Let's Play - Shadowrun Returns

What is it?

Shadowrun Returns is a single player role playing game with tactical turn based combat elements made by Harebrained Schemes. It's also a Kickstarter funded game released in mid-2013 based upon the Shadowrun table-top boardgame. Whilst it include a campaign, Dead Mans Switch, there is also support for the Steam workshop and comes with custom mission tools so that users can share and play each others campaigns. 

What is it about?

The main campaign included follows the story of your character investigating the mysterious death of a friend and trying to track down the killer in 2054 Seattle. The characters motivations are a combination of honour, greed and nothing better to do. The Dead Mans Switch story lasts around 11 hours and presents a good and well polished story with many interesting characters and conversation options. Whilst this included campaign is interesting and enjoyable, giving back a semblance of old noir style detective stories, the real gem is in the use of the Steam Workshop and included mission building tools to allow sharing of stories.

Combat in the game takes place in a turn based manner, similar to X-Com. The primary skills that are used are take the form of ranged, close and magical combat and are used dependent on your characters abilities. As such, a shaman is more likely to use summoning or magical attacks to fight enemies. 

However, forming teams of diverse runners is important for victory. Shamans can often boost accuracy and provide other shield bonuses for team-mates, whilst deckers can hack into the matrix to override sentry guns and other systems. Alongside this, deckers engage in combat with AI systems and other deckers within the matrix and combat takes part in a similar manner to the physical world. 

As the player levels up, using karma, they can upgrade their stats to provide combat bonuses in different skills. These include the ability to use advanced decking equipment, improved weapon accuracy, better conversation options and more. 

Where can I get it?

Shadowrun Returns is available for PC(Mac and Windows), iOS, Android and Linux. Currently it is available on the Steam and Humble store pages. There is also a sequel out called Dragonfall which is available as DLC. Extra campaigns and stories are available via the steam workshop. I am currently playing through Shadowrun Unlimited which provides a very interesting campaign so far and can be found here.

What do you think?

Overall Shadowrun Returns is a very interesting RPG game, the included campaign is good and provides enough to whet your appetite however the inclusion of steam workshop and custom content support is what makes this game worthwhile. Already campaigns such as Shadowrun Unlimited and Jacked-Up have provided extended hours of gameplay and interesting and novel additions to gameplay functionality such as safe houses. Although this is the case, it would've been nice if more official campaigns were included with the base game.

The game itself follows closely to the original Shadowrun lore and ties the campaign into the mythos aided by the fact that Jordan Weisman, creator of the original Shadowrun started this project. This merger of cyberpunk and fantasy also makes for a very interesting setting which I personally enjoy a lot. Apart from this, the in-game artwork and background environments are beautiful and further emphasise the dystopian nature of the setting. The lack of voice recordings is offset by the (for the most part) well written story and appropriate soundtrack.

Rating : 8 / 10

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Email: markmmiller@hotmail.co.uk
Xbox Live: Dr Death MK 2
Steam: 7thsanctum
Follow @7thsanctum
Origin: 7thsanctum
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Global Game Jam 2014 - Face/Off and lessons learned

Over the weekend  I participated in Global Game Jam at the Edinburgh jam site. The goal was to make a game in 48 hours, starting at 5pm on the Friday with a deadline of 5pm on Sunday. The secret theme this year was a quote from Anais Nin, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are". After the theme was revealed we had some time to band together with everyone else at the event and come up with some pretty interesting and wacky ideas. Some people decided to make platformers where everything in the world was not as it seemed, others worked on an Oculus Rift horror game and several awesome ideas were thought up and discarded quite early on. 

One of the ideas I pitched was a game where you play in a standard FPS view against other players and the goal is to eliminate the other players. The main feature though was that at the start of the game the views of all the cameras are switched so that you would then be looking at another players view but you would still be in control of your own body. Through this 2nd person view point you then had to kill the person who had your eyes to retrieve them. Although this idea sounded quite interesting at the time it proved to be very complicated to play initially for many of the play testers. The gameplay itself when it worked was very good, mainly when two players who were trying to eliminate each other were looking at themselves and trying to take out their own view port. Sadly more often than not players would end up wedged in walls and completely stuck.

In the image below, Player 1 would be looking at the top left quadrant which is the camera view of another player. Their objective is to then work out which of the other bodies they are controlling and finally eliminate the player whose eyes they are looking out of.

Figure 1 - Original Game Idea

On the final night however we decided to add some alternative experimental game modes as we managed to get the initial game completed quite early. The first of these was a crowd hunting game, you play as a robot, mingling hiding in a crowd of other robots and your job is to find the other human player in the game who is also a robot and is also attempting to hunt you! This idea came about from one of the original ideas we had for the game which was that of crowds of NPC robots making it more difficult to spot yourself. After implementing them however we realised that it was actually more fun trying to spot others at all when people were trying to hide and blend in with the robots who were in the crowd.

Figure 2 - In-game Screenshot

Overall many lessons were learned over the course of the jam. The main one was that humans cannot survive  (and functional optimally) for 48 hours on purely chocolate and water. The other was that, it doesn't matter if your idea changes from what it was initially and new ideas that you come up with along the way shouldn't necessarily be restricted.

Anyways, although what my team and I made was not the most polished looking game it was a pretty interesting concept that we managed to make up in a relatively short period of time. Check out the video below to see a game in action.

Credits:
Mark Melville Miller (7thsanctum)
Sam Serrels (dooglz)
David Strachan (Halcyon)
Kenneth Benzie (infektor)

Our game jam page can be found here : http://globalgamejam.org/2014/games/face

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Email: markmmiller@hotmail.co.uk
Xbox Live: Dr Death MK 2
Steam: 7thsanctum
Follow @7thsanctum
Origin: 7thsanctum
Youtube: 7thsanctum
Github: 7thsanctum

Gaming Discussion - The Free-To-Play Model

Free-to-play mobile games are pretty rubbish. Here is why.

Recently, even more so than in the past. The free-to-play model for video games has become an increasingly popular method of marketing your game. In today's economic climate, why would you drop £40 on a so called 'AAA' title when it is just a rehash of previous game ideas or another sequel in a never ending saga.

You can have any character you want as long as he's brown haired and in his thirties

Originally the popularity of the free-to-play was due to several Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPG), such as Neopets and Maplestory as well as their ease of access. Practically anyone with a computer could play. Things got even better for free-to-play with the creation of Runescape by Jagex, a web based RPG with great graphics and sound gameplay. These games are still amongst the most widely played of the free-to-play games out there, and what they lack in sheer graphical fidelity and immersion that mainstream 'AAA' titles might have they make up for it in being wide reaching, affordable and not requiring advanced technology to run them.

It was no surprise then that the mobile gaming platforms of iOS and Android lapped up this model and soon a whole host of developers churned out so called "free-to-play" games like there was no tomorrow. This has led to a mass of games which are all identical in but name and graphical style. How naive was I to think that Jurassic Park Builder, The Simpsons : Tapped Out and Tiny Tower would have anything but identical gameplay. (I would mention many others as well but sadly I have no space here to list them all) They all follow the same format of building things, early on they emphasise the fact everything you do takes time (real time) and that you can speed things up with the use of money (real money). This inherently has nothing wrong with it, if your user is impatient why not give them the option to speed things up a little bit? That itself is fine, but when it gets to the point that a game is pretty much unplayable because you are sitting and waiting for the game to let you play then I think it is unreasonable. I got to a stage where the time it took to build a new floor was something along the lines of two real life days (48 hours), there is nothing else to do in that game other than collect rent and change the uniforms of your staff. There are no tactics, no thought. Nothing that can go wrong other than your lack of efficiency. It's matter of order building, collect money and then wait. Rinse, cycle and repeat. This can be said for every single of those games in those formats and is what I call preventative gameplay. Where a game actively tries to stop you from playing.

Another notable example is CSR Racing, a game in which you participate in drag races against other AI controlled cars. Each race requires a certain amount of fuel and you start off with around 10 units of fuel. Each race results in credits which you can then spend upgrading and buying new cars so that you can win bigger and better races, thus rewarding you with more credits. The main gripe I have with this game is the 10 units of fuel limit and the inability to just play races for the fun of it. If I use up all my fuel I have to pay real money to restock or wait through the timer. It's not like I can even play skirmish races that don't result in extra money but allow me to hone my skills. Of course, developers have to recoup their costs somewhere but I don't think it's fair for a game to advertise itself as free-to-play when in reality it's free-to-play (for a bit). It's not impossible to take this model and make it work.

Look at all those races I can't play 

Take for example World Of Tanks, a free-to-play tanks battling game much in the same way as CSR Racing has cars in it's garage you are instead filling up your garage with tanks. The main notable difference I find with World Of Tanks is that it does not restrict you from playing the game. At no point does it actively stop you from playing and ask you for money. Each tank battle nets you credits and before you head out into the next battle you need to repair and rearm your tank with credits. The amount you earn from a battle, even if you lost is usually more than enough to recoup the costs. I'm pretty rubbish and my tank finances are still in the black. Now is this model so hard to do? One of the incentives that the wargaming.net team always said was paying allows you to progress faster through the game. Double XP/Credits plus rarer tanks (which don't necessarily mean superior). Even other mobile games like Zombie Gunship don't stop you from playing just to ask for money. 

Not a single fuel indicator in site

There are many notable games out there that follow this free-to-play model that I would be more than willing to invest money into and have already done so in the past. Games such as Hawken, Age of Empires Online, Planetside 2, World of Tanks and Firefall stand at the forefront of my mind. Even notable games such as APB and Star Wars : The Old Republic switched from being subscription based to the free-to-play model and have been just as successful if not more so than in the past.

I think showing the player what they could get for subscribing but not forcing them too is always good.

The thing to note is all these games I have mentioned are PC games. Even Runescape and MapleStory are PC based games. Where are all the mobile games? Who knows my friend. Currently on my mobile device I have these free-to-play games; Zombie Gunship, Curiosity, Jurassic Park Builder, Showdown, Checkers and Wordament. Of all the games in this lot the only one I would put money towards are Checkers and Wordament and for those two I can't even work out how.

Do I think free-to-play is bad? Of course not, just certain ways companies and marketers push it out there harm it's effectiveness, sometimes even to the detriment of the game itself. This is what I think needs to change in free-to-play mobile games.

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Email : markmmiller@hotmail.co.uk
Xbox Live : Dr Death MK 2
Steam : 7thsanctum
Follow @7thsanctum

SIE App Jam Day - Super Trolley 2

On the 27th of February I participated in the very first App Jam hosted by the Scottish Institute for Enterprise at Napier Univeristy. The task was to make an application for mobile devices in less than 9 hours.

I decided to make a game in which you had to run around a supermarket and try to cram as much stuff into your trolley as you could within a certain time frame. (If you've ever seen Supermarket Sweep you will understand where the inspiration comes from)

I developed the game in Unity3D with the aim to get the core gameplay elements in and then port to Android. Since I didn't have much time I avoided spending too much time in sourcing or creating assets, instead finding the main items free online. I figured getting the game playing well was most important.

Figure 1. The Player's Character.

After setting up the scene and setting up a system for spawning different items along the shelves I had to create the player. My original plan was to have the player attached to the trolley via their hands, left clicking with the mouse would lift up the left arm and right clicking the right arm. This would mean that the player had to maintain control over the trolley whilst trying to swipe as much stuff off of the shelves as possible. Sadly though I couldn't get the arms acting the way I wanted in the time I had so I instead opted to attach the player to the trolley through the use of a spring and have the arms fixed in place, extended.

Figure 2. The player after collecting lots of items

After trying to get the arms working which was my main goal, I realised I'd spent too long on this part which meant other parts of the project suffered. I finally added in a method of counting up the players score and measuring time. The game so far includes 2 items but adding more won't be too difficult.

I have many places I wish to improve this game, people at the Jam seemed to enjoy the parts they played despite numerous glitches so I will work on this some more when I get a chance to. Hopefully with more time I will be able to get the arms working!

Anyways that's enough from me, I haven't slept enough over the past few days so I better catch up this weekend. See you guys next time. 

Oh and here is a quick gameplay video where you can see how it works as well as numerous problems, I will upload a version for webplayer soon when I get some of the problems fixed.

Also thank you to Darren Whigham for organising this event check out his twitter here for some cool game development stuff. Thank you also to SIE as well as Informatics Ventures and Codeplay for attending.

Let's Play - Sleeping Dogs

What is it?
Sleeping Dogs is a single player open-world action game developed by United Front Games along with Square Enix London Studios. You play as Wei Shen, an undercover police officer in the Hong Kong Police Department who is trying to infiltrate a Triad Gang, the Sun On Yee.

And doing a damn good job too

What is it about?

The game is a third-person, action/adventure with some minor role-play. It is similar to other big games of the same genre such as GTA, L.A. Noire and Assassins Creed but instead tries to make it's own mark by combining several different elements. Instead of playing a straight up Cop or Crook, you play as an Undercover detective. This gives you plenty of freedom to break the rules to maintain your cover which puts a focus on the criminal acts you perform as a means to get things done rather than blindly murdering everyone.

There's a reason for this violance so that makes it ok

Another interesting focus is the martial arts in the game. You don't get to use your first gun until much later on and even then they are sluggish and awkward to use. The combat flows very much like Rocksteady's 'FreeFlow' system from their Batman games, it is however not as refined being quite repetitive and sluggish at times. This is dwarfed however by the games use of Hong Kong as a setting, beautiful lights are contrasted against a city with a rich cultural heritage and mass urban sprawl.

Sleeping Dogs has a few pretty amazing "WOW" moments, the scenary and a few cinematic scenes will still surprise. Lighting effects are top notch and with the high-resolution texture pack installed, many characters look extremely detailed (dare I say, beautiful?). Flashlights occasionally appear on guns which demonstrate this even further.

I like shadows and lights ok?

One major drawback though is the stiff facial animations. This causes many cutscenes to be a let down which is exacerbated by the voice acting. Despite being set in Hong Kong and being influenced by many Hong Kong action films, the majority of the cast speak English in a distinctly american accent. Occasionally people will speak in Cantonese which is great, they even represented a few British and Indian characters too, but sadly this is not often enough.

As pretty as it is I don't expect it to win any wet t-shirt contests.

Where can I get it?
 Sleeping Dogs is available for PC via Steam and OnLive, PS3 and Xbox 360 for around £30.

Winston is pissed because he missed the steam sales...

What do you think?
Sleeping Dogs took a while to grow on me, I was hoping for a more "Hong Kong" experience  It's a step in the right direction though and has a few fun and quirky mechanics. Sadly the game is let down by awkward cameras, overly sensitive driving and poor facial animations. Gunplay pays a distinct homage to John Woo's action films but even this somehow feels wrong. The game acknowledges it's strong points, mainly the martial arts system and keeps that the main focus for much of it. If the designers made everything Cantonese I would've felt a bit better.

Not all of the games ideas miss their target

A good alternative to classics such as GTA but not quite matching it's impact on the genre. A fresh blend of elements, mechanics and an captivating story line keep this game original and fun.

I rate this 7.2/10

Check out the video below for some action packed footage of me playing Sleeping Dogs!

Let's Play : PAYDAY : The Heist

What is it?
PAYDAY : The Heist is a four-player cooperative shooter developed by Overkill Software. You play as one of four robbers (Dallas, Hoxton, Chains and Wolf) who work together on a series of daring heists which range from robbing a bank to breaching a hospital secure wing to steal a blood sample.

Wolf - Chains - Dallas - Hoxton

What is it about?
The game is a first-person shooter in a similar vain to Left 4 Dead but as a group of robbers you must work together to break through each missions security systems, whether that be blowing through walls or using thermite to melt through a safe. You start each heist with your weapons holstered, giving you a short while to scope out the area and set up your first objectives before you accidentally end up alerting the police. Hopefully you can guess what happens after.

My oh my, FBI! 

So far PAYDAY is a pretty fun game for four players. I have yet to work out how to unlock weapons or to change classes but the gameplay is simple enough to be grasped quickly yet complex enough to provide a deeper playthrough. As Overkills first title it is a good sign of things to come, with a good work ethic and team bonding come good games.

Waiting for the cops with a hostage

Where can I get it?
PAYDAY is available for the PC on Steam and Playstation 3 on the PSN store for around £15. Although in PC Gamer 245 they give out a free code for PC users, so get buying! Find out more from Steam here now!

The game allows you to take cops hostage too!

What do you think?
Overall I think that PAYDAY is a very good game, with a nice twist on the four player co-op genre it brings a few interesting features. It's gunplay is fast and intense and although with only 7 missions, each one is wildly different from the last, offering countless hours of replayability. Overkill is set to churn out more DLC in the future though. (Infact they already have one out plus a free mission set at No Mercy from L4D) I have to say that this game has its faults, silly AI, repetitive drilling and sawing sections which could be shortened, but even taking these into account it is great game. Not quite as refined as Left 4 Dead but definitely a welcome alternative.

The entrance to the First World Bank

Well thought out missions, excellent voice acting and a fun, fast experiance make this stand out. A few unexplained elements, too few new gameplay elements as well as dodgy AI drag it's score down.

I rate this 7.8/10. 

Check out the video below for some action packed footage of Craig, Scott and myself kicking butt!