Be Excellent To Each Other

WHO WILL WIN

SOME SOON-TO-BE-TERRIFIED SLUTTY TEENS



~VS~



ONE STABBY BOI

Clue: it's Our Boi

The answer originally was: AWFUL BUGS AND HILARIOUSLY BAD BALANCING! is it more fun now?

We saw no bugs beyond some rare clipping through objects and dodgy ragdoll physics on dead bodies -- both were only cosmetic and only momentary. It's had numerous patches since launch.

Too early to tell about balancing. Jason seems very powerful but we don't really know what we're doing yet.

Jason should be powerful.

I escaped twice, even if I did run over a friend the second time. No-one one else did, though.

Oh my god, now I'm sad I went to bed.

Ah, that explains what happened to me last night!

I could have run you over, too!

Oh god it was amazing. Grim... and Nase kept jumping in the car and starting it, then Jason pulled the driver out of the car and they swapped seats, and Jason kept failing to kill them, and they kept almost getting away, then Nase ran off, Grim... drove off, and ran him the fuck over.

You missed the bits where I tried to run Jason over and the car bounced off him and stalled, and when Nase sent me the wrong way into a dead end, and when Nase got caught and I jumped out and "helped" him and then I got into the passenger side and Nase got in the driver's seat and we FUCKING HAD IT and then he pressed the wrong button and got out again.

Running Nase over cost me 1,000 points

People not playing this need to know what it does with voice chat, because it's very good.

(Background if you don't know: it's asymmetric multiplayer. Up to seven camp counsellors are trying to escape Jason. Jason is the last player, trying to kill them all.)

Voice chat only works when you are close by. This means humans can talk, and co-ordinate, but only when near to each other... until they find a walkie-talkie. This means the start of the game is scary and lonely as fuck, with the only sounds your character's hysterical muttering to themselves and (hopefully not) the OH SHIT SON music that plays when Jason gets near. Once you find a radio, all counsellors with radios can talk to each other freely. BUT: Jason follows these rules too! At one point last night, I saw Riles sprinting for me, Jason on his heels, as I lurked in some bushes. "Don't lead him towards me!" I squeaked, only to hear Cras (as Jason) reply "you know I can hear you, right?" as he coolly speared Riles between the shoulderblades.

Once you die, you get a "dead thread." Everyone dead can spectate anyone in the game, and communicate freely with all the other dead people. This is good, because if you die early on and the game goes the distance you might spend 15 minutes in there. But like Mafia, this is actually pretty good fun in its own right: you can follow any player and do a lot of "WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY DOING" with the other dead folks. It's also much less stressful.

This also means we have suspended the usual Beex rule and have no party chat in-game. You can still join the party -- we'll probably have one going for co-ordination -- but in the PS's quick menu (the thing that appears when you long press the PS button) you can scroll down to Party and select Prefer Game Chat. Then the game will override the party.

Top moment of this last night: watching Wookie run away from Jason around a sofa (woo!), then run back at him (boo!) then get grabbed (boo!), then get free (woo!), then hit Jason with (IIRC) a frying pan (woo!), then escape through a window (woo!), before inexplicably climing back in through the same window directly into Jason's welcoming arms (wtf)

I do love the sound of this.

I like that it's sized for many players, and also the balancing seems quite good - there was a decent few escapes and a decent few outright slaughters

Can Jason be killed at all? Or is it all about escape?

Jason can be killed but it's almost ludicrously complex and requires extreme co-operation amongst the players. You'd be a hero if you pulled it off.

I think sticking together might help in this game, it'll make you easier to find I guess but the coordination aspect is bloody difficult when you're out on your own with a can of gas and no Walkie-talkie

Strangely enough, the game I'm making has similar voice chat mechanics (well, is planned to.) would be interested to see how it works if I could join in with you at some point.

Because we're using game chat to override party chat, we won't be able to hear you when you join. So, er, send a message or hope we notice?

Possibly a topic for another thread, but tell me more - what's the game? What are you making it in etc.?

Unreal engine 4 (had a look at unity by prototyping the idea there, but ue4 is more like what I'm used to.) currently working through basic art stuff, character models etc etc. Current plan is a sort of odd mix of a multiroom Mafiaish idea with a semi-turn based system (game is split into periods where you have a certain amount of options available each turn) and exploring in a changing play area, but with a fair amount of information incompleteness (everyone has their own goal to win, but they can be split up into broadly social and antisocial categories) and so relying on voice chat and private/non private/not knowingly public conversations to try and figure out what's going on is somewhat important to my mind.

A fair way off a playable alpha though.

Try not to Fart 2.

I think I could put that out in a couple of days, were I so inclined.

I'm not

Sounds good. I've been trying for ages now to get the motivation to finish a project in Unity, for some reason I just really struggle to wrap my head around the way it does things. I'm used to the likes of AMOS and Blitz Basic (don't snigger ) where everything was procedural and not a bunch of objects looking after themselves.

I don't know why I struggle, I deal with OOP stuff pretty much every day with my webdev work. Just can't get it going in Unity.

I can't imagine any modern game engine being procedural. Although they can do a good job of entirely abstracting away the code layer entirely so long as you don't want anything too complex.

I think that's the problem, the code is abstracted away so I can't "see" what it's doing. I'll have to keep banging away at it though.

UE4 comes with all the source code... Useful if you know c++.

Generally speaking, I tend to lose interest when it comes to having to do all the art assets. Hence why I'm front loading them, and come up with a design which can cope with relatively little in that area.

(or the gravity power-esque xblig game I made where getting a decent network game proved bastard hard to get decent replication. Local play worked well enough )

I have (sort of) the opposite problem - if the game I'm writing looks like ass I quickly lose interest, so I always spend bloody ages putting together decent graphics (even to use as placeholders) but by the time I've done all that I've lost interest in the code itself

One way to escape is with one of the two cars. Each needs a battery, fuel, and car keys -- fuel and battery are usually fairly close by but the keys are an arse to find.

Cras, Grim... and I had assembled all three! And Riles, as Jason, had left us mostly alone. We nervously waited as Grim... poured the petrol in. But this was a two seater car! I had the keys so I jumped in and started it. Grim... won the lifeboat lottery and got in the passenger seat. Jason appeared in front of us! (This is bad, if you hit him the car stops dead.) But! I think he saw Cras, now on foot and usefully serving as bait, and teleported after him. Grim... and I swore, I gunned it, and we cruised to safety, leaving Cras to an uncertain fate...

...halfway there Grim... says "wait, I'm carrying the second set of keys oh we've just left oh dear."

Also we had a round where Grim... killed us all in a matter of minutes. That was the day he stopped being a Stabby Boi and became a Machete Man.

The reason I won the lifeboat lottery is because Craster couldn't work out how to open the car door.

Fiction imitating reality, right there.

I had a quick go with randoms last night. Died twice early on. Once I was hiding in a lodge, the second time I was running around trying to find stuff.

Wookie's rage-inducing hiding tactics were very effective. Barricaded doors slow Jason down a lot, at least in the early game before rage mode sets in. I wasted most of my time just hunting Wookie from building to building, and if there were any other living councillors, they'd have had pretty much free rein during that time.

After some initial teething issues because STUPID FUCKING PC GAMING we had a really fun session of this. I was the only counselor to escape in our three games, when Sal was Jason. And I only managed to do that because I luckily found the phone fuse and then the phone cabin in the first few minutes of the round. Oh and Dave shot Ian in the face because he hit him with a pan

Ian asked for it.

And because I was aimlessly mooching about not really knowing what any of Jason’s special things did. I feel like your win against me is a hollow victory.
However I did enjoy hearing you say “we’re fucked if Sal works out how to use any of the abilities” after popping up near you waiting by the car.

It's a properly great little game.

Fun Sally!

I had my first go as Jason in a public match. Didn't kill anyone.

I had my first go ever and was him. I had no idea what to do, but got shot, firecrackered, and shot again but killed the athletic chick who was hiding in a wardrobe and another one who was standing about. I saw lots of red shapes but couldn't get them. I just warped from house to.house a bit to try and find them. And smashed doors.

I get the feeling that he's actually damn hard to play against a group of people who know what they're doing.

That's one reason I tend to play against people who absolutely do not know what they are doing.

Dave's got a new drunk girlfriend

The other reason is because you don't know anyone who knows what they're doing.

Also true. Twice last night APoD spawned into the game, button fumbled, and set off firecrackers immediately. Stealth!

I am getting quite good at being super stealthy now. Dave was Jason in a public match, and I managed to gas up the boat and was just hunting for the propellor when his game crashed.

I really enjoyed the 2 games last night. Even being dead is fun.

I feel there should be more awards for blasting past your mates on the way to the exit in the car without even slowing down. Ideally also you should be able to show your bare ass out of the window

For me, T'were a very frustrating experience. The first person I killed had the temerity to bug out and stay running on the spot after I killed her. The second, warped rond like crazy and I killed air, which gave me a kill (Ihope)
Then found someone who just warped about tables and couldn't be hit even when they were right in front of me. And then it crashed.