Revolution 60 released today! (graphical, iOS)

Revolution 60 is out today on iOS!

This is my first game design credit in a commercial title, and I’m incredibly excited that it’s finally going live.

Revolution 60 is a highly cinematic action-adventure game with a branching narrative leading to 24 ending variations. The plot follows a team of four female special agents as they infiltrate a wandering space station in an effort to stop a nuclear war before it starts. The game has been routinely compared to Mass Effect and Heavy Rain in the press, although it’s only 3-5 hours long and designed for iOS. (There will be a PC/Mac version released later, but not quite yet.)

The initial download is free, and the first 20-30 min of gameplay so that you can see what it’s like. At that point, the game will ask you for a one-time payment of $5.99 to unlock everything.

I hope some of you will check it out, and if you do, I hope you enjoy it!

Link: itunes.apple.com/us/app/revolut … d742869081

This sounds super great! I have to wait for the friend with the iPad to return from vacation, but I look forward to playing it then.

I will totally be checking this out at the weekend, I’ll let you know what I think! Congratulations!!

I’ll check it out too. This will give me something different and fun to talk about on my podcast.

I would guess you’d recommend an iPad for play? Does it work on a phone?

It supports iPhone 4s and later, and iPod Touch 5th generation. I’m downloading it now to try on iPad. Oh, and it’s good to see it on the front page of the app store! (Best new games, UK site).

I’ve played mostly on an iPad mini, but iPhone 4+ should work fine, as mostly useless says. (That wasn’t mostly useless.)

Ooh, good to hear! Thank you for the good news!

Thank you very much for letting us know. Downloading. I’m always glad for a chance to support an IF/Adventure endeavour of a community member (because, mostly, I already know it’s likely to be something I’ll enjoy).

EDIT - Yep, enjoying it immensely already. But FYI, “subtitles off” doesn’t seem to turn them off all the time. They were showing all through the second scene (the mostly non-interactive one that end with Holiday shooting an explosive device). Though subtitles were OFF in my config, they were still showing… with the puzzling exception of Holiday’s very last line of the scene.

EDIT - Purchased. 3-5 hours long? That’s not much, that’ll leave me wanting more. Will there be more?

EDIT - Tell you the truth, the one-liners after combat scenes get pretty old pretty soon.

EDIT - BTW, works a charm on iPod Touch. Heck, I’ve played Monkey Island 1 and 2 on the iPod Touch. People should realise that just because it’s not as big as iPad, it doesn’t mean it’s too small to enjoy a game on.

EDIT - Ah, the game mentions a sequel and the fact that my choices will be remembered for that. Kind of a pity, because I wanted to replay and try different choices and the harder difficulty level. But if my choices carry over, I’d rather stick to my first choices of my first playthrough.

EDIT - Finished. That was most enjoyable. The combat scenes did get pretty repetitive, I started groaning at one point when a new one started, but it’s an interesting combat system with clearly quite a bit of thought behind it. Well worth the money, and I’m definitely getting the sequel(s?).

I’ve been playing this weekend. It might be because I started it last night and I was tired, but I’m not entirely following what’s going on. I think I’ll need to replay the first bit. I need to get it for Addie so we can talk about it on our podcast, but she’s on her mom’s account, and in-app purchases are blocked. I don’t see a stand-alone purchase in the app store. Is there a way to buy it without doing an in-app purchase?

Bought and downloading. It’s on the USA best new games slider also.

Oops… I mean I got the demo. I liked it so far. The sound and music are exceptional. The graphic design of the world is also phenomenal. The character modeling looks like Curse of Monkey Island with an anime flair. I’m not a fan of anime but the bold rigid shapes simplify animation I’m sure, especially in regard to hair. The animation was silky smooth on iPad mini. I crashed right at the demos end, but I like that they suggest rebooting the iPad before playing.

I like the idea: choice based narrative with touch based QuickTime events. The battle system is good - I like that I can dodge at will and try to set up a shot like I’m on a chessboard. The voice acting for Holiday was a bit stiff. I liked the readings by the peripheral characters better. The one battle I had…like two or three times was repetitive. I understand once with guidance and once at full speed on my own, but I would have liked some new shapes other than circles or rectangles. Or perhaps a choice of a more complicated shape to do more damage.

I’m happy to see a primarily female dev team also! I danced around a bit when CVE appeared in the credits. Way to go!

Don’t worry, just keep playing. It took a while for me to understand what was going on, too. By the time you get to the spaceship and learn of your mission (in fact, by the time you get to leisurely interact with Amelia and Minuete) you’ll have a better grasp of what’s going on.

HanonO: I agree voice acting wasn’t always spectacular, but I found it competent and above average - I’ve certainly seen far, far, FAR worse. And Holiday does have a couple of particularly fine performances.

Thank you to everyone who’s been trying out the game! It means a lot to me to see so much excitement.

There’s a sequel coming down the road, and we’re going to take the feedback from Revolution 60 into mind as we start working on it.

If you’re interested in seeing more before then - Frank Wu and I collaborated on the Chessboard Lethologica, a companion book to the game. Right now, it’s available via iBooks only, though I’d love to see it become eventually available in other mediums. It’s written as an orientation manual for new Chessboard recruits, and it includes bios for most of Holiday’s team, info on the Fifth Column, AI structure, nanotech, genemods, geopolitics, and so on.

Thanks for the bug note!

After you finish playing, the game retains a save file for each of your save games. You should be able to choose among them when the time comes - or you can write down Holiday’s code somewhere safe and enter that instead.

I’ve done a little dancing around about that myself. (Okay, a lot of dancing around about that!)

Could you be a tad more specific? Because right now I’m feeling a little let-down. By “branching narrative” I thought it meant that choices I made throughout the story would alter its course, but I’m replaying the game with a completely opposite approach to my previous one and it turns out that so far…

…it’s only affected the flavour of the text for the duration of the three-or-four lines of ensuing dialog; and after that, I get points in professional, or rogue, or amelia, or minuette, and things continue as planned.

I’d like to know if this is what I should expect from the rest of the game, because I’m a bit disollusioned right now, but I’m aware that…

…there might be some room for narrative branching. Or does “narrative branching” simply mean that the choices are monitored throughout the game and will result in different endings being available?

Also, those 24 endings, does it boil down to - as I now believe -

…or is it in the ending that the branching really begins, and some key decisions we made throughout the game are taken into consideration apart from the ones that get us pro/rogue/mel/min points?

Again, I have to ask this because, where I’m standing right now, I’m not seeing what I feel I’ve been led to expect. I’ll keep playing, because I really enjoy it, and I’ll still want to play the sequel. Maybe these questions will answer themselves shortly when I continue my playthrough, but I felt the need to ask them.

EDIT - Let me just say this because I keep thinking it: anyone here remember “Angel”, the Buffy spin-off? Amelia reminds me a lot of Fred, and during most of the game Val reminds me a lot of Ilyria, whom Fred turns into at the end (well, who “possesses” Fred, actually).

Throughout the game, you are constantly offered choices that affect the game experience - the tone of a rogue-leaning Holiday’s interactions with her team are very different than the tone of a professional-leaning Holiday’s, for example.

However, the overall plot remains fairly linear until the end, and then the ending changes significantly based on your alignments/affiliations and other key choices you’ve made during the game.

I thought as much. Yes, the tone differs, and it’s enough to lend the character a different personality, so that’s achieved. I just had something else in mind when I read “branching narrative”.

That’s fair. I’m sorry you were disappointed.

Bah, I’m less disappointed now. Another side of me has taken over, and I’m now hunting for the ending-particles to try to get to the one I like best. To be fair, it’s not exactly as I thought - everything condensed to a few choices at the very end, most of which aren’t really choices at all because they are limited by the points you’ve been getting through the game. No, I’ve come across a decision point that I see opens up a few narrative variables already. So it does start to branch as I thought, just a bit later than I’d presumed.

EDIT - Huh. Guess what, my favourite ending was my original one, the one I got first…

Rogue
Amelia
Save Val
Shoot the vial

Also, I have to ask (not a spoiler, I don’t think, so doesn’t need the tags):

Why does Amelia have to clean up the transmission from N313? Min presents it as a fait accompli, as though she were well aware of what the transmission was and what it said and what their mission was… so why does she present it to the team in a format Amelia has to clean up?

Ha! I will use spoiler tags anyway!