The robotic gentry are returning, gunning for your hide as you try to escape the horrors of the English countryside. And in the game, wahey! Which is to say that Big Robot, the studio of RPS co-founder Jim Rossignol, have announced a remaster of their 2014 sandbox survival shooter Sir, You Are Being Hunted. That'll be a whole separate game but the original isn't forgotten, receiving a big ol' patch which spruces up the look and technoguts while restoring multiplayer.
]]>Shining lights on problems might not be as effective a solution to social ills as first thought, but it seems key to surviving a nightmare robopocalypse. Announced back in July, Big Robot (Sir, You Are Being Hunted and The Signal From Tölva) are living up to their name again with The Light Keeps Us Safe, a techno-horror survival adventure set in a world where the sky has gone dark and robots prowl the endless night.
The game has been shrouded in mystery and shadow up til now, but in a new video released today (and found below), we get our first brief peek at what survival entails in its gloomy world - narrated by dev lead (and RPS co-founder) Jim Rossignol. The game is due to enter early access in October.
]]>This week on RPS: Where Are They Now? we revisit Jim Rossignol. You might remember Rosso co-founded RPS in 1873 but couldn't resist the bright lights of Game Development City. Packing his bindle and hitting the road, he co-founded Big Robot, the studio we last saw with survive-o-shooter Sir, You Are Being Hunted. But where has Rossignol been since then? What happened to Big Robot? Did the bright lights lure another innocent soul to ruin on the technorocks?
Nah mate, they've been quietly working on The Signal From Tölva [official site], a first-person explore-o-shooter about robots on an alien planet.
]]>I've grown immune to the draw of bundles as the number of them has increased, but the Indie Legends 4 Bundle has a good enough haul that it reminds of the early days of Humble. For €3.15 (around £2.62/$3.51) you get Viscera Cleanup Detail (with DLC), Door Kickers, Skullgirls, Sir, You Are Being Hunted, Reus, Lethal League, Party Hard, and Another World. I haven't played Sir or You Are Being Hunted, but I'd pay that much for Door Kickers alone.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
DISCLAIMER: FELLOW RPS FOUNDER JIM ROSSIGNOL AND SOME OTHER CHUMS MADE THIS GAME. DO NOT TRUST A WORD I SAY ABOUT IT.
]]>When I pop open and drink bottles I find in bushes, people gasp and scuttle away in horror. Yet it's cause for celebration when we virtually get together with pals to drink cyber bushbeer. Go figure. The point is: steampunk countryside survive 'em up Sir, You Are Being Hunted [official site] has finally added multiplayer.
RPS co-founder Jimmy Ro-ro is one of the folks behind Sir, I should of course mention, but I've only met him a few times myself and certainly never when sober so I couldn't tell you much about him. He's shorter than me, and I don't care about the rest.
]]>We're not going to be publishing a Wot I Think of the game Sir, You Are Being Hunted because one of the principle people behind it - although secondary in overall accomplishment to the mercurial Tom Betts and the incendiary James Carey - is me. I started a small game design company (just the three of us) back in 2010, and in November 2012 we Kickstarted our first big project, which was the open-world stealth and survival game, Sir, You Are Being Hunted. Today, after just over eight months of Early Access, that project hits V1.0. This means that we've done what we promised we'd do in the Kickstarter, and the game is superb shape. It's out and you should play it. That's my objective analysis of the situation, anyway.
Oh, and there's a Professor Elemental video below to celebrate the release. You should watch that.
]]>The IGF finalists have been announced, and it's a fantastic list. Very deserving games. But there are others, ones that didn't make the grade, and I want to stand up and salute them in public. As a first round judge on the awards, I played a whole bunch of the 650 entries, and there are some real gems in there that are no longer in the running. (Obviously I didn't play all the entries, so there will be many more great games that still go unrecognised, and that's sad.) So, as we did last year, here are the Second Annual Horace Awards For Forgotten IGF Entrants.
]]>Sir, You Are Being Hunted, unquestionably the game of the year according to every gaming website except for this one (out of sheer modesty), has just released a big update. The Industrial Biome is now part of the game, which not only gives you a whole new style of territory to be terrified within, but also a couple of new terrific NPCs - The Scarecrow and the Bog Monster. You can see a video of it below. And before we get there, have a very hefty declaration that Sir is made by a phenomenally handsome team including our own Jim Rossignol, so what you're witnessing here is grotesque corruption.
]]>You can't survive 15 years in the writing-about-games business without understanding the importance of magnanimity. Just because Jim & Co. have, thus far, failed to implement any of my Sir, You Are Being Hunted improvement suggestions doesn't mean I'm sulkily cold-shouldering their Hammer-House-of-Hannay creeping-around-on-the-moors game. Just because Sir's player-protagonist still isn't a) A downed Luftwaffe pilot endeavouring to retrieve and destroy parts of a top-secret radar jammer, b) King Charles II fleeing to France across a Britain crawling with ruthless Robo-Roundheads, or c) A hedgepig the like of which Wiltshire has never seen the like of which, didn't stop me spending the weekend with the latest alpha.
]]>SUPER DISCLAIMER: Posting about a game I made with Big Robot.
]]>EXCITING DISCLAIMER: Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a game made by Big Robot, a small studio which I help run. I am also a founder and editor of this website. Had to mention that. Just so you know.
Anyway! I was just thinking that I should probably mention the release date of the PC game I am working on, on the PC games website I work for. That just seems to link up somehow. So here we go: it'll be available to download and play on Humble Store and Steam on the 19th of August. Holy crap that is soon! It's an 'alpha' though, so it still has a few months to go before completion, as we're only about half way through implementing all the robots that hunt you, and have two more biomes to set up. There may be minor glitches, too, but on the whole we're really rather pleased with it.
You can be hunted, you can be horribly murdered by robots, you can drink tea, and you can escape from the islands. It works. And I think it's beautiful.
Just in case you've not been following my witterings about the project, let me tell you a bit more about it, below.
]]>IMPOSSIBLY IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I run 3-man game studio Big Robot in my spare time. This post is blatant self-promotion of that happen-thing.
We're busy getting Sir, You Are Being Hunted ready for Rezzed, which means that the playable alpha for our Kickstarter backers is not far away. Part of the work that we're doing towards that involves new biomes, and I've made a video to show off one of those, which you can see below.
]]>IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER THING: As well as working on RPS, I run a three-man game-dev outfit called Big Robot. Our current project is Sir, You Are Being Hunted, which did fairly well on the Kickstarters. Rather than pretend RPS can be objective about this I am making a policy of declaring this interest and letting you decide for yourselves.
Without further ado, I've posted the latest videos below, so you can take a look. Love you!
]]>WARNING: Blatant self-promotional post ahead. Love you!
As many of you will doubtless be aware, I've spent the last couple of years dual-classing as journalist and game developer. I've worked with two friends – Tom Betts and James Carey – to create the indie studio, Big Robot. We are currently Kickstarting our third game, Sir, You Are Being Hunted. With just a week to go, I wanted to talk plainly about why we're making it, what the game is, and what it means to us. Specifically, what it means to me. Because this whole gaming-making business is a complicated, tricky thing, and worth talking about in some detail.
]]>It's rather of note that Sir, You Are Being Hunted is being developed by Big Robot, a team led by one Jim Rossignol. Who happens to be an owner and editor of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. BIAS.
And so it is that Big Robot are rolling around in Queen-faced money. Bar sociopathic lunatics withdrawing pledges, Sir, You Are Being Hunted will be receiving the £40,000 they so politely asked for, and therefore should have the funds to complete the game. So long as Jim doesn't bet it all on a horse or something. And quite significantly, there's still 25 days to go. They've also updated with some new footage, which you can see below.
]]>WARNING: Entirely self-promotional announcement ahead. (Love you!) Over the past couple of years I haven't just been blogging, I've also been making games. I've been making those games with two friends, Tom Betts and James Carey, with help from a bunch of other splendid people: artists, programmers, actors, musicians, and designers, all of whom I've been lucky to know. It's been a strange experience, but it has also been with a very specific goal in mind: to make the kind of games that I want to play. The culmination of our efforts in this regard currently reside in Sir, You Are Being Hunted, a procedurally-generated first-person stealth, combat, and survival game which we've been making for most of 2012. It's been going brilliantly, and despite all the complexities of making such a game, we have a working prototype. Now though, I need your help. With the launch of Kickstarter in the UK, we've pitched the game for funding. I will be profoundly, personally grateful if you would back it.
You can watch our pitch video - which includes loads of footage from the in-development build of the game - below.
]]>WARNING: A shameless self-promotional post lies ahead!
With months of Sir, You Are Being Hunted development behind my Big Robot team, and many months more ahead, we're beginning to get ready to show you it in action. The first glimpse of that is below, in a trailer made up of footage from the alpha build. Sir is a procedurally-generated, first-person action game made in Unity by a team of four. It's about being hunted across bleak islands by automatons and robo-hounds. It's about sci-fi weirdness, tea, murder, and some raised eyebrows. We're now aiming for its appearance in 2013. Please do take a look.
]]>WARNING: SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION POST AHEAD. LOVE YOU GUYS!
So for the past two years I've been multi-classing with game dev studio Big Robot, and we've been doing some stuff, which we've talked about before on RPS. The thing we're most excited about, though, is what we're working on right now, which is called Sir, You Are Being Hunted. It is a procedurally-generated first-person, open world game, with some sneaking, some shooting, some tweedpunk adversaries, and plenty of fleeing in terror. We're now making excellent progress towards something playable, and have a few images to show for it.
Once in a while in this job, you get to speak to a hero. A developer whose work you've always more than admired - perhaps even had your life changed by. But today I spoke to Jim Rossignol about his new game, Sir, You Are Being Hunted.
]]>Big Robot, the indie developer headed up by one Jim Rossignol of this here website, has just taken the lid off its fourth project. Fourth! How did that happen so quickly? You've already played Avseq, you'll get to play Channel 4-funded education game Fallen City soon and you may have seen a few screenshots and test videos for the open-world game codenamed Project Lodestone. And now, there is Sir, You Are Being Hunted. It's an open-world survival game starring gentrified English robots who hunt humans for sport, and was referred to on BR's drawing board as 'a British indie STALKER.' We're promised "robots that ape tea-drinking, poachers that lurk in reed-beds, and red-eyed hounds that patrol the moor".
I would say that Sir, You Are Being Hunted looks absolutely lovely and has a fantastic concept, but if I did you'd have no idea whether I'm being objective or not.
]]>
