So What Are You Playing This Weekend?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 31, 2010

So – just out of curiosity here, what games are YOU playing this weekend? I mean besides Starcraft 2. 🙂  (I don’t have it, myself, and don’t have time to play. ) Just kinda curious where tastes and spare time is running… As for me – besides Frayed Knights, I’m planning on putting a little […]

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Utah Indie Night, Summer 2010

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 30, 2010

On Thursday evening we had our quarterly Utah Indie Night, held at ITT Tech. It was probably our most lightly attended indie night we’ve had since the very first year.  Maybe it’s because Greg announced there’d be no pizza this time. Tight budgets at ITT these days… Mike Rubin of Orange River Studio, who continues […]

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Utah Indie Game Night - Comments: Read the First Comment

What Makes Game Programming Awesome

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 29, 2010

It was the summer of ’83. Or so I think. Up late on the Commodore 64, music turned low so as not to wake my parents. After making a few little Space Invaders and Missile Command clones, I was going to tackle something in the adventure / RPG genre (the two weren’t quite so separate […]

Filed Under: Programming - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

“Text Adventure” Mini-Playthrough of Age of Decadence

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 28, 2010

For your amusement: Who Likes Text Adventures? A play-through of one of the several text-adventure sequences in Age of Decadence. It’s already started, so it’s a little late to be one of the players I think. But it’s fun to see what they are doing with their choices.

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Best. Bollywood. Video. Ever.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Except it’s not really Bollywood. It’s The Guild… But as I’ve been subjected to some Bollywood flicks because my wife and several friends are fans, this had me in stitches. I especially loved “Forward Slash – Almost Kiss!” Better than “Do You Want to Date My Avatar?” Man, I dunno, hard to choose. It does […]

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Almost Half of PC Game Sales Are Now Downloads…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 27, 2010

We’re living in an immaterial world, and I am an immaterial gir… uh, guy, er, whatever. NPD: Full-Game PC Downloads Reaching Parity With Physical Purchases I think if you were to add in things like downloadable content and in-game transactions for virtual items, and especially subscriptions to games like World of Warcraft, the number shifts […]

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

“You Are Upside Down in China.”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Here is a recent conversation here at my office. I was Engineer 3 not participating in this particular exchange, which gave me a fun perspective: Engineer 1: Let’s go to Africa and see how you look. Engineer 2: Okay, we’re in Africa. Engineer 1: Straight and level, heading north. Looking good. Engineer 2: We’re now […]

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Steven Brust’s Firefly Fanfic

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 26, 2010

I’m really not into fanfic (“Fan Fiction”), so I’m not exactly the guy to talk about it much. But I do know that, like Rodney Dangerfield, it gets no respect. It’s despised by some. However, for a lot of amateur writers, it’s about the only way to find an audience. Write a quality short story […]

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Tron Legacy – New Trailer

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 24, 2010

Awesome. Must be ComiCon time… Tron was one of those strangely influential movies of my childhood. I was already programming and writing some games by that time, but the coolness of the idea of virtual worlds, I guess… planted a seed and inspired me to really push into game development. I wanted to BE Kevin […]

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Frayed Knights: More Artificial Stupidity

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 23, 2010

A real quick development note on  Frayed Knights (because I’m about to hit the road again for a few hours): I’m working on some fairly simple artificial intelligence stuff right now – heuristic / weighting stuff for enemies choosing targets, etc. So they won’t try to, say, heal somebody who is already healed, or anything […]

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Merchant of Venice, Citizen Kane, and… Din’s Curse?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 22, 2010

We’re in Cedar City, Utah this week. It’s home to the Utah Shakespearean Festival which is going on now, so we hit The Merchant of Venice tonight. It was my daughters’ first live Shakespeare play, and I wanted them to see a comedy rather than a tragedy. I don’t think we could have picked better. […]

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RPG Alternate History Game Jam – August 9th – 15th

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 21, 2010

RPGDX has a new not-a-contest going in about 3 weeks. Make an RPG in a week with the theme “Alternate History.” This sounds really, really cool. Dunno if I can afford to participate or not, but I really want to. Details here Start dreaming up ideas for “What If” scenarios now…

Filed Under: Game Development, News - Comments: Comments are off for this article

“Mindie?” No Thanks

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 20, 2010

Alistair Doulin writes on both Gamasutra and his own blog (they are the same article) about bridging the gap between mainstream and indie game development… what he jokingly (I hope) refers to as “mindie.” It’s actually not a bad article. I did enjoy reading it. By his definition, most of the games I mention here […]

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

The “F**k Off!” Heard ‘Round the World…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 19, 2010

So the story is now last week’s news, apologies have apparently been extended and accepted, hug-hug-kiss-kiss there’s nothing more to see here, move along… But I think it’s interesting in hindsight to see what happened with a slightly fuller view of the story. According to Cliffski’s blog and a couple of other sources, it kinda […]

Filed Under: Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Profound Disappointment at Monkey Loss

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 16, 2010

I picked up (well, downloaded) the new Special Edition of Monkey Island 2. On the X-Box, I’m afraid… I figured it should be a family thing. One of my daughters was getting into the first one. The Special Edition of the sequel doesn’t seem quite as spectacular as the first, but it’s probably because the […]

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Retro - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Is That All You Do, Play Games?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 15, 2010

It was a little bit of a shock when we had to go to the hospital a week after I graduated from college. I almost automatically wrote down, “Student” on the form when it asked for my job title. I realized – holy crap! – I was actually “unemployed.” My wife was teaching second grade […]

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 7 Comments to Read



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