Reduction: Mission 1 - Moving As A Team

Here's a runthrough of Mission 1 from the campaign Reduction, which I am designing... That's me playing with "Pancage" (new to the game Alien Swarm).

I like the top-down shooter format. I feel it's a better way to teach people "squad tactics" because it doesn't have the tunnel-vision that the first-person shooter format has. First person shooters (like Call of Duty) make people myopic: they're good for teaching shooting, but lousy to teach people how to move with your team-mates. Top-down shooters give people an all-around team perspective. Of course, we're dealing with "aliens" here, but imagine what else we could do with the format?

See the blog for Reduction at PrepareToDrop.com

What Alien Swarm Means To Me

A Gritty Kind Of Sci-Fi

When I was young, years ago, I used to design and gamemaster science-fiction tabletop roleplaying missions and campaigns. This was where I cut my teeth on mission design, game design - even screenwriting and filmmaking to some extent, as many of my campaigns and missions were delivered in a cinematic way.

The first "bug mission" I did, in my homebrew version of Traveller (the RPG), was even before Aliens came out. (It felt more like Alien than (read more)...