racingfreak92

Receiver

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Anyone played this yet?

Its a FPS created by Wolfire games (people behind Humble Bundle and Overgrowth) for a design competition.

Has some very interesting mechanics - you have no reticle and control your gun in a weird detached sort of way. The entire gun is modeled and you have to do things like pull the hammer back, load each bullet, make sure the safety is off, etc. I think the graphics are beautiful, reminds me of Mirrors Edge a bit.

Watch the trailer on their page for a good introduction to it. You can download it from their site for $5.

http://www.wolfire.com/receiver

also a interesting video about the art design

http://blog.wolfire.com/2012/06/Receiver-Art-Asset-Overview

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Haven't played it, but it looks quite nice. I'll give it a try.

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I'll have to retry this game tonight. You really need a dark room because the game is very dark and there's no gamma adjust.

Anyway, I played a few rounds and the game is quite brutal. Damn those hovering tasers. So far I made it up to 2 out of 11 tapes.

The controls are a bit shit.

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QWOP of FPS.

Looks interesting though, but so far I am not making much progress

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It controls really poorly, the aim feels slippery, but otherwise it's a cool concept.

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Heck yes. I'm really enjoying this, and it makes me hope they'll focus on developing the concept further once Overgrowth is done.

It's very systems driven, in that roguelike and Looking Glass tradition, but on a smaller scale. Instead of interaction between the environment and different types of enemies, it's about the individual components of your weapon and the enemy drones. It reminds me most of what Introversion seemed to be trying early on with Subversion. Basically, rig up the world with interacting and breakable objects, give the player something that can selectively break them, and model the consequences. The enemies have weak points, but not in a flashing, attack-for-massive-damage way. They can be disabled without being destroyed, and the difference isn't just an arbitrary flag like killing vs. knocking out.

Your gun is meaningful and powerful, down to the individual round. That part reminds me of Tom Francis talking about his motivation for Gunpoint. It also works so well with the tension of the game. If you think you've shot out a turret's camera, how do you tell for sure that it's been deactivated? You can't waste ammo, so you try to duck out again for just long enough to see if the turret can acquire lock, but still avoid being shot (and dying, and starting over).

The total lack of explanation of the game systems, combined with the pretty extreme difficulty, makes everything you learn more meaningful. Finding a new tape that (within the fiction) explains how the kill drones work isn't just for flavour or unlocking some bonus that lets you deal 10% more damage, it reveals important information to you the player and affects how you decide to play.

Also the aesthetics are cool. The weird angular buildings, lack of texturing, and lighting do give it a sort of dark Mirror's Edge vibe. The movement generally and something about the sprinting specifically remind me of the SS2/Thief engine (which I always love being reminded of).

I'll stop raving, but I'd love to see more discussion about this on the internets generally. It's a shame there's a cost and it's not pay-what-you-want, but perhaps it'll be included in a bundle sometime.

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I have a few problems with this game. The concept of it being systems driven is fascinating, but I think they executed a lot of them very poorly. I have an opposite opinion about the damage system.

If you think you've shot out a turret's camera, how do you tell for sure that it's been deactivated?

You cant. There are almost no visual cues to communicate this. Sure its nice they didnt do some Call of Duty-esque reticle flash when you get a hit, but they also didnt do anything subtle to communicate it indirectly. With the camera you can see that the light has been shot out. But I havent been able to discern any indication of when you have disabled the gun. Wasting ammo is costly, but more costly is dying and having to start all over. Since it takes just a single bullet to kill you, its quite annoying that you either have to risk all your progress or waste a shot because the game is ineffective at explaining itself.

It feels like they relied on reaction time far too often, which is such a rigid, Doom-style game mechanic. Where everything else in indicates they didnt want to be a typical Video game.

The game also gets very monotonous as you play. The randomized environments are nice, but some of the areas are very boring and after 15 minutes of playing you will have seen it all. If your like me and have yet to collect more than 2 or 3 tapes in one game, youll get bored quickly having to search the same areas over and over. Also they randomization of starting ammo and chambered ammo is tedious. Each time you start you have to make a spider-hand across the keyboard to pull the magazine out and check it before starting, or risk running into the first enemy with only a single bullet in your gun.

Also its weird to mix the mostly fixed order audio tapes with the idea of no saving. Again, if you are dying a lot, that means you have to listen to the same thing over and over.

The fact that they charged for this is SO douchy. $5 for a game you made in a week for a competition? Thats like a Tolkien publishing his grocery list and putting a price tag on it. I also assume that by now Wolfire has plenty of money from Humble Bundle, and they dont need to make this cost so much.

EDIT: Its almost as if the game knew to test my patience. I just booted it up again and died instantly because a drone was immediately behind me and looking at me, I died before the screen even fully faded in. Its time for me to file this game under "failed experiments" and move on.

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It's definitely not perfect, but there's something interesting enough that I keep coming back to try and get more than 2 or 3 tapes. I think for a game made in a week [citation needed] it's expected to find some flaws. I hope they'll find time to polish it a bit.

PS. I've heard at least 6 different tapes, so it doesn't seem very fixed order to me.

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Made in 9 days, not 7. But very short dev time.

Out of the 10 or so tapes Ive heard, its been the one about it being "normal to only hear static at first" at least 50% of the time, and only 3 unique tapes total.

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Man, I hope they release a patch that makes the game easier. I've been playing a bit every night and still haven't got more than 3 tapes. By now I think I've heard almost all of the different ones, though.

Even managed to clean a room that had 7 (!) flying fucks at one time, but then either ran out of bullets or died some stupid death.

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Yay. Got 4 tapes in one go, then bumped into a corridor with a killbot when ran out of ammo and had to escape from one of the flying drones.

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I really like the look of this game. I haven't played it yet as I'm planning to pre-order Overgrowth at some point (read: not this close to the Steam summer sale) so there's little point in buying Reciever seperately. Plus, I don't know if I'd want to pay for a game that I'm not even sure they're going to update. It looks interesting as a little free bonus game included with the main game though.

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I really like the look of this game. I haven't played it yet as I'm planning to pre-order Overgrowth at some point (read: not this close to the Steam summer sale) so there's little point in buying Reciever seperately. Plus, I don't know if I'd want to pay for a game that I'm not even sure they're going to update. It looks interesting as a little free bonus game included with the main game though.

Whaat? Overgrowth pre-order already gave me this game for free? Should've read the details.

[EDIT] I'm giving away a free copy of Receiver

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Could I have it? It seems interesting, but I don't know about paying that much for such a limited game.

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Could I have it? It seems interesting, but I don't know about paying that much for such a limited game.

Sure, I'll figure out whether I can give you the one I bought or the one I got with the Overgrowth pre-order and then I'll PM you. But getting sleepy now, so I'll do it in the morning.

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This game is hilariously well designed.

- You press E to remove the magazine from the gun, but then to put a new one in, you press Z. Pressing E a second time makes you drop the magazine on the floor, which makes you look like a bumbling idiot.

- When reloading, in order to load individual bullets into a magazine, you have to first holster your gun (because you need two hands).

It really makes you think about how guns are portrayed in games. And it's realistic down to a tedious degree, which is really entertaining.

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I don't remember thinking Lugaru was an extremely fun game, but I appreciate the attention to detail Wolfire puts into game design at the most core level. I'm not sure about their level design since I haven't played anything but Lugaru. The weekly alpha update videos, while they did them, were fascinating. Also the videos they put together about their game jams are worth watching if you're interested in that sort of thing.

One thing about this video that jumped out at me was the flashlight bit, because that goes right against what I've heard about proper gun handling.

Flashlight-Main-2.jpg

Here's an explanation of using a flashlight with a gun. I will say, to the devs' credit, that safety actually isn't a huge concern with this particular situation because there are no friends for you to be pointing your gun at or sneak-attacks to protect your head against (I think? I haven't played it). However, there is the problem of not illuminating your sights, and that practically speaking a two-handed grip makes it more likely for you to accidentally eject your magazine. Still, again to their credit, the technique they settled on looks pretty cool.

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One thing that this game does very well is highlighting the comedy inherent to your ineptitude. Dropping a full magazine on the floor or dry firing three chambers before cycling through to your one remaining bullet makes your character seem like a clumsy idiot. I'd like a competitive multiplayer mode just to watch other people drop all their bullets and run away.

It also reminded me of this ABC experiment:

It turns out shooting people is really hard.

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Tried out the game again, with its new content, after hearing Thumbs 92. The game is in concept still fascinating as ever and in execution still completely drained of fun.

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I'd like a competitive multiplayer mode just to watch other people drop all their bullets and run away.

But talk about a high skill ceiling. I guess at a certain point getting the muscle memory to be able to just do simple reloads and negotiate a flashlight while shooting at the same time kind of has a skill cap just in how fast a person can move or how fast the game accepts inputs, but with how complex these weapons are, I can imagine a pretty serious metagame coming from precise sequences and tactics to optimize for really specific firefight scenarios.

Also, just from my own experienced having lived in a household that totally took advantage of the weird post-9/11 defense research spending spree, I can imagine DoD giving some team of five dudes a $300k grant to study this weird game and analyze how the mechanics could apply to real firefight situations.

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It's on Steam now. There's a blog post about the Greenlight process, which includes the following quote:

Finally, we got a surge in votes following an

about Receiver, and that kept us solidly in the top 10, and we got greenlit in the fifth batch!

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