Brendon Chung

Korax, that is INCREDIBLE!!!!!!

Yup, this a bug. The Vinylman music is supposed to stop playing. I'll be including this fix in the first content update.

A+ thread title

I picked up Doom on the good word of mouth it was receiving, and - wow - I was delighted and surprised by what I got. In my mind, I was expecting a big fast corridor shooter. Throw in some guns, some monsters, some level design loops, and there ya go -- a fun old-school FPS romp. What I ended up getting -- and what I wasn't expecting at all -- was a single-player arena shooter. You're thrown into a combat zone, all the doors shut, and I almost expect to hear an announcer announce "round 1, fight." The one thing it most reminded me most was Quake 1 deathmatch. Wild player speed + a shocking amount of verticality + "gamey" powerups/pickups + always, always, always moving. What I associate with Quake is how its speed was always cranked to 11 -- way too fast for your brain to really parse what's happening, so your hands just go to this instinctual auto-pilot zen zone. I guess "flow state" is what some people call it, and Doom 2016 completely laser-focused on that for me.

I love Q2DM1. I love its verticality. I love its interconnectedness. I personally like how spartan it is - no teleporters, no death pits, no environmental dangers, no traps, and the only moving parts are a couple elevators. I dunno, there's something pure? or humble? about stripping the map down to just pure layout work. In a way it reminds me of how they say the best third person cameras are the ones that just kinda disappear and become invisible.

As talked about in ep 166: The Last Night. Lean, stylish, lovely: http://timsoret.itch.io/the-last-night

Last Survivor DLC:

I hope you're all as excited about Enemy Starfighter as I am.

Thanks! You're too kind. Tinkering is a good word. I think it's sometimes easy for developers to get railroaded into being the best and doing things the right way. Games are playful things, and I think there's room in the development process to reflect that.

Yup, everything's rolled in there. I'm usually allergic to game documentation, but reaching for connections between everything was too fun to pass up.

I will never move away from fart jokes. It's evergreen territory.

Gone Home I always play as a nosy tourist in first-person games but am always getting shot, so Gone Home is basically perfect for me. I'm so excited there's now a Gone Home genre. State of Decay I think State of Decay is one of the few open-world games that really takes advantage of the fact that it takes place in an open-world.

State of Decay is an open-world game that takes advantage of its open-world structure. It leans toward the Mount & Blade & Elite model of world simulation. For example: my buddy Ed became infected. I scavenged some medicine for Ed. It slowed down the illness, but Ed still needed more help. I received a mission to fetch the camp's doc, who was currently squirreled away in a barn some miles away. Before I embarked on that, I decided to clean out some of the infested houses near our camp, since our camp barely survived the last zombie horde attack. As I'm cracking zombie faces, a couple message boxes appear: "Ed is dead." "Fetch doc mission: failed." And just like that, a playable character was now permanently gone. The on-going nature of things, coupled with perma-death and events that organically sprout out of the systems, makes for a game where decisions feel meaningful. The game can be janky. Framerate and performance chug, there's roughness in the camera and animations, and it's a little strange you can't bring an AI buddy with you on your explorations - yet they kinda-sorta let you do so by accepting a mission with an AI buddy, and then just ignore the objectives. In short, this is an open-world game that really shows the promise of the genre.

I think it boils down to doing two things: 1. Repeatedly shout "look at my game" into people's internet faces. 2. Start doing that as early as you can. Your game exists, and it takes a significant amount of time for that fact to seep into people's brains. Start talking about your game early in development and slowly build up an audience. By "early in development," I mean: you have things moving on the monitor. It's a long uphill marathon of weekly/daily updates that, as mentioned above, demands a lot of time. For my game Atom Zombie Smasher I made the mistake of following the AAA model of starting publicity some months before release. When the game was released, awareness of the game was pretty awful. It took about one year afterward for the game to get any real traction. Learning from that, I started talking about my current project early in its development, and awareness of it has already overshadowed my previous games. It's impossible to reach some sort of audience saturation point. As Chris Hecker says, "You can’t overhype your game, you can only under-deliver." It's a big world out there, and there will always be people who've never heard of you or your work. Keep talking about your game, keep sending out builds, and keep poking the shoulder of every website that exists.

I wonder how much a recorded gameplay stream differs from an unrecorded session. When I see people breezing past rooms in Let's Play TFOL videos, I figure I'd probably do something similar were it me being recorded, and I'm the guy who spent several minutes poring through Gordon Freeman's locker in Half-life 1 (why does he have a baby picture? Whose baby is that???). But I also do think part of it is because of game vocabulary and expectations. In my game Quadrilateral Cowboy, there are sticky notes and signs and objects that give hints and tutorials. When I demoed Quadrilateral Cowboy at PAX, a fair amount of these signposts were missed - partly because they need some work, but general feedback I got was that people assumed the signposts were decorations and incidental details. TFOL is able to get away with it because recognizing the world details are not required to finish the game.