Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Microstudios panel proved to be the most controversial and widely talked about at Develop 10, but the exchange of commentary followed by detente wasn’t all that was worth taking away from the gathering, where Beatnik‘s Robin Lacey (Plain Sight), Positech‘s Cliff Harris (Kudos, Democracy, Gratuitous Space Battles), Introversion‘s Mark Morris (Darwinia, Defcon, Uplink) and Hello Games‘ Sean Murray (Joe “They’ll all be in” Danger “if there’s not a PC port”) talked about the state of the Microstudio. Starting with what a microstudio is anyway…
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Lewie, when marching into the purely-conceptual RPS office to deliver his beautiful Bargain Bucket also brings news that Introversion have made their source code for Darwinia and Multiwinia available. For thirty quid at the Introversion store you gain access to the full source code to nose at and mod to your heart’s delight, the ability to add your own branches to share, access to the dev-forum. Also, there’s going to be a meta-server for Multiwinia. I have no idea what that means. I hope it means there’s a superpowered server. That’d be amazing. Anyway – good news, I think. Those interested can buy here.

Last night at BAFTA in London the handsome men of Introversion sat on stage to chat about their more recent launch, that of Darwinia+ on XBLA. It’s Darwinia and Multiwinia combined for console-dude fun-times. What was a little more interesting, however, was that they did a demo of their next game, Subversion. Chris admits cheerfully that it’s probably a year until they should be doing a demo… but they did it anyway.
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Now, that would be something. AND IT WILL BE. While the 360 release of Introversion’s Darwinia+ isn’t RPS’ business, their launch event at BAFTA crosses over into our world for three reasons. Firstly, it’s a developer Q&A whose topics include “Which is better, Xbox or PC?”. Well, PC, obv. Secondly, I’m actually the chair and will be both prying truth from the Introversion boys and selecting raised hands from the audience. Thirdly, you get a free drink if you buy a ticket. Yay drinks! Anyway, it’s on February 19th and tickets are available now for a fiver each. Do come.

Nothing much to add to this, but wanted to show it. Earlier, Introversion twittered a recent shot of Subversion. You’ll see it above, fucked up a bit by our JPGing and expanding of it. Go see the original here. It’s looks both quintessentially Introversion and as beguiling as ever. My money’s still on something Neuromancer-y.

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.