For me, Starhawk represents a lot of firsts.

It’s the first time I’ve worked with a startup. LightBox was formed from the remains of Incognito after we finished Warhawk and its expansions, so I’ve been with the studio since Day One.

Incognito was based in Salt Lake City, Utah, but we wanted to move LightBox to a more active creative center. That led to my first interstate move, to beautiful Austin, Texas!

When we formed LightBox I was the only game designer on the team. I guess I became lead designer by default. It fell to me to hire a team of designers, another first for me. Fortunately I landed a great crew!

Starhawk is also my first full-featured AAA title. Sure, Warhawk had the production value, but it was multiplayer-only. This is the first time I got to work on a AAA game with not only great multiplayer, but also a story-driven single-player campaign, which is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I got into the industry.

It’s the first time I, personally, had serious media exposure. On Warhawk I gave an interview or two, but on Starhawk I was doing the full rounds, both at our unveil event in downtown Austin, and later at my first E3.

I also got to attend GDC for my first time (and my second!) while Starhawk was in development. I met a lot of new people and learned a ton of amazing things there; GDC has since become the one thing I most look forward to each year.

Late in development I had the opportunity to speak (alongside colleagues Trent Polack and Matthew Gallant) at Juegos Rancheros, a local gathering of game developers, about the relationship between Starhawk and my indie work. It was my first ever public speaking engagement. (It could’ve gone better.)

As a lead I was exposed to lot more of the inner workings of the game development business than I ever had the opportunity to see before. Not just tech and process, but also publisher relations, marketing, financials… the works. For the first time I got a very real, practical sense of how much it costs to make a AAA game, and where all that money goes.

I’ve been in the industry about seven and a half years now, and LightBox is the first studio — and Starhawk the first project — where I experienced really loving my career. On the flip-side, it’s also here that I’ve had to deal for the first time with real frustration over creative differences (because this is the first time I’ve actually cared enough to be invested in them). And unfortunately, it is NOT the first time I’ve had to endure an end-of-project crunch.

But I guess that’s creative work for you: the greater the distance between the highest highs and the lowest lows, the more likely you are to be working on something special.

So what’s next?

Just like with Warhawk, we’re planning extensive post-release support for Starhawk, starting with our launch-day announcement that all DLC maps will be made available free of charge. We’ve released early concept art for the first such map, named “Cypress” (no release date announced, yet):

As for me personally: if you’ve followed this blog at all you’re probably aware of my indie project Fail-Deadly and its impending iOS port.

Due to several months of crunch on Starhawk, all my indie work has been completely on hold. But now that Starhawk is on shelves, I should be getting back in the saddle and finishing up the iOS version of Fail-Deadly, hopefully this summer.

In the meantime: enjoy Starhawk, and I’ll see you online!

You have to get back on the horse.  Somehow, and I don’t know how this kind of thing starts, we have started to lionize horseback-not-getting-on:  these casual, a priori assertions of inevitable failure, which is nothing more than a gauze draped over your own pulsing terror.  Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is.  What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you.  And it does, actually; it does.  Go look outside.  You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.

FUCK. YES.

In the end, all I could think about was Ashley.

I met her at the beginning of Mass Effect, on Eden Prime. She was the sole survivor of her squad. I could relate: I’d lost a squad of my own, back on Akuze.

On Virmire, when the shit hit the fan, I saved her without hesitation.

I remember she liked poetry. Especially Tennyson.

Then the Normandy SR-1 went down. I died, and woke up in a Cerberus base, rebuilt from the ground up. Early on, Mass Effect 2 showed no signs of bringing back any of the old crew, Ashley included. I remember being disappointed. Miranda was no substitute.

Then we landed on Horizon, and Ashley was there. She thought I was dead, but the joy lasted only so long as it took her to realize I was working alongside Cerberus. Suddenly she was suspicious, cold. I wasn’t the Shepard she remembered. And just like that, it was over.

Miranda became a little more attractive after that, but I still remember the twinge of guilt when she came to my cabin the night before our suicide run through the Omega IV relay. It should’ve been Ashley in that cabin… but it wasn’t to be.

We jumped through the relay and destroyed the Collector base. We survived, and I cut ties with Cerberus for good.

Then the Reapers hit Earth, and while preparing for a mission to Mars to recover the blueprints for what would eventually become the Prothean Crucible, I ran into Ashley again. She’d made Lieutenant Commander, come a long way from the Gunnery Chief I met back on Eden Prime. She was wary, unsure I’d really cut ties with Cerberus, but I convinced her to join me on the mission. I’d prove I was the Shepard she really remembered.

On Mars, Ashley was nearly killed by a rogue AI. We barely managed to get her to the hospital on the Citadel. I remember going to visit for the first time. There was a gift shop there. Flowers, chocolates… and a Tennyson anthology. I looked forward to seeing her reaction when I gave it to her. It’s the little things that matter most.

She was still comatose. She looked like hell. We couldn’t talk. I said a few unheard words and reluctantly went back to saving the galaxy.

I remember she sent an email a while later. I was light years away. She’d been offered a SPECTRE position by Councillor Udina. The second human SPECTRE — a hell of an accomplishment. She’d earned it. I was proud.

It led to me pointing a gun at her, and she at me. Udina had betrayed humanity, and she was protecting him. She hadn’t realized his treachery. That situation almost got real, real ugly. I think the only thing that held it together was that she and I, we knew each other better than that.

I remember we united the galaxy, together, to take the fight to the Reapers.

I remember saying our goodbyes in the ruins of London. I remember her saying, “I don’t want you to go.” But I had to. We had to. This was it.

I remember making a run for the Citadel beam, dodging laser blasts from the Reaper that had intercepted us. Ashley was right behind me. We were almost there.

And then I was down. I remember the hopelessness, the desperation in the radio calls. “They’re all down.” “Nobody left alive.”

I staggered to my feet, badly wounded. Bodies lay strewn about. I saw a woman in blue armor lying face down just ahead. Ashley wore blue armor. Please, no.

I took a bullet from a Marauder that came out of nowhere, and by the time I put it down and looked back, the woman in blue armor was gone. Maybe I’d been disoriented in the fight? Where was Ashley?

And then I was in the Citadel beam, being pulled up, and I found myself in a room full of corpses. Ashley, Ashley, are you in here? God, I hope not. Where are you?

I stumbled through this unfamiliar part of the Citadel and found the controls to open the docking arms, which would allow the Crucible to connect: our last, best hope to destroy the Reapers. Admiral Anderson was there, and the Illusive Man too, clearly indoctrinated. Shortly, he was dead.

I remember slumping down next to Anderson. We were both mortally wounded, two career soldiers who knew their times had come. I felt for Anderson, my loyal friend from the beginning, but really I just kept hoping for Ashley to burst into the room, alive and bringing hope. She didn’t. For all I knew, she’d been incinerated by the Reaper.

At least we’d gotten to say goodbye.

Things got pretty surreal after that, but in the end I was faced with a monumental choice: take control of the Reapers, as the Illusive Man would have; fire the Crucible and destroy the Reapers, as we originally intended; or assimilate myself into the Crucible and synthesize all organic and synthetic life in the galaxy into a single form, ending the need for the Reapers’ cycle altogether. In every case, my own life was forfeit.

It was supposed to be a philosophical dilemma, that much was clear. Deciding the fate of the galaxy, and all that.

But all I could think about was Ashley.

Take control of the Reapers? Then I’d become what the Illusive Man had been. It might’ve saved Ashley, but she’d be devastated by that choice: it’d be easier for her if I died, than for me to become… that.

Synthesize all life in the galaxy? It would end the war, but the Ashley I know and love would cease to exist. Not much salvation, there.

So I fired the Crucible, destroyed the Reapers, and died hoping that Ashley would be safe. My last thought: I’ve made her lose me twice.

At no point in making this decision did I give the slightest shit about the rest of humanity, about the Turians or the Asari, the Quarians, the Krogan, or any of the other races. I had united the entire galaxy behind me, and in the end, all that mattered was a Gunnery Chief I met on Eden Prime.

–

To be clear: I’m not actually in love with a video game character. But Mass Effect is a role-playing game, and I’m the sort of gamer who takes the “role-playing” seriously. Throughout this trilogy I lived the saga of Commander Shepard, and Ashley Williams was a powerful part of that saga.

I wrote this narrative to illustrate a point: Mass Effect made me care about a character so much that I made the most important, most final decision of the entire trilogy based on what I thought would make her happy. The choices on the Crucible are all brutal, to be sure. There was no clear “right” answer, if you were thinking in terms of saving the galaxy. But thinking in terms of saving Ashley? That choice couldn’t have been clearer.

I have never in my history of gaming experienced so profound a realization as this: Mass Effect, for me at least, created empathy. Real, true empathy. I can’t think of a single other video game that’s done that.

There are people who say that games and stories are fundamentally opposed. Ashley only meant anything to me because of the choices I made: this kind of empathy could not have been done in a non-interactive medium. I finished the Mass Effect trilogy my way, and I’m still thinking about Ashley, and it’s not just because of the story: it’s also because of the game, because I had the opportunity to choose to make a selfless decision for the good of someone I cared about.

And I say that’s proof-positive that games and stories can be a match made in heaven.

A while back I noted an article by Adam Saltsman where he gave similar advice:

Ultimately, whether you are aiming for big games or small ones, or somewhere in between, my advice is the same: start creating something right now, and keep doing it every day.

Well, here’s another voice speaking up in favor of the direct approach, Loot Drop’s Elizabeth Sampat:

That’s the big lie. There’s no “breaking in” to game development. Waiting for your break is like standing outside of a public library waiting for someone to invite you in. If you have the love and the drive, you can walk through that door on your own.

You really should go read the whole thing; it’s a great story. But I especially wanted to point out this gem, from her response to a commenter:

When I was making (and self-publishing) these little games, and I got my first job interviews, and I thought SHIT! What do I put on my resume? I’ve been taking shit jobs so I had more time to make my games! It took a friend actually reminding me that the games I made counted, and were why I was being offered the interview in the first place. It is incredibly easy to de-legitimize the games you make on your own, but you’ve got to fight that urge. Take yourself seriously and other people will, too

I think Elizabeth is spot-on here, and I think this de-legitimization is the thing that makes people think they need to go to school, or get to know someone on the inside, or carpet-bomb studios with empty resumes: they’ve convinced themselves the games they might produce as amateurs have no value. Sure, those games might not sell, but with every game you make you learn a little more about what to do and what not to do, about what you’re good at and where your skills gaps lie, about what ideas you have in you to express, and about how you can put it all together without killing yourself in the process. The skills you develop, and the knowledge you gain about yourself, are both infinitely more important to studios than your college degree or your social connections. And I know what I’m talking about: I was personally responsible for hiring the entire design team at LightBox, and I’m telling you right now what I did and did not look for in making those decisions.

Now stop reading this stupid blog and go make a game, already!

It’s a little trickier with Fail-Deadly, since most of the game’s exposure is to random folks all over the world via the Internet, people I will most likely never meet. But fortunately for me, some of those people have a hobby of their own: playing games and posting video recordings of their playthroughs to Youtube. I’ve known about the “Let’s Play” phenomenon for some time, but I didn’t figure a little hobby project would find its way onto that radar.

But that’s the cool thing about the freedom of information: anyone can play and post anything, no matter how niche. And suddenly, lo and behold, I’ve got a whole playlist of people playing Fail-Deadly. Some even have running commentary! Design jackpot!

I particularly enjoyed this one, by Youtube user crazyofengland. He seems so emotionless at the start, and then a few minutes in he just totally panics and starts cursing and losing his shit. It’s amazing.

But entertainment aside, there is one very surprising, interesting, and slightly embarrassing thing that I discovered in pulling this playlist together: a plurality of players seem to be experiencing an issue whereby none of the projectiles, score pop-ups, or certain effects are rendered. I had received a bug report via Twitter a couple months ago about missing score pop-ups, which I’ve never been able to track down, but because the reporter is Russian I’ve been chasing a theory that the bug had to do with that locale (e.g. an issue rendering the Russian character set). But seeing this trend in the playlist, I don’t think that’s the case. It’s too early to say for sure but I think it may be a z-sorting issue of some kind. Question is, what’s the common element among the players who are seeing the issue? My best guess at the moment is that they’re all on Windows Standalone builds, but that seems too broad.

It sucks, because the players who aren’t seeing projectiles are seeing a pretty unpolished presentation. And worse, not seeing score popups means an entire layer of gameplay — combo bonuses and quick drops — is entirely invisible.

Anyway, consider the bug added to the list for version 1.2… and God bless you wonderful Internet people for uploading gameplay videos.

Check it out:

And vote for Fail-Deadly at New Challenger’s Facebook page! I’m currently getting trounced by the excellent-looking Rainbogeddon, but we can try, right?

Note: The images throughout this article are scaled down to fit this blog’s formatting; just click an image to view it at its original size.

Who This Article Is For

I’m going to present a brief overview of a number of techniques I’ve used to create a classic 2D “pixel art” look in Unity. This article is not a beginners’ tutorial: I’m assuming you already know how to use Unity in a 3D context and are just looking for some pointers on how to make it work for 2D pixel art.

Sprite Setup

The first thing to understand is that even though you’re making something that looks 2D, it’s still technically a 3D scene. Each sprite in the scene is a single, textured quad, positioned in 3D space just like a regular model.

You’ll need to create and import a quad to use as your mesh. I made mine in Modo, my modeling package of choice. It’s just a simple one-sided quad, 1 unit to a side, with its face normal pointing down negative Z. I also applied a planar UV projection to normalize UVs across the face.

Why is it important for the quad to face down negative Z? Because you want to set up your game camera facing down positive Z in Unity so that world XY correspond to screen XY, and that means the quad will need to face the opposite direction so that it’s facing the camera, and thus can be seen.

Incidentally, you may be wondering if you can just use Unity’s built-in Plane primitive instead of modeling your own quad. I don’t recommend this, because the Plane primitive actually consists of a 10×10 quad grid, meaning each sprite will render 100 times the amount of geometry that you actually need!

In Unity, you’ll import your quad and then set up a prefab consisting of a MeshFilter and MeshRenderer, so that the mesh can be seen. You can make prefabs for different game objects – enemies, pickups, effects, etc. – like you would in 3D, just making sure that they all use this quad model.

Texture Atlassing

To create different sprites you’ll need different textures. The simplest way to do this is to assign a different material to each sprite prefab, which contains an image of the sprite you want, but this actually has a nasty hidden performance cost. Every unique texture in the scene triggers a GPU context switch at runtime; the more unique textures you have, the more context switches have to happen every frame, and thus the worse your frame rate.

You can solve this problem by creating a sprite atlas. This is just a single texture with all of your sprites contained in it, in a grid:

Each sprite prefab has the same material assigned (more on the material assignment in a minute). You can write a simple script to handle the atlas lookup: just expose four numbers – min X, min Y, width, height – and then programatically set the sprite’s UVs to match that rectangle. Here’s the UV assignment code I used (note that you have to flip the V coordinate when translating from texture space to UV space, otherwise your sprite will be upside-down):

Vector2[] uvs        = new Vector2[m_mesh.uv.Length];
Texture texture        = m_meshRenderer.sharedMaterial.mainTexture;

Vector2 pixelMin    = new Vector2((float)m_currentStrand.frames[m_animFrame].x / (float)texture.width,
                        1.0f - ((float)m_currentStrand.frames[m_animFrame].y / (float)texture.height));

Vector2 pixelDims    = new Vector2((float)m_currentStrand.frames[m_animFrame].width / (float)texture.width,
                        -((float)m_currentStrand.frames[m_animFrame].height / (float)texture.height));

// main mesh
{
    Vector2 min = pixelMin + m_textureOffset;

    uvs[0] = min + new Vector2(pixelDims.x * 0.0f, pixelDims.y * 1.0f);
    uvs[1] = min + new Vector2(pixelDims.x * 1.0f, pixelDims.y * 1.0f);
    uvs[2] = min + new Vector2(pixelDims.x * 0.0f, pixelDims.y * 0.0f);
    uvs[3] = min + new Vector2(pixelDims.x * 1.0f, pixelDims.y * 0.0f);

    m_mesh.uv = uvs;
}

The principle behind this is quite simple. UV space represents a percentage of each dimension of the texture:

Calculating the actual UV values for a particular sprite rectangle is tedious. It’s much easier to express the sprite rectangle in pixels, especially since Photoshop’s Info panel shows you the cursor’s current pixel coordinates and the pixel size of the selection:

So, the code simply divides the pixel coordinates by the overall texture dimension to get a percentage along each axis, and voila: valid UV coordinates!

(Remember the gotcha, though: the V coordinate has to be flipped!)

My script actually does more than just assign a static set of UVs: it also functions as a simple animation manager. Since you can set UVs programatically, it’s easy to define an array of different UVs in sequence which define each of the frames of an animation, then programatically swap the UVs at the appropriate rate in order to animate the sprite. My script is simple, and requires manually entering pixel coordinates for each frame of each animation strand, which is admittedly tedious… but since I don’t have a ton of animation data, it’s been acceptable thus far. It would be straightforward (though beyond the scope of this article) to extend the editor to improve the process, for example by visually selecting rectangles directly on the texture in the editor UI.

Sprite Shader

Your sprite still needs a material to reference your texture atlas, and for that you need a shader. The most obvious choice is the default Transparent Diffuse, but even this simple shader does more than you need (such as supporting per-pixel lighting, which you’re probably not using in a traditional 2D sprite-based art style). Unlit Transparent Cutout is simpler, but we can get simpler still. I wrote a custom Sprite shader which is as bare-bones as I could get it:

// Custom sprite shader - no lighting, on/off alpha

Shader "Sprite" {
Properties {
    _MainTex ("Base (RGB) Trans (A)", 2D) = "white" {}
}

SubShader {
    Tags {"Queue"="Transparent" "IgnoreProjector"="True" "RenderType"="Transparent"}
//    LOD 100

    ZWrite Off
    Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha 
    Lighting Off

    Pass {
        SetTexture [_MainTex] { combine texture } 
    }
}
}

(I suspect this can be cheaper still, but my knowledge of ShaderLab is limited at best.)

Texture Filtering

If you’re going for the “pixel art” look, then it’s absolutely critical that you set your sprite textures to use Point filtering mode, not the default Bilinear. Point filtering preserves hard edges in the source texture, keeping your sprites nice and clean:

You’ll also want to disable Mip Map Generation (mip maps make faraway textures look better, but this only applies to a 3D perspective view) and check your texture compression settings. If you’re building for iOS the default compression setting is some flavor of PVRTC which will ruin pixel art. The most accurate setting, but also the most memory-intensive, is RGBA32. Since most pixel art uses a limited palette, you can typically get away with RGBA16 with no visual degradation, and reduce the memory footprint of the texture by half. If your sprite doesn’t need an alpha channel (perhaps this texture atlasses a bunch of background tiles?) then set RGB16 to save additional memory by discarding the alpha component.

Camera Setup

For a typical 2D style, you’re going to want to use an orthographic camera. With an orthographic camera setup, objects do not get smaller as they recede into the distance. This allows you to use the Z (depth) axis as a layering mechanism, controlling which sprites draw on top of which while ensuring everything still lines up nicely.

Place your camera at the world orgin (0, 0, 0) and orient it to face down positive Z. Take note of the world axis display in the viewport: note that when you’re facing down positive Z, world X corresponds to screen X (increasing to the right) and world Y corresponds to screen Y (increasing from bottom to top). This makes it very easy to a) think of your game in traditional XY coordinates, b) translate between world space, screen space, and GUI space (more on that in a minute).

Orthographic Size

If you’re going for the “pixel art” look then the camera’s orthographic size is of critical importance; this is the trickiest part of nailing 2D in Unity.

The orthographic size expresses how many world units are contained in the top half of the camera projection. For example, if you set an orthographic size of 5, then the vertical extents of the viewport will contain exactly 10 units of world space. (The horizontal extents are dependent on the display aspect ratio.)

Recall that your sprite quad is 1 unit to a side. That means the orthographic size tells you how many sprites you can stack vertically in the viewport (divided by 2).

To render the pixel-art look cleanly, you need to ensure that each pixel of the sprite’s source texture maps 1:1 to the viewport display. You don’t want source pixels being skipped or doubled-up, or your sprites will look distorted and “dirty”. The trick to ensuring this 1:1 ratio is to set an orthographic size that matches your vertical screen resolution divided by the pixel height of a sprite.

Let’s say you’re running at 960×640, and you’re using 64×64 sprites. Dividing the vertical screen resolution (640) by the pixel height of a sprite (64) yields 10, the number of 64×64 sprites that can be vertically stacked in 640 pixels. Remember that the orthographic size is a half-height, so your target orthographic size in this case is going to be 5 (one-half of 10). It should look like this:

If you set your orthographic size to half or double that target you may still get usable results, because the sprite’s vertical size will still divide evenly into the viewport’s vertical size. But if you set the orthographic size incorrectly, you will see some pixels skipped or doubled, and it will look very bad indeed:

Variable Resolution

You don’t need to be confined to a single, fixed resolution in order to render clean pixel art. The simplest way to handle variable resolutions is to attach a custom script to your camera which sets the orthographic size according to the current vertical resolution and a known (fixed) sprite size:

// set the camera to the correct orthographic size (so scene pixels are 1:1)
s_baseOrthographicSize = Screen.height / 64.0f / 2.0f;
Camera.main.orthographicSize = s_baseOrthographicSize;

While that is a simple fix, it does have a drawback: as the screen resolution decreases, you’ll see less and less of the world, and sprites will take up more and more of the screen. That’s the consequence of keeping a 1:1 ratio between source and screen pixels: a 64×64 sprite takes up more apparent space at 640×480 than it does at 1920×1200. Whether this is a problem or not depends on the needs of your specific game.

If you want your sprites to remain the same apparent size regardless of screen resolution, then simply set the orthographic size to a fixed value and leave it there regardless of the screen resolution. The drawback there is that your sprites will no longer have a 1:1 source-to-screen pixel ratio. You can mitigate the ill effects of that by only allowing resolutions which are exactly half or exactly double your target resolution.

GUI Considerations

If you’re using Unity’s immediate-mode GUI, there’s a simple trick you can use to automatically rescale the GUI to fit the current screen resolution, even if you’ve hard-coded all your GUI coordinates. Simply put the following at the top of your OnGUI call:

void OnGUI()
{
    // scale the GUI to the current resolution
    float horizRatio = Screen.width / 1024.0f;
    float vertRatio = Screen.height / 768.0f;
    GUI.matrix = Matrix4x4.TRS(Vector3.zero, Quaternion.identity, new Vector3(horizRatio, vertRatio, 1.0f));

You may occasionally need to translate between world- and screen-space coordinates. The built-in Camera.WorldToScreenPoint and Camera.ScreenToWorldPoint functions work perfectly well with an orthographic camera, but there is a gotcha: their notion of screen-space, and the GUI system’s notion of screen-space, use inverted Y axes.

When you use Camera.WorldToScreenPoint you’ll get back a point with X increasing to the right and Y increasing from bottom to top, with (0, 0) at the lower-left of the screen. The GUI system expects coordinates with X increasing to the right and Y increasing from top to bottom, with (0, 0) at the upper-left of the screen. So if you’re translating between world space and GUI space you’ll need to invert the Y coordinate:

y = Screen.height - y;

Physics in 2D

You can constrain Unity’s physics sim to run in 2D… sort of. Create a physics object and attach a ConfigurableJoint component to it, then set the “ZMotion”, “Angular XMotion”, and “Angular YMotion” properties to “Locked”. This prevents the physics object from moving along the Z (depth) axis, and constrains its rotation to only take place around that same axis (so it can’t pitch or twist “into” the screen). It’s no Box2D, but it’ll get the job done.

Note that you’ll need to set up this kind of ConfigurableJoint on every physics object in your scene. Unfortunately there is no way to globally constrain the entire physics sim to two dimensions; it must be done on a per-object basis.

Particle Systems

You don’t generally need to do anything special to use particle systems in 2D. Depending on the desired effect, you may wish to ensure the Z velocities are always zero (for example if you want to ensure a more-or-less even spread of particles in the camera plane, e.g. for an explosion). Because you’re using an orthographic camera, any Z motion in the particles will not be obvious. (If you see particles moving strangely, this is the first thing you should check.)

If you also want your particles to have a clean “pixel art” look just like your sprites, simply assign a material using the Sprite shader (discussed earlier) in the ParticleRenderer component. (Unfortunately I have yet to devise a way to atlas sprites in particle systems.)

Fin

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Best of luck in your 2D Unity endeavors!

It is, at its core, one of the most horrible games I’ve ever played. It’s also remarkably entertaining.

Incidentally, this is the first time I’ve seen someone latch onto the fundamental evilness of the game’s concept. That’s something I’ve actually spent a lot of time worrying about, but fortunately it appears to be a virtue, as Mr. Smith’s extensive writeup is positively saturated with evil glee.

Based on the theme enemies as weapons, its creator Josh Sutphin picked up the idea of using two armies against each other, two cultures even, and ran with it. Then he took it into the middle of no man’s land, planted it among the ruined, charred corpses of the combatants set against each other, clambered atop the hollowed hulk of a tank, its innards fused together into a mass of the organic and inorganic. There, he fell to his knees and let out an almighty roar of triumph.

I don’t even know how to picture myself like that. It’s, like, a whole new perspective on life.

And then there is perhaps my favorite description of the game, ever:

It’s like having weights thrown at your face as you attempt to catch them and place them on a pair of scales, which are balanced over two buttons linked to the electricity supply that provides juice for the chair that you’re inexplicably strapped into. It’s also, as others have mentioned, a little like Tetris. A little.

Thanks RPS for the glowing review. I’m enormously happy that my little game has curried your favor.

(Now I just have to make sure I don’t fuck up the next iteration!)

Fail-Deadly‘s an unusual spin on tactical games, but it can also seem like much more than that. To me, for example, it’s a reminder that this really is the best era to be interested in games, because, whatever’s happening in mainstream, big-budget gaming, a small team – even a one-man team sometimes – can come up with a weird, exciting, distinctly non-commercial idea, and is then able to build it, release it, and let everyone else play it.

I love this point, not so much for what it says about Fail-Deadly, but for what it says more broadly about indie games and the democratization of game development. That one guy in his spare time (or one girl in hers) can not only build a game — thanks to tools like Unity — but distribute it worldwide via everything from a personal website, to a portal like Newgrounds or Kongregate, to any number of app stores, and now even to dedicated platforms like Xbox 360, iOS, and Android, with minimal business experience and little to no financial investment, really is a little miracle.

(Thanks to colleague Andrew Weldon for spotting this this morning, because I was an awful, awful person who was not following @edgeonline, a grave mistake which I have since corrected.)

Five days ago this year’s IGF finalists were announced, and Fail-Deadly was not among them. That wasn’t really surprising, but even so it was just a little bit disappointing. I was considering calling it the end of that game’s run, calling the current version “final” and shelving the project in favor of new, fresh ideas. I was feeling like the game hadn’t achieved much, at least not beyond its Ludum Dare 18 victory over a year ago, and it left me wondering to what extent it was worth continuing to pour effort into.

But something nagged at me. Ten days earlier I had discovered that PC Gamer featured Fail-Deadly as one of its week’s best free PC games. That feature actually ran back in late November; I didn’t stumble across it till New Year’s Day. I was pretty excited about that shout-out, but I was too late to the party to capitalize on the short-term attention boost. But then this morning I received a tip that Fail-Deadly may have also been featured in this month’s print edition of PC Gamer UK. That’s something I haven’t yet been able to verify… although I’m taking steps to do so, because I’m not quite so humble as to pass up an opportunity to hang a bit of mainstream press in a frame on my wall.

Then this afternoon I was looking at site stats for Third Helix and I noticed something curious: the vast majority of search terms leading here recently have been for some variation of “fail-deadly”. And subsequently, as you might expect, the vast majority of page hits (aside from the index) have been the Fail-Deadly game page.

It’s always possible that it’s just spam-bots. I Google Fail-Deadly every now and again to see what might’ve popped up without my knowing it, and every time I do that I discover yet another automated “free software” aggregator that’s picked up some version of the game at some point in the past and is now mirroring it on some server halfway around the world, quite probably injected with all manner of malware and awfulness.

But then again, it’s possible that despite my near-complete lack of promotional effort, Fail-Deadly is slowly picking up legitimate momentum on its own merits. And when I entertain that possibility, I can’t imagine how I could ever have felt like the project wasn’t worth the continued effort.

To that end, I’m making a renewed push toward another significant update to the game. I’ve already gathered some feedback, suggestions, and bug reports from comments on this blog and from Twitter, but those have largely been driven by an existing topic. In the interest of soliciting broader and more open discussion, I’ve opened a forum. There’s a section dedicated to Fail-Deadly, sections for each of my other games, and some general discussion. The forum currently looks about as attractive as a baboon’s ass, but I’ll be working that out over the next few days so that the forum shares the styling of the rest of the site.

So… what would you like to see in the future of Fail-Deadly?