GDC: N+ Postmortem

By: Derek Yu

On: February 27th, 2008

Nick Waanders, of Slick Entertainment, has released the slides for his and mare’s N+ postmortem. Slick did the development for N+ for XBLA.

Kotaku actually has a nice write-up of the game, where they laud, among other things, the excellent multiplayer co-op:

Single player is great and all, but the game really transforms itself in multiplayer mode. I’m not talking about the Survival Mode or the Race Mode here, but the four-player co-op. Teaming up with three other (good) players completely changes the experience. Playing over the same levels in single player mode the teams I have gotten with have come up with some truly innovative and entertaining ways to use our numbers to our advantage.

I’m seriously (srsly) sad that I’m nowhere near an Xbox 360 with Live support right now. Good co-op is so rare in games…

Posted in Community, Developers, IGF / GDC | Tags: metanet, SlickEntertainment

http://www.indiecade.com/ E.J.

In addition, I think the results of last week’s LIVE Activity are worthy of an entry of its own:

http://majornelson.com/archive/2008/02/26/live-activity-for-week-of-2-18.aspx

N+ domination!
http://0xdeadc0de.org Eclipse

yeah, the last game i played with a real solid coop mode was the first Quake… oh wait Serious Sam 2 wasn’t bad too.

I think that coop stuff is actually making the game fortune
PHeMoX

Co-op is nice when you’re playing with people that are nowhere near your own level or a lot better. If they are just about the same level, it’s so much cooler to play against eachother than to take on the AI together if you ask me….

All in all ‘co-op’ seems to be the new buzz-word for AAA games too… :S
I should settle on a name

I don’t think I get the hype around N.
Dom Camus

Interesting remark on language choice…

“Build a prototype in an ‘easy’ language”

OK, sensible. But then why switch to C++ for the main development? A simple game like N+ can’t possibly require it.
Al King

“I should settle on a name”, it’s just fun and addictive. Jon Mak is good friends with the Metanet guys, also, which I guess is part of the reason for his joking comment â€œIf you donâ€™t buy N+… youâ€™re not indie.â€ If there’s ‘hype’, it’s because a lot of people think the original is a good game and wish the developers the best of success – simple as that.
raigan

mare put up the slides in downloadable form (right side of page): http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n+_XBLA_media.html

@Dom: someone asked this at the talk, Nick said that we actually did need the speed in the end, because of how the netcode works — it re-simulates, which means it sometimes has to do 60 frames of calculations in a single frame..
Muhammed

Need…PSN…or….PC….version….now….please….

Seriously, anyone know anything about an updated PC version or a PSN version?
aeiowu

fucrate and I played n+ for like three hours last night on co-op. I think we swore enough to make a sailor blush. It was awesome. Great work on the port, and the co-op levels are delicious.
Hyudra

“I donâ€™t think I get the hype around N.”

> N is sort of the modern equivalent of what Prince of Persia was back in the old days – it takes a simple concept & design, mixes it with very smooth gameplay & makes the game purely about your own skill.

It has a good tempo, clear/crisp layout, intuitive controls & never punishes you for things beyond your control.
Carlz0r

You’ll “get” the hype around N if you actually try to get in to it. When you notice that the simple, yet effective physics can totally change the course, distance, speed, etc, of a jump, you’ll begin to realize that it’s a game about pure skill. There’s more than one way to do most levels in N which is a major plus for a lot of gamers.
http://gnomeslair.blogspot.com/ gnome

N+ might even teach a certain much-anticipated PS3 a thing or two, uhm, too…
NickWaanders

“But then why switch to C++ for the main development? A simple game like N+ canâ€™t possibly require it.”

In multiplayer, it does actually. The prediction systems need to be able to resimulate up to 60 frames of the game in 1/60th of a second, which means it needs to be REALLY fast.

Aside from that, XNA wasn’t available at the time we started the game, otherwise I would probably have tried making the game in XNA first.

Cheers,
Nick
Dom Camus

Wow – so that’s an effective 360fps! Only ninjas could possibly be that cool! :-)
Bronze Dog

Oh, great. Looks like I’ll be needing to get an Xbox, now.
raigan

hmm.. i thought i posted, but anyway Nick stole my answer ;)

also, Mare put up a downloadable version of the slides (right side of the page): http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n+_XBLA_media.html
Zaphos

If you need to re-simulate a full second of the game, doesn’t mean the lag is already bad enough to render the game unplayable?
PHeMoX

Do you really need a prediction system like that? Pre-simulating a full second seems a bit overdone to me actually, but I can imagine the advantage C++ as language has in this case makes it the obvious choice for development.

*N is sort of the modern equivalent of what Prince of Persia was back in the old days – it takes a simple concept & design, mixes it with very smooth gameplay & makes the game purely about your own skill.*

Damn right! It’s not hype, it’s ‘N’. ;)
Eggplant Wizard

Sooo ….
C# is not good(fast) enough to write games that require decent(speedy) realtime netcode for multiplayer?

Has this changed since XNA 2.0 release?

Or are all us guys writing games in XNA with C# going to get a rude awakening when it comes to implimenting multiplayer?