WAVES IS OUT!
That’s right! It’s available for purchase right now!
To celebrate there will be 15% off for a week making the price a lovely $8.50 (ish) rather than $10 so take advantage and tell all your friends. You could use that extra $1.50 to buy some Fizzy Pop.
Now due to the nature of Time zones and the fact that only big name games with huge publishers get midnight releases locked to timezone the game will not be out everywhere all at once.
You can buy the game right now from this very website even if it isn’t actually November 16th yet where you are.
Next up will be GamersGate which should be available sometime around 10am GMT (It may be later or earlier I don’t have an exact time).
Then we have Steam which should be available around 6pm GMT.
Now not to worry because wherever you buy the game from you will get a code that you can put into Steam and it will work right away even if the Store page isn’t up yet on Steam.
If you have any issues then email me or post a comment.
If you feel the need to start tweeting your highscores then kindly use the #WavesScores hashtag and for everything else use #WavesGame.
Waves is Gold
It’s a phrase that has absolutely no basis in reality for a downloadable indie game but Waves has “Gone Gold” which is to say that the final release version of the game has been built and is ready for sending to distributors.
So like it or not Waves will be released on November 16th. There is even a timer counting down to it on the Waves page. Technology eh? Marvellous.
Blue Fire Dawn – Press G To Generate
Waves is basically finished now so that means I get to mess around for a bit in the name of “Prototyping”. At the moment I have a vague hand-wavey idea of what I want to make after Waves but I can’t really commit to anything properly until I know if I will have enough money for what I want.
There is however one thing that I have always been very interested in and that’s procedurally generated levels. This is a thing that common wisdom over on the UDK forums suggests should either be impossible or at least so very hard that you would be better off building your own engine instead.
Naturally I decided that this is exactly what I was going to spend my weekend trying to do…
After soliciting a name from Twitter (thanks to ElectronDance for the winner) I set about trying to generate a level in UDK.
The first attempt was horrible and shall not be mentioned again.
The second attempt is below and turned out quite well. In fact it turned out so well that you can download the prototype and tootle around an infinite number of procedurally generated mazes. Seriously there is nothing else to do in it except tootle. No baddies, no pickups, nothing. It’s not a game it’s a piece of tech.
Anyway you use WASD or the arrows to move and you can press G to generate a new level.
If you want to pretend there is a game in there then there is always one really big room that has only one entrance. Try and find it in the dark.
I’m not sure if I’m going to use this yet but it was fun to be coding something that wasn’t Waves (even though I did copy all of the rolling ball stuff from it).
In other news: 1 week to go on Wednesday!
There are no unlocks in Waves
The relevant bit is at around 3 minutes in.
There are no unlocks in Waves. None at all. If you buy the game then you get access to all five game modes right away. This won’t prevent most of you trying them all out in the order they appear in the menu but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from starting out with Bombing Run rather than Crunch Time.
This is for a reason and that reason is not “Too lazy to put in unlockable content”. The reason there are no unlocks is because the moment you have unlockable content gamers start to focus purely on unlocking the content rather than enjoying the game itself (See The Overjustification Effect).
I’m going to use an anecdote to support this (even though there is plenty of empirical evidence that supports this theory anecdotes are fun and more relate-able)…
I recently started playing Space Marine multiplayer. It’s a lot of fun when it isn’t lagging (which is sadly most of the time) but it has a few too many unlocks. Ever since I started playing I have been playing as a pure Tactical Marine – Bolter and Frag grenades only. At first this was because I just love the Bolter (it’s an awesome feeling weapon to use) but after a few hours it was because I wanted to unlock the Kraken Bolts for it. Then once I had unlocked the Kraken Bolts I wanted to unlock the Targetter (Which I still haven’t it being bloody hard to do). I was refusing to let myself play with any other class or weapon combination because I wanted to unlock one of the rewards (which I suspect once I had done I would use for two games and then try to unlock something else).
My quest to unlock everything for my Bolter was starting to affect how I enjoyed the game. It was no longer enough that I scored a kill or if my side won the game – if I hadn’t gotten at least one Bolter Kill Streak out of the game then in my eyes it was a failure. I was completely single mindedly focussed on unlocking content to the point where I had stopped enjoying the game and was playing in a way that was completely selfish and detrimental to my teams overall effectiveness (if it wasn’t for the fact that everybody else was playing this way I’d feel a bit more guilty about it). I’m now making myself play with whatever I want to or feel the situation demands rather than trying to unlock specific items one at a time. I may unlock the content eventually but I will do so in a much more organic manner over a longer period of time. Above all I’m having fun again.
Now I know that one of the reasons for having to unlock content is to ensure that the player has learnt how to use the pre-requisites sufficiently – but in the majority of cases the unlocks exist to keep people playing a game they may not be enjoying because they have sunk a lot of time into it and would feel horrible if they just abandoned it. Unlockables are more often completely cynical methods of trying to extend playtime (and coming from AAA console development I have been in the meetings where the solution to a game being 4 hours too short is to add some hidden objects that unlock concept art so I know it happens). In some instances the addition of unlockable content can completely undermine the entertainment to be gained from just playing the game.
Waves is about enjoying the game itself. It rewards good players with increasing difficulty rather than decreasing (which is often what unlocking powerups achieves) – the better you get at the game the harder the game will be in response. It’s designed to keep you in a sweet spot where your abilities are being pushed just enough to keep you from being bored but not so much as to make you frustrated (See Flow) – the score is only there so you have feedback on how well you’re doing (and also so you can gloat to your friends).
Waves can never be completed but it can be exhausted. It is not possible to “100%” the game but it is possible to reach a point where you feel that either you aren’t going to get any better at it or that you would rather spend the time doing something else. I don’t mind if you get bored of Waves and stop playing as it is in fact inevitable that you will. I just hope that while you are playing it that you’re enjoying it for the experience of playing, learning and improving rather than because you persevered long enough to unlock everything in it.
A Release Date!
Waves will not be released in October. Sorry.
It will however be getting released on November 16th. That’s an exact date right there. Put it in your diaries.
The reasons for this are many but I’ll give you the 3 big ones:
Battlefield 3 (In the UK at least), Modern Warfare 3, and Skyrim.
I won’t be playing any of them (well maybe Skyrim) but it’s simply a matter of publicity and the fact that when expensive high profile games come out nobody buys or writes about indie games.
Now this sucks because as my followers will know I’m basically broke now. I’m running on fumes in terms of savings and it is only thanks to my lovely girlfriend and some very understanding parents that I’ve been able to keep going as long as I have. I would love to release this weekend if I didn’t think that releasing now would be worse than releasing after all the big hitters have been and gone.
The other benefit of this delay is that it will let me poke various press people into action so they can play the finished version of the game rather than a beta for their reviewing. I will also be able to put together a launch trailer which is something I just wouldn’t have had time for otherwise. Post in the comments any ideas for the trailer because if I’m honest I’m a bit rubbish at them.
So remember: November 16th. It’s not a Wednesday it’s Wavesday. Aha. See what I did there? Gosh I’m funny.
The Highscore Videos
They have started!
This demo run of 7,742,184 by mr DjParagon is so far the highest score I’ve heard of and beats my personal best by about 2million. If you want to know how to score big in the demo then give it a watch and probably a frame by frame study…
Demo Feedback, Issues and What Happens Next
Hello lovely people!
Thankyou for trying the Waves demo (You have tried it right? If not go here and do so then come back).
The demo has been available for a little over 24 hours now and the feedback so far has been great.
However the Demo has had some issues (one of which I fixed last night as you may see in the post below this one).
If you are having issues then first try the following steps:
- Run the game as administrator. If this solves your problem then let me know in the comments.
- Reboot the computer. Yes I know it sounds obvious but it does solve most problems.
- Install the latest video drivers.
- Redownload the demo, uninstall it and then reinstall it. Sometimes files get corrupt during download or during the install. It’s unlikely but it can happen.
If you still have trouble then you may be suffering from one of the following issues that I hopefully will have fixed later tonight.
If you were having problems with the demo on Windows XP then I urge you to uninstall the game, download the latest version and install it again. All the problems with Windows XP should now be fixed. I am however sorry to say that without making the installer about 200meg larger you will still have to sit through the .NET install process. You can thank Microsoft for this.
- Crashing on Startup - If you are on Windows XP then you need .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 try installing this and see if it fixes it.
In terms of low-framerate issues then I can only recommend that you go into the video settings and turn off Distortion, Ambient Occlusion and Bloom and reduce the resolution. It won’t look as pretty but if you are struggling to hit 30fps this should help. If you turn all of these off and you still have problems then I’m sorry but your graphics card just isn’t powerful enough to run the game properly and there is nothing I can do about that.
For the record I developed the game on a Geforce GTS250 and it runs at 60fps with no problem with everything on. It runs at 30fps on my laptop with an ATI 5470 which if you look at this chart is actually pretty rubbish. Anything better than the 5470 shouldn’t be having any problems at all.
I hope everybody is enjoying the demo and if you are having any issues that I’ve not covered here then let me know in the comments. Part of the reason for the demo release is to find these problems so I can make sure they don’t happen in the full game so thankyou for your patience if you are having issues.
Of course if you aren’t having issues and want to tell me how great everything is then you can comment too 
Demo Updated
Just a quick note that the Demo has been updated to fix a bug in the installer that meant you had to run it with administrator rights. If you’ve been having problems getting the demo to run then you should download the updated version from here and reinstall it.
Let me know in the comments if there are any problems or if it fixed any problems you were having.
Squid In A Box Unleashes WAVES Demo
It’s here at last. The demo I’ve been promising for… well nearly forever it seems.
For the impatient you can click HERE to download the demo now.
Press release below the cut…
Waves at EG Expo
Subtitle: My Feet Really Hurt
So I’m back home after two days at the Expo. Waves is still there but sadly as it costs a fortune to either stay in London or commute and I am nearly broke I won’t be around to tell people how to play.
First a picture of a complete stranger playing the game:
So if you are planning on playing Waves at the Expo then forewarned is forearmed as they say.
Note: All of this info is actually available in the games How To Play and Controls section but it seems Expo visitors have an aversion to these things.
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