Freaky Discovery of the Weekend – and Using Urban Mythology as Game Plots

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 12, 2010

Okay, I thought I was having my leg pulled actually following up on what sounded like a freaky-deaky conspiracy theory, but after being told that the signature line on all my checks wasn’t actually a line at all here in the U.S., I decided to play the sucker and go ahead and inspect the line […]

Filed Under: Design, Geek Life - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Room Escape Games and Micro-RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 10, 2010

Classic graphic adventure gaming has had a bit of a casual resurgence lately with the appearance of “Room Escape” games. If you haven’t played any yet (and I’ve only played a couple), they are basically tiny adventure games, usually written in Flash, that have gained quite a bit of popularity. They take place in a […]

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Casual Games, Design - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Are JRPGs “True” RPGs?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 25, 2010

Kombo.com makes the assertion, “An RPG is not an RPG when it’s a JRPG.” I wanted to get all up in their grill with that and whip out Persona as the counterpoint, but they already made that exception themselves.  D’oh. So instead, as a fan of (some) jRPGs, I still feel a desire to defend […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

A Quick Revisit to Serpent Isle

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 10, 2010

I  try to devote a certain amount of time each week to playing RPGs. Yeah, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it *g*. I do it to keep myself grounded in what’s out there, what the classics have done, what’s new, what the indies are doing, and to keep my mind working on […]

Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Flickering Torchlight and Replayability

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 2, 2010

I chatted with a bunch of folks last week and over the weekend about Torchlight.  Torchlight impressed the heck out of me when I first played it. I managed to snag it while it was sale, but it would have been well worth it at full price.  It’s an excellent action-RPG, and I think I […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 14 Comments to Read

Building Character

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 5, 2010

I used to love making characters for RPGs. Both for pen-and-paper RPGs and for computer RPGs. Making your character was half the fun. Then it got old. Kinda. I assumed it was just that the problem was that I had been getting older, and less patient, more “mainstream,” or something. And so for years, I […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Game Design: All Or Nothing, and Deviants

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 21, 2010

Okay, is it just me, or did old-school RPGs really tend to hit players early with things like diseases and poisons, when they are too low level to afford proper cures? Assuming this isn’t simply a gross mis-interpolation based on a couple of examples, my guess might be that this was simply because there was […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 22 Comments to Read

Story and Consequences

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 14, 2010

Craig Stern of Sinister Design asked several indie game developers about the role of narrative in games in an article entitled, “Why Have Narrative In Games.”  Now, they were all RPG developers, which is traditionally a very story-heavy genre, so the answers were perhaps unsurprising. My own answer is probably the biggest outlier, as I […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Lone Wolf or Party Animal?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 7, 2010

Okay, RPG fans, here’s my question for you: In CRPGs, are you a lone wolf, or a party animal? Do you prefer to play RPGs where you control only one character (though maybe you have a henchman or something to help you out), or do you prefer the kinds of games where you control a […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 24 Comments to Read

Avadon: You Work For Bluebeard…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 4, 2010

… Except his name is Redbeard. Jeff Vogel has begin his developer diary series on his new game / trilogy / series / franchise, Avadon: The Black Fortress.  His first post is on where his idea came from: Avadon Developer Diary #1 – Where Ideas Come From In this case, it came from an opera. […]

Filed Under: Design, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment

What If Game Design Hasn’t Progressed In 30 Years?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 2, 2010

Matt Barton proposes an interesting thought experiment over at Armchair Arcade: Some Thoughts Towards a Non-Linear Game History His not-quite-so-preposterous idea: What if game design hasn’t truly progressed since 1980, merely changed fashion? If you could somehow make yourself blind to the technological / graphical improvements, has game design really advanced in thirty years? I’d […]

Filed Under: Biz, Design - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

It’s the Voice Acting’s Fault

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 24, 2010

I’ve complained about it before. Shamus Young complains about it better. Y’know, for a brief, glowing moment in the history of our hobby – pretty much the late 90’s – it seemed like we almost had it right. The text was supplemented by voice, but it was limited –  enough to help visualize characters.  But […]

Filed Under: Biz, Design - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Making Epic 3D Dungeons, Part 2 – Applying the Lessons

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 21, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, in Making Epic 3D Dungeons, I talked about the evolution of the classic “dungeon” paradigm from dice-and-paper gaming through the development of computer RPGs, and how its fared through the pseudo-3D and finally fully 3D presentation. There are a couple of additional resources I want to recommend: Brenda Brathwaite article […]

Filed Under: Art, Design, Frayed Knights - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Making Epic 3D Dungeons (Part 1)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 11, 2010

UPDATE: Part 2 of this series, dealing with practical considerations for level design, can be found here: Making Epic 3D Dungeons, Part 2 – Applying the Lessons I grew up playing D&D, sometimes using the classic modules from TSR, often penned by Gary Gygax himself, or other writers like Allen Hammack, Ken Rolston (known to […]

Filed Under: Art, Design - Comments: 26 Comments to Read

Games – Too Big, Too Hard?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 4, 2010

Unable to resist an easy double entendre, GamePro EVP John Davison writes about how we now have solid evidence of something gamers are frequently loathe to admit: Too Big and Too Hard The upshot of the article is this: Now that game developers are including stats reporting in their games, they are learning our actual […]

Filed Under: Biz, Design - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

Manual Labor

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 30, 2010

The “Golden Age” of CRPGs unfortunately hit around the time I was a poor, starving college student. I had more time than money. Maybe that was why I ended up getting into my games much more than I do now. Nowadays, I’m able to find out what I was missing back in the day, but […]

Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 13 Comments to Read



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