Lately, as I mentioned, Donhonk and I have been ballsing around with a new project. So far, we don’t know what the project actually is, and that is super exciting, so much so that we’re almost trying not to find out. We’ve had hours of conversations about immersive sims and crazy David Lynch films and Interstate ’76 and Hitchcock and The Last Express and the works of Brendon Chung and Wolfenstein 3D and ludo-narrative dissonance (you can scoff, but Clint Hocking coined it, so forget you) and Quake 1 and Harvey Smith’s novel Big Jack Is Dead and Adventure Games and Twin Peaks and The Good Old Days and all kinds of shit. That doesn’t tell you Thing #1 about what we’re doing, but maybe it tells you something about our inspiration? Maybe. We’ve talked over a whole bunch of game ideas, at times feeling like we’ve found The Thing We Want To Make and then rethinking it the next day, and it’s fun as balls. I just spent over a year focused pretty much on one large, planned-out thing, so this is cathartic, and I’m not feeling a lot of pressure to decide what the Next Thing is yet.

The one thing that is completely static about this mystery project is the art style, which is actually what kicked the whole thing off. Donhonk has been talking for a while about his love for the blocky low-res unfiltered look you get in things like Quake 1, and I dig it too. I also love the low-poly, unsmoothed meshes in Interstate ’76, with their untextured faces and solid colours.

Interstate '76. You can buy it on GOG

I looked into how to make the unfiltered-texture thing happen on UDK. It turns out it’s easy, and the unsmoothed-mesh look is just a matter of not smoothing stuff, so after a couple of experiments we pretty much have the look we wanted. By conventional standards it looks terrible, but in a way that we love. It looks like my inaccurate memories of the games I played as a kid.

The best thing about making things in this style is being able to quickly and easily make an asset and move on. The highest-res texture we’ve used so far was 256×256, and the lowest probably 8×8. It’s surprising how much detail you can pack into so few pixels when “just enough” is all you need. This is a scene we threw together in two hours (disclaimer: I had the tree meshes leftover from Shotgun Sunrise). 

I like how aggressively, confidently bad these are. 

             -MrHoatzin of the Idle Thumbs Forums

I think it looks great, as good as it would ever need to. Possibly too good. I may down-res some textures. But mostly I feel good that an idea jumped into my head and I was able to get it on a screen in a couple of hours from nothing. After the amazing age of Half-Life 1 modding, I was always disappointed with the relative scarcity of Source mods, and I’m sure this was a big part of it. A style like this means we don’t spend time getting the specular just right on this wall, or tweaking the vertex animation on the other elaborate foliage material. We just make a thing, and then we make another thing.

Now to decide which thing we’re making…

The game’s still not out (SOON) but the wholly original soundtrack by Jonathan Yandel now is. You can go listen to it for free and then buy it for a low low price.

It’s a seriously good soundtrack by a seriously good dude. If you ever need someone to make music for your game, hit him up.

You can check out the soundtrack hither.

I made a video of some Neat Things you can do with the Razer Hydra and HL2 with the Half-Life VR mod. Shooting over your shoulder, using the crossbow scope, shooting around corners, crowbar stabs, etc.

InFlux, that sweet game you’ve presumably voted for on Steam Greenlight, is still waiting on Epic to fix UDK’s colossal memory leak before it can release, and in the meantime I’ve been planning for its PAX Aus appearance and organising distribution stuff – getting it on as many distribution platforms as possible. So far they’ve all been super nice to deal with and easy to get in touch with, in stark contrast to Valve’s performance with Steam Greenlight, which much of the internet has been rightly upset about lately.

I was optimistic about Greenlight when it was announced, which is why I created InFlux’s page about twenty minutes after it went live, but it’s turned out to be mismanaged and terrible. Although we’ve been in the top 100 for this entire time, it’s increasingly looking like we’ll never get on Steam through Greenlight, and Valve assures me that there’s no alternative. The system has no clear policies or set of rules, even the iterative, constantly-revised kind you might expect. It’s perfectly possible to be Greenlit at #60 or to sit at #5 forever, so once you’ve been in there a while, you know Valve’s passed over you repeatedly already, and the laborious upvote harvest feels pointless. It’s harmful already, because it forces the tone of your marketing away from whatever you were doing and into “I Just Want You To Click This Button”. You can always get around it by signing with a publisher, until, at random, you can’t, and your whole launch falls apart.

Valve tells me the community does an excellent job of indicating “what will sell”. By their repeated appraisal, InFlux won’t. But it’s got 21,000 “yes” votes, and if half of those people buy it, I can fund my next game.

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In other news, I was sick all last week, and generally not thinking super clearly, and I guess in that addled state I forgot that I was broke and impulse-bought a Razer Hydra motion controller thing. I probably thought it would be amazing to use with my Oculus Rift Developer Kit, which I don’t have yet. Anyway, it arrived today and I toyed around with it for a while, mostly with Half-Life 2.

HL2 was the only thing I was able to find that the Hydra was able to do anything interesting with, and that through a mod designed to be used with the Rift. The box says it supports an “extensive PC game library”, but that “support” is only emulating the mouse/keyboard/gamepad and is clumsier than all of them. The HL2 VR mod, on the other hand, lets you control your weapons by waving your arms around. It took me over an hour to get the Hydra working right with the VR mod for HL2, and even then, I couldn’t look up or down (on account of the mod assuming I had a Rift on), but it was still pretty playable, and occasionally awesome. This is a terrible photo, but what I was trying to illustrate was that instead of alt-fire zooming HL2′s crossbow, I was able to hold the scope up to my “face” and snipe guys that way.

I was also able to physically extend my arm out to the side to shoot around corners or over the top of cover without exposing myself. This was probably My Favourite Thing. It was still a bit unwieldy, but I surprised myself a few times by successfully quick-drawing on antlions or crossbow-sniping a dude as I ran. Also, you can turn your gun on yourself, which is weird. After a while, my hands got kind of crampy and uncomfortable and I stopped. I tried to go back to it later but I couldn’t make it work again. Dang.

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In other other news, I’m working on a new thing, with a friend, name of Donhonk. We’re totally winging it and have no idea if it’ll turn into anything. We love the low-res, unfiltered textures of Quake 1 and the low-poly unsmoothed look of the characters of Interstate ’76, so for now, it looks like this:

You are tantalized.

That’s right – in an extremely exciting turn of events, our new game InFlux has been selected to be exhibited at PAX Australia in July as part of the Australian Indie Showcase (AIS)! You can check out the full lineup for the AIS over here.

What this means is we’ll be at PAX Aus showing off InFlux in our very own booth space thing. You’ll be able to rock up and play the game for yourself, and commune with the developers, and all that good stuff. I’ll also be on a panel along with the rest of the developers selected for the AIS. The game will hopefully by released by then, and you can come by and tell us what you think. We’ve never done anything like this before, but we’re gonna do our best. Many thanks to the folks at Penny-Arcade and their Australian associates for giving us the opportunity.

In the meantime, don’t forget to go vote for InFlux on Greenlight!

Thanks everyone!

You shiver as you swim, though the water is not cold. Up ahead, Goldblum laughs at you. You sense his derision; feel it in your dermal denticles. He’s too fast – you cannot hope to catch him. But maybe, just maybe, you can steal his shoes. This is BioShark Infinite.

So a week or so ago a game came into my brain as I drifted off to sleep. I reached for my phone, half-asleep, and hastily threw it in an email to my good friend James Benson. The email went like this:

Quote

Endless Swimmer game where you are a shark chasing a taunting Jeff Goldblum along the ocean floor. Like that one shark Bruce in Finding Nemo. Randomly generated or at least randomly decorated level. Jeff isn’t modeled because that’s hard, he’s probably just a sprite with shitty body. Get points by eating fish along the way. Very limited control, up/down/left/right while ceaselessly pushed along open-ceilinged tunnel/ocean floor. Dodge obstructions. Can boost, get boost by eating stuff. Gold coins rare, give mad points and a Jeff goldblum pun. Nigh-constant obnoxious video game congratulation text in impact font on screen all the time. LEVEL 14 UNLOCKED X20 MULTIPLIER. ATE A SNAIL SNAIL BONUS. You can’t catch goldblum but if you get close enough you can steal his shoes and a voice says “dude we could totally steal Jeff goldblum’s shoes”. Shark is maybe a robot with sweet robot eyes. When you fail because you hit too many obstacles the fail screen is Jeff goldblum’s face saying something mean from one of his movies. Beat your high score. Boom.goty of the year.

Fast forward to last night: the guy who did the UI stuff on InFlux comes by and we unexpectedly end up game jamming and making BioShark Infinite as an impromptu celebration of being more or less done with InFlux. SO HERE IT IS. Some features got cut/changed from that pitch, there’s no fish for instance, but we’re pretty happy with our ~10 hour vidjagame.

Download link.

Controls:

A=left

D=right

Space=jump (yes)

God speed.

I made an awesome river. There’s a reasonable chance it’s the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.

Also, don’t forget to remember to remind all your friends to vote for the game:

InFlux just went up on Steam Greenlight! We’d love it if you went and voted for it. So far the feedback is amazingly positive and is making us feel extremely good about ourselves, but we have no idea how many votes we need to actually get on Steam, so tell your friends!

From Greenlight:

InFlux (by Impromptu Games) is a puzzle game that mixes meditative exploration and puzzle platforming in a series of beautiful natural and abstract environments. You are a mysterious metal sphere which falls from the sky, traversing an apparently deserted island dotted with cubic structures of glass and steel. Each glasshouse is a puzzle to be solved.

The game is being developed for Windows, Mac, and secondarily iOS, on the Unreal Development Kit. We hope to release it this year.

• Sit in a comfy chair and become as relaxed as you have ever been while playing a video game
• Solve a series of mind-bending cubic puzzle structures connected by
• A series of beautiful, natural hub world environments to roll around
• Meet a majestic and enigmatic humpback whale

Tentative system requirements:
Minimum:
-Windows XP SP3/Vista/7/8 or OS X for Mac
-2.0+ GHz processor
-2 GB system RAM
-SM3-compatible video card
-2 GB Free hard drive space

Recommended:
-As above but with higher numbers

Thanks everyone!

Assuming your computer has Windows on it, that is – Mac version probably coming soon, though.

A few weeks ago I thought it would be fun to do a PC version of our iOS game Vroom!, which was based on our Half-Life 2 mod Shotgun Sunrise. So I made said PC version, only a couple of bugs with it didn’t get fixed until more recently. So now, here it is! All the fun of the iOS game but more so – better graphics, more zombies, all that good stuff.

Download it here.

Update: It’s also on Desura now. Desura is pretty sweet, you should get the client.

New news for the internet!

InFlux continues according to plan. Here’s a new screenshot of a new area, the forest, which is probably my favourite area so far. The trees and foliage assets in this area are mostly by Alex McDonnell, who lances freely in the Melbourne area. James Benson is also going to be doing some animation for our whale, bless his little Scouse heart.

Also, here’s a sweet new glasshouse.

The mobile version is also coming along pretty well:

I attended E3 this year, and met a bunch of cool guys from a bunch of cool companies. The highlight of the trip wasn’t the actual convention as much as getting drunk with guys from the internets with whom I modded HL2 back in the day, who now work at Gearbox and Respawn and Lukewarm Media. I made a quick video of the game to show around E3 on the iPad, and it was quite well received. Here’s that:

Also, meeting Chet Faliszek and making sure Gabe Newell knew his beard was awesome.

Something that was less awesome, though, was the whole Booth Babes thing. I don’t know if it’s because there’s more of these stories on the net lately or if I’m just coming across them more for whatever reason, but I’ve been reading more than usual lately about gender issues and misogyny in Video Game Culture. It’s a weird thing for me to read about, because I don’t see a lot of this in my life, maybe because I don’t play games online anymore, or hang out with anybody who strongly identifies as a Gamer, or anything. The idea of a strong general undertone of sexism or misogyny in the subculture surrounding games has been kind of an abstract thing for me – “I don’t really see it, but I guess that’s probably a thing”.

Attending E3 basically made me go “Oh wait, yeah! There it is.”

It’s not like at PAX, where there’s a rule against booth babes, and EA tries to quietly sneak a few in anyway. They’re everywhere at E3, and they’re surrounded constantly by seedy guys asking to get their photo taken with them as though they were celebrities. A guy walks past and tells his friend “I’M GONNA GET A PHOTO WITH EVERY BOOTH BABE!”. Another guy has his arms around two models from whatever booth, when another walks by, and the guy yells at his friend with the camera to go get her and bring her here so he can get his photo taken with three hot girls he doesn’t know. It’s not that I didn’t know booth babes existed, I just didn’t realise these guys existed. It is honestly some bizarre, creepy shit. I am surprised, but I am also surprised that I am surprised. I don’t usually underestimate people’s capacity for douchebaggery.

Oh, also, a guy clung to the breast of the female statue at the Borderlands booth for probably ten seconds while his friend took a picture. 2K rep: “Wow. Stay classy”.

In unrelated news, Vroom!, our iOS game, went free last week. Since then it’s been downloaded 55,596 times (more actually, iTunes’s stats aren’t real-time), which is super rad. Hopefully, our customers are being provided with adequate amusement. Also, I was bored the other night so I made a Windows/Mac version. There’s a couple of bugs to be fixed with it, and then I’m thinking I’ll probably put it on the internet for free – or maybe some kind of Pay-If-You-Want system.

Also, Idle Thumbs is a pretty great podcast to listen to while you work on makin’ video games. I find myself adopting Idle Thumbs jokes into my vocabulary. They really know how to turn a phrase.