Robin's blog

As you've probably guessed, the Beatnik crew is taking some well earned R&R over the Christmas break. "Stuff" is still going on behind the scenes however it's being done at a much more leisurely pace.

To keep you all in the loop, before the next release we’d really like to improve the networking performance of the game. This isn’t something that we can guarantee will be done within a certain time frame so please bear with us, an update will eventually arrive!

In other news, we’re very happy to announce that Plain Sight will be published on Steam. All the paper work was finished up prior to Christmas so it’s now official, you’ll find Plain Sight nestling alongside other great indie games such as World of Goo and Audio Surf. Oh yes, whilst on the subject of Steam, feel free to join the Plain Sight Steam Group. We’re all on it and, so far, it’s proven to be the easiest way to get in contact with us individually...

Hope you all have a great new years eve - get drunk!

Happy Christmas everyone!

Check out the above Christmas card Declan sent us – it rocks!

To celebrate a (rather minor) update we’ve let a new influx of people into the beta test. Hurrah! Keep an eye on your email inbox for confirmation..

Also, for the beta testers, check out our events calendar for scheduled Plain Sight mash-ups.

Hope you all have a great day!

[EDITORS NOTE: due to our rubbish website CMS (and my inability to untick the 'send as HTML box') all the emails were sent with no formatting -how unprofessional! Well, what do you expect for 21:20 on christmas eve?! Anyway, I resent it and the build is up... ]

Hello world.

Firstly, a big THANK YOU to everyone who’s taken part in our pre-beta trial. Especially thanks to those who’ve found show-stopping fun-killing bugs. Don’t worry, they shall be fixed very soon; In the meantime, please keep posting your feedback. If you don’t tell us what sucks, we can’t fix it!

This week the office buzzword is “performance”. By the beta launch all you’ll need is a 486 and a 14.4 modem. That’s it, amazing! You see, we’ve harnessed the power of unicorn dust (also known as dandruff) so now every computer in the world should play the game just fine*. Happiness!

*Mr Bump says this isn’t true.

... and the iminant launch of the pre-beta


Oh, you lucky kittens. Hand plucked from our friends and forums to enjoy the wonders of Plain Sight a whole week prior to the beta launch. What joys and bugs you shall discover.

Ok, so it was a slow news week last week. Don’t worry we are doing stuff, however the most exciting stuff *coughpublisherscough* we can’t really talk about, so, here’s a brief run down on what’s going on.

By popular demand, Lawrence has been working full time on the camera. It’s now silky smooth and smarter than an Octopus (they're bloody smart). He’s telling me there still lots to do, so it can only get better. Alex is working on the ‘over the internet’ networking, it’s pretty technical and probably won’t be of much interest to you however it’s worth mentioning (to make him feel good)

News from the indie-games hemisphere; as previously mentioned, our good friend Tommy has made a better-than-kittens game called ‘Goo!’. No, not ‘World of Goo’ – just, ‘Goo!’.

Anyway, to celebrate the upcoming IGF (which, being suckers for punishment, we’ve entered Plain Sight into) here’s an awesome video he made last year.We approve.

Speaking of the excellent World of Goo, there’s been some flame wars/controversy on the intertubes. According to the developers, 2D Boy, it’s estimated that piracy rate is a whopping 82%. This makes us sad on the inside. Yes, we know it'll never disappear entirely. However, pirating an indie game is kinda like stealing from the homeless.

If you did find World of Good on the torrent sites (and enjoyed it) don’t be tight - cough up. It’s only $20, that couldn’t get you 4 pints of beer in London.

Whilst we’re trying to flog you stuff; ‘This is a Cry for Help’ is indie developer/artist Edmund McMillen’s life work – 10 years worth - all on one CD for a piss-tiny $10. You may not have heard of Edmund but you’ve probably heard of Gish and, if you flick through this list of games, comics, and sketch books , you’ll realise that this mere mortal has had a significant impact on all us indie-types. Lose some more money.

Here’s some free stuff (made by our fwends) for you to play.

by Edmund:

Meat Boy
Aether
The Badlands

by Adam : Gravity Hook
by Dock : Tumble Drop

After one of the most revolting post-birthday hangovers of my young life, it’s time to stick to my word and announce our second competition.

Up for grabs is the sole remaining Plain Sight poster from the Euro Gamer Expo as well as a free copy of Plain Sight. As promotional material goes, it’s about as sassy and sexy as you can get.

How can you get it? Simple, promote us.

To the right you’ll see a wonderfully pre-prepared Plain Sight image. You can find a silhouette here, and a high res version here. What you have to do is take this image and put it somewhere interesting. Then take a photo and post your adventures on the forums. The image/story that tickles our fancy the most wins.

While you could just print it, cut it out, and paste it onto a wall, feel free to be original! You could mow it onto your lawn, or decorate a cake with it, etc. Basically: just go nuts.

EDIT: Teams will receive group prizes. Sassier and sexier group prizes.

Things that’ll count:
1) Originality
2) Location
3) Size
4) How many people you roped in to help (the more the better)
5) Background story

We will announce a winner in two weeks.

Good luck!

Holy Moles! It’s London Games Week next week. That means if you’re a gamer with even the slightest shred of street-cred you’ll be hot-tailing it to the Eurogamer Expo next Tuesday and Wednesday. If you’re cooler than cold, you’ll be getting shit-faced at the Rock Paper Shotgun THINKOSIUM on the Tuesday night.

So, what have we been up to? Amazingness, that’s what. 

Basically Plain Sight is in a state now that we’re happy to send out and show to important people. Yes, it has a few bugs and yes, its missing quite a bit of the stuff we’re still working on but we think it’s a pretty good representation of what’s going to be hitting the interweb at the tail end of November.

This pre-beta build is going to be on show at the above-mentioned Eurogamer and pretty much anything else we’re invited to over the next few weeks.
However, as we know some of you lovely people won’t be able to make it to the event I keep continuously plugging so, as a Happy Friday The 24th Of October present, please find a link to a little video I recorded 15 minutes ago.  It’s totally unedited and, as I’m using the mouse controls, you may find the camera a bit sharp – however we’re finding it great fun to play! Swank!

ENJOY!

PS: you may notice the new dash / attack mechanism – it’s awesome.

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve got now, these fucking characters – they look like postman pat- they’ll change. The game you’ll finally make will be something totally different to what you’ve got now – it’s just the computer games way.”

I didn't believe it at the time - but it's true.

For the first couple of weeks, Plain Sight was a multiplayer stealth based combat game with a super advanced mêlée fighting mechanic. It was gritty, it was mean, it was “the most amazing game in the world” and we couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been made. Unfortunately, it could never work. Firstly, because it would have cost about 10 million to make. Secondly because online mêlée is, and you can quote me on this, FUCKING HARD.

Let’s take an early build of Plain Sight. You press the button, the player slashes his sword. Looks great and, on level ground, works. Now, give those robots the power to jump around a planet and move at the speed of Thor, God of Thunder. The likelihood of your player being within a certain radius of your opponent is pretty darn small. This makes it hard work for the players involved and, as work is no fun, the game is no fun.

“But but but but” I hear you say “I was playing Soul Caliber and Heavenly Sword – and they were the awesomeness”. Yes - Soul Caliber = two axis and single player games have the enemy AI throw caution to the wind and swarm you. So, it’s a problem.

Have we fixed it? Yes. We think we have. How? Sea otters. Lots and lots of sea otters, working around the clock 24/7. I guess we’ll find out tonight at the XNA:UK show and tell. If it gets the thumbs up, I’ll post a gameplay video on Monday – swank! EDIT: going to do a proper video, it'll be up by the end of the week.

PS: The above image was the first of Declans commissioned pieces for us... the original (found here) had a girl in the image. I personally prefered it without - what do you all think?

If so, join us at this year’s –super awesome- TIG Source TIG Jam UK

What’s TIG Jam? Well, it’s a three day event where young and upcoming game developers get together, drink beer, talk rubbish and make games.

The person/team who makes the best game by Sunday evening wins a mystery (AMAZING) prize and oodles of the stuff known on the street as “respect”.

If you haven't got what it takes to join a gang, curb stomp a stray cat or give yourself a tattoo with a rusty razorblade, you can still be the pimp-daddy. Make a game in three days. Easy.

Tickets are £25. Due to space limitations, there aren’t many of them.

Click on these words to find out more information.

Have a great weekend!

Alright folks,

As promised here’s an update of what’s going on:

Firstly, a date for your calendar. If anyone is London bound on Friday the 17th of October our friends at the XNA UK User Group have organised a ‘Show and Tell’ for Plain Sight and the incredibly awesome Sumo Squash at the Microsoft lair HQ near Victoria. If you’re poor and hungry, there will be free food and drink (perhaps booze).
Full details can be found here.

Development for Plain Sight has moved up a gear. It’s now the metaphorical 11 on the metaphorical guitar amp.

I’ll start on the tech side and move to the realms of artiness.

We’ve been lucky enough to enlist the services of Michael Lidgren. Michael is best known for his .net network library (originally named) ‘Lidgren.’ It’s totally free, open source and is now the backbone to Plain Sight’s multiplayer hootenannies.
‘Why do I care?’ you ask. Well, you should, because of the simple formula:  better the networking = more killer robots – lag + other cool stuff

Lawrence has been hard at work plugging in a new and improved gravity system.  Not only can you run up walls and all over the ceiling; you can now jump/fall off a platform and then run along its underbelly. Ace! Whilst working on this, we’ve been spending quite a deal of time getting the camera working just right. Not only does the game feel natural, intuitive, smooth (and similar such words) on an Xbox controller but also with a keyboard and mouse.

Although it’s not as sassy and sexy, it does deserve a mention - Alex has had the joyous task of hammering out the cockroaches from the Plain Sight code.

Thanks to The Audio Guys, the sounds are pretty much finished – there’s still a bit of tweaking and reworking to do, but this shouldn’t take long. Afraid there is still no news on the music, this is something we’re going to work on during the beta test.

Most of the work has been on the look and feel of Plain Sight. We’ve thrown in a new  cartoon shader engine. This will be something you’ll be able to turn on and off in game, so if you want that classic ‘pre-beta’ Plain Sight look, you still can but you’ll probably agree with us that the new look is cooler than unicorns.  

We’re now up to ten levels that we’re pretty certain are going to make the beta. Over the next month we need to play the living hell of them to make 100% certain they’re up to scratch. For a multiplayer game we feel that it’s quality not quantity; so we’re looking for as much feed back as possible from you guys during beta...

There is more stuff (like new sword slashes, spawn points etc ) but my fingers are getting tired. So, enough of me, jump over to the brand spangling new screenshots section for a gander at what we're up to.