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I-smel
Hey look man, my name's "I-smel". What I lack in smarts, I at least pay back in honesty. Boink!

Tom Brien @I-smel

Age 32, Male

England, MAN-CHESTer

Joined on 3/2/06

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Here's what I'm doing in 2013!

Posted by I-smel - February 18th, 2013


Last update, I thinik I posted a video of JetGetters, right? Well if I didn't then here it is:

That's a Week 1 prototype, and right now I'm on Week 3. This game idea is more exciting the more I think into it. Stealing enemy's jets, piggybacking on team-mate's jets, hijacking missiles mid-flight and steering them around...
I have 4 classes set up right now- I just described one of them for a whole paragraph but deleted it cos it sounded like bizarre rambling; BUT TRUST ME IT'S THE COOLEST!!

There's loads of potential for it to be a real Team Fortress, except I definately won't be falling back on "This is the Heavy equivalent, this is the Medic, you can unlock hats etc." clone stuff. For a tangent on something I learned about Team Fortress this week, scroll down to the comments. I'd give you a link right now, but it's not much fun for everyone to play one at a time, so what'd be the point in that? I'll organise a beta or something soon enough. Network code is really jerky and imprecise right now- Me n Alex are working on some collaboration and teamwork stuff that's going really well, but I can't confirm anything yet. If things line up, I could end up leaving England and going to live in The Netherlands to work on and release more games- so that's a BIG DEAL!

Mindchamber interviewed me, FUCKING SUCK IT @THEINTERVIEWER, WHAT NOW!!!!!!!?
MindChamber is really good at interviews. I did this one a while ago with Penny Arcade Report, and they sent me 7 bullet-point questions in an e-mail. I filled em in with a load of stuff, and they only printed a couple sentences of me describing No Time, and then kind of wrote a conversation around it. This one I just linked IS basically an improvised conversation, with all the slow boring parts cut out. That's WAY BETTER!!!!! Sorry if any of my answers come off as super hipster indie whimsical.

In November 2011 I went to MineCon, which is the Minecraft convention, and had a booth for some game I can't remember. It was in Las Vegas and there were a few thousand people attending, so that was a big crazy thing. In March this year, I think I'm attending the Flash Gaming Summit, and GDC. Fuck it this post is too long- That's it!

Play my Raybots!


Comments

-So here's what I spotted in TF2. First off: did you ever notice they improved the designs over time?
<a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BDJl7I-CEAEpADS.png:large">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BDJl7I-CEAEpADS.pn g:large</a>
Anyway I was kind of worried about the fact that I don't play so many multiplayer games, and I'm not experienced in designing them. So I feel like there's some missing ingredients I don't know about. Last week I watched this talk with Gabe Newell:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU</a>
"Testing a multiplayer game is so different to testing something like Half Life. In CounterStrike, we added the riot shield and player numbers went up. Then, we took the riot shield away, and player numbers... went up. Cos people are just there to play with their friends."

I think this is one of the key things I wasn't keeping in mind. Multiplayer games are ABOUT PLAYING WITH YOUR FRIENDS. Every Valve game since then has brought that more to the centre of the game. TF2 is full of medics that heal you, spies that take out turrets for you, engineers that give you ammo... the mechanics are all built to make you BE GOOD FRIENDS. It's a bunch of complete asshole strangers saying "Let me handle that for you!", and everyone feels like they're amongst friends. That's why I've played a billion hours of TF2 (and Gears Horde Mode) online, and about zero hours of Modern Warfare.

Left 4 Dead and DOTA 2 are also designed along this philosiphy. There's a bunch more I noticed when you look at the character's visual designs, but this is also pretty long, so I'll just sum it up and say that they're designed to let THE PERSON PLAYING shine through as much as possible. You might go into a class-based multiplayer game with all these ideas for funny, cool characters- but that's actually a mistake. The TF2 guys aren't made with that in mind, their function is to be a projection of your friend at the keyboard, and THAT HAS TO BE THE PRIORITY, because THAT'S WHY PEOPLE ARE PLAYING.

I completely agree with you about TF2. And L4D. And multyplayer games.

This definitely look interesting. Can't wait to try it.

Jetgetters looks kind of brilliant!

Yeah there's shooting and buildings and classes and loads of stuff since that video!

Geez man you're doing like 1million things. I feel like a slacker loser for being too scared to even try anything 3D much less multi-player...

You have TOO MUCH ENERGY! :-)

oh so thats the song that was blaring out of toms office.

Hey Thomas, thats quite awesome dude. Looks interesting and sounds it too, is there a kickstarter for this? or are you doing this all on your free time? I'd perhaps gladly donate some cash if you need it.

not doing another kickstarter, this is made on the money we got from No Time being on Steam

can you sell me some of your energy?

What makes you want to live in The Netherlands ?

Business partners live there.

and anyway it's supposed to be nice, so sure

Here's what i'm going to do in 2013:
Ready?
Are you ready?
Here it comes:

NOTHING! (Imagine a surprised audience sound)

No, play MY raybots.

There was a flash game kinda like where you stole spaceships. I'm too lazy to find it, but is that where you got the idea? :D If not, you could steal some of those ideas too!

Also, don't delete rambling about code next time. I'd probably enjoy it...

LOL I MEANT CLASSES AS IN IT'S A CLASS-BASED MULTIPLAYER GAME!
Those raybots were cool, I voted great on Bomb King.

I got the idea from basically the videos of people playing Battlefield, and doing that awesome trick where they jump out of a jet, snipe a guy, and land back in the jet. The idea was to make a game that's just all that all the time, with people ragdolling around the sky like fucking maniacs.

LOL, now I feel like a total nerd...

Can't get behind you man, you are so negative on so many other's news entries that I just can't support anything you do anymore. You play the sarcastic troll so much it kind of pisses me off because I think that indie developers should support each other but so many of your posts cut others down that I just feel that you should fail hard so maybe you can taste some humility.

You must be talkin about someone specific, cos I can't find anyone I was a huge dick to from the passed couple months. Although now I'm kind of interested, cos I KNOW I can be a huge dick to people, but I'm wondering who you're thinking of.

Also, you guys praising him for his energy? Where do you get that nonsense from? His last submission on this site was in Oct. of 2012 and before that was Mar 2012. How is that energetic? Get off his dick.

Look back through my news posts, it's usually off of Newgrounds. Like I released a game on Steam, learnt C#, 3D modelling, learnt Photoshop and put out a tonne of art, animated 20-something intros for other games, did some random iOS game art, bought and redecorated a house, and a bunch more.

I ride Max Gilardi's dick on this all the time, but all his stuff's on Youtube.

WOW dude you write way too much
Next time make your post twenty nine words MAX
It's a universal law that anymore than that and nobody will read it

yeah and this was like CUT DOWN!

I've started cutting parts out of these, like I relegated a section about TF2 to the comments. I was hoping this length here would be good.

That was thirty three words not twenty nine.

How are you supposed to make flash games when you can't even count.
Jesus. What would you do without your fans >_>