ReNo

Condolences Minos, never a nice thing to go through. As has been said many times already though, if you're willing to travel there's no doubt that you'll get snapped up somewhere. Hopefully somewhere you can really shine in some more ambitious projects too Good luck in the search!

Quick reminder for everyone that this is out tomorrow! As a big fan of the Penumbra games I've really been looking forward to this. If you pre-order it from their website or from steam you get a 20% discount, so get your order in quick if you wanna save a bit of cash. My purchase on Steam came to just £10 with the discount, but even without it's hardly breaking the bank at £13. http://store.steampowered.com/app/57300/ Highly highly recommend any survival horror fans take a look at this - if it can live up to Penumbra it'll be ace. Eurogamer seem to think it does from the 8.10 score, but to avoid spoilers I didn't read much of it http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-09-07-amnesia-the-dark-descent-review

Nah dux, not back with em. Can't really talk about the situation in depth here, but myself and 2 other guys left to do our own thing as Haiku Interactive at the end of last year. When we left though the game was basically done except for bug fixing. Since then it's been in a sort of limbo, but looks to finally be ready to go.

Yeah the TF2 comparisons are a bit annoying. I mean I can get the visual comparison but some people are writing it off as a rip-off when the gameplay is completely different. The only gameplay it shares with TF2 is that both are FPS games. While TF2 is as team-based a shooter as it is possible to be however, BGT's gameplay is completely every-man-for-himself. Even the graphical comparison is annoying, given it's a fairly natural evolution from The Ship, which predated TF2 by over a year... But anyway, I guess it's inevitable if you've got a cartoony shooter just now. MNC got a lot of trash talk about it for the same reasons, although I'd say it was better warranted since it is so strongly team based. People came around to it in the end though! The teaser video isn't something we did in-house at Outerlight - it's Ubi's marketing material. I'd have to agree it's a little baffling if you don't know anything about the game, but like the fake "movie posters" they released a few days before the game announcement, I guess it's all designed to get people curious rather than being informative. No doubt they'll have gameplay trailers and the like before release

At long last the game I worked on at Outerlight before I left has been unveiled! It's called "Bloody Good Time" and it's being published by Ubisoft. Should be out on XBLA and Steam before the end of the year. For those interested, it plays a lot like our previous game "The Ship", only quite a bit faster. It's a source engine based multiplayer game in which you play the role of one of 8 different Hollywood wannabes filming under the instruction of the sadistic Director X. Each player is given the name of one of the other players and is tasked with killing them using one of a whole bunch of weapons. As in The Ship you've got to take care of your needs as this is happening; visiting the toilet or grabbing a drink at the bar to avoid falling asleep on the spot or becoming weak with hunger, for example. All the while one of the other players has been given your name and is trying their best to take you down, so you've gotta keep looking over your shoulder for any suspicious stalkers... It's a lot of fun and our playtests were always crazy and competitive, so we're really pleased it's finally seeing the light of day. Ubi Page: http://www.ubi.com/UK/Games/Info.aspx?pId=9098 Kotaku article: http://kotaku.com/5628927/clowns-versus ... -good-time

Yeah I agree, there's a fair few names in there that are pretty big as TV goes. No household names I guess, but certainly experienced. - Andrew Lincoln (main guy) is pretty well known in British TV, having starred in "This Life" and "Teachers". Nice to see him in a US show. - Lennie James (black guy) was Sol in "Snatch", and starred in a US post-apocalyptic TV show "Jericho". - Laurie Holden was in a bunch of "X-Files" episodes and a main character in the "Silent Hill" movie. - Michael Rooker is that grizzled looking mean guy in a whole shit load of TV shows and movies. You'd definitely recognise him if not know him by name. - Sarah Wayne Callies was a main character in the show "Prison Break". I'm looking forward to it. Need a new show now most of the other ones I watch have ended. Pretty much getting by on just Entourage at the moment

Sadly not got a good enough connection for hosting myself. Got a fairly decent ADSL setup through Sky for 3 of us to share for personal usage, but I wouldn't wanna try hosting anything on it; only got 512k upload I think. Sadly Virgin - the standard fibre optic provider in the UK - isn't available in my area just now. Not sure I'd have the knowledge or desire to deal with maintaining it either, as HP said. I think WebFaction are a fairly large provider, so I'm not too worried about them going under. They've been around 6 years, and they've got a 60 day money back guarantee if, for any reason, you choose to leave 'em, so I figure it's worth a crack. Thanks for the advice folks, much appreciated

I'm not really sure I agree that it's a question there's no point raising, Warby. There's a lot of people here with portfolios (or more!) and presumably most of those are on their own hosting. Just looking for some info on who has been good, who has been bad, and anything anybody has to share on the big names in web hosting. There's certainly a ludicrous amount of choice in the market these days, and yeah a lot of that is region specific so hard to people to comment on, but there's a fair UK contingent on Mapcore so hoped to get at least a little insight. Beyond that, we're happy to look beyond UK offerings, though probably only US based to avoid any language barriers with support issues. Anyhow, thanks for the heads up so far guys. UK2 certainly look good, probably the best UK offering I've seen in terms of an all round package that isn't blatantly "too good to be true" as some of those "unlimited" offerings you mention are. We're not going to be handling huge amounts of traffic and right now at least we won't be relying on the hosting as "mission critical", so we're loathe to spend more than £5-10 a month on it. Their low level business package is therefore a good match for our requirements. My only concern is a lot of negative reviews I stumbled upon, but as I mentioned before, a lot of those sites come across suspicious and potentially faked, so it's hard to judge. At the moment we're really tempted by WebFaction. It's a US based hosting company, but we've had a few recommendations from them elsewhere and the bulk of chat about them online seems positive. Anybody know of them or used them before?

Hey guys, hoping you can offer me some advice. My Haiku colleagues and I are looking to get a new web host for our company website and project specific websites. Currently we are using one guy's personal account on fasthosts to host our only website (http://www.avaglide.com), but want to move to one for the company itself and figured we should do a little research first. Anybody got any good advice on who to go with? Or conversely, who NOT to go with? I use 1&1 for my personal website and it's always been good enough for that, but you don't get quite as much for your money as some other places seem to offer, and as a little portfolio site it's never exactly been tested with big loads or many visitors. In terms of what we require, we'd like Linux hosting with PHP/MySQL support, preferably allowing for multiple databases but we could make do with one. Ideally we'd like unlimited usage, and probably around 10Gb+ of space. We'd also like Ruby/RoR support, or at least the option to upgrade to that if we need it in the future. Anything come to mind? Or anybody had any horror stories to share? Looking up reviews online, half of them read like company shills, so it's hard to know what to trust.

My condolences Defrag, really sad to hear. I've got a mate at Ruffian who had said things weren't looking good at RTW, but I wasn't expecting something as drastic as this after MyWorld was only announced so recently. Guess that was more of a "well..might as well let the world see it" kind of last-hurrah? All the best on finding a new gig mate.

Warby: It's pretty easy to get into mate! For making Xbox Indie Games all you need is a retail Xbox 360, and Xbox LIVE Gold Account (£40 per year) and a subscription to the Creator's Club (£60 per year IIRC). After that you can use Visual C# Express for free to do your programming, and whatever tools you normally do for your asset creation. XNA is a pretty powerful platform for developing but it's also really easy to use as programming APIs go. Getting your games published on the indie games marketplace is as easy as passing through a peer review system, and provided you do you then get 70% of any sales that your game makes. It's still a bit too small a market to reliably make good money off - most games sell between 100 at the most disappointing and 10,000 if they do well (the top sellers are around 100,000) - but it's definitely one of the more interesting markets around at the moment. dux: I had to look up Wetrix, looks fun though, so who knows We've a few projects up our sleeves that we'd like to work on, but for the time being we're taking a wee break as one of the team has just gotten married and is off on his honeymoon. I'll be sure to let you guys know what's next when it's nearly done Thanks for the kind words guys, hope anybody who tries it out likes it, though let me know if you have any thoughts as we're always happy for some constructive criticism!

I knew I was gonna be snapping up Limbo as soon as I saw the first trailer; it's easily amongst the most beautiful games I've ever played. Anybody with an Xbox should play this game, and even if it isn't to their taste in terms of gameplay they should absolutely grab the trial just to experience the visuals. That said, the gameplay is top notch too. Some head-scratching puzzles in places but never cheap or frustrating, and although I do have to agree that it relies on trial and error quite frequently, it is through those inevitable deaths that I found much of the emotional impact of the game. You see it coming but only just, and it's that split-second of panic - that realisation of impending doom - that got me every time. I found myself tip-toeing forwards in places, fearful of what was coming next. Seeing a button embedded in the floor and thinking "I know I have to step on this...but I don't want to!". For me, that is ultimately the emotion that sums up Limbo. Dread. You don't clear a section and think "ah, relief!" like in so many other games. Instead you think "oh shit, it's only going to get worse!". It's also a great game to play with a non-gamer. My girlfriend isn't into games at all, but when I showed her a trailer for Limbo a while ago she instantly took a liking to it, so we played through most of it together. She had a lot of fun just soaking in the atmosphere and helping with the puzzles, without ever touching the control pad. She's now asking if there are similar games that I can show her, so I have an excuse to introduce her to Braid and Ico soon And in reference to those games, I'd have to say that Limbo *almost* surpasses both, but ultimately fails to. It absolutely lives up to their atmosphere and gameplay, but despite undoubtedly managing to evoke strong emotional responses through its gameplay, visuals and setting, the minimalistic story left me surprisingly cold. SPOILERS!!! The problem for me was that the storyline didn't build in any meaningful way. At all. I had no idea I was approaching the end of the game when all of a sudden I hit the credits. In fact, the game actively misleads you about your progress by giving you a "cleared" percentage that DOESN'T RELATE TO THE GAME LENGTH. How cheap is that? You finish the game at 80%, and then suddenly realise they included getting all the achievements in hitting 100% completion. I'd seen my clear percentage right before the end scene, meaning I watched it thinking "still 20% of the game to go", and as such felt horrendously robbed when the credits rolled. I don't mind the short length of the game at all, I'm happy to pay for short, high quality games, but that ending and the deception in their progress percentage really knocked me for six. Not only that, but in many ways it feels like the maliciousness of this "limbo" diminishes as the game goes on, which is the opposite to what you'd expect. That giant spider was surprisingly early in the game, and then the attacking boys with their darts or arrows or whatever around a 3rd in. After that, although the puzzles got harder, there was basically nothing beyond environmental hazards to deal with. I kept expecting some other "foe" to face in a similar manner to the boys or the spider, but nothing really came. Those weird bug things that clamp into your head don't count /SPOILERS Anyway, enough said. Great game, highly recommended. I'll probably play through again to try and gleam a bit more from the story - I think there's more hidden in the environment than I appreciated first time through.

This is looking totally friggin' sweet! I love pirate games, I love blue skies, I love stylised cartoony graphics, and I love seeing a bunch of guys as talented as you lot taking the plunge into the indie scene As mentioned the anims are holding back the presentation a little in their current state, but they're perfectly adequate for a prototype. Everything else is looking spot on. What is your plan of action with this; are you guys still employed elsewhere or is this now a full time effort for you? I think what you guys have done so far is looking absolutely ace, and I wish you all the best of luck getting that Unity Pro prize!

Hey fella's! It's been a long while! I feel bad showing up after such a long while with, surprise surprise, something to pimp out, but maybe that's better than a random "hi" with nothing to show? Either way, I hope you won't mind too much Some of you might remember that I released a game on Xbox Indies called Crate Expectations late last year. Well myself and the other 2 guys at Haiku Interactive have just let our 2nd game loose on the world! This time around we decided to make a game to fill a niche that doesn't get filled too often, and with so many people clamouring after a new Pilotwings title we figured hang gliding was a good bet. We also wanted to make a game that was relaxing and approachable for people of all gaming skill, but still presented a good challenge and good competitive potential through online scoreboards. Finally, we wanted to make a game that uses the Xbox Avatars, because we don't have an in house artist to make our characters and we're not blind to the fact that the market on the Xbox Indies channel seem to love Avatar games So we present AvaGlide! An avatar-based hang gliding game featuring 4 game modes, 3 levels, selectable time of day variants, online scoreboards, medals to earn, local multiplayer, 2 control styles, and...well I guess that's about it actually But hey, it's only $1! TRAILER... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

Wow, nicely done Ginger, glad you found somewhere, and somewhere totally sweet at that! Split/Second is looking ace, and I really enjoyed Pure too.

No love for Trials HD on mapcore? I've not done as much gaming as I'd have liked this year but this game, like it's predecessor Trials 2, ate up a whole lot of hours. If anybody here plays it and wants somebody to compete against on the leaderboards then add me on Xbox Live - ReNo84. I'll also give a nod to... - DJ Hero for making me give a shit about rythm action games, which I normally don't get much fun out of. Haven't played it all that much yet but I've really enjoyed the times I have. - Storage Inc for giving me some faith in Xbox Indies, as well as showing me that the forklift truck driving genre didn't die with Shenmue. There's plenty of others I'm sure, and I've enjoyed plenty of the big games too (MW2, ODST, AC2, etc...), but in a way they are kind of a given.

Edinburgh is a lovely place to visit - a lot of history to enjoy and some beautiful views when the weather is good. But then, the weather is very often not so good :/ It's a nice compact city that is easy to explore on foot, and there are loads of nice little traditional bars to pop into. Once again this is a biased hometown suggestion, but that doesn't make it any less worthy of consideration

You can remove me from Outerlight - I left at the start of December. I'm now working as a designer at a new startup called "Haiku Interactive". We're also based in Edinburgh, UK.

I don't see how it can. The whole point of this is that it is rendering the game for you. Therefore it needs to react to your input, render the results of your input, then send it back. You can't just have a buffer to deal with that because what are you going to buffer? The rendered video that has resulted from an input you haven't even made yet?

Are you using materials that are meant for models on brushwork? You shouldn't be using "VertexLitGeneric" materials on any brushwork or you'll get weird lighting issues that sound a lot like what you're describing. To fix it you can either switch it out for a different material that uses a suitable shader for brushes, or if you really want to use that texture and there isn't a LightmappedGeneric version of it available, you can create your own LightmappedGeneric material that references the same texture(s). Apologies if you've already checked for this, just sounds like a likely candidate.

I think "controversial" is maybe too strong of a word. Yeah you are right. I wasn't really meaning to claim they spark controversy, simply that they tend to split people's opinions. I guess a better term would be divisive.

I guess these sort of games are always quite controversial. Some love them for attempting to use the medium to tell a story or convey a message, rather than simply an excuse to shoot at things. Other people hate them because they ignore one of the fundamentals of the medium - gameplay. It's hard to deny the latter point. There is no "fun" to be had in holding right until you are prompted to press space. There is no challenge, no risk, and arguably no reward. But does every game need to fulfill that? I remember a friend and fellow game developer say something to the effect of "if you're putting story above gameplay, then you should be making a movie not a game". I can't say that I agree with that statement. I think that it depends entirely on what it is you are trying to achieve. I find games like this one interesting not because of the gameplay, but because they present a story, or a message, in an interesting and novel way. The interactivity can be an integral part of the storytelling, such that you can't just say "might as well have been a movie" because by making it so you'd be detracting from the experience. I strongly believe that watching this play out automatically wouldn't have the same effect. By making the player themselves decide to rebel against the monotony of the daily routine the game becomes a far more personal experience than you could have as a spectator in a movie of the same events. I can see why some people wouldn't enjoy the game, as if you approach it looking for a gameplay experience you're pretty much destined to leave disappointed. I personally like seeing projects like this, however, for showing the potential of games as a truly unique way of presenting a story.

Very neat indeed. Really nice presentation, music fits it perfectly, and although it is hardly the most challenging of games it does give you a little "oh cool!" kick each time you find one of the changes I really enjoyed it.

Cool thread, I've just ordered a few of these as a result. My contribution is "Dark Hour", or "La Hora Fria" to give its original name. It's a 2008 Spanish horror/sci-fi movie about a group of people who are forced to live in some kind of bunker to avoid the threat of the "strangers" and "invisibles" - 2 different types of entity that are extremely dangerous to the survivors. The film joins this group after they have clearly been living in the bunker for some time, and follows their daily routine and fight for survival. It isn't perfect - some of the acting is mixed, and the action scenes can be a bit poor - but it presents a hugely intriguing world that really makes you wonder about the backstory. Where are these people? When is it set? Are they the only survivors? You're left to figure out your answers to these questions as the movie goes on rather than being spoon fed all the facts about the situation, and I found it to be really quite captivating. I'd highly recommend it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0484273/

Aww christ, they go and add this right when I'm done working with Source. I would have KILLED for this feature a couple of years back. I resorted to horribly contrived visgroup structures to mass change lighting/entity setups and therefore achieve something approximating the same effect, but obviously that was never applicable to geometry. Not only that, but hammer even had trouble with visgroups - add too many and you end up with the whole visgroup system of your map breaking and the need to manually remove visgroups using notepad to get them working again! Still, nice development for them to add. I guess they're not quite done with source yet then...