GameDevBlog

Another interview: XNA Community Spotlight

Here's one with me and Bill:  http://creators.xna.com/en-us/community_main_feature4

Another Schizoid Spoiler On Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErQ2FGMug7w is The Gauntlet getting golded in uberschizoid mode.

I've never been able to do that - though I did do it in wingman once.

We're #1

A while ago I said that one day, Torpex Games would be the first hit if you did a search for Torpex on Google.

That day has come.

Last year's IGDA leadership forum talks available on DVD

Hey all, Jason Della Rocca just let me know that the talks from last year's leadership forum are available.  There are some really cool talks in there, by Greg Zeschuk, Ray Muzyuka, and Trent Oster of Bioware...by Don Daglow of Stormfront (rest in peace, Stormfront)...Mike Capps of Epic...Tim Gerritsen of Human Head...Clinton Keith...and a pretty funny one where Mike Capps interviews Tim Schafer.  And my, let's call it..."controversial"...Theory Of Drag talk is in there too.

Here's the link:  http://www.igda.org/leadership/?page_id=64

Our First Youtube Tip Video

Spoiler:  how to get one of our most difficult achievements - The Barber of Schizville.

Warms my heart.

Major Nelson Interview

Larry Hryb interviewed me over the phone about Schizoid for the Major Nelson show:  http://majornelson.com/archive/2008/07/11/show-285-schizoid-and-e3.aspx

Co-Optimus Interview

Just did an interview with Co-Optimus, the website all about co-op gaming.

Uberschizoid: it's not as hard as it seems

So back in the mists of time when I first started working on Schizoid I thought "Uberschizoid" - the mode where you control both ships with both sticks - was *the* mode.  Fortunately, Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias talked me out of that .  In kleenex tests I saw a lot of people try it once and throw down the controls - "Nobody can do that."

Which is fine, the main thrust of the game is co-op, so find a friend or play online, but if you want to try something really different...stick with Uber for a while.

I'm not a super uber gamer, but I can do it--I've beat the game at uber, and so has Bill--so let me share some of our tricks.  Humans can't truly multitask.  We joke about needing your corpus callosum severed in order to play the mode, but you don't.  Instead you find crutches that allow you to get by:

Some of these could be considered spoilers. 

One of the biggest problems is you forgot which stick controls which ship - particularly when they're on opposite sides of each other on the screen.  The "anti-panic lines" (those red and blue lines going from the corner of the screen to your ship) help here, but not 100%.  One good thing to do here is try to keep the left stick ship on the left and the right stick ship on the right most of the time.

Another good thing to do is to think of one ship as your "base" and the other ship as its satellite.  For the most part you fly the ships together, in the same direction, and when fighting heterogenous hordes you move the satellite around relative to the base.

Just like in co-op, you should almost never split up, except possibly on some of the breeder levels.  The further away they get from each other the harder it is to split your attention.

In pulsinator levels, once you've dealt with everything but the pulsinators, you can often just park one ship out of range of the bullets, then take out all the pulsinators of one color with one ship, then all the pulsinators of the other color with the other ship.

Even with all that, I haven't been able to gold the Gauntlet or Chophouse levels in uber.  Bill and one of our testers have golded Gauntlet and have proven it's theoretically possible to gold Chophouse...can't wait to someone do it on youtube.

The PAX 10

Woo!  Penny Arcade just declared Schizoid one of the PAX 10 winners!  Fantastic!  I love those guys.  First Draconus and now this.  And the timing couldn't be better.

So launch night was awesome!  Wild seeing the early leaderboard and achievement competition - a guy named SnapDragon singlemindedly plugged away at Uberschizoid mode and damn, he's good.  A huge Tiger Woodsish gulf between him and the next guy (for a while it was me but then I just had to go to sleep). 

Schizoid has two kinds of leaderboards:  "Stalker" - which is for points, and "Vanguard" - which is for highest level.  "Stalker" is the default view, so a lot of people have been doggedly trying to get gold medals, which is how you get the most points, on every level, one after the other.  We'll see how long they keep that up, some of the later levels are really hard to gold. 

The network play seems to be working awesome, if I do say so myself.  We've played with guys in Minneapolis, the UK, and Madrid and it's been pretty smooth and totally playable.

To sum up:  totally stoked. 

Schizoid Launches Wednesday!!!!

At 2 AM PST!!!! 

So we'll be staying up to watch it post.  (Why'd it have to be so late?  I'm old.)  And getting drunk.  Maybe we'll play some online games with total strangers.  Anybody wants to chat/play around then I'll be signed in as "Jamie Fristrom".  Pretty creative gamertag there, eh?

And once it's up, if you want to play a game online with me send me a message.  (I don't think I'll be too deluged with invites.  Once when the blog was more popular than it is now I invited random strangers to play chess and only got one response.  Made a friend for life, though.)