Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In my second post about videogame architecture over on BLDGBLOG, I connect some ideas about the design of videogame cities to the possibilities of procedural generation. It’s a little bit speculative, especially when I start to link Half-Life 2’s Viktor Antonov (whose concept art for The Crossing is above) to Chris Delay’s methods in Subversion:

“What parameters would we need in order both to understand and create a science fiction Edinburgh, or Sao Paulo, or Vancouver? Identify the necessary fantasy logic within a procedural city-building system and you could recreate cities with their alternate identity in an instant. An accelerated future Moscow, or a retropunk Venice, instantly sprawling out of the monitor.”

Stuff like that.

I didn’t notice my Eurogamer interview with Chris Delay at Introversion had been published, until the weekend. It is, strictly speaking, 360-related, in talking about their open-development process with Darwinia+ for Live Arcade. They’re basically showing a load of internal documents and papers from interactions with Microsoft. To quote Chris: “They suggested a few guidelines and we went ahead and pretty quickly stepped way over them and started publishing confidential reports with classified ‘Do Not Publish Outside Microsoft’ written on them”. There’s a lot about Introversion more generally as a company too. The interview was done the day after Chris had posted the 2008 in hindsight piece noting how close Introversion had come to closing and we talk a lot about that and the possibility of a “zombie Introversion”. Which would be sad, in many ways. Go read.

I’m pretty chuffed with this enormous Chris Delay interview over on Offworld. It’s part of a series of wide-ranging chats I’ve been having with my favourite developers. Sample text:

Rossignol: You’re making programmer art an art style. You’re vindicating that approach: artists don’t have to be there to make games look good.

CD: There’s definitely a look and style to our videogames. I love sharp, vectorised lines, and work towards that. Look at the Darwinians, they’re a classic piece of programmer art that got promoted into the lead character of the game. They’re now our company logo too – what kind of logo summarised our design philosophy?

Go read.

We’re a little late with this, but Introversion have released a new demo of Multiwinia. And, listening to the major complaint about the last demo, they’ve released it with online multiplayer. In other words, download it and you can play any of the demo levels. Also, if joining a LAN game set up by a player with a full copy of the game, you can play anything. Also, they’ve included Rocket Riot as a new demo game mode. And finally – which is why being a little late is bad – they’re also offering a special deal on Steam where you can buy it for a mere $9.99, and it comes free with the splendid Darwinia. This weekend only though, so hurry if you fancy it, like.

Anyway – gotta run. Back later for the Sunday Papers. You’ll find the press release – including an admission of being wrong on the demo point – beneath the cut.
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Chris Delay writes at length on the Introversion forum about Multiwinia’s release:

Multiwinia has the highest conversion rate we’ve ever seen. What this means is that every time somebody plays the demo version, there is a percentage chance that they will go on to buy the game, and that percentage is higher than any of our other games. This is excellent news, and generally lines up with our belief that Multiwinia is the most accessible of all our collection, the most immediately satisfying, and the most visceral and intense of our games. We can infer from his high conversion rate that people enjoy our game immediately, and that makes us very happy. By comparison, Darwinia had a very low conversion rate, at least initially, because we royally messed up the launch demo. The kinds of conversion rates we are seeing with Multiwinia are in fact excellent by any standards, and we should be very happy about this.

Unfortunately, a high percentage of zero is still zero. Nobody is playing the demo of Multiwinia.

More quotes and additional notes follow…
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UK indie development heroes Introversion have dropped us a line to say that the boxed version of Multiwinia hits UK stores on Friday. Not that I care, I already have my copy of this effortlessly charming abstract RTS warfare game. I wish there was a demo Use this demo to convince yourself of its retro-beauty and simple efficiency. All I can do is point to Kieron’s extended happy ramblings and say that this is, quietly, one of the best RTS games this year.

Have you bought it yet? If not why not then you are dead to me. Come on RPS community, let’s get some games going over the weekend.

Probably should have mentioned this yesterday, but Multiwinia is now available from the Introversion store, and there’s a splendid collector’s edition available alongside the boring old standard box. You can also pick it up on Steam. We’ve really enjoyed our pre-launch sessions with the game, and we’ll probably cobble together some kind of in-depth overview next week. Y’know, if we have time. I suppose those of you already spoiling for a Multiwinia War should post your inclinations in the comment thread.

If you haven’t made your mind up yet then you should probably take a look at the Multiwinia demo, which contains a bunch of maps and game modes from the full game.

Goodness, what a lot of tech problems we’re having with the site today. We’re hopefully on the road to recovery now, but it does mean my intended ramblomatic post about ancient horror RPG The Legacy: Realm of Terror will have to wait until tomorrow.

Instead, for today’s last snack you’ll find the latest video for Introversion’s upcoming slice of indie loveliness Multiwinia beneath the cut. This series of trailers takes a charming stylistic approach, hearkening back somewhat to the original Portal video, but with more polite British children talking about launch countdowns. The space race concept for this newly-revealed mode sounds loads of fun, while the actual game footage looks beautifully explodey as ever. Makes me even sadder that the preview code I was supposed to be receiving ages back never arrived. Hopefully this cheeky little number will be in all our hands soon, however.

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The latest explanatory trailer for Multiwinia has arrived (actually it turned up ages ago, but I only just got around to posting it), including some lovely tutorial animations and a load of in-game battle-footage. I’ve been playing our Multiwinia preview code over the last couple of days and rather enjoying it. It’s beautiful, obviously, but it’s also just complex enough, in the way all good RTS games. I think this is going to be one 2008’s quietly successful games. For a detailed preview take a look at Kieron’s hands-on impressions.
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Introversion declare that Mondays are to be Multiwinia Mondays for the next six weeks, as they build up to the release of the multiplayer reworking of Darwinia. In response I’m declaring Tuesdays as Tuna Tuesdays, where we all eat tuna-based food. Just so we all know. So yesterday the first video tutorial for one of the six game modes was revealed, Domination, and it’s below.

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