Projects

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Telling Lies

Details

Category
Steam PC/Mac and iOS
Description
A Video Game About Private Conversations
URL
Telling Lies on Steam
Release Date
August 2019

Reviews

Phenomenal acting and a deep central mystery make this voyeruistic adventure game something special.

9/10 – Game Informer

An atmospheric, brilliantly written and acted detective thriller that tells a compelling story in a unique way.

87/100 – PC Gamer

Lose yourself in one of this year’s best video game stories.

9/10 – IGN


Telling Lies is the new video game from Sam Barlow, creator of Her Story and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. An investigative thriller game with non-linear storytelling, Telling Lies revolves around a cache of secretly recorded video conversations. It stars Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé and Angela Sarafyan.


How does it work?

Telling Lies sits you in front of an anonymous laptop loaded with a stolen NSA database full of footage. The footage covers two years in the intimate lives of four people whose stories are linked by a shocking incident. Explore the database by typing search terms, watch the clips where those words are spoken and piece together your story.

Unlike anything you've played before, Telling Lies is an intimate and intense experience. A game where you decide the truth.


What did I do?

After working with Sam Barlow to bring the multi-BAFTA winning Her Story to Android devices, I was excited when Sam told me about his next idea: Telling Lies, at the time it already had a publisher in Annapurna Interactive and Sam wanted me to help him create the game.


Whilst Sam was busy writing the story I got the software side of the project ready, creating the Desktop that you see here, with a system of Windows that could be moved around and resized, a collection of Icons that could me moved around the Desktop, into file folders and used to launch applications. As well as the main Retina application that contained the gameplay loop, a version of Solitaire and a suite of other applications for editing notes or settings and even debug applications for examining the progression and music systems.


By the time filming started I'd broadly completed all the functionality for the system and took a break to fly to LA and watch some of the filming. It absolutely blew me away, the attention to detail was amazing and although already convinced, I understood then how amazing it was going to me. I flew back to the UK to eagerly await the new videos. I fixed any remaining issues, added lots of polish and added the systems which enabled it to be translated into eleven languages!

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Glitch Auction House

Details

Category
Mobile App
Description
Companion app to support the Massively Multiplayer Online Flash game Glitch
Date
February 2012
News
Glitch Auction House is no longer available due to Glitch The Game sadly closing down

Introduction

Auction House was an app for iPod or iPhone which accompanied the massively multiplayer online game Glitch which sadly no longer exists. You can no longer run the app because it needed the Glitch servers and API in order to work. Therefore it is no longer available on the App Store.

Features


Player Information and Statistics – View your mood, health and player level. See how much more experience you need to move to the next level and check how many Currants you have in your purse. Watch your character animate in all their finery and tap the screen to make them jump up and down. Careful you don’t make them angry though!


Inventory – View your current inventory including all of your bags and their content. Sort the inventory in a variety of ways; by slot, by category and alphabetically! See the number of items in each slot and get an idea of how much everything could be worth if you wanted to sell. When you do decide to sell you can do it right from your inventory, just tap and  update count and price.


Auctions – Using Auction House you can view the latest auctions or search for an item by category. You can see the latest list of items you have up for auction and for all auctions you can see the seller and get a description of the item.


Glitch Auction House is a fully functional visual aid enhancing your experience of Glitch whether you are online playing the game in your browser or just want to sell a few items whilst you are out and about in the real world.

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Quiz Climber Rivals

Details

Category
Mobile App
URL
Quiz Climber Rivals on the App Store
Developer
Relentless Software
Release Date
Dec 06, 2011

Screenshots

Quiz Climber was the first iOS release that I helped to create. It is based on a simple concept of answering questions within a time limit against your friends and it was executed as a highly polished and beautifully animated 2D vertical scroller with a colourful parallax background. It was integrated with Facebook to help you find your friends easily and the background was used to reinforce a strong sense of progression.


The prototype for this game was done using native xCode, with a simple list of friends, showing their avatar and their current best score. Each time you played, if you got a better score and overtook some more friends you would be shown to overtake them in the list with a visual swap of rows. The idea is that no matter what it looked like, this aspect of the game needed to have a hook on it's own, because no amount of pretty graphics is going to make this game fun if it wasn't already. It worked, this prototype was already a hit with those around the office and those who got to play it externally. The stage was set to go into full production with this idea.



Next the character you played as needed to be endearing to players and to provide an identity for the game. Our in house concept artists mocked up some ideas for what this character could look like and a design was chosen. The little guy was cut up with a few frames of body graphic to help animate him jumping around. With a tail that we could rotate around behind him and some facial expressions to swap in and out depending on what was happening around him. So he could be happy when he overtook friends and sad when they jumped ahead of him.


As part of the concept art used to create the identity of the character there was also a selection of possible backgrounds. A few backgrounds were chosen and cut up into layers to create a parallax background. I love parallax backgrounds in games as it gives the player really great feedback following their input and they are really fun and rewarding to make. It also allowed us to create a strong sense of progression as you moved from question to question: you start up in the dark depths of the forest and as you answer questions correctly you move further and further up through less and less foliage until you break out into blue sky and then eventually on into space! This means that in an instant you can look at the screen and gather how well someone is doing without even needing to read the number of questions that have been answered correctly. If I did this background again then I would add a little background drift as you move the device around which could really add to the sense of depth.

I have mixed feelings about the Facebook integration. It is by far the best way to get access to all friends already playing the game. As soon as you sign in with Facebook you are already playing against your friends list without the need to post on their wall or send any further invitations. But at the time it was launched people were still very wary of Facebook integrated games because they had been burnt in the past by apps that posted to their wall excessively and annoyed their friends. Only a few months after Quiz Climbers release Draw Something really took off and I think a big part of that was the Facebook integration. It seemed like it was the right time to launch with Facebook integration and just a little message promising not to post to your wall was enough to convince people that it was safe. Now Facebook integration is far more accepted and it is an easy way to sign up a new player and get access to people they already know who are also playing your game. It's the kind of thing that can really help your game to go viral.


Quiz climber is loved by all who play it, as it has a great combination of a brilliant hook and the high quality polished graphics to keep it looking attractive to new players. It was a shame that Facebook integration received such a backlash initially, but I think it was just months away from being the right time to release such a game, and it really picked up after this initial feedback. All in all I am immensely proud of the end result and it gives me great satisfaction that I was part of the team that created it.

Available on the App Store!

Details

Category
Console Game
URL
Buzz! Quiz World review
Developer
Relentless Software
Release Date
2008 - 2010

Buzz Franchise

Relentless Software helped create many Buzz! titles. I personally contributed to Buzz! Quiz TV, Buzz! Quiz World, Buzz! The Ultimate Music Quiz and Buzz! (Quiz Pack Player).

Buzz! Quiz World
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MotoGP 07

Details

Category
Console Game
URL
MotoGP 07 Review
Developer
Climax Racing
Release Date
2007

The main feature I was responsible for implementing on MotoGP '07 for Xbox 360 was the online Pink Slip mode. The game already had a fantastic system for customising your bike, you could store multiple bikes that you may have bought or been awarded in your garage, and you could paint them different colours, fit different upgrades and fit logos over sections of the fairing. What could we do to make more of a feature of the bike customisation? Well, you don't know what you've got till you lose it, so how about you get to gamble your bike with real people over Xbox Live?

Moto GP Screenshot

So, I was tasked with creating the online Pink Slip mode. Online players would be able to challenge other Live players in a one on one race for victory. If you crossed the line first you would win your opponents bike for your own garage, if you lost the race your bike would be gone forever.

After thinking this over for a while I realised the main issue with this is, put simply: cheating. How do I stop people from just quitting out of the race as soon as they knew they were going to lose? I could remove their bike for quitting the race or pulling the network cable, but the bike was stored in the save game on the Xbox 360 hard drive, so what could I do if they just switched off the box?

First I decided to look at who else, if anyone, had implemented a similar feature. How do they stop cheaters from devaluing it? After some fruitless investigation, I was directed towards Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I got hold of a copy but it turned out to be a single player career mode. A great feature but not really what I was after. It turned out that no one else was really doing the same thing, so this was going to be a unique feature.

Moto GP Screenshot

The ideal solution would require a dedicated server, when the players agreed to the terms of the race and started the game you would remove the bike details from their garages and save their games. The bike details would then be held on the server which would be responsible for deciding the winner at the end of the race and awarding them with both bikes. This way you have removed the bikes from the respective players saved games before they had even started the race and they no longer have the opportunity to cheat. Unfortunately, as is often the case, we didn't have the budget to implement the feature in this way and it also seemed unreasonably harsh to punish a player by removing their carefully customised bike if they had legitimately lost their network connection during the race, through no fault of their own.

It's a tricky problem but maybe one way to solve it would be to hold the bikes on the server, and allow a rematch whether a player had legitimately lost their connection or not. There would be some design issues to solve, for example what would happen if when a player regained connection their opponent was now in a another race? However, I'm sure it would lead to a nicer experience for the player.

The solution we ended up using in GP'07 was to simply punish cheaters by naming and shaming using a dedicated pink slip leaderboard.

When you started a race the race_starts column was incremented and when you finished a race the race_finished was incremented. This meant that I could calculate a reliability rating which would become part of the search and sort criteria for sessions, clearly shown when you looked for lobbies to join. Additionally I also included a races_won column. With a percentage won and a percentage completed, I gave the player everything they needed to pick the lobbies that contained honest competitors.

All in all I would have liked to have done the server side solution and no doubt that would have ended up being a more slick experience. But we often have to weight up the cost to benefit in this industry and make difficult decisions. In the end I think that Moto GP 2007 had the best online Pink Slip mode of any console game at the time.

Moto GP Screenshot

A worthy addition can be found in the online section, where you can now gamble your hard-earned (and painstakingly customised) bikes in pink slip races. Lose the race, lose your bike. MotoGP has always had a robust multiplayer component and community and this idea serves both well.

- eurogamer

Moto GP Screenshot
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About Me

Introduction

I’ve been working in the industry for over 17 years and in that time contributed towards more than 20 titles including those targeting multiple platforms. I’ve worked on console games, PC games and Mobile games in areas as diverse as Gameplay, Networking, Physics, Graphics and Presentation.

I also have a keen interest in helping graduates and generally improving the diversity of our industry. I help to run the Search for a Star competition organised by Aardvark Swift and I am a Lead Evaluator for Creative Skillset visiting Universities and feeding back on games programming courses. I also visit Schools to talk about a career in game development and have volunteered as a Stem Ambassador.

Together with Ross Mansfield, I formed the studio Furious Bee Limited to provide programming and art outsource services. We are a very small but highly experienced team of industry veterans, we both make games and help other people to make their games too.

Contact Me

Contact Information

Address
Sheffield South Yorkshire, UK

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