It’s time to start thinking about how much to charge for Gun Monkeys.

I’ve always said I think I underpriced Time Gentlemen, Please! when I put it at £3 ($5). At the time, it seemed like a fair price for a non-talkie game in a dying/ dead genre. I quickly learned two things: a nicely-budgeted game comes across well in reviews (almost every review of TGP said it was a complete steal). The other thing is: you can always lower a price, you can’t put it up. So TGP has been £3 for the last 4 years, it can’t really go down from there.

I’ve got no interest in duping overcharging anyone, but money to help speed upThe Swindle’s development would be handy. So here’s some honest FACTS about the game:

- Gun Monkeys isn’t a huge game, but it’s infinite due to random generation, and you’ll get dozens upon dozens of hours of entertainment out of it honing your skills. Think QUAKE III or Team Fortress 2, it’s essentially replayable forever.

- There’s one game mode; the gameplay is 1-on-1 ‘Gibbage‘ deathmatch, where you need to top up your Power Core by harvesting Power Cubes. These cubes are in short supply, so you fight over them against someone else, online (local games are also supported). I’m not really interested in diluting that core experience with half-baked Capture the Flag variants just for the sake of padding it out. This is what the game is.

- Although the level structure itself is widely-randomised and infinite, there’s only so many planets, colours, times of day and weather patterns it’s ever going to be able to generate before arenas start to feel a bit ‘same-y’, even though that’s a HUGE number of ‘themes’. That’s something I’ll keep working on right up to release (and possibly beyond).

- All that said: I’m keen to get across the game is fucking good fun. I’m massively addicted to it. It’s a fraught, tense, sweaty affair that frequently has me screaming obscenities at the other player. It’s genuinely brilliant. It doesn’t need loads or fluff and filler to pad it out, it’s a honed, crafted, fat-trimmed game that supplies short, sharp jabs of frantic multiplayer mayhem.

I’ve got a price in mind. I’d be really interested in hearing what other people think. Do please comment below, or @ me on Twitter, or feel free to email me if your response is very long. Would love to hear your thoughts.

I know, this is arguably an impossible question until you’ve played it. Sorry. Here’s the trailer, to give you some idea:

(the trailer really really works best at 1080 resolution and fullscreen. please do, if you can)

SIZE FIVE GAMES is excited to announce the release of its next game, GUN_MONKEYS.

(the trailer really really works best at 1080 resolution and fullscreen. please do, if you can)

GUN_MONKEYS uses all the buzzwords. It’s a devastatingly-indie, Procedurally–Generated, Physics-based, Online Deathmatch platform game from multi award-winning developer Size Five Games.

“I needed a tiny break from my next game, The Swindle,” said Size Five’s Chief Executive of Game Development, Dan Marshall. “I’d been working so hard on it for so long I was struggling, creatively. I decided to take a break and remake the very first game I ever released, Gibbage. The result, after some significant tweaks, is GUN_MONKEYS.”

In GUN_MONKEYS, players take charge of a modern-day power company. In the distant future, a catastrophic experiment into Perpetual Energy obliterates all human life, leaving the world choc-full of free-for-the-taking energy. Your job is to send a legion of pleasingly-expendable monkeys forwards in time to collect Power Cubes and return them to present-day, all from the comfort of your PC.

Sadly, it looks like one or two other entrepreneurs have had the exact same idea.

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GUN_MONKEYS will go into beta shortly – anyone interested in taking part should follow @danthat on Twitter for details.

GUN_MONKEYS will be available on PC, Mac and Linux.

Press contact: dan@sizefivegames.com. Please do.

(The Swindle’s still very much in development. I just took a crafty break)

Hello! Fun Fact: I get emailed approximately three billion Composer showreels every single week! Generally I have a lovely long listen and think “man, if I ever needed a composer I’d definitely get in touch with this guy!” and then I don’t write their names down or anything so they could be anywhere.

So, here we are: The Swindle needs a clever music tech GENIUS. Is that you?

The Swindle’s music is an odd one. Its Steampunk (so needs all the rhythmic tick-tock, mechanical, classical scoring that you’d expect) but it’s also Cyberpunk, so needs some space-y, hacking, what-is-humanity-oh-god-my-arms-are-guns-in-the-future motifs.

Forgive me, I don’t speak ‘music’. One thing I’m definitely keen to avoid: 1960s Spy Caper music. Definitely not that, that’d be too obvious.

First thing that needs doing is I’ve got a trailer here that needs music QUICKLY. It’s about a minute and a half. From then on, I want to work closely with someone to craft a beautiful, amazing score that really enhances the game. Previous experience doing game music, and understanding how everything needs to hang together is a must.

You also need to be UK based. This is not because I’m racist, it’s because I really want to be able to meet in pubs, chew over ideas, get it right face-to-face, and I don’t think text can always do that where music is concerned (see description of Cyberpunk music, above). I want to work closely with someone who really digs and understands the project, someone who is passionate about getting it so, so, so very right and winning themselves awards for Best Game Music. I think for that to work, it’s best if we can meet in person, like awkward wobbly fleshbags.

Email me dan@sizefivegames.com with the subject I AM A MUSIC WIZARD, and if you can include a link to something you’ve done that’s even remotely similar to what I’m after that’d be amazing.

OOH: and let me know how much you cost, but don’t price yourself too high because I have very little money.

If you’ve found your way here by magic and want to know more about me, I’m @danthat on Twitter. If you want to know more about the project and see some screens, that’s here.

One of the things I’ve always been keen to try out in The Swindle is the idea that you can come back to the levels over and over. I didn’t want them to be like Green Hill Zone Act 1 where you whip through and never see it again, I want you to be able to explore and re-explore.

In order to keep that from feeling stale, I implemented a Day/ Night cycle, so the same level can feel varied depending on whether it’s an orange-y dawn, a purple-y dusk or pitch black night. Time of Day isn’t just about visuals, it’ll effect gameplay too. You’re harder to spot at night time, but they switch the lights on, for example.

Along with that, I’m adding in some weather, so it can now start raining. Here’s the tech of how it’s done.

(uh, you’ll probably have to click these screenshots to see what I’m on about)

The trouble is, raindrops are expensive; rendering every drop would slow everything right down. So first up, we’ve got a Plane with a simple seamless rain texture on it. That’s layered to the Background, and is only displayed by our Background camera. It has a little script attached to it that scrolls the texture, making it feel like rain.

Next, we’ve got a Particle System that spawns individual raindrops. Thanks to Unity4′s magic ability to have rain collide with World, rather than just planes, the raindrops themselves can be destroyed on contact with tiles and physics objects (stuff like the crates you see here).

As the raindrops are destroyed, they’re spawning two subemitter effects – the first is a simple splash to show impact. The second is a nice shader effect drawn in front of the objects, which distorts as it drips down.

Neither the RainDrop particle system itself or the heavy rain plane are particularly big; dropping rain over the entire map when you can only see a portion of it feels foolhardy. The WeatherSystem object was initially childed to the camera system, so they’d pan around with you, but this led to problems when you go into buildings, or underground. With the rain always spawning just above you but offscreen, it was possible to make it rain inside. So instead the WeatherSystem’s is its own object, and position is tied to the camera’s movements with certain restrictions in place. It never moves down below ground level, for example, so if you go deep into the sewers you won’t find it won’t suddenly start raining.

A few more Particle Systems attached to ledges and drainpipes for run-off, and it’s done! It’s amazing how something as simple as a spot of drizzle can completely change the tone of a level.

Hello there! Time for a quick update on The Swindle. It’s looking amazing! Where to start?

Tim’s still trying to get the AI up to scratch, and he’s re-written some of the core lighting code because it wasn’t really lighting anything up very well. All valuable stuff, but it’s taking time because they’re so bloody complicated. For example, guards sometimes shoot themselves in the face which, frankly, is probably the first thing they shouldn’t really be doing if we’re going to portray a relatively-believable environment. I’m not even going to pretend to understand what’s going on under the hood. Magic, I guess?

Meanwhile, I’ve been re-writing some of the stuff that just wasn’t good enough. Bombs are now lovely and tactile to use, with a new-look explosion that thankfully looks completely brilliant. I’ve also revamped a lot of the code that makes walls and objects destructible, which means there will be more noisy, destructive ways into buildings, should you choose.

I’ve also re-worked the style of the backgrounds, which now kind of suit the game more (and, critically, they’re easier to produce!).

Besides that, there’s loads of little details I’ll go into at a later date. Like pigeons! You can disturb flocks of pigeons, which flap about causing a scene and potentially alerting guards. Or bouncepads and spikes, which have recently gone in and give the game a proper Sonic-style platformer vibe.

All this, because I’m putting together a brief teaser trailer. I want to show off the game moving, and start doing some dev videos, but I’m reluctant to be showing off a buggy Alpha build as the ‘first look’ at the game. So I’ll put something glossy together first (hopefully by february), and then hopefully I can start showing off little bits and bobs from time to time.

If you want to know more, I tend to post new screenshots and details to my Twitter:

Last night, in a crowded pub called “Dirty Dicks”, a dozen or so indie devs gathered for a festive pint, a grumble, and some impromptu awards. It was a smaller, quieter affair than last year, because I haven’t got much time on my hands at the moment. Hopefully we’ll return for a full-on shindig next year.

However, there has been some excellence in indie games this year, and they deserve a mention. These awards are important, because winners are chosen by Indie Dev Industry Peers.

Here are the winners of The Golden Teabags 2012 in full:

Best Use of a Danny Wallace in a Videogame: Thomas Was Alone
Best Game No-one Played: Derrick the Deathfin
Weirdest Idea: Curiosity
The A… The Awa… The Awa FUCK. The Awar FUCK. The Award f FUCK. The Awa… FUCK! The Award for FUCK. The A… The Award forthebestmobi FUCK. The Awards for the best mobile gam FUCK! Super Hexagon
The “White Hole” Award for Stealing Time: FTL
The “ewww” Award for Bestest Killings and Blood: Hotline Miami
Best Instance of Keeping a Dead Genre Alive: Resonance
Twitter Popular Vote: FTL
Jammiest Kickstarter: Simon Roth for Maia
Best Game: Thomas Was Alone
Nicest Man: Alex Tutty, for a record second year running.

Following last week’s post about how we’re handling trendy-looking 2D in Unity3D, I had a few requests for a bit more info on what we’re doing Editor-side.

Here’s Tim again, explaining what on Earth he’s been up to:

We use Unity Editor extensions for lots of things, The Transform2D Inspector is an example of one we use to customise the editor to work better in a 2D game. It overrides Unity’s default Transform Inspector for object that have a Toolkit2D Sprite component attached. It simply cuts away all the information we don’t need for a 2D game; for example, we never have to rotate something on the x or y axis… it just doesn’t make sense in 2D, so we hide that data away and only show the z rotation, which the inspector surfaces as ‘Rotation’. We use Unity layers to separate objects in to different render layers, but there are also loads of other unity layers for special case physics filtering, so we have a Layer drop down on the 2D transform inspector that is filtered to just show the render layers.

The Enable Snapping Checkbox turns on our snapping tool. This is implemented as a delegate that hooks in to EditorApplication.update. Unity has an inbuilt snapping mode, if you hold down control whilst moving an object with the transform gizmo the position is updated in 1 unit steps. If there is a fractional position, the object keeps that. Our snapping tool is different; it always caps the X and Y position to an integer. This is important so we don’t get any gaps forming between world tiles. Unlike Unity’s snapping, it also works on scale. There is also some smart stuff in there to copy an object’s scale out of transform and in to the Toolkit2D sprite, which helps with performance.

We also use Editor extentions for data entry. A neat example of that would be the Day/Night system. For any time in the 24 hour cycle we can set a custom atmospheric colour. When we draw a frame, we interpolate between the two colours that are closes to the current in-game time. It’s a simple but effective system, but it relies on that colour-time list being easy to edit. As the data in this component is a list of classes, Unity’s default way of drawing its inspector proves… awkward.

Unity defaults to showing the whole list in a tree view, which is confusing to say the least. The custom inspector lays the information out in a table like structure. At the top we have some helper buttons to either clear the entire dataset, or to replace it with sample data. Each entry in the table has helper buttons to delete the entry, or to clone it up or down. The table sorts itself as the times are changed:

A lot of our tools are designed to visualise dynamic systems at design time. The Time of Day Slider here is an example of that, as you move the slider the day/night system updates in real time in the Editor, so we can see how changes to the data effect the game. For example, if the game was looking too bright at 3am, we can quickly set the slider to 3, and the table shows up what colours are being mixed at this time, along with the previous and next time marks. We can clone one of these entries, tweak the colour to something darker and fiddle with the time until we are totally happy with the look.

Some other examples of extensions that help visualize dynamic systems are our Level Tinting Tool (which helps us change the colouring of the entire level on the fly) and the Dynamic Rope Tool (which helps set the start/end points and tessellation values of a physically-simulated rope or cable)

Finally, we have really complex data creation tools, like the Waypoint Network Generator. We use A* pathfinding to allow the guards to navigate around the world. In the XNA version you had to lay out waypoints and link them together by hand, it was a cumbersome process to say the least. For the Unity version we have an editor extension that can automatically generate the waypoints themselves, as well as drawing the waypoint network in the Editor. We do this by spawning probes at a starting point. They follow along the platforms, periodically laying down waypoints. If the probes hit interesting objects like a locked door they lay down waypoints that have extra information to describe the obstacle. If a probe finds something like a staircase of a survivable fall, it spawns more probes on the other end to link the two paces together. In a matter of seconds these probes can explore an entire level and leave an accurate waypoint graph for the AI to use.

When generating the waypoint network we could do an entire level in one go, but as it is a long task we don’t want the editor to become unresponsive while doing. Instead, the generator is step-able When we are updating the waypoint network, the generator hooks in to EditorApplication.update and steps the probes once per frame. This lets us watch the probes travel around the world. Its a fantastic way to spot problems with the map or waypoint generator (it also looks totally cool and futuristic -D)

Different types of waypoint are drawn in different colours, while the lines between the waypoints show us how they connect together. For example, the falls from the platform over the door are one-way only. The dark green marker in a line shows the direction of travel allowed by the connection.

Hello. Dan again. So there you have it! Clever, eh? As ever, if you want to know more about The Swindle, the best thing to do is keep an eye on my Twitter feed.