Complexity Trade-Offs and RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 2, 2012

I was showing a friend the GOG.COM trailer for Legend of Grimrock over the weekend, and I found myself trying to explain the appeal of the title in a world full of games like Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, the recent Fallout games, etc.  Since he isn’t much of a gamer, appealing to the nostalgia factor […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

What Endings Would YOU Change?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 23, 2012

Okay. So Bioware will be changing Mass Effect 3‘s endings (probably) by popular demand. I jokingly added a new ending to Frayed Knights in response (though I like the new ending better). Apparently some more indies are jumping in and doing the same, now. It’s a silly stunt, but it’s fun, and hey… isn’t that […]

Filed Under: Design, Mainstream Games, Retro - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

How Wizardry Was Made

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 21, 2012

Ever wondered the story behind the making of the original Wizardry game? I eat this stuff up. I really do. I always have – long before I was a game developer.  The behind-the-scenes stories of the people making these games is a big deal for me. I guess I’m weird that way. Of course, I […]

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Hanako Games on Endings…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

My post yesterday was more about the relationship between game designers and the players over the unsatisfying stories (or story endings) in games. Georgina Bensley (Hanako Games) more specifically talks about story endings… of books, film, TV shows, and of course games. Why they sometimes End Badly. It’s an enjoyable essay: I Whine About Games: […]

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How To Ruin the First Fifteen Minutes of Your Game…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 19, 2012

I’m not going to name names, but there’s a particular indie game I picked up last week that I was pretty excited about. It was a huge game, so I ended up having to download it overnight. But it looked cool and sounded fun. I was excited to try it out. Unfortunately, the day I […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part VII: Wouldn’t It Be Cool If…?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 14, 2012

Okay, I had a short hiatus with this series simply because there were far too many interesting and newsworthy things to post about over the last couple of weeks. I’ve got a small backlog of blog posts to go out, and topics to discuss, which is actually a pleasant change of pace for me.  Usually […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

RPG Design: Seven Ways to Fix Boring Quests

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 7, 2012

So while much of what I’d like to talk about today applies to any kind of  simple “quest” in a computer role-playing game, I’d like to direct your attention to the overused “Fedex,” “fetch,”  or “courier” quest type.  If you haven’t heard them referred to by those names, you’ve probably still played them. At their […]

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Unity C# Question

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 6, 2012

Maybe someone here who is more familiar with Unity and/or C# can give me a hand here. Using the Monodevelop IDE, I had the following code (somewhat modified here)… public class RoomGeo : MonoBehaviour { public string[] wallResources= {“wall1a”,”wall2a”,”wall4a”}; void CreateWallVisual(int index) { int val = m_RoomTemplates[0].walls[index].wallID; string strname = “Tiles/”+wallResources2[val]; } } Okay, all […]

Filed Under: Programming - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Another Take (of Three) on JRPGs vs. WRPGs…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 29, 2012

Courtesy of Extra Credits – now hosted over at Penny Arcade: Western & Japanese RPGs (Part 1) I’m interested in hearing what else they have to say, but I’m not sure I’m going to be on board with their conclusion that WRPGs and JRPGs are two distinct genres.  Especially as I made a big case […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Technical Dungeons

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 28, 2012

I’ve got a new term which I’ve been using all week to describe a feature of a particular flavor of dungeon-crawler RPGs: “Technical Dungeons.” I don’t know how to define it yet. You get it in many roguelikes and old-school western RPGs. You don’t get it in most JRPGs or modern non-indie RPGs. Darklight Dungeon […]

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RPG Design: Variable Encounter Difficulty

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 23, 2012

A friend asked the other night about combat encounter difficulty in RPGs – is it better to have the challenge be consistent, or variable? I answered pretty firmly in favor of the latter. I think most people who suffered through the automatic level-scaling in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion would probably agree. But here’s why. […]

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A Game Dev’s Story, Part V: Language Skills

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 22, 2012

As I attempted to imitate my favorite arcade games on the Commodore 64, I found myself running up against a pretty major limitation: Speed. Specifically, the lack thereof when running my homemade games.  I learned a lot of tricks (most of which I’ve forgotten, now) to making my BASIC programs faster. But while those optimizations […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

WRPGs vs. JRPGs – Not as Different as You Might Think?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 21, 2012

For a while, I was tempted to split up the RPGs on RampantGames.com into “Western-Style” (WRPG) and “Japanese-Style” (JRPG) role-playing games. I’ve not done that for a number of reasons, the main one being that it is too difficult to draw the line on indie games. A game written with RPGMaker will automatically inherit the […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part IV: Sixty-Four

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 17, 2012

When released, the Commodore 64 was quite simply mass-produced awesomeness. We didn’t really know it at the time… it was just another “home computer” released in a sea of competitors. It came from a company that had specialized in business systems (the name was “Commodore Business Machines,”), with one weak home computer entry (the VIC-20, […]

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Robert Boyd on How To Become an Indie Game Developer

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 16, 2012

Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games (“Cthulhu Saves the World“) has some advice for aspiring indies… So You Want to Be an Indie Game Developer? There is probably nothing new here for folks who have been following this blog for a while, but it’s still good advice: Practice, Analyze, Iterate. There’s more, of course, as well […]

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part III: Grand Designs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 15, 2012

In our previous installment, our hero (er, me) was learning how to program on a tiny, super-cheap computer with 1K of memory. Er, the computer, that is. Our hero has slightly more memory, we’d hope. While I was playing on a toy computer, the arcade / video game boom was hitting full swing — the […]

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 7 Comments to Read



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