Author Archives: Dan Lawrence

May 23, 2011

AHL 2 released!

Well technically it’s being re-released in a much improved version, but I’ve had a play and it’s now pretty close to the glory days of the AHL 1.4/5 era.

For those who have no idea what any of those words mean, go and watch the trailer embedded above. Multi-player gunbastard madness.

The Action family of games and primarily it’s somewhat more elitist sibling The Opera was where I started out getting involved in making games as a teenager, and incidentally what I spent a large part of those years playing. John Woo, akimbo pistols and crazy dives through plate glass windows were the epitome of adrenaline soaked cool to my younger self and I spent far too long in darkened rooms trying to recreate scenes from films with a copy of Hammer and Paint Shop Pro. I certainly would be doing what I’m doing today without the time I spent coding The Opera’s abortive Source version (I submitted a chunk of it for review to some senior programmers at Codemasters, and I built a seperate Half-Life mini-mod for my degree dissertation). It’s no exaggeration to say that they’ve had more direct influence on my career and employable skills then any of the courses I took at university.

Understandably I’m a little nostalgic for that time, but I think there is a genuinely good game in AHL and indeed in this new Source version with fresh maps. The servers seem to crash a fair bit right now (the current developers appear to be well aware) but when they’re up it still provides some great moments of action movie joy as you dive backward from the top of some stairs, sailing right over some mook’s head and nail him in the back with a magnum. Nothing beats that. Don’t just trust me though, trust RPS too and read this great retrospective.

You can get AHL 2 here.

Rugs, doors and better options

By Dan Lawrence

A rug and a door in a Free Company Level

It’s the Easter holidays here at the Robotic Shed, a time for doing some gardening & pondering the chocolatey eggs to come. However amidst the shocking indolence some forward progress has been made, which, if you squint a bit you might be able to find some proof of in the screenshot above.

Mainly, I’ve had another pass over the game’s options menu and finally made sure that everything in there can be toggled on and off during the game as well as before it. I also added a couple of new options; 1) to change the texture quality 2) to toggle v-synch on or off and 3) to rebind the game’s control keys. Usually this kind of thing is fiddled about with at the last-minute in a game’s development but I decided to get it out of the way now as their broken-ness had eventually cracked the deep buried QA tester in me.

I’ve also added normal maps to most of the models since the last update and fixed up their shading code. They have to be quite pronounced to be actually visible at the game’s camera distance but I think it improves the look of things like the stone walls and tiled floor quite a lot from some angles. Normal maps were the last significant piece of the game’s graphics ‘tech’ that weren’t working so it’s nice to have them finished and therefore the last steps in the asset creation pipeline nailed down.

Finally, I’ve added a couple of new object types to the level furnishing mix; a new fancy rug at floor level and a door. The door is animated but is still awaiting a bit of man-door interaction code before it’s a finished thing. I suspect doors are probably going to be the main thing other than enemies that the player’s mercenaries will interact with as they complete a level’s objectives. I’m not sure I’ll match Deus Ex’s impressive number of ways to interact with a door but I’ll at least manage opening and closing.

Leave a comment | tags: graphics, options | posted in Free Company, Programming

April 8, 2011

Don’t take it personally Shepard

By Dan Lawrence

...it would definitely be Leon though.

I recently played through the rather excellent don’t take it personally babe, it just ain’t your story (available here) which despite generally being about as far from what I’m making as an indie game can get provided a perfect example of a type of game design that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Namely dialogue choices where you have to actually pay attention and turn on your brain if you want to get what the game is giving you. In DITPB each of the offered choices are subtle and nuanced (Do I interrupt this arguing couple? Should I throw an escape line to a third wheel?) and most depend heavily on the story roles and context, particularly your knowledge of the personalities of each of the characters. At one point in the story you have to tell a student off and because of the student’s manipulative personality and the teachers position of authority I felt that it was vital I came down as hard as I possibly could, leaving no wiggle room. The choices had real weight and meaning to me because to make them well required you to make use of your mental image of the character’s world.

The trend in commercial story driven games has been to take dialogue choices in the opposite direction. Choices are big and obvious, they are usually over black and white topics that award morality points and most egregiously recently they are being handily sign posted so you don’t even have to think or engage with the dialogue at all. I’m thinking most obviously of Mass Effect, which currently strides across the story driven game genre like a colossus of critical acclaim. Which in some ways is very deserved; the universe building is excellent, the characters are mostly engaging and the presentation is top-notch. What the Mass Effect dialogue isn’t though, is much of a game. There is still gaming to be had in Mass Effect as a whole; some exploring and decent shooting parts but the dialogue game has withered to allow a TV and film influenced alternative to bloom in its place.

I’m not sure it’s possible for the mainstream to go back; production values get in the way, and I expect, as with the continuing success of the Hollywood blockbuster, there is a huge segment of the audience that actually prefers the choices being simpler and not requiring you to pay any attention. What it does mean is that there is a yawning market gap that games like DTIPB and developers like Christine Love can rush in to fill.

1 Comment | tags: dialogue | posted in Game design