What can I say, Valve was nice enough to include commentary tracks for all of their games, and I can't help but comment on it.

So the topic du jour is Team Fortress 2, released after all these years. (I have some things to say about Episode 2, but they'd be spoilerific, so I'm going to hold off for a while.) For anyone not familiar with TF2, it's a multiplayer only team-based shooter (red players vs. blue players), where each player picks one of nine distinct player classes to use for the round. The way the game plays changes depending on what class you're playing as.

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Valve Software, makers of the Half-Life series of action games, recently released a very strange little puzzle game called "Portal." If you're unfamiliar with it, I recommend you watch the trailer, because it does a much better job of explaining the game than I could with words.

One of the nice things about this game is that it comes with developer commentary that you can listen to as you play the game, which gives some insight to their design process.

Perhaps the most interesting thing they discussed was that they treated almost the entire game as a tutorial. Which isn't to say that they hold your hand the entire game (quite the opposite!), but rather that whenever they weren't teaching you new gameplay tricks, they were reinforcing the old ones they'd already taught you. They found that if they didn't, players would routinely forget that the old moves were still options.

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Kathy Sierra has a great post about how to subvert a company from within: basically, continuously ask "how does this help our customers kick tail?" As rarely as you might hear that in the halls of Microsoft, I think you're only slightly more likely to hear it at a game design company. Really, though, it's even more important here.

The entire point of a game (or, really, any form of entertainment) is to make you feel good. That might be because it gets you thinking or it might be because it gets your blood pumping. Either way, the game needs to be focused on making that work and making you feel great.

In that vein, give Entropic Space a try and let us know how well it makes you feel awesome!

As you can see from our fancy new sidebar, our first Flash game is available! Entropic Space was prototyped in-house in about two weeks and then tweaked and given graphics (courtesy of Rory Starks) and sound for another two weeks. We've got a screencast up if you're interested in the prototyping process.

We're very happy with the resulting game, which has been entered into the fourth Jay is Games competition. The theme was "ball physics," which I think is pretty evident in the gameplay.

In Entropic Space, you control Astrocrash, the last of the Planetkillers. His job is to travel as far as possible into Entropic Space by gathering energy. The only way to get energy is to knock planets into each other. But watch out for the black holes (and the white holes they turn into)!

Have fun and let us know what you think! You can read other people's comments at the Jay is Games competition page for Entropic Space.

There's been a lot of discussion online recently about moral choice in Bioshock. Or, really, the one moral choice in Bioshock and how it's disappointing. In the same breathe as they speak their disappointment, many people cry out that Bioshock could have done better. I actually think they couldn't have without making the game unrecognizable.

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As you've may have noticed, the Studio Cypher site has had a complete overhaul. We like the new design a lot and hope that you do as well. However, any site redesign can introduce problems. I did my best to connect these new pages to the old URLs, but I might have missed some. If you try to get to a page and find that it no longer exists, leave me a comment and I'll hook it up once again.

Thanks for your patience as we transition!

Sometimes the makers of alternate reality games want to do something special for their players, and have an event instead of the usual gameplay. These require much higher player involvement while they last, enough that the players should be warned about it ahead of time.

Most developers try to find in-game ways of doing this. We did this with the RUMI and Boat Poker events. A player says "Hey, something big's going down on Friday, try to be around at 7pm, okay?" For most events, this works just fine. But what if you're planning something bigger? Something that people might have to ask for days off work for?

The folks making Eldritch Errors took a rather straightforward approach to this problem, by posting it directly to their out-of-game blog, Schmeldritch. This is a good solution because it gets the information out that something's going to happen, but there's no burden of knowledge on their in-game characters so they don't have to worry about fitting the announcement in, plot-wise. They haven't said where the event will be, but past experiences plus this recently released map suggest northern Virginia, so players in that area know to be prepared.

And while we're on the topic of mentioning future happenings in out-of-game blog posts, I find it oddly apropos that the Schmedlritch post ends with "The train has already left the station."