Today on the stage at EGX Rezzed 2015, Dan Marshall discussed his game The Swindle and how he has used his experiences with other stealth games to make the game that he wanted to make.

The presentation started off with Marshall saying that indie developers were able to create games to target niches and specific types of games that they thought the gamers wanted but didn’t yet exist. He said that while he enjoyed stealth games, he had come to dislike a lot of the ‘tropes’ associated with it and so had aimed to make The Swindle a stealth game that didn’t contain any of those bits he disliked, such as confusing line-of-sight or fail conditions that would throw you back to a checkpoint over and over.

The Swindle is basically a stealth game that takes place in a steampunk setting, with some cyberpunk vibes thrown in too for good measure. The aim of the game is to break into and steal all the money from the levels which take the form of buildings which are procedurally generated, so you never play the same building twice. You can choose to break into the building however you want and approach the stealing in any manner, although there are enemy robot guards, cameras and other security entities around who will set off the alarm if they see you, draining the remaining money from the building’s access points. Ultimately the goal is to steal as much as you can and escape before the police show up at the end of the time limit.

The story of the game is that this world’s equivalent of Scotland Yard will be turning on a giant AI to monitor the city and all crime in 100 days. As a thief that’d make your life a bit difficult so you’re eventually working your way up to stealing the AI before it will be turned on. The alarms in each building will reduce the remaining day count by 1 every time they’re set off though, which Marshall said is how the game will add tension rather than the ‘get caught, reset to checkpoint’ method employed by other games.

The Swindle is being made by Size Five Games, and is hoped to be out sometime soon although no details or platforms have yet been announced.

With EGX Rezzed  in full swing, one of the panels I was interested in today was Titan Souls. Being developed by Acid Nerve and published by Devolver Digital, the game places you in the shoes of a tiny pixel hero armed with a bow and one arrow. Your goal is to take down the titular titans. Every fight is a boss fight, pitting you against a foe with only one hit point. Giving a presentation at EGX, they talked a bit about the design philosophy of the game, as well as  demonstrating some of the boss fights.

Interestingly, they revealed that they would gauge the balance of a boss by how many times testers died before beating it. They also expanded a bit upon the idea behind the single hit boss fights, discussing how they wanted it to be relatively easy to remain alive during a fight, but difficult to actually win the fight.  This was, of course, accompanied by a gameplay demo- which ended in a few unfortunate deaths for the devs.

With an obvious attention to detail, gorgeous art style and unique one shot, one HP mechanic, Titan Souls is looking better than ever. Keep an eye out for this game when it releases simultaneously on PS4, PS Vita, PC and Mac.

Ok, EGX Rezzed 2015 kicked off today and teh press were invited to check out ArenaNet’s 40 minute demo of the new Heart of Thorns expansion that’s coming soon

The first thing that jumped out at me was how the game honestly feels like nothing has changed… at all…

So rather than roll a new character and try the new Revenant class, I decided to basically make my main lvl 80 necromancer that has served me well since day one of the Guild Wars 2 release. And again, nothing new. apart from having to bind the controls slightly based on how I’ve played the game from release, the game felt exactly as it has the whole time.

The demo kicked off with a quite nice intro sequence in typical Guild Wars 2 style, but you very quickly realise that this is mid campaign, as you have no idea WHY they are doing what they are doing and what for, and this lack of info drops you squarely into what appears to be a Destiny’s Edge/Pact team up against a new jungle dragon, which quickly goes HORRIBLY wrong, leaving you and a few survivors to make your way through the jungle to save other survivors and find out what happened to Destiny’s Edge and the rest of the very quickly destroyed fleet.

What DOES happen very quickly is the learning of your first Mastery Point, this leading to learning how to glide for short distances. I must admit, I used this only once, to jump between a platform for a boss event that you stumble on pretty much straight away. This was interesting, albeit typical GW2 style, everyone is in it for themselves, 99% of people won’t help you if you are downed and the rest only for the extra experience for helping you back up, not for team work at all

This was a fun boss fight though, much more movement from the boss, a Wyvern instead of a dragon this time, on a roundish platform, although his rotation of moves got memorised very quickly and his fire breath attack is reasonably easy to evade. It was still enjoyable though, but I can see it getting boring quickly if too many people did it regularly, but then this is the problem with all the GW2 world boss fights

Now, some reading this will ask why I didn’t try the new Revenant class and there are two reasons… 1, I plan to make one and live stream it on release. and 2, I had to wait in the que to play this for nearly two hours. I watched every other person play one, apart from the odd veterans like me that wanted to see if our main class had changed.
Now the Revenant looks interesting, and I’m sure I will enjoy it when I play it, but really? If I wasn’t going to get it to stream, I’d wait a while after release and get it at discount.

I must say on a personal note though, the day was made all the more fun by the awesome Gaile Gray, the Guild Wars 1 community manager that always had time for us idiots in GW1, even the super opinionated ones like me and the PVP community, and although I very much doubt this gets read by anyone at ANet, I highly recommend the devs listen to the Lady Gray and bring back Lions Arch and International Districts, the game needs more conga lines and Froggy

Some time ago, Amazon launched a new online storage service called “Glacier”, so named because it was designed with a view to act as “cold storage” for your files. Glacier offered cheaper storage for those files you just HAVE to keep online, but don’t have a need to access on a constant basis – such as backups. In a clear case of “anything you can do, I can do better”, Google have responded by launching their own similar service, known as Google Nearline.

Google Nearline is a new service to host historical data and files you don’t expect to use very often. For example, say you’re a student. You’ll probably want your latest essays and coursework, research notes and so on immediately accessible via Google Drive to work on as you need ready for the upcoming deadlines; but what those essays from a year ago or older that have long since been passed to your teachers or professors and marked? They might be worth keeping for later review or research, but you probably won’t be needing to read those very often any more, right? That’s what Nearline is for. It’s the kind of cloud storage that businesses often need, but ordinary people may not want, especially if it isn’t cheap.

Luckily, keeping things cheap is something Google has been very aggressive about recently. Back in March, the company slashed Drive storage pricing across the board, cutting the price of its 100GB Drive tier by more than half and lowering the cost per terabyte per month to just $10 USD. With Nearline, however, Google are allowing customers to fine-tune their spending and storage requirements to the exact penny if they so choose – the service charges by the gigabyte, at a rate of just a penny per GB per month.

Google Nearline also offers advantages in other areas, according to the company. One is in its speed – while services such as the aforementioned Amazon Glacier require several hours before the stored data can be retrieved once again, Nearline is able to serve data in around three seconds. It also integrates with other products in Google’s Cloud Platform portfolio, making it easier for pre-existing installations to tap into the system.

Google’s moves are a reflection of the cut-throat industry online storage has become, where any company that doesn’t move fast will crash and burn rapidly. Even as storage offerings become cheaper and faster for the consumer, the profits on offer continue to shoot up as more people embrace online solutions to store data where they can easily get to it later – whether it’s personal, private or business. With Microsoft’s Azure platform proving itself one of the company’s most profitable divisions; and storage-based companies such as Box and Dropbox raising millions in investor funds, competition is always hotting up.

Author of the popular science-fiction book series Discworld Sir Terry Pratchett has today lost his fight for life at the age of 66. It was reported he died with his family around him of early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Pratchett was most well known for his series of books known collectively as the Discworld books, about a disc-shaped world set on the backs of four elephants positioned on the back of a giant turtle called Great A’Tuin. The series while it dealt with many fantasy sub-genres such as fairy tales and horror also contained a lot of examination of big issues such as the meaning of death, religion and business and politics, with the storylines of the main characters often interweaving between books. Forty Discworld novels were published in Pratchett’s lifetime, as well as certain books being adapted into other mediums such as graphics novels and televisual programming.

Pratchett announced his suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s back in 2007, but continued to write anyway, completing a forty-first Discw0rld novel just last year. He used his fame to campaign for assisted dying and to raise awareness of dementia and other related illnesses.

The news was announced over Sir Terry’s Facebook page with a statement that read: “It is with immeasurable sadness that we announce that author Sir Terry Pratchett has died. The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds. Rest in peace Sir Terry Pratchett.”

Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna Pratchett has been tweeting out the news too and thanked fans for their well-wishes to herself and Pratchett’s family at this time.

Many thanks for all the kind words about my dad. Those last few tweets were sent with shaking hands and tear-filled eyes.

— Rhianna Pratchett (@rhipratchett) March 12, 2015