Category Archives: Development

Out now: AVSEQ

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Big Robot’s first commercial game, AVSEQ, is here! We thought it might be a good idea to explain what it is…

BUT FIRST, LINKS:

Windows demo.

Mac Demo.

Buy Windows version for $5.

Buy Mac version for $5.

There is a SLIGHT DELAY in the payment being processed. I am sorry. Please do not hold your breath or you will pass out.

AVSEQ (which we pronounce “A-V-Sekk”) is an audio-driven game based on an installation design by our chief programmer, Tom Betts, who multi-classes as an artist and musician. The idea behind the project was to create a challenging, abstract action game in which you link up atoms to obtain a high score. As you do that, however, you unlock the underlying structure to each level, which is a musical sequencer.

Ah, so now we’re getting to the origins of that strange name. AVSEQ = audio-visual sequencer. As you play through the pretty-looking visual atom-linking element of the game you also activate the sequencer grid, creating musical loops. This process is random, so each level playthrough will create a different loop, based on the grid of sounds you are able to unlock on that level. Each AVSEQ level has 2.2300745198530623×10^43 possible audio permutations, thats 22 tredecillion in total. No, honestly, that’s a real number, we looked it up.

Anyway, moving pictures will help with the explaining, so here’s a new video trailer:

We will look at an iOS version too, if there seems to be enough demand for it.

Working On Fallen City…

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Hello! We’re still working away on Fallen City. It’s been bumped back slightly to March 2012, but will still be freely available to play, and still be about little dudes in a city. Here’s a couple of images from today. Firstly the scene view in Unity, the tool we’re using to make the game, as we try to figure out the best configuration for sound effects across the level.

And here’s a shot from the game itself:

Click both for full size!

AVSEQ Approaches!

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Our audio-visual sequencer game, the cunningly named AVSEQ, will be arriving in the next few weeks. We’re just polishing off some of the rough edges and putting together a demo for you. Initially it will just be available on PC and Mac, but we’re hoping to be able to bring it to a few other formats after Christmas. That’s really all the news for now, and the next thing you’ll hear a lot about will be AVSEQ, followed by the Fallen City release in the Spring of 2012.

Brooms & Bird Flaps: Major Milestones In Fallen City

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This has been a strange week to be developing a game about cleaning up a wrecked city full of angry people. Fallen City is our first (but not only) project, and it involves brooms, tea, anger, inspiration, and cats. It’s a commission by Channel 4 Education, who wanted us to create something which examined the value of living in a city. A British sort of city. That’s what we’ve done.

Fallen City is a place that has already been allowed to fall into ruin and dereliction. Its inhabitants are bored, frustrated, ultimately angry humanoid creatures, many of whom are so pissed off that they are in an near-comatose state. Others are boiling over with rage, and continue to destroy or block off parts of the city. The player’s job, then, is to find ways in which to dissolve this ennui and rage, to bring the city back to life from dereliction. Fallen City looks a bit like management games of old (perhaps a hint of Dungeon Keeper in there) but it’s actually a sort of puzzle game. Figuring which buildings to create from the ruins you renovate, based on the kinds of staff you have available, is the main challenge for the player. If you want sort out the problems in an entire district, then you’ll need to make the right decisions about what that area needs. Getting 100% out of a level means cleaning the whole thing up, and choosing the right skills to unlock all the abandoned streets and annexes.


(Click for full size.)

There’s a little more to it than this, however, because we tried to reflect the implications of things like Broken Windows Theory, and also everyday experiences about how people feel when faced with urban environments. Our little creatures – Angries, we call them – are hyper sensitive to ruination, and will become extremely miserable if exposed to too much dereliction and abandonment. Push them too far and their energy – their attention span – will fail, and they’ll retreat to somewhere they feel comfortable. They might need a bit of cheering up – through music and street performance, for example – before they’re ready to help out. By default the Angries aren’t particularly interested in anything, and a few of them are swollen purple with rage at the world, the world that has promised them so much and then denied them it.

Yes, we’re playing with some odd metaphors for a videogame, and that stuff is even more stark this week, but I think what we’re prodding has a few different layers. This isn’t just social, it’s also about the material, functional nature of what cities are: Machines for living in, battlesuits for surviving the future. Infrastructure, we’re arguing, is too easily overlooked, but it shouldn’t be because it is bound together with making life liveable. The Angries need to bring their Idea Yards and the Curry Pumps back online if they are to remember why their city is such a valuable place, and how all the stuff it already has in place – its roads and pipes and cables – exist to look after them. We bring those unnoticed physical aspects of the city into focus, and allow the player to bring them back to life, and remember how and why they make life liveable for city-dwellers.


(Click for full size.)

We’ve done an enormous amount of work to get to this stage – as is evidence by comparing the most recent images above with a shot from the prototype, below – and I’m regularly breathing sighs of relief as the other talented Big Robot members and contractors make huge strides towards completing the game each day. This week alone has been a torrent of bird flap noises, exploding cats, weird goblin noises, and even minor moments of emergence.

This is the first game I’ve made since I tried to put something together with a chum aged 14, so it’s been quite an experience.

And, yes, it’s all come into sharp focus this week. A week of terrible events in real British cities, and week where our own Fallen City hit a major milestone. It’s a proper game, now, and there’s a strangeness to it echoing events in the real world. The issues we’ve been mulling over in cartoon, digital form have come into stark clarity, and that makes me hope that the game seems appropriate and interesting when it appears for you to download (free on the internet). If nothing else, we’re now working on something shockingly relevant, and that alone has made me want to get it just right.

You’ll find out more about that when the game arrives early next year.

April Update: Hello, Blimey. Fallen City, AV-Seq, The Bunker.

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It’s been a while since we had an update on here, so I thought I’d say a few things about how we’re getting along.

Our Channel 4-funded project, Fallen City, is storming ahead (as you can see above) and we’ve now got our angry little chaps wandering about in cities that are part placeholder, part final art. It’s a lovely feeling to see the vision we had for the game being slowly filled in with the details required to make it real. The two artists we have working on the game are doing a great job, in spite of the strange brief we gave them, and the occasional problems generated by myself and James (my co-designer) really not being artists in at all. We’re also really getting to grips with bug-hunting, and okay, wow, we’ve managed to create, identify and (hopefully) expunge some exotic Ouroboros worms of design-meeting-code-meeting-design.

Fallen City, as I’ve mentioned before, is an educational title about appreciating cities. The tagline will be something like “Get The Fallen City Back On Its Feet!” That’s precisely what you’ll be doing. Turning a delapidated, abandoned city into something beautiful and alive. It’s a sort of a metaphor for reciprocity in living, in which you prod the resident “Angries” into tidying up the city and, ultimately, causing them to drop their cynicism about the place they live in. Having realised that taking care of the world around them means that the world takes care of them, the Angries become something else. Maybe not Happies, but certainly something less frowny. It’s an odd little game, but it’s starting to have real character, and I hope people will take to it.

Our impossibly industrious programmer and 3D graphics master Tom has also been putting the finishing touches to a project that he started way before Big Robot began flexing its pneumatics. That’s AV-Seq, which you can see an image from, below.


It is, as the title might suggest, an audio-visual sequencer game. Nodes fall from the top of the screen and must be connected according to colour and the detonated in the sequencer grid below. Detonations open up patterns within the sequences, which is based on the musical track that is playing underneath. The patterns create their own sort of melody over the top. It’s shaping up to be a fine musical puzzle game, and it’s already rather mesmerising. We’ll have more on this soon, I suspect, because it might well be our first proper release.

Much further away, in the realms of strange experimentation, we are producing things that look like this:


This is our other, more ambitious spare-time project. I am playing games like Stalker and Darwinia as part of my research for it. We’re designing clever, polygonal robots to live in it. It also has a name: The Bunker. This is our long term plan, and something that we’re going to have to raise money for to make in the way it deserves. It’s going to be the project that – in a nonetheless lo-fi indie sort of way – expresses my interest in open, living worlds, and also robots. Robot ecologies. More on that soon.

What We Are Building In Here

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Last week Channel 4 announced the project that I’ve been describing, cryptically, as “Game One”. The proper working title is “Walking City”, although I suspect that too will change in the next couple of months. We’re describing it as a “strategic, urban puzzler”, but really it’s a game with genes from Dungeon Keeper, Animal Crossing, Theme Hospital, The Sims, and even Lemmings. It should – Gods of game development willing – be perfectly indie PC, with an interesting core game mechanic, funky lo-fi visuals, and a playful attitude.

Walking City is a project I came up with in collaboration with Alice Taylor at Channel 4, who was looking for games that might fulfill her educational remits for the indie game budget. I wanted to do something about the value of the future, and the value of cities, both of which seem, of late, to have been somewhat reduced in their placement on the stock market of our imagination. Creating a game that was about reclaiming a city came to mind, and this developed into something which will be both an interesting exercise in anti-dystopian playfulness, and an offbeat take on familiar ideas about strategy games. The Walking City is about starting with things in ruins. This is no blank slate, as you might expect with SimCity, but instead a catastrophe of cynicism and neglect. It’s about helping the people that remain in a collapsed civilization to pull themselves out of the hole. It’s also going to be a game about /influencing/ the people in the city, rather than simply telling them what to do, and it’s working on the idea that if you clean up and fix one thing in an environment than that will have a knock on effect for everything and everyone else in its area of effect. This throws up some really interesting design challenges, of course, particularly in how you keep such a system simple and comprehensible. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I find interesting about game development. Also, it’s one of the things I find interesting about education: finding ways of reaching people without being preachy, condescending, or basically rubbish.

Walking City is not without jeopardy, of course. We are planning on filling the city with many of the threats and destructive influences that real world cities throw up – and we’re doing that from the top and bottom ends of our imaginary society. Of course I’m all about the mechanical game, the systems, too, and I’m hoping it’ll be a decent challenge, as well as fulfilling the other criteria that a Channel 4 game is expected to meet. It’s about as exciting as an opening project could be, not least because the Channel 4 funding means we can tackle it without fear of not being able to complete it.

We’re building the game using Unity, an engine which RPS readers will be vaguely aware that James Carey and I have been dabbling with since we made the RPS game, Shotgunity. It’s been a bit of a surprise for me, since I have almost no practical skills whatever, finding that Unity is straightforward enough not just for me to follow what is going on, but to have some input at a technical level. Not only that, but it’s a solid way for us to manage the project, and to control versions via the asset server. We discovered all this this largely through our work on Game Two. I’m not even going to say what the working title for that game is, since it’s basically ridiculous, but I can explain a little about what the game is, and why we have been working on it.

Game Two was about warming up for the Channel 4 project, getting us familiar with Unity as a working environment, and working together on something. But it’s also about Big Robot being a bigger thing than one commissioned project. This is intended to be the start of something long-term, something that will allow me to investigate some of those ideas I’ve always suspected might be cool or interesting when I was working just as a journalist. Procedurally generated worlds, robots, survival, and plenty more besides. It’s a big game, and it’s going to take a long time to finish. So far, at least, we’re really enjoying it, but don’t expect to see much more than odd screenshots before the end of next year.

More, er, soon (ish).