reasons for that and I’ll list them below. None of them are bad of course – in fact I’d say all the reasons for me being off the radar are pretty awesome and cool. It’s been a very eventful university semester.
Firstly, I completed and handed in my dissertation on visual variety in crowd simulations. I’m pretty happy with how it went… the project was completed on time and the results gathered by the evaluation supported the changes I’d made to the agent’s model in the world. You can read the full project report here, hopefully you won’t find any mistakes in it (if you do… please don’t tell me as it’ll make me panic.)
Secondly, I completed my last two assignments of the year:
A games design document for a ‘critical’ game looking at illicit gun-running, capitalism and dictatorships. The player assumes the role of an unscrupulous arms dealer who travels to a fictional island in order to make money off of the war brewing between two countries.
A pathfinding assignment in which I implemented a pre-baked pathfinding solution in order to simulate more agents at runtime… it allowed for the simulation to have 20,000+ agents moving around all at once.
Thirdly, myself and the rest of my wonderful council at the university’s anime society (JAMS) put on a big event in the university’s bar called ‘LinCON’ – we had a load of things going on such as an artists alley, a sumo suit arena, sushi, origami and calligraphy. It was a great night and from all the feedback I’ve received everyone had a great time. I’d specifically like to thank Pia Davison from Lucky-Con for taking a big chunk of her free time out in order to help us get ready in time!
Fourthly, it was my birthday last Friday so I had a wonderful party at The Shed, my local student pub. We took on the theme of “Steampunk… like a sir.” and I was most impressed with how good everyone looked in their shirts and dresses. I like my parties to be classy and with whiskeys and victory cigars this was no exception to that.
Fifthly… and I think this is the biggest and most awesome news of this entire update… I’m lucky enough to now be the managing director of my own games company! I’ve literally been buzzing this whole week after receiving the news that I’m now in such a position at the age of twenty two. I’ve been in touch with a couple of initial clients and hopefully in the future Top Notch Studios will grow to be a well-known development company here in Britain!
Thank you for reading! I’m sure I’ll be doing more updates soon about other things I’m working on… and I’ll be typing up the next Laundry RP files soon when I get chance to!
Well… I can honestly say that was perhaps the most stressful and tiring jam I’ve ever had the pleasure of being a part of. I should have known not to go to a 24 hour long game jam with a horrible cold looming in my sinuses.
The jam itself was incredibly well run, shout outs to the Lincoln Computing Society and everyone else who ran the show, you definitely trumped last year both in terms of turn-out and quality. Plus, the pizza wasn’t as spicy this year… so I didn’t spend most of the night gagging for a drink!
So myself, Amelia, Alex and Craig got together to make a game based on the randomly chosen themes of “Uranium” and “Madness”. We all went downstairs to the pub in order to discuss what our idea was to be… but unfortunately the pub was closed (at 11 in the morning?! What?!). We decided to make a game similar in style to Oregon Trail, Warioware and Super-Wagon Adventure… and we kinda succeeded… in a way:
Not going to lie, both myself and Alex have agreed it might be one of the most generic games we have ever made. It’s mechanics are stale, old and overly-used. It is badly balanced… either making the game a cake-walk or a hellish, nigh impossible nightmare. It was a bitch to code for Alex… and a soul-crushing, time-consuming, pain in the arse for me to input the 150 odd elements that made the game up. On the plus side, both Amelia and Craig made some top-notch assets for the game.
What would we do differently? Choose to make a game with more unique gameplay would probably be the first thing… dodging and shooting games are a dime a dozen. We’d also probably avoid making such an complex and branching story in such a short period… and we’d also take more breaks. We both also agreed that the themes were a tad too easily attached to one another, which made it harder to come up with something unique (A great deal of the final games we saw made the radiation make the player ‘go mad’).
But… somehow it managed to get the Award for “Best use of Theme” and also an honourable mention for something else (I can’t remember what… I was far too tired.) I have no idea how, and I don’t really want to question it. But I guess I want to thank Rockstar and Crytek for finding something we couldn’t see by the end of the day-long dev session. Hahah.
It’s been a pretty unproductive weekend – which is okay because Alex and I have worked our butts off this week on getting Hideous into its first-playable non-buggy state. Here’s a few screenshots from one of the last builds we made for the game:
The screenshot above is the view from inside the maze. The one below is the “Summoning Circle” that all players need to stand in before the game starts – it is located in an ethereal realm above the maze.
Hopefully this week we’ll be able to get the game completed before the February Deadline! We do have a contingency plan if worst comes to worst – both myself and Alex have some older games in the pipeline that we could release, an extra month on this game could get it really nicely polished. It is probably the most ambitious project I’ve undertaken as of yet… so I was prepared for a few hiccups along the way!
I had a little meet up with Alex and Amelia on Friday and we discussed the character for Hideous. Amelia did some amazing conceptual pieces based on a bunch of random creepy-pasta images I bombarded her with. We decided on parts of each monster to take forward into the next iteration of the character design:
We’re adding in more code to improve the way in which players see one another in varying light levels, this should make the game more fair when it comes to seeing one another in the maze. Kirt is working hard on making more models in order to make the environment more interesting. Things are coming together beautifully!
Six days into February and I’m proud to announce that game number two is well under way! Myself and Alex Saye have been programming and designing like madmen for the last two days… and we now have some stuff to show!
Let us present our idea:
“Hideous” is a multiplayer Unity game based around the central mechanic of players not being allowed to see one another without dying. The game is set in a Victorian/Lovecraftian maze in which the player has been transformed into a disgusting monster that causes anyone who sees him to die – unfortunately the player is also in a maze with several other horrors… so a battle to be last one alive begins!
We’ve already got the basics done – but the game is still in pre-alpha right now. We’re using the same technique as I used as part of my first #1GAM game to get the networking right (it seems to be working fine… for now). We’ve got some really sexy looking rain particles in the game right now… they hit the walls and ground and bounce really nicely – I’m sure they’re gonna look really great when the models and textures are in the game.
Once again Kirt and Amelia are working on 3D models for the game! Kirt is working on the environment (hedges/walls/floors) and Amelia is designing and then making the horrors that the players will become. It’s all coming together nicely… and we’ve got ages to polish it up and make it look awesome.
We also have Will Bryce working on some macabre music for the main-menu of the game, I’m looking forward to hearing what he has cooked up come the end of the month. He’s been doing a lot of research into scary game music and Victorian-esque compositions… so it should be pretty awesome!
We should be getting some models imported into the game either tonight or tomorrow… so expect another video and a blog update soon! This game is hopefully going to be wonderfully terrifying!
So my game “The Food Chain” has been published and I like to think that its gone down pretty well. We did a few play-tests of it in the university’s computer labs and everyone seemed to really enjoy playing it. I even had my lecturers playing it (one of them said that they think it could be quite addictive) along with the students.
If you want to play my game with friends you’ll need to set up a LAN network – you can also get a feel for it by playing it yourself on two screens (but that’s hardly very fun…). Here is a link to the game in action: Play “The Food Chain” Here!
Some cool things I learnt:
Oliver is a gaming troll and he intentionally would get bitten in order to lure the shark towards where other people were hiding their fish. (Not gonna lie… clever tactic – but a little mean.)
Unity networking isn’t too hard – but I’m still only able to run things on a LAN network… which is a real shame. But i’ll definitely look into getting it working over the internet as soon as I have a spare couple of days.
My laptop is a trooper and can run a good few copies of the same game at once for testing.
SCRUM development methods go out of the window when it’s just me working on a project. Whoops.
Amelia and Kirt are both awesome 3D Modellers – and I really want to work with them in the future!
It’s surprisingly cheap to get some assets from the Unity Store… and they can be really good quality.
And lo: January turns to February and game number is about to rear its ugly head! Working alongside first-year games computing student Alex Saye, we are developing a game named:
I’ll post up more information about this delightful little game as soon as we have something to show!
So the game now has a death state for the poor little fish. They have a health variable that drops drastically when the shark takes a chunk out of them, when it drops below 50% the fish begins to bleed into the water… it’s at that point the fish is pretty much screwed. Suddenly the theme from JAWS kicks in and the fish runs for its life from the pursuing shark – who is hot on its bloody trail.
I’m pretty happy with both the feedback you get when attacking and being damaged now too: sounds and masks both give the player a satisfaction from chomping down on the fish. It is a great deal of fun both to play as the hunter and the prey and for completely different reasons (the thrill of the chase and the fear of being caught respectively).
I really love the way that the shark moves and how it appears through the dense underwater fog – it looks very similar to videos of real sharks I’ve seen on documentaries in the past!
Amelia has also been working hard on making a replacement for the place holder prey model – its starting to look really promising! Here is a picture she sent me earlier of the adorable little thing (ignore the untextured eyes…):
I’m looking forward to doing a LAN game of this with a good ten or twenty of the little blighters all hiding from the shark! Here’s hoping that I can get the rest of the game polished up and ready before the end of the month!
So I decided to be completely insane and use the short time I have to make this months #1GAM game a mulitplayer game. This might not seem like a big thing… but I’ve never really do any networking before in my life, so its been a real uphill struggle getting it all working properly!
Luckily my friend Martin pointed me in the direction of a really nice little tutorial for networking in Unity3D. So now I’ve got a decent-ish LAN multiplayer game that can have a hefty amount of players attached to it!
The idea behind my game (based on the theme from the first meet-up) is a deadly match of hide-and-seek between a rather hungry shark and some very tasty little fish. One player assumes the role of the enormous shark, their job is to hunt down and eat the other players in the underwater environment around them. The other players who assume the roles of the little fish can hide the plant-life, caves and rocks around the level.
The game works quite well at the moment, I’ve got a great deal of things I want to tweak before I call it completed. I went to the university’s computer labs yesterday and we managed to get about five people all playing the game at once which was pretty cool. I got a really nice quote from one of the second-years who had a go:
Scariest six minutes of my life – I kept seeing you swimming past my hiding spot.
The best thing about that was I hadn’t even added in the death mechanic to the game yet! Since we play-tested it I’ve added a health variable to the little fish in the scene and when it gets too low the fish starts to leave a blood trail in the water – leaving them open for easy-hunting!
If you want to play a current build of the game… it’ll be at this link here.
(Special thanks to my friends Amelia and Kirt who are working on 3D Models for the game!)
Sean Oxspring's Omniverse 