Game Dev Quote of the Week: RPG Commerce Edition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 31, 2014

This week’s quote comes from Ernest Adam’s 2013 “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie” column: “The constant buying and selling in CRPGs harms their heroic quest feel, so the least you can do is make this more efficient so that the player doesn’t have to waste a lot of time on it. It’s not fun to […]

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Utah Indie Night, January 2014

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 30, 2014

The first Utah Indie meet-up for 2014 was held at the Wahoo / NinjaBee offices. This is the first time I’ve been able to attend at their offices since they moved to new ones. (Long-time readers may remember that I used to work for them). Spencer Buchanan started out the evening (once pizza was obtained) […]

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What Does a Beginner Need to Start Making Games?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 29, 2014

Courtesy of a Steam Sale, I found myself in possession of GameMaker Studio Pro edition for the bargain price of 25 bucks a few weeks ago. I’d actually considered taking a good, hard look at it after some comments on game development after considering some comments on one of the posts here (I think it […]

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Wizardry Online: So long, and thanks for all the death, or something

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 28, 2014

Looks like Wizardry Online didn’t last long. At least not in North America. Sony Online Entertainment is shuttering four MMOs this year, and that’s one of them… It was a pretty hardcore online game featuring permadeath, no auto-healing, and server-wide PVP. While my own history comes from somewhat more hardcore role-playing games, this always sounded […]

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The King.com “Saga” gets funnier and funnier

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 27, 2014

So you know how King.com was claiming that their efforts to trademark (and monopolize) the words “Candy” and “Saga”  for videogames were supposedly to protect themselves from evil cloners just trying to cash in on their IP rights? Well, they weren’t wrong. There are some unethical, despicable douchebags who will blatantly do that, and worse, […]

Filed Under: Biz, Politics - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

“Just Another”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 24, 2014

This last week, I bought “just another” indie RPG and “bullet hell” shooter. Why? Good question. I have a zillion games now, and don’t have time to play them all. So why pick up a couple of mediocre-sounding titles? Well, in the case of the indie RPG… I like to support the indie RPG community.  […]

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Game Dev Quote of the Week: The Not-So-Secret Formula For Success Edition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 23, 2014

From a bunch of excellent advice from the article, “What Triple-A Developers Could Learn From Indies“: “With such a great track record of repeated successful titles, the most common question that I get is ‘What is your formula?’ Really it is very simple. Pick a target market that you know well. Understand what they are […]

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The Trademark Bullies Strike Again

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 22, 2014

When I heard that the Candy Crush Saga creators actually hired gambling industry experts as consultants to help them extract the maximum amount of money from their players, I thought they were real scumbuckets. Apparently, that comparison was completely unfair to actual scumbuckets. Now they have gone and trademarks words commonly used by games. Like […]

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Learning to Make Games: Putting in the Time

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 21, 2014

My dad used to joke about how he’d bought all this exercise equipment but it hadn’t helped him one bit. Then he’d say something like, “I’m going to try using some of it now, and see if that makes a difference.” Yeah, it was a lame joke. But I sometimes get into that mentality, too. […]

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Steam Dev Days Reports

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 20, 2014

I can’t comment on the details, as I wasn’t there. But here are some of the bits coming out of Valve’s big (industry-only) developer conference: Cliff Harris: Steam Dev Days Afterthoughts Gamasutra: Steam Dev Days Tweets, Day 1 Gamasutra: Steam Dev Days Tweets, Day 2 Valve’s Michael Abrash shares his Steam Dev Days VR slides […]

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Game Development Quote of the Week – On How to Measure Success

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 17, 2014

This one comes from over twenty years ago, from the pages of Compute! Magazine. This was in an era when video games (particularly computer games) were almost but not quite the big business they are today, and were still being made by small teams that would often be considered “indie” today. “You can’t concern yourselves […]

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Game Development: Looking at Hard Numbers is Hard

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 16, 2014

How much does it cost to make a mainstream video game? Kataku mines out a few numbers. I remember being told that our games at Singletrac cost closer to $1.5 million to make… but that may have been in the Twisted Metal 2 era. Jaffe would know better than me, as he was one of […]

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Is Broken Age Telling the Story of Gaming Independence?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 15, 2014

Yesterday, two hotly anticipated Kickstarter-funded games were released… or at least “beta” released.  It was a busy day, so I haven’t had a chance to play as much as I would like, not play The Banner Saga at all. In fact, by the time I managed to wrestle my key from servers that seemed to […]

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Biz - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

So if AAA is screwed and mobile is screwed, what’s left?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 14, 2014

These are an interesting (in the Chinese curse kind of way) pair of articles, if true… First off, mobile is in trouble. The cost of acquiring a customer ($2.75) has officially exceeded the amount by which the average customer will actually ever pay ($1.93). Developers, brace for a bloodbath: The cost of getting a new […]

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That New Oculus Rift Thing…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 13, 2014

Many years ago, I went to a short-lived “Virtual Reality Arcade” and played Dactyl Nightmare against some of my coworkers. The framerate was horrible, and the visor could cause a headache without even being turned on, and the vertigo was vomit-inducing. However, for all those problems, it was kinda cool. Last year, I got to […]

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Sixty Days of Rocksmith 2014

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 10, 2014

I didn’t exactly sign up for the Rocksmith 60-day challenge or anything like that. But it’s been a little over 60 days since I first started playing with Rocksmith 2014. If I was truly disciplined, and learning to really play the guitar was of greater importance to me, I’d have been playing 4+ hours per […]

Filed Under: Geek Life, Guitar Games - Comments: 13 Comments to Read



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