Office Space

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 12, 2011

A peek into indie game developers’ offices. Which in some cases means, “bedroom.”

Ars Technica: Where the World’s Best Indie Games Get Made

For those who might wonder, the Rampant Coyote Fortress is a spare bedroom in my basement. The previous homeowner build a nice wooden deck which now covers over the window.  In order for it to still count as a bedroom, I think according to code the window still had to be able to be used as an exit or something, so he put a trap door in the deck above the window. So I kind of have a secret escape route. I may have to push through a nest of black widow spiders or something to do so, but that only makes it more cool IMHO.

Filed Under: Geek Life, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Thief’s 3D Rendering

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 11, 2011

This one’s for the programmers.  I got a kick out of it, I expect a few others will, but it probably won’t be too exciting for most readers. My apologies.

Sean Barrett has written up a high-to-medium-level explanation of the software 3D rendering he did for Looking Glass’s Thief: The Dark Project. He mentions previous projects (namely Ultima Underworld and System Shock)  briefly, to contrast their rendering systems with what he did for Thief.

http://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html

This brings back programming memories from the mid-90’s. I did my own share of rasterization with texture mapping (though I don’t think I ever did perspective-correct texture mapping), even going down to the assembly language level. And tweaking the painter’s algorithm so that objects would be properly occluded. And, failing that, breaking objects into smaller pieces so that my modified Painter’s would work. But nothing I did compares to the work he describes here.

Sometimes I miss doing that. But not usually. While there’s a part of me that loves getting down as close to the metal as possible, optimizing the pipeline, and other stuff like this, I don’t think I was ever very good at it.  I’m much happier making the “game” part of a game.

Filed Under: Programming - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

The Skull of S’makh-Daon Gets Another Thumbs Up!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 10, 2011

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon gets another very positive review:

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Review at Digitally Downloaded

An excerpt:

“As time goes on, the maximum that your stamina your endurance bar can actually hold decreases. This WILL be your downfall. There’s no way to fix this except spending drama stars or resting at an inn. Another kicker is that drama stars do not save with your games. Saving and reloading is not encouraged.

“Sounds like a game breaker, right? Hell no! As a matter of fact it adds so much more depth to the usual rinse and repeat of RPG turn based combat. This forces you to really think about when you should be resting, going back for potions, using those stars, and makes you pick your fights carefully. To this end, I offer a protip. DO NOT threaten the talking surrealist skull in the Tower of Almost Certain Death. That’s good life advice too.”

Another bit:

“The writing is the reason every RPG fan should play it, or even RPG haters, hell, everyone! There are just so many amazing moments; like after getting killed the full five minute dialogue that takes place. I can’t find any videos and only one screenshot, so you’ll just have to buy it and find out. The game was worth it just for that.”

Well, shucks.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 24 Comments to Read

Interview: Talkin’ PC Gaming and Frayed Knights

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 7, 2011

True PC Gaming has an interview with me where I talk about PC gaming and Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon.

You can check it out here.

I don’t think Adam intended this,  and maybe I’m just overly sensitive to this, but I did find myself feeling a little defensive in the questions about digital distribution platforms. I don’t know if that came out in the interview, but in case it did, I wanted to clarify. I get a little bit of a vibe from the industry in general these days that digital distribution = the big portals. I used to bristle back when people equated indie games to casual games, too.

Not that I dislike the big portals (I still have a couple of games from Steam that I haven’t even played yet…), or that I had any problem with casual games (I enjoy them, too!).  The digital distribution services are taking a middleman role that is still needed, whereas the traditional publishing model is … well, not quite going the way of the dinosaur, but definitely … er, “losing steam” if you’ll pardon the pun…

But the thing with being indie for me is having the freedom to bypass the middleman or the “process” entirely. That’s the point. Sure, you can choose to have a publisher or distributor or whatever agent you wish to help you better serve your customers. I’m jumping through the hoops now to do just that (and doing a bit of waiting for responses…)

As an analogy, I don’t have a problem with Wal*Mart the way some people do. I shop there sometimes. But I do not want all the little stores to be replaced by Wal*Mart, either. Especially when they sell things that probably won’t ever be carried by a local Wal*Mart. The same goes for indie game distribution. The big portals and distributors are awesome and have a huge audience and sell things for an incredible discount, and to their credit do get some indie games that even *I* have never heard about. But I don’t want their dominance to be at the expense of the little guys selling quirky but awesome titles.

UPDATED: Wanted to clarify that this tangential rant wasn’t based on the interview.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Interviews - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights Levels Up – More Frayeder and Knightier!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 6, 2011

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon has been updated to version 1.04. Yes, if you blinked (or slept, unlike me) you missed versions 1.01 through 1.03. That little story will be worth a blog post of its own. The important part is that we’ve made some improvements to the game. These are primarily bug fixes for technical issues and important gameplay issues, but I managed to sneak in some typo corrections and some handy but minor interface tweaks.

If you own the full version of the game, you can grab the update (and all future updates) here:

Frayed Knights Updates Page

The patch is pretty small (but significant!), so it’s a quick update.

For new purchasers as of today, their version is already updated to 1.04. They will not need to apply this patch. Not that I think it will damage anything if they do.

The demo will be getting updated. It is currently only updated (at some locations) to version 1.01, as the later changes were all in non-demo content (specifically, the Eastern Wilderness).  But I’ll be bumping the version number anyway to help avoid confusion. The demo will not have a separate patch. Patching a free demo seems weird.

For those who are curious, here is the list of (almost) everything changed in this update. Version 1.04 only fixes an issue introduced in the (briefly available) previous patches:

New Features:

• You can use the standard keyboard numbers 1-4 to choose the target friendly character in Spell target selection menu.
• The critical hit bonus of a weapon is now displayed in item data window in the inventory screen.
• Spacebar acts the same as the enter key for advancing dialogs and other windows.
• Venric’s store now has a short bow and a chain mail hauberk. This only affects new games, not existing saved games.
• Character base attack and defense scores (with current equipment, including shields) now displayed on character sheet.

Feature Changes:

• Slightly improved chance of success on searching.
• Luck provides a small bonus for searching.
• Hidden items now have a slightly larger discovery radius.
• Line-of-sight checks added to certain hidden items to avoid detecting items on another floor.
• Change text in options menu from “Full Screen Video” to “Play Full Screen” to prevent some confusion.
• Removed penalty for search checks for triggered traps. (Meaning – it’s a trap you just stumbled upon without searching it out first)
• Slight increase in all character’s magic defense to compensate for bug-fix on magical attack hit chance.
• Slight position change of some hidden objects to make them less annoying to find or work better with line-of-site checks.
• Added dice roll on results for magical attacks.

Fixed Issues:

• Hitting “escape” to close the journal no longer screws up your controls.
• Restoring default key controls from options menu now works correctly.
• Fixed bug where swapping characters prior to Benjamin leaving party would permanently remove one party member.
• Fixed issue with Ol’ Hoss’s quest where the hidden stash may not be detectable if another hidden stash had been uncovered.
• Skipping empty save-game slots no longer causes crash or broken game state.
• “Blank” merchants in saved games force a refresh to defaults on load: No more getting left with empty merchants forever.
• Fixed a spot in Pokmor Xang where player could get stuck on crates in left guardroom.
• Removed the magical disappearing signpost in nighttime Ardin.
• Fixed corner of a house in Ardin that was floating slightly above the ground.
• Tweaked screen resolution filters to prevent unplayably small resolutions or prevent playing in native (or higher) resolutions.
• Fixed the very ugly defaulting to 16-bit in full-screen mode.
• Fixed bug in Energy Conservation feat that was often preventing it from reducing endurance costs.
• Canceling the travel menu with the escape key no longer leaves player stuck in area border zone.
• Exiting other windows will no longer leave the main screen in combat mode when combat has ended.
• Fixed bug with certain types of dice rolls (particularly spell hits & searches) that was producing reduced success rates.
• Fixed bug where incapacitated characters with autofade would still fade at the beginning of combat. I know autofading uses no endurance, but I had no idea it required that little exertion! 🙂
• Shield bonus now works for weapons in primary hand.
• Eliminated shield bonus on non-magical weapons except for parrying dagger.
• Darkened empty drama star sockets.
• Fixed Various typos. Not including this on.

Have fun!

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Matt Chat Visits Daggerfall

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 5, 2011

Man, this thing brought on the nostalgia. I tried re-playing Daggerfall a couple of years ago.  I didn’t get very far. But when it was new,  I bought it on release day, put up with its buggy madness, and enjoyed the ever-living crap out of the game.

I don’t know if it was as ambitious as its predecessor, The Elder-Scrolls: Arena (which curiously had no arena in it). I was in a roundtable at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference where the lead designer for Arena claimed he’d originally planned it as a party-based game. Thus the cover, I guess. But the other party members kept getting lost in the 3D environments, and so they dropped it and now, almost at the fifth game, The Elder Scrolls remains a solo-character RPG series.

I skipped Arena, myself, as that was back in the day when RPGs were a dime a dozen. But I was caught up by the Daggerfall hype, and except for the bugs (which were annoying but unfortunately expected in a game of this scope) I was not disappointed.  It was a game world I pretty much lived in for a few months. And as a game developer, I was simultaneously fantasizing about the ways I could improve upon it.  Given, of course, infinite time and resources.

It’s hard to play now. But I remember wishing, as I was playing Oblivion, that it played a little more like Daggerfall.  I don’t remember if I felt that way about Morrowind or not. 

Anyway – if you enjoy these videos (and have money left over after buying Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon), Matt is still requesting donations to help cover the time and expense. You can donate at:

http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/3793.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

October Indie RPG Sales

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 4, 2011

The “Laxius” series of games turns a decade old this month. The first three games – Laxius Power – were free titles, and a learning process for game maker Indinera Falls. Later, as Aldorlea Games, Indinera released the premium “Laxius Force” series.

To celebrate the anniversary of a decade of indie RPG-making,  Laxius Force 1 and Laxius Force 2 are on sale this month for $7 off each if you use the code “LAX10” in the coupon box on the order page, and then click the “recalculate” button.

Spiderweb Software – the longest-running commercial indie RPG creator that I’m aware of – is also having a “Glorious October Carnage Sale.”  All of their games are receiving a permanent price decrease, and an additional 10% off on top of it for the month of October. There’s no coupons necessary for this one – just head over to http://spiderwebsoftware.com/ and pick your games for Windows or Mac – including bundled collections.

Have fun!

Filed Under: Deals - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Post-Release R&R?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 3, 2011

Ah, with Frayed Knights 1 all released and stuff, I’ve been able to enjoy a wonderful several days of rest and recuperation, catch up on playing games and TV shows, and even get some sleep for a change. Maybe I’ll finally finish that stack of books I’ve been meaning to read…

*SNORT*

Okay, yeah, I couldn’t finish. But seriously, folks…

Releasing a game as an indie feels a bit like being the proverbial one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest.  On top of bug-fixes, there’s been customer support, and an endless marketing effort trying to get the word out to as many places as I can. And then the Day Job is going into crunch mode as well, with a ton of stuff I have to get done before they ship me off to Thailand for the latter half of October (yes, I get to miss Halloween this year… I’m crushed).

My wife is utterly confused by all this, as she had thought that she’d finally get her husband back once I released the game.

But overall, the release has been going quite well.  Unfortunately, I do have a big ol’ stack of issues I’m looking into, some of which are causing serious “WTF?” moments as I’m digging through code trying to figure out how something is acting so weird for a handful of customers. I’ve discovered some great ones. My favorite so far is a bug caused by changing Benjamin’s position in the party order prior to going to sleeping at the inn the first time (right after the Temple of Pokmor Xang, where the demo ends). If you do this, you can end up with another party member permanently removed from the party forever. I don’t recommend doing this, as I don’t know what instabilities this introduces later in the game, but it’s an intriguing possibility. Especially with the ghost of the missing party member still being involved in dialogs…

Speaking of bugs and fixes, I should have the update out sometime this week, in preparation for releasing it to affiliate channels.

 

 

Filed Under: Biz, Frayed Knights - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

GameBanshee’s Review of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 1, 2011

I hope you guys forgive me for talking about very little other than Frayed Knights this week. And probably next week. But after almost three decades of dreams and several years of effort, it’s been something of a big deal. Or rather, its consumption of my attention has been at an all-time high the last couple of weeks, and I really haven’t been able to concentrate on much else.

Anyway, there’s an epic 5-page review of the game over at GameBanshee. Surprisingly, it’s not by Brother None, who did the stellar preview last week, but by Eric Schwarz. And as you can guess from the page count, this is not a shallow review:

GameBanshee Feature: Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Review

An excerpt:

“Despite the focus on dungeon crawling, that doesn’t mean that Frayed Knights is devoid of interesting quests, however. Although the game is, for the most part, quite linear, providing the player with a mostly fixed path through the game, many quests have at least one or two minor decisions to make. None of them have any long-term consequences or real moral dilemmas; rather, it’s the way in which all of the quests interact that makes them fun to get through. Frayed Knights has a very good way of having one quest lead to another, and then that next quest leading to two more, and most of the game’s quests will span nearly the entire length and breadth of it, requiring you to enter multiple dungeons, speak to several different characters, uncover hidden secrets, and so forth; some of its best quests require the completion of others to finish up, and others rely on your own deduction rather than obvious tips. This can sometimes create a feeling of directionlessness, but this can usually be remedied by making a bit more progress or exploring another dungeon. Not all quests end up marked in your journal, either, and when you combine that with the lack of a quest compass, you’ll wind up with a great feeling of accomplishment for figuring out where to go, what to do, how to solve a particular puzzle, and so on. Being able to simply deduce how to get through the game for yourself is, sadly enough, something quite rare in RPGs these days, and it’s extremely refreshing to see that Frayed Knights doesn’t just require this, but does such a great job of encouraging and rewarding it. “

 

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Utah Indie Night – September 2011

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 30, 2011

Starting this month, Utah Indie Night went bi-monthly instead of quarterly, so we’ll now be meeting six times a year instead of four. The original plan to meet quarterly was sort of quick, casual decision on the part of the eleven or so of us who met for the first one, so there wasn’t exactly anything sacred about that decision.  We were just concerned that meeting too frequently would hurt our numbers. This was more of a concern when there was only eleven of us. We’re a lot bigger now.

For me personally,  night began with an extremely nice gift and a little bit of good-natured ribbing by Jonathon Duerig, author of Tile Factory (go play it, BTW, it’s a very good game!). He gave me a cake and had the entire group sing, “Happy Ship Day” (to the tune of “Happy Birthday”) to me as a congratulations for FINALLY shipping Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, after *cough*years*cough* of it being a perennial showpiece at indie nights. Thanks for making me feel like a celebrity for a night, dude!

The real celebrity of the night, however, was novelist and former game designer Tracy Hickman, known by many of us old RPG farts as the co-author of the Dragonlance series and the original Ravenloft D&D module. He’s written dozens of modules since then. And, as good friends with Richard Garriott (who I supposed has given him plenty of insight into the computer game side of things), he is also the screenwriter for “The Apogee of Fear,” the first science fiction film shot on location in space.

He gave our formal presentation for the evening. His talk went way into overtime, but was fascinating throughout, packed with useful tools for game designers interested in story within their games. The focus was on improving storytelling in games, though a lot of it was about a very insightful analysis into story structure that I hadn’t heard before. He covered some basics about creating game-story structure that I’d heard him talk about many years ago involving the use of soft boundaries and hard boundaries to direct the course of the game to follow story structure while still allowing plenty of room for player freedom and choice. But the main thrust of the talk was on a couple of different approaches to story design. One was involving plot “throughlines” – he explained that games are really good at presenting the first two involving the “objective story” and “main character’s story,” but were generally very poor at handling the other two throughlines. He also showed a way of breaking principle characters of many stories down into two sets of quadrants, one for “drivers” and the other for “passengers” for the objective story throughline (though, as he pointed out, the main character need not be a ‘driver’ character… using To Kill a Mockingbird as an example.)

Anyway, I don’t know about everyone else, but I was pretty intrigued by the talk. He covered a lot of territory, even given the extended length of his presentation, and only plugged his website / workshop, Scribesforge.com, a little bit. But I feel like plugging it here as a thank-you for an insightful presentation. My wife, a professional storyteller,  found the discussion equally useful and was frantically taking notes right next to me.

He also told a very powerful story of one soldier who had been influenced by one of his earlier books. It was a very moving story, and I can’t do it justice and won’t even try. But after sharing that experience with us, Hickman explained that this was the power of story. Story can change lives.

After that, and a chance to get some autographs from Hickman (I gave him a copy of Frayed Knights on a burned CD as well, though I have no idea if he’ll ever play the thing), we broke for the game presentations in another room. This is an informal, simultaneous thing, which always leaves me feeling I’m missing a bunch of stuff. Especially when I’m showing my game (and I was… for the last time!) I did get a brief look at the latest update on the always awesome LinkRealms.  Jonathon Duerig had “Tile Factory 2” which I got to see only briefly. It will hopefully be up on Kongregate pretty soon, though.

Curtis Mirci showed me the latest build of his shooter-with-RPG-elements, “March to the Moon,” which makes Frayed Knights seem like a downright somber game by comparison.  It is still in mid-development and needs work, but I think I was in need of a nice, goofy, fun shooter. I really had fun playing it.

Bryan Livingston collared me at the end of the evening and dragged me to look at his project, Smote.com, which he described as something of “World of Warcraft meets Gauntlet.” Yeah, he knows how to get my attention. The game looks a lot better now that it’s not just white blocks. I was really impressed. It’s still very much in development, but is already fun.

And there was a lot I missed that I caught glimpses of.

As always, I am impressed with the talent of the indies, here in Utah and everywhere else. In my opinion, the guys who make games and actually PUT THEM OUT THERE, through contests, ad-supported networks, pay-for-download, or whatever… these guys are my personal heroes. It’s easy to criticize games, but it’s something else entirely to build something of value that has to compete in a contest or the ‘real world’ marketplace, and to succeed on any level.  That’s a big part of why these evenings are such an inspiration for me.

And the other thrill is seeing the students doing their projects too… there are some extremely creative ideas out there. It’s equally inspiring to see these tiny projects coming out that really break the artificial boundaries of genre and style and do some new things. They may have near-zero commercial possibilities, but they challenge the status quo and help open up the player’s (and designer’s) mind about the possibilities of game mechanics, theming, and even the concept of what a game really is.

I really appreciate these meetings. And my kudos to Greg Squire, for putting these together and running them for all these years (and now going even crazier by making them every other month!). We kept talking about it being a “nice idea,” and wishing there was something like this locally, until he got tired of wishing and did something about it.

UPDATE: A two-part post about the night’s festivities can be found at The Ludi Bin. With pictures, which automatically makes it 100% cooler than my post:

Utah Indie Night, Sept 2011 – Part 1

Utah Indie Night, Sept 2011 – Part 2

Filed Under: Utah Indie Game Night - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Indie Test Drive of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 29, 2011

I may have to hire this guy to do voice-overs for the next game…

And part 2:

Not too much new for people who have played the demo. I keep thinking, “Gah! Have Dirk use Fade! Have Dirk use Fade!” and a few other things when watching him play. It’s quite instructive watching other people play your game.

Anyway, even if you’ve played the demo, these are entertaining videos. Enjoy!

As far as other Frayed Knights news is concerned – there’s an old saying that the only bug-free software is the software that’s not being used anymore. Fortunately, it looks like Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is getting a lot of users. I’m thrilled. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback, and a “nice” list of issues that need to be addressed in an upcoming update.  So I guess my whole dream of kicking back and relaxing for a day or two after release is gone. But hey, I got to sleep for over five whole hours last night, which was a big improvement!

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: More Previews, Reviews, and First Impressions

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 28, 2011

It’s been a pretty surreal 24 hours for me, as you can probably imagine.  While I’ve been dealing with the various release-based issues, there have been some more great articles about Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon I wanted to share.

First off, there’s GameBanshee’s Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Preview, by Brother None. An excerpt:

“The drama stars are a fun little concept used in this game. Every time you take any significant new action (opening doors into new areas, finishing fights, have Arianna drink from a dodgy pool of water, turning a lever) one of eight points in one of three stars is filled. When you reload a game, the stars are cleared and you’ll have to start filling them again. You can fill up the three stars, first to bronze, then to silver, then to gold. As you upgrade them, you can spend them for ever-increasing one-time fall-back options, able to lift negative effects or awaken knocked out characters. The intent is to encourage you to play through dungeons rather than rely on constant saving and reloading, and it works fairly well, I find myself saving with a much lower frequency in this game than in others, and rarely reloading at all.”

Next up – our first reviews! RPG Watch’s Frayed Knights Review. This is basically two reviews in once. Both Skavenhorde and Corwin started playing beta versions, and I think both have played through the game about three times. I fear they might know more about playing the game than I do. I really want to include excerpts from both sides of the review. Corwin in part one:

“Hopefully, at some point you will have a party wipe. Why? One of the funniest dialogue sequences in the entire game occurs when everyone in your party is incapacitated. Make sure you read it all the way through at least once.”

And from part two, from Skavenhorde:

“I loved this game. It’s what I’ve been waiting for since Wizardry 8 or even the end of the Quest for Glory series. It’s a turn-based “blob” RPG set in a quirky setting where adventuring is a lifestyle choice. Even if you don’t like games that aren’t serious in nature there is still a wonderful “blob” combat RPG here. “

They both invoked Wizardry 8 in comparison to Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, which is pretty high honor in my book. Not that I am so full of myself to even imagine that my little low-budget indie game can hold a candle to Wizardry 8. Or Wizardry 7. I think I’d be willing to take on Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, maybe.

I should be noted that Skavenhorde has posted as a guest writer for this blog. It’s up to you to decide if that would influence his review.

Finally, there’s Bits n Bytes’ The Indie Fix: Frayed Knights First Impressions. Armand K. offers his thoughts after a few hours, not getting too far past the point where the demo version ends:

“The mod­ern indie gam­ing scene to me really reflects the atmos­phere of the ‘80s and ‘90s PC game devel­op­ment scene, with ded­i­cated peo­ple mak­ing the games they wanted to make and loved. So per­haps it is no sur­prise that we’re see­ing more and more of this sort of RPG com­ing around. The developer’s pas­sion for his craft shines through Frayed Knights, a fea­ture that isn’t so com­mon in games requir­ing hun­dreds of work­ers devel­op­ing small parts sep­a­rately from each other. It’s refresh­ing to see this sort of thing sur­face lately, and this game would have prob­a­bly been remem­bered as a clas­sic should it have been released in the first half of the ‘90s (of course, this is assum­ing it keeps the steam it’s built up in the first few hours).”

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon – Now Available!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 27, 2011

I’m feeling lazy, so I’ll just post this li’l press release…

Salt Lake City, UT – Indie computer game developer Rampant Games has announced the release of its long-anticipated role-playing game, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, an indie role-playing game drawing inspiration from the classics, with a humorous twist.

Embracing the style and mechanics for role-playing games that have been largely abandoned by major publishers, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon features a first-person perspective, turn-based combat, a statistics-heavy game system, a party of four characters, and thousands of lines of unvoiced dialog presented in comic-book style word balloons.  The Skull of S’makh-Daon also adds new innovations to the genre, including a “drama star” system that encourages players to accept setbacks in the game rather than reloading and trying again, and a mini-game where players must disarm traps one component at a time using their character skills and available tools.

On top of the serious, ‘hard-core’ engine, The Skull of S’makh-Daon layers a world and story with a decidedly more tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre. Spells and skills have names like “Power Word: Defenestrate” and “Size Doesn’t Matter.” In a world of jaded heroes and veteran adventurers, the player’s party is a team of misfits: Arianna, a dainty warrior with an attitude problem; Dirk, an adrenaline-junky rogue who doesn’t seem to understand the word ‘subtle;’ Benjamin, a nature-priest and newcomer to the adventuring lifestyle, and Chloe, a ditsy sorceress with a love of cute, fuzzy animals and setting her enemies on fire.

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is now available as a digital download at http://frayedknights.com. It is unrated, but should be content-appropriate for most teens and adults.

Features include:

•     30+ hours of gameplay
•     Challenging, turn-based combat in a game
•     A spell named, “Power Word: Defenestrate.”
•     Over a hundred base spells, most with several upgraded variants
•     Over 80 feats to customize the party as they progress through the game.
•     Nearly 200 different items to be used and abused by your characters.
•     A “Quarterstaff of Nad-Whacking.”
•     Sixteen “dungeons” (interior adventuring areas), five outdoor areas, one village, an alternate dimension, and some green dude’s one-room hovel.
•     A 69-page (PDF) manual

About Rampant Games: Rampant Games is a mainly one-person game development studio in Riverton, Utah. Owner Jay Barnson is a veteran game programmer from the “mainstream” industry, involved in the development of numerous hit and not-such-hit titles for consoles and the PC since 1994.

Media:
Trailer Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb3ext0i5UQ

Website:
http://frayedknights.com

###

And on a personal note…

Whew.

Guys, I can’t believe I’m finally releasing this thing. I really hope you like it.  I’ve wanted to do something like this since I was a young teen playing Ultima III for the first time. This isn’t a magnum opus. It’s only a beginning. But I’m thrilled to be able to share it with as wide an audience as I can get. Please help spread the word, if you can.

But mainly: I really, really hope you enjoy my game.

Thanks everyone for their support through this long project – whether it was encouragement or providing content, offering suggestions or going to town on testing. You guys rock, and the game is far better because of you.

Have fun.

UPDATE: Because I released in the wee hours U.S. time with a new account with a U.S. payment processor, there’s been some slowness in fulfillment. Nobody will get charged until their order is fulfilled. This should be resolved shortly, but the first batch of customers might be stuck in “pending” status for a few more hours. I apologize.

UPDATE 2: The issue has been resolved. New vendors have tighter fraud screening, and they’ve fixed the issue. This is a Good Thing on their part, just unfortunate timing.

 

Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Game Announcements - Comments: 39 Comments to Read

Be ‘Frayed

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Be ‘Frayed.

Be very, very ‘Frayed…

Filed Under: General - Comments: 19 Comments to Read

Extravagant Frayed Knights Codex Preview Feature

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 26, 2011

RPG Codex did a huge combo of a quick preview (only 3 hours of play), a “Let’s Play” blow-by-blow account of combat, and a short “hostile” interview with me.

Extravagant Frayed Knights Codex Preview Feature

This may be something of an information overload. I do want to suggest that while the combat section is extremely detailed, I don’t know that most players (myself included) pay QUITE that much attention to all that detail.  It’s there when you need it… when your whole party is on the verge of being wiped out and every single spell or bonus counts, it’s nice to have it there. But most of the time I just pay more attention to the health bars and who has been silenced / slept / etc.

Anyway, this is RPG Codex. They aren’t predisposed to heap favor upon games. I think Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon obtains some good will and a little grace on account of having turn-based combat, which might help offset the marks against it over there for having low-budget looks, a pregenerated party, and the overall silliness that it embraces.  Still, it’s a pretty fair preview, and actually helped cement some ideas for small-but-significant changes I made over the weekend to improve the first-time player experience. Mainly tutorial stuff, though I feel I managed to kill two or three birds with one stone here.

We’re almost there, guys.  I hope you like it.  We’re not out of the woods yet, so there are no guarantees, but… I hope you haven’t made any big plans this weekend.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Mistakes, Process, Simplicity, and Communication… A Game Development Chat with Corvus Elrod

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 23, 2011

I had a conversation with indie game-maker Corvus Elrod this last week, which can be read over at his website. This one is mainly about design and development thoughts in general (though we do talk about Frayed Knights a little):

A Chat with the Rampant Coyote

The focus (in my mind) is a lot about process – improving the process of game development. Corvus is finally finishing his big tabletop storytelling game project, and I’m finally finishing my big CRPG project, and we reflect on what can be done to make things better.

It’s a little embarrassing, but he does ask me the hard question about simplicity in design. I preach simplicity. I warn newbie game devs to keep it simple. And then I produce a gigantic project like Frayed Knights. What gives? Am I just a hypocrite?

Well, yeah, in some ways. It’s also taken way too many years of my life, so let that be a lesson to you. But here, I actually try to amend my principle a little: Simplicity is not necessarily the end-goal. Simplicity of design – being able to clearly see the “core” of the game – is critical.  If you have that solidly in mind, then things like “feature creep” are no longer a big concern. You’ll have thousands of ideas, but be able to tell the difference between which ones truly improve the game, and which ones clutter it or distract from it.

At least that’s my thought now. You can read more over there. I’m not an expert designer, or an expert businessman, or really an expert anything, so I welcome feedback and suggestions.

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



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