Minecraft Didn’t Sell Itself

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 6, 2015

It’s popular (in indie circles) to say that Notch did everything wrong with Minecraft, yet it still managed to become the biggest indie success story of all time. The game was confusing to players until they’d checked out some kind of out-of-game tutorial (or had someone sitting next to them explaining it to them). It […]

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Indie Hats

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 5, 2015

I have the brain of a programmer. Or maybe I just have the programming of a programmer. This bites me in the butt as an indie. If I’m not coding, I don’t feel like I’m doing “work.” This is wrong, wrong, wrong, and I have to keep working at it. Because, with that attitude, I […]

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Productivity: The Group of Three

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 12, 2015

The middle 50%+ of game development is the hardest for most people, I’ve found. At the beginning of the project, the game is being built up from nothing and is making rapid improvements daily. It’s exciting and motivating. And at the end, even though it’s a hard slog, you can see the light at the […]

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Steven Peeler on Traits in Zombacite

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 9, 2015

Steven Peeler of Soldak Entertainment – the dude behind Depths of Peril, Din’s Curse, and Drox Operative, has a bit to say about a new mechanic in the fantasy-zombie-apocalypse RPG in development, Zombacite. The mechanic is traits – special passive abilities that can be acquired via increased stats. He hopes that it will help encourage […]

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How 3D Racing Games Worked Before 3D

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 6, 2015

This may be for hard-core code geeks only, but I don’t care. It’s fascinating reading! It’s an article about how titles “faked” 3D race tracks in an era before there really was the hardware or processing power to do real 3D at racing-game speeds. I remember making some games of my own that faked it […]

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Analyzing Diablo

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 2, 2015

Radek Koncewicz of Incubator Games has done a retrospective of the original Diablo with an eye towards dissecting its design. He includes some commentary on its journey from a more conventional roguelike (Diablo actually started out as a turn-based game) to a best-selling PC action-RPG. An excerpt: “It’s immediately obvious that consumables made up the […]

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Game Dev Quote of the Week – Spit-and-Polish Edition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 26, 2014

This week’s quote comes from an older post at Gamasutra – “The Art of Polish: Developers Speak.” There’s plenty of good advice there. Including this: “Polish is often adding things nobody will ever notice, comment on, or appreciate, but will notice, comment on and appreciate when they aren’t there.” – Frank Kowalkowski (of Interplay, Obsidian, […]

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RPG Design: An Imperfect Union

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 19, 2014

When this article posts, I should be in the air with most of the Pacific Ocean behind me, on my way back from Japan. Didja miss me? Didja even notice I was gone? Spending a week and a half in the Land of the Rising Sun kinda made me want to play Persona 3 and […]

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Indie Game Dev Thought of the Day #1

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 15, 2014

Dumb thought for the day: Being a game programmer will teach you that there’s a very fine line between genius and stupidity. very fine indeed. What sounded brilliant in your head last night may prove to be absolutely unworkable, shortsighted, and stupid when you try to implement it. Or… it might not.  

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Making Money Making Games – Part 4 – How the indies have always done it

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 12, 2014

So in parts 1 and part 2 of the series, I discussed how the games biz has changed over the decades. In part 3, I talked about how many different ways there were to make money from games if you are willing to step outside of the box. That’s a lot of changes and variation. […]

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20 Ways to Make Money Making Games (part 3)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 11, 2014

A continuation from my talk at BYU. You can read part 1 here, and part 2 here. So… throughout our relatively short history, video games have been treated by the industry as an analog to toys, books, movies, magazines (subscriptions, you know?), services, drugs (first one’s free…), widgets, television shows (advertising-supported), as a benefit of […]

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Making Money Make Games – Part 2 (More History)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 10, 2014

Continued from Part 1… The 1980s Okay, this is the part of the story where I personally started paying attention and getting involved, if only as a consumer. At this point, especially as things were starting out the decade, there was still a huge question of what kind of industry “video games” were going to […]

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Making Money Making Games – Part 1 (History)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 9, 2014

I gave a presentation at BYU for their game development club a few weeks ago called “Making Money Making Games – a Historical Perspective.” I didn’t do my best job ever on it, and ran out of time for the “important stuff” at the end, so I kinda breezed through the end. So I thought […]

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Twenty Years of Kicking Butt and Making Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 4, 2014

The original Sony Playstation is twenty years old now. At least if you count its Japanese release. I suddenly feel old. I got my first professional game development job in October 1994. My studio, SingleTrac, was a new startup (I was employee #16!) under contract with Sony to produce a couple of new games for […]

Filed Under: Game Development, Geek Life, Retro - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Why did the Avatar of Virtue screw up everything s/he touched?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 2, 2014

I was amused by PC Gamer’s article by Richard Cobbett, “Ultima: The Legacy of the Avatar.” (Hat tip to RPGWatch for the link). He doesn’t present anything all that new, although he does drive home the idea that the Avatar’s efforts to save Britannia ultimately led to its doom. Actually, not even saving Britannia. Just […]

Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

RPG Pacing

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 28, 2014

I should keep a collection of weird (but sometimes insightful) ideas that I get when I’m busy working on my game after midnight. It seems that the combo of fatigue and focus in the late hours on the nuts and bolts of RPG development cause some strange “thinky thoughts” (as my wife sometimes calls it). […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 2 Comments to Read



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