Quick Look: Heat Signature

Nice! Looking forward to this.

Edit: I wonder if we'll ever get quests back. I really liked them...

Will have to watch this on my lunch break, but it would have been cool as an EX with Tom Francis.

Not really convinced by the look of this one but it does have the pedigree of Gunpoint behind it...

I wonder if this is the game with the really good names that Austin mentioned a while ago on Waypoint Ra-

*hits play and immediately sees the names Ginger Castle, Proxy Herschel, and Columba Andromeda*

Yes, yes it is.

:D

Hotline Miami in Space!

Who would have thunk it.

For some reason I thought this had a similar look to Gunpoint. Must have been thinking of some other game ...

Loving the music.

I hadn't heard anything about this until this week when some site ran that article about the limited-time ship. I saw that it was made by the guy who did Gunpoint (which is a fantastic game) and thought nothing of it. Now I'm probably going to buy it this weekend. Great QL!

@sgtexo: The track that plays starting around 15:25 is really good.

this looks and sounds awesome

When Jeff talked about this on the bomb cast it sounded cool but the games official launch trailers didn't do a great job showing it off. Watching on a tablet finding it hard to parse what's going on so would need to see this on a pc.

Really hope this does well for Tom Francis it looks great. Anyone not familiar with his other work should check out Crate and Crowbar (his podcast), his blog and his Gal Civ 2 diaries. He's a really terrific games writer and has some pretty interesting perspectives into games.

The music in this is very good.

Interesting. I found Hotline Maimi to be annoying at times, I wonder if it has the same amount frustration.

I really wish I liked the way this looked.

This game looks great, but I really dislike the way it looks. Sort of reminds me of FTL, but like a much different take on it obviously.

Um, speaking of "glitchers"...

My biggest complaint with this game would be that the "ships" are nothing more then random non-symmetrical mazes that don't even remotely resemble an actual coherent spaceship design. It's a somewhat superficial issue I suppose, but one that really ruins any possible immersion for me and only hinders the replayabilty, since you pretty much know exactly what each "ship" will be like, even if they're technically random.

About the only thing this game seems to be doing wrong is, well, the graphics seem like a bummer. Maybe there is some kind of upgrade later in the game that high-lights all guards with an out-line or something but man..

I think I get the meaning. You suppose to play this like it was Hotline Miami with a pause. Pause, make a plan, execute. That seems to be the designers intention with the pause, full map view and super slow-down during combat and etc.

The problem is, the super-slow down and what seems like melee and combat which feels really cool, as Jeff says to paraphrase "You feel like some kinda super space ninja". That leads you to wanting to play this game without the pause. Get in, roll up on fools and swat them down. Again, the kind of not-pauseable gameplay of something like hotline miami. But since that is not the intent of the game design..

It still looks really good though. I feel like if you can play it in the pause, plan, go, the developers seem like their systems are leading you too, you'll really enjoy it. If there is someway to high-light the guards so you can also play pause-off go go go, you'll really enjoy this. If your wanting the second and stuck with the first you might be sad?

I was super excited to check this out after Jeff talked about it on the bombcast, but I really don't like the way this looks, kind of a bummer because everything else seems neat.

This game reminds me of Megatraveler for some reason.

Ben with the Alfred Bester pull. Yiiiiikes.

This looks extremely cool

It also looks like a game that was made entirely by a programmer. If someone came along and cleaned up the UI and the art overall it would be really something, but as it stands the screen is incredibly busy and dense with color in a bad way. NPC's are almost indistinguishable from the environment and the ships themselves look like a bunch of corridors rather than actual "craft" of any kind. It's an interesting aesthetic but one that a) is not very good to play in and b) seems like it would get very repetitive very quick.

I hope that with time maybe he will patch some stuff in like vision cones and some graphical overhauls to make it easier to see whats actually going on.

@humanity: Yeah, I think there's far too much graphical noise in the ship tiles alone, but I'm afraid this was done on purpose to obscure or compensate for the ugly simplistic random mazes. So any effort to streamline the graphics would probably only make these ugly mazes more apparent. It's a real shame, but the more I see of these "ships", the more I hate everything about their design, or lack thereof.

Edit: Well it looks like there are some cleaner ship designs in other parts of the game which seem to make identifying enemies easier, so at least there's that.

At 35:36 it felt like Jeff was starting to tell a beautiful story about the hammer he once had, because of the music that started playing.

I think spaceships would look more utilitarian, because they don't need to conform to aerodynamics. Just put whatever you need wherever you need it.

The Glitch Traps are one of the most useful items in the game; you can place them in bottlenecks so that if someone knocks you out, as they're carrying you off the ship, they get teleported into space and you're saved.

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation.

Deep space is my dwelling place,

The stars my destination.

I wish this was a sequel to the movie Repo Man

Loving this game so far. Only until watching this QL did I realise you could kill enemies in only the pause menu, cause I was doing an assassination mission without a lethal weapon.

This looks great (though not my style of game sadly, don't like stealth focused kinda games) actually. Though I can't help but notice that its at least partially similar to Cryptark which the guys have looked at twice now. Obviously one game is a stealth focused screw-em-up kinda game the other is just an action game basically with twin stick controls. But the whole launching from your ship to dock to the in the ship guys have to be subdued stuff - kinda similar still.

What's with everything being crooked? Odd creative choice.

@yellownumber5: it is driving me crazy looking at it

At a glance I thought this was some kind of board game, maybe a Battleships clone. Glad GB took a look at it or I would've missed out.

@yellownumber5: It's a Hotline Miami thing.

The music is great

Looka kinda neat but most of the time I couldn't even see the enemies, which is a dealbreaker.

No kidding, quests were great!

One of the design goals was apparently that nothing kills you immediately, you always get a chance to wiggle your way out.

Of note is that the ships don't exist in a bubble, they can end up interacting with other ships (ramming them, get into combat, etc). You can even smash a captured ship into an enemy ship.

@icyeyes: Oh right, real spaceship design. That thing.

I only played about an hour but wow, I am loving this game. It totally does make you feel like a space ninja. I also found and raided the special launch-week ship and looted the special item.

It's The Everything Gun. Teleports stuff lying around into the barrel when you fire. Then it fires those items like a shotgun. Items like wrenches, for instance. Or swords. Or other guns. It's stupid and I love it.

Fantastic, this was all the confirmation I needed. Gunpoint was quite impressive so I'm getting this immediately!

I liked Gunpoint and really dig the vibe (music, colors, set up) in this, but kind of wish the art didn't look like sophomore photoshop illustrations, specifically the portraits, and a lot more readable. Maybe it's different when playing the game, but I had no idea what Jeff was looking at or how he was spotting guards.

Also, that UI could really have used some pairing down and usability pass.

If your frustration with Hotline Miami was not having the reflexes to take out three assholes and a dog before eating a shotgun blast, then yes this might be the game for you. Pause and slow time make planning much more important than twitch.

Jeff is ignoring the teleporters and traps though, which makes it look like a slower and less satisfying version of Hotline. I don't want to be the "playing it wrong" guy, but that stuff is how you get creative and break open the game. Why wait for guards to wander into your murder nook one at a time, when you could use the visitor teleport to drop in, leave a glitch trap, then zap off again while they all get teleported into space?

It can definitely be tough to see the guards sometimes, and it can be a bummer to have the consequences that come along with not seeing a guard (being shot; being thrown into space; maybe dying) because of it.

However... the game is pretty neat. Having a good time with it, and I'm going to hold off on playing much further until my Extra Life stream in November, now that I have a bit of understanding on the gameplay loop and mechanics.

Hmm I don't really see the draw of this game. There was a lot of low-key hype for it which made me interested but I just don't see it.

I watched a bit of Tom Francis' videos about making a game, and Heat Signature definitly has that same DIY feel to it, like it started with blobs with code attached to them to make them come alive.

Sadly enough, it also looks like a game a programmer made on his own. The enemies are hard to spot, hard to see where they are looking at and the entire game looks pretty ugly to me. I hate the idea of clicking a 'kill' button to make the guy die as well. Especially when the action is done with the mouse. Why not bash the enemy multiple times to fully kill the guy? You already have the blood effect to distinguish unconscious bodies vs dead bodies.

Also not sure if they changed this, but in earlier versions i remember getting up to a ship could be an ordeal already, with ships having heatscanners and shields and you having to drift towards a ship without creating enough heat to trigger the sensors. Wonder if that's still in here, given that Jeff can auto-dock to ships. The title suggests that it's still in there i feel.

This game is really fun so far. I was a little underwhelmed at first, but it ramps up quickly. I have gotten surprisingly attached to my characters so far. Had one cool situation where one of my higher level guys got captured, and the next character I picked was his Mom, whose signature mission was to save her son who got captured. I worked my way up to that signature mission and it was an absolute bitch - ton's of shield and armored guys. I barley got out with her son successfully and retired once I got back to my home base. I then continued on as the son and ended up getting myself killed on his signature mission (bled out in space).

I now want to go back to Gunpoint to see how they compare.

Also the crooked camera seems to be a camera bug related to how you dock your ship. It is annoying, but doesn't happen that often. When it does you usually can fix it by undocking and then redocking.

Jeff kind of did the game a disservice by playing so zoomed out imo making everything harder to read on video (already seeing some complaints about it in these comments). I don't love the art, but zooming in more definitely makes it look and read better. I understand wanting a wider view, but you can look around when paused so I tend to zoom in much more and just do that regularly.

It sounds like people really enjoy the systems, but the game just seems so unreadable. I think Gunpoint is the only GotY Top 10 game that I have ever not liked (apart from the writing), so I think this might just be a pass for me in a crowded year.

This game looks cool but man is it hard to visually read what is actually happening on screen, the characters don't stand out from the background enough or something.