Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

“I”ve Been to the Ninth Circle of Monetization Hell – It’s Called the Arcades.”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 10, 2012

Gamasutra has last year’s presentation by Mark Cerny where he talks about how the face of gaming has changed since he started as a developer in Atari’s coin-op division. And how – in his view – things still need to change: Mark Cerny – “The Long View” (Or as Gamasutra titles it, “How developers are […]


Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



Frayed Knights: Taking On An Army

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 9, 2012

So here’s something with the development of Frayed Knights 2 that I haven’t come to a conclusion on yet: Changing (or tweaking)  some of the fundamentals of  combat. When I began work on Frayed Knights, I had a lot of big ideas about designing role-playing games. A lot of these big ideas – like a […]


Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 9 Comments to Read



To Grind or Not To Grind?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 8, 2012

Rowan Kaiser talks about “grinding” – an ill-defined term that generally references facing repetitive, meaningless combat encounters. ‘Grinding’ and it’s Relationship to the RPG Genre Grinding is generally a negative term, and I agree in that I dislike games where grinding is a significant source of gameplay. I remember all too well my frustration back […]


Filed Under: Design - Comments: 9 Comments to Read



The Ouya Kickstarter – Clearing $7 Million In Its Final Hours

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 7, 2012

The Ouya Kickstarter has been extremely interesting to watch. To be honest, I’m a little surprised by the amount of support that has come through for this tiny little “indie” game console. They’ve cut a deal with OnLive, bringing some “streaming play” for mainstream games to this little platform. There will be an Ouya part […]


Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 3 Comments to Read



Curiosity

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 6, 2012

I gotta admit, as much as I tried to blow it off as “no big deal,” the Curiosity landing on Mars thrilled me. I was glued to the NASA feed through the entire entry — realizing, of course, that by the time we saw anything the limitations of light-speed meant that it had already happened […]


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



Want Players to Finish the Game? Let Them Quit!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 3, 2012

There are a lot of important features to an RPG that make the experience really stand out for me. But these days, with my “grown up” schedule, the two most important features for any video game (not just RPG, but I’m focusing on RPGs here) are the following: 1. Make it easy for me to […]


Filed Under: Design - Comments: 12 Comments to Read



Why Game Development Can Be Like Fight Club

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 2, 2012

Kotaku blasts the games biz for what it thinks is its “biggest problem” – not telling customers (and the press) everything they want to know about everything going on inside a game development studio. Gaming’s Biggest Problem is that Nobody Wants to Talk The author chalks this up to some kind of incredibly secrecy that […]


Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 3 Comments to Read



Epic Game Recruitment Ad

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 1, 2012

Okay, yeah, two days in a row linking to videos. But this one is worthy of note, if you haven’t seen it already. I’ve never heard of this game company before, but their recruiting video is pretty hysterical. Two words of caution: The language (and logo for one company) is not exactly family friendly and […]


Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



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