Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Cliff “Positech” Harris has sent word that he will soon be the indie-dev-who-turned-publisher, because he is publishing Redshirt, the debut title from indie dev The Tiniest Shark. In the tradition of Positech’s Kudos games, Redshirt is a life sim set aboard a space station, and it takes a satirical look at the impact social networking might have on familiar sci-fi tropes: “Navigate the professional and interpersonal politics of the ubiquitous “Spacebook” to curry favor among friends and colleagues. As intense intergalactic conflict rages around you, it’s up to you to accrue those all-important “likes” on your status updates! Whether you’re looking for love, opportunities for promotion, or even a chance to play Zero-G golf with the captain, you can schmooze your way through social circles and claw your way up the career ladder. Perhaps you too can finally achieve the dream of an off-station transfer, or even the Redshirt’s opportunity of a lifetime: being sent on an away-mission!”

Redshirt should appear at some point this year.

If there’s one thing better than tanks fighting it out, it’s tanks fighting it out for no reason other than because they are tanks. Let Tanks Be Tanks should be the subtitle of Cliffski‘s RTS, Gratuitous Tank Battles. Followed by three exclamation, because nothing says gratuitous than ‘!!!’. Even the sound in this video is gratuitous: Cliffski has recorded 7 minutes of the game playing, showing off his development tools that he’s choreographing the tank violence with. Unfortunately, the tanks are so loud that he had to set his mic up to compensate. This set off a tit-for-tat response with the game that ended up with his mic being declared a war crime. It’s loud, people.
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Hello 2012! The observant among you may have noticed that I appeared to write something yesterday but I actually wrote that in 2011. Yesterday, I was still in a burrow eating the last needles of the Christmas tree in preparation for emergence. The first thing I saw as my eyes adjusted to the light was a developer diary for Gratuitous Tank Battles, so I brought that with me. Within, Cliff puts forward two game design proposals. One, “a sort of Upper Class World War I English General Simulator”, the other a game taking place during a war that has spanned centuries, leading to battlefields strewn with laser-spewing Tiger tanks, tiny infantrymen and robots alike. He’s making the latter. We must demand the former as well.

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Cliff Harris has sent word that the first footage of his next game, Gratuitous Tank Battles, is now available. You can see it below. Cliff describes this as “a video showing early work-in-progress footage from battles in ‘Gratuitous Tank Battles’, the RTS/Tower Defense/ Sim strategy game.” In it you can see elements of both the attacking and defending games, as well as some of the conditions of battle, such as pesky darkness. For more on this you can have a read of my interview with Cliff, in which he explains the inspiration for the game and his aims for building on Gratuitous Space Battles with a more complex and strategic game.
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Observant eyes may have noticed that there’s a new expansion out for Gratuitous Space Battles, the fleet building slice of indie goodness from Positech. While this fresh bit of DLC doesn’t add any new game modes, it does add 10 new ships, three new pieces of equipment and a new scenario. The new ships belong to the titular Parasites faction, who sound very unpleasant indeed. Swanning around the galaxy looking for host species to grow their larvae in? It’s not on. There’s a trailer showing some particularly gratuitous space battles below and a new pic from Positech’s upcoming Gratuitous Tank Battles for your eyes to look at.

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OK Cliffski, you’ve got our attention. The one man powerhouse behind Positech Games, best known for Kudos, Democracy and Gratuitous Space Battles, has been teasing a new game, currently titled “GTB”, for the last few months. We want to know: What is it? There’s some clues and details already revealed, but not enough for us to piece the whole thing together yet. Here’s what we know so far: Read the rest of this entry »

Cliff “Positech” Harris, the man who is currently finishing off the campaign parts of Gratuitous Space Battles, has been busy with a side project: wrangling independent developers.They now have a new indie portal called Show Me The Games. It’s supposed to be a collection of some of the best indie games on the PC, and includes some that you might recognise. Cliff explains:

SMTG is a crazy plan to try and prove that indie game developers, despite theoretically being in competition, can come together as a group, throw some money in an ‘advertising’ bucket, and help promote each others games. It’s true that getting indie developers to organise together is like herding cats, but I’ve owned 4 cats over my life, so I’m not scared. Using the amazing nasa-like technology of random numbers, the SMTG site randomises the games listing so nobody gets ‘top slot’. This simple listing of games is hopefully just the start, there may well be competitions, discount bundles or all kinds of stuff happening on SMTG in the future. The main point is that we now have a fixed location to host that kind of thing.

Go take a look.

If there was a significant problem with fleet-management game Gratuitous Space Battles, it was that it was almost too gratuitous. There were a lot of space battles, with nothing to link or contextualise them. To fix this black hole in the space-time of his creation, Cliff “Positech” Harris has been constructing some DLC, a “massively single-player” non-linear campaign, which is now nearing completion. I had a quick chat with him about this development, which you can read below.
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There was a problem with the rather clever space-battle fleet manager game Gratuitous Space Battles. It was this: there was no campaign mode. I’ve no idea how you would fix a problem like that, but fortunately one man development army Cliffski has plenty of ideas. One of them is relevant: he’s going to add a campaign mode. He explains: “The GSB campaign is a singleplayer ‘conquer-the-galaxy’ style game, where you build up vast space fleets and kick interstellar ass. Rather than set, pre-determined fleets to battle against, the game utilises the fleets designed by other GSB players to provide an endless variety of opponent, so you will be pitted against real carbon-based intelligence on every step of your path to galactic dominance.” Read more about this extraordinary move here. It will be paid DLC, price TBC.

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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