Contesque 1: Level Names — Winners!
By M&R | July 23, 2008
The first N+ Downloadable Levelpack releases today (it’s up right now!), which is really exciting.
We tried to make everyone happy: there are 150 “easier” Singleplayer levels, which should ease the pain of those who have found N+ too difficult, and 50 Co-op Multiplayer levels, which should appeal to even the most hard-core N+ players. Plus, a fun surprise still shrouded in secrecy! At 200pts, that works out to 1 pt per level — great value and a virtually guaranteed good time.
PDLC0 is only 284k — if you start downloading right now, you’ll probably be finished by the end of this sentence!
On to the Contesque winners. So first off, thanks to all the participants in our contesque. We know it must have been difficult because the level of silly in our level names is so high and probably unpredictable (to others), but we hope it was at least fun. We also hope you’ll come back for the next contesques, which will launch prior to the release of N+ PDLC1 and 2. 
You can find the answers here.
It was a very close race! We decided that instead of awarding prizes to only the top 3, we would give the top 5 a copy of N+ XBLA, ’cause that’s how we roll. The top winner will also receive the aforementioned copy of OXM UK featuring exclusive N+ gamerpics and themes, and the N+ Moleskine notebook. Without further ado, the winners:
Dan F.
Kevin d.
Droqen
Joseph D.
And the top winner is:
Brian E.
Congratulations, winners! We have replied to your contesque submission email with your prize. Please email us back!
Thanks again, everyone, and good luck next time!
Topics: history, news | 4 Comments »
N+ Levelpack 1: Out on Wednesday!
By M&R | July 21, 2008
Yes, it’s finally here! July 23 2008 will see the release of the first (of three) downloadable levelpacks on XBLA. Sorry this took so long!
This set of levels contains 150 “easier” singleplayer levels, and 50 “pretty hard” co-op levels; it will cost 200 points, which is only 1 point per level!
So far the best entry for the contesque has only guessed 5 out of 8 level names correctly.. keep those entries coming! We’ll post the winners after the contesque closes on Wednesday.
The other two levelpacks are waiting in the release queue, we’ll be having contesques to celebrate whenever they launch — unfortunately this won’t be in August, as apparently the launch schedule is super-packed.. oh well, hopefully that schedule includes Braid!
The second levelpack will feature 150 “harder” singleplayer, 50 race, and 25 survival maps. The third levelpack is free, and features reworked levels from the original N — 150 singleplayer, 50 race, and 50 co-op.
Each levelpack also features a special little gift…let’s just say the ninjas are looking pretty good 
The sad news concerning the levelpacks is that they won’t work with leaderboards or achievements; this was one of the major issues we had hoped to address in the ill-fated Title Update. If at some later point we manage to get everyone on board for a TU — say, for a special anniversary — this will definitely be on the top of the list.
Anyway, stay tuned for more contesques and levelpack news.. and hopefully a Robotology post in there somewhere!
Topics: news, rants | 30 Comments »
N+ Level Pack Contesque: Part the First
By M&R | July 16, 2008
The first XBLA N+ level pack, featuring 150 “easier” Singleplayer levels and 50 “regular difficulty” Co-op Multiplayer levels, is coming very very soon — by the end of July!
To celebrate, it’s time for another contest-like-event, or to use our newly coined term, a “cont-esque”!
We decided to run the contesque from the blog because it’s pretty simple, so here goes. This event is open to everyone, worldwide, who wishes to enter. The rules are straightforward: below is a list containing 32 level names. 24 of these are from the first N+ Level Pack PDLC, and 8 are level names which do not appear in N+ PDLC0 — level names we would never actually use for various reasons (style, cliche, etc). We’ll reveal these reasons with the winners, next week.
All you have to do is email PDLC0 [at] metanetsoftware [dot] com subject line: “Contesque 1 Submission” with the numbers of the 8 level names you think are fabrications. You can email the names of the levels as well, but please be sure to email the corresponding numbers.
The contest will be open for one week only, so get those submissions in fast! Only one per person, so make sure it’s your best guess. The top three will each receive a copy of N+ for XBLA, and the person with the most correct guesses will also receive a copy of the Official Xbox360 Magazine UK (Issue 35, July 2008) containing exclusive N+ gamerpics and themes, and an official N+ Moleskine notebook. You can see an image of the notebook and magazine here.
And now for the list, in no particular order:
01. west enderson
02. tread on my dreams
03. the hammer of not bickering
04. blue mineys
05. the grayzor mountains
06. out of the blue 3
07. your ninja is in another castle
08. ranks a rot
09. I am comin’ to kill ya
10. sudden valley
11. supercalifragilisticexpialidoc-N
12. the hills are, uh, live
13. 88 gates
14. billesque
15. N-KOTB
16. ninja’s first suicidal lust for gold
17. superliminal monument
18. what are we doing to pigs?
19. subliminal 2
20. little lost robot
21. level in the shape of male reproductive organs
22. ninja: impossible
23. Droids ‘B’ Us
24. the new star wars trilogy is AWESOME
25. ocho!
26. ”going next door”
27. his name is N
28. gauss darn it
29. Level 5, Detention Block AA-23
30. the grass is always grayer on the other side
31. life support, for real this time
32. electric jellyfish
You can see the level names from N+’s built-in levels here (scroll to the bottom of the page), if you think that will help you
Check this page for the rules and FAQ.
That’s it! Good luck, everyone! The contesque is now open.
Use this link to email your submission.
p.s. Want your own notebook? Get one here! http://www.metanet.etsy.com
Topics: n+, news | 20 Comments »
Exciting Exclusive for UK N+ Fans!
By M&R | June 27, 2008
We love you, UK! This month’s Official Xbox360 Magazine UK (Issue 35, July 2008) features an N+ exclusive: sweet gamerpics and themes not available anywhere else in the world.
N+ fandom has never been so thoroughly stonking! Or corking.. we couldn’t decide quite how to describe this news
Topics: n+, news | 5 Comments »
“The time has come,” the Walrus said..
By M&R | June 20, 2008
Maybe that title is a bit misleading.. there’s no huge news to report these days, but a few smaller things happening that we figured we’d share.
Robotology-wise, we’ve been porting our simulator over to C# (from Actionscript 3); we’re still not sure what language we’re going to use for the final game, but we’ll definitely be using C# for prototyping from now on.. it’s pretty awesome!
So far it looks like we’re about 10x slower than Box2D, which (hopefully!) shouldn’t be a huge problem — mostly this speaks to the skill of Box2D’s author Erin Catto. There are still a frustratingly huge number of things that need to be added or improved, but we’re slowly slogging through them.. a better Robotology post should be coming soon.
We just submitted three downloadable levelpacks for N+ XBLA (one of which is free), we’ll be posting with more details as soon as we get a launch time. In total there will be over 750 new levels! The multiplayer maps in particular (over 300 of them) are a lot better than the ones that came with N+, since we’ve had more time to learn what works. We made sure to include more co-op maps, since they’re apparently quite popular.. these ones are even harder, so start practicing!
There’s also a small bonus in each pack which will remain secret for now.. or will it?!
The handheld versions of N+ are coming out in August; we’re really sorry about the repeated delays, however they’ve definitely been worth it as the games have steadily gotten better with each revision. Here are a few new videos to make the wait even more agonizing http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2008/06/trailers_n_ds_and_psp.html
Topics: n+, news, robotology | 32 Comments »
Yes! Now We Can *Legitimately* Call N+ “Award-Winning”!
By M&R | May 25, 2008
This just in, N+ has won the PopVox People’s Choice award for Best Console Game! This is a huge surprise, because it was up against such greats as Assassin’s Creed and Everyday Shooter. We owe it all to you, people who voted. Thank you so much for your support — we love that you’re enjoying the game.
Slick Entertainment is based in Vancouver, where the ceremony was held, so Nick was able to attend and receive the award. Nick took these fantastic and very classy pics. Yay! You can watch the awards ceremony here. The N+ party starts at 4:45 — great speech Nick!
This rocks. Thanks everyone!
Topics: n+, news | 35 Comments »
Robotology: Back to the Drawing Board
By M&R | May 14, 2008
After about a year of being busy with other things, we’ve finally been able to return to working on Robotology. Finally! We’re still in R&D mode, trying to figure out how the hell to support the various features we want. But it’s progress, and that rocks.
Simulation is mostly solved — it still needs quite a bit of retooling, and possibly we’ll need to try different methods for collision detection if there are problems down the road, but for now it’s at least figured out and working. There are various related problems we have yet to tackle, such as motorized control, but those have to wait until we have more of the fundamentals worked out.
Currently we’re busy trying to figure out animation and the graphics system in general. As with physics, we’re developing our own animation technology from scratch. This is a pretty major task, but it’s even more necessary that we do it ourselves because in this case there is absolutely nothing out there that will do what we want to do. Hooray!
For whatever reason, the vast majority of 2D games are sprite-based; this is really strange, since graphics technology has moved ahead by leaps and bounds, but very few people have attempted to retroactively apply modern animation technology to a 2D setting. Hopefully we’ll be able to make some progress in this field. Fingers crossed!
Right now we’re still brainstorming and trying to figure out exactly what we’d like to be able to do; unlike physics, with which we’ve been fooling around for years, we’re total n00bs when it comes to graphics/animation — we’ve been relying on Flash for both tools and runtime engine. We’re also trying to figure out what we can practically implement; we’ve been writing little test apps to try various graphics operations, such as morphing, triangulation, and dynamic offsetting (shrinking/inflating the surface of a polygon.. not simple scaling). It turns out that all three problems are far from solved, at least in terms of game-friendly real-time solutions..
We don’t have animation properly “sussed” yet, otherwise we’d be able to better explain what the various aspects of the problem are.. all we can say for sure is that once you eschew sprites, it gets tricky Of course, this is the whole point — if you want to avoid the limitations of a sprite-based system, you’re necessarily going to have to deal with all of the problems that using sprites lets you avoid.
Not that we’re trying to engineer a super-powerful graphics solution! We’re perfectly happy with limitations — especially if they make implementation easier — we just want to work with a different set of limitations than those imposed by sprites. So, writing our own version of Flash is out; a generic all-encompassing graphics engine is going to take too long to create, and (equally important) such a solution isn’t likely to be near as fast as a specialized, limited system that does exactly what we need, and nothing else.
This is the main problem we’re facing — how to balance what we’d like to be able to do, with what we’re likely to be able to implement in an efficient manner. The way you represent data has a huge impact on what you can do with it, and the limitations implicit in various formats and conceptual models are often hard to tease out.
At this point the vastness of the problems we’re going to have to figure out is pretty daunting.. this was supposed to be an easy project to get our feet wet with OpenGL! Sadly we really do want to try to find a unique solution for our graphics needs. Of course, anything that can’t be totally figured out can always be designed around, but still, the question of how the hell we’re going to “do” graphics is currently making us somewhat vertiginous… *cue suspenseful music*
In other news, we’ve set up a small shop for handmade merch on etsy:
Metanet’s Shop
It’ll contain whatever we have time to create, and whatever we create collaboratively with other artists, which means supplies will probably be really limited. Look for more merch in other forms as soon as we can get it together!
Anyway… that’s all for now. Back soon, hopefully!
Topics: dev, news, robotology | 35 Comments »
Braid Party!
By M&R | April 29, 2008
Sorry for the lack of posts, we’ve been laying low for a while, working on Robotology.
It hasn’t been all work though — just last week we had a Braid party where some friends came over to have their minds thoroughly blown.
In other news, N+ reached 100k sales on XBLA! That’s just incredible.
We’ve made three level packs (one of which is free), but sadly they can’t be released until we do a Title Update to fix a few things — that should hopefully be happening in early summer.
That’s about all that’s been going on around here.. back to work!
Topics: misc, news | 9 Comments »
Positivity Part 1: Royalties
By M&R | March 24, 2008
Rather than continue to be negative — which apparently only works if you’re a fast-talking British bloke — let’s instead look at what was great about XBLA. Part 1: high royalties.
Why does a high royalty rate matter so much? All it really means is a bit more money for us greedy developers, right?
To quote Alaska senator Ted Stevens, circa two years ago: NO!
Allowing developers to keep the lion’s share of royalties was one of the most striking aspects which set XBLA worlds apart from retail. It was a quantitative difference which enabled a qualitative change in how developers approached making commercial games. It meant that a game didn’t have to sell incredibly well to break even — it could be behind the curve in terms of sales, and still be successful!
Allowing developers the opportunity to be successful with less-than-average sales was one of the most revolutionary aspects of XBLA — perhaps the most revolutionary aspect — certainly the one that created the most opportunity for indie/small developers. Unfortunately not everyone may have realized this, and thus failed to take advantage of such a unique and unprecedented state of affairs.
The main problem we have with retail-level royalties is that they lead directly to retail-level quality — to use a sports analogy, if everyone is always swinging for the fences, they’re going to strike out a lot more often than if they were just trying to get on base. When you need higher-than-average sales to break even, there is more pressure to appeal to absolutely everyone, seeking the lowest-common-denominator, taking no chances, and inevitably pleasing no one. At least, this is one theory for why so many games lack personality/soul/”flava”.
Maybe it’s naive to believe that games will ever overcome Sturgeon’s Law. Maybe it’s unrealistic to think that a giant corporation would be interested in spearheading a paradigm shift in commercial gaming. Maybe it’s stupid to think that professional game developers would ever choose to make something they wanted to make, over something they thought would sell well. Maybe it’s hopelessly optimistic to think that all the people making terrific, weird-ass freeware games on their own time could actually hope to do so on a full-time basis. Maybe it’s borderline communist to think that some day the IP-stealing, price-driving-upping middle-man publishers would be cut out of the equation.
*shrug* Welcome to Metanet Software! Hopefully we aren’t the only ones daring to dream about these crazy possibilities.
Topics: news, rants | 36 Comments »
In Defense of the Apparant Shitstorm
By M&R | March 22, 2008
Well, apparently our Gamasutra interview is controversial. Probably we should do what all the professionals have advised us to do, and just stop reading comments — it is the internet after all. But let’s instead take one last stab at dialogue.
First of all, everyone we’ve worked with at Microsoft have been terrific — smart, helpful, bright, and passionate. Obviously we haven’t met everyone working there, but those who were involved in N+ were great to work with. We’re sorry if our criticism of the service hurts them, because we know they’re doing their best. The “most games suck” problem really seems to be a pervasive institutional issue rather than the fault of this or that person.. more on that later.
Secondly: the interview was done before N+ came out.. hence we’re not complaining about our sales. We are surprised and thrilled by our sales — we’re just happy that people are trying N+, and that some of them are enjoying it.
Third: the interview happened about an hour after we found out that the royalty rates for XBLA have been “adjusted” to the point where our whole business plan moving forward was totally shafted.. hence the bitterness.
So: what the hell were we thinking?
We didn’t intend to provoke outrage, we simply spoke candidly. Actually saying what you think rather than being fake in an interview situation is apparently just not done, but don’t shoot the messenger — it’s not our fault that the vast majority of XBLA games suck! Literally every single person we’ve ever spoken with is in agreement on this, and yet it’s apparently shocking for gamers in general to hear (assuming that’s who reads joystiq/kotaku).
If you think back to when these downloadable channels (XBLA/PSN) were announced, they were supposed to be the “anti-retail”: good royalties for all involved, smaller/less “epic” games (quirky ideas which would never have been approved by a publisher), basically a mecca for small teams. In hindsight we were perhaps naive to buy into what was apparently empty marketing speak, however we really believed that something worthwhile and interesting was happening.
Fast forward to now: royalties (allegedly) suck, casual games outnumber proper video games (this will have to wait for a future post for further discussion), the vast majority of titles are “disappointing” (this is perhaps a more politic choice of words than “utter crap”), and small teams are being actively funneled through publishers.
As gamers it was unbelievably depressing for us to try literally 80 games and enjoy less than 8 of them. As we mentioned in the article we no longer bother to try XBLA demos because of this.. we just wait until we hear something good about any given game. So, we’re back in retail-land!
The fact that the channel is glutted with crap IS a real problem that shouldn’t be dismissed. The “diamonds will always stand out” argument doesn’t work when gamers have ceased to pay attention to XBLA due to how badly the last 10 demos they tried sucked.
As developers it was incredibly frustrating to see Nick pitch his game — which is really awesome, but a secret for now — only to be told that “genre X is oversaturated”. It’s only oversaturated because, for example, a piece of crap like Street Trace somehow got in early and is now preventing actually good games from being made. Before you call us arrogant for bad-mouthing another XBLA game, note that in this case it was a direct quote from X360 Magazine UK (”A piece of crap.” [Issue 26, p.118]).
Those who point out that retail has the exact same problem as XBLA are correct — but that doesn’t somehow diffuse our argument, if anything it just reinforces it since XBLA was meant to correct the problems endemic to retail games and that whole shebang. If my soup tastes like garbage, I would hope that the waiter’s explanation isn’t “yes, but most of the food we serve here tastes like garbage”!
This ties in to the larger rant of “why do the majority of games TOTALLY SUCK ASS?”, which is a very complex topic. Certainly everyone is to blame — gamers, developers, publishers, press. Hopefully someone will figure it out before consumers become totally jaded and it’s music-industry-style meltdown time.
We don’t expect everyone to be perfect. We’ve made some crap games ourselves. Making a game that sucks shouldn’t be a big deal — it happens, you learn from it. What is inexcuseable is when you make an utterly crap game, and then RELEASE IT ANYWAY.
What’s even worse is when your job is to decide which games to release, and which games to cancel, and you choose to release, for example, some lightweight neon bunny match-3 and then cancel something interesting like, say, a physics-puzzle-based Thrust-like game.
Also, we should mention that any developers whose games we singled out shouldn’t feel too bad, since we also think that “The New Super Mario Bros” pretty much sucked (especially when compared to SMB3 or SMW), and we didn’t like Halo or Halo2 (haven’t tried 3 yet). So.. take it with a grain of salt? You’re in good company at least. And, be cognizant of the fact that this is all our (very?) subjective opinion — N+ receives it’s share of poor reviews, too — it’s impossible for any game to resonate with every single person who plays it.
Hopefully we’ll have something good to write about next post — heh.
p.s - we’re not “fanboys” as some have accused.. we just can’t afford a PS3 yet! SSD:HD is pretty crap though, so it looks like Sony aren’t immune either.
Topics: n+, news, rants | 83 Comments »