Revisited: “How Do I Get Past the Harpies?”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 4, 2011

Word from testers have been coming back over the last couple of weeks. Seeing other people enjoy a world that you’ve created is a tremendous feeling. It’s also motivating – you see parts that aren’t working well (these guys are testing the game, so I get a lot of that), and want to fix them.

This reminded me of a story I shared about five years ago on the old blog, and thought I’d share it here, with some minor revisions. Indie wannabes who haven’t yet released a game (even freeware) to the public: This is what it’s all about. I got my first taste of it before I was even in high school. Times and technology change, but the thrill of making games for others does not.

“How Do I Get Past the Harpies?”

Back in the 1980s (but still true today), if you happened to know a thing or two about computers, people assumed you were an expert on the subject. And you’d get called on to fix other people’s computers. At the age of 14, I knew how to program in BASIC and a little bit of 6502 machine code; I knew what a floppy disk was (they were mainly 5 1/4″ back then); and a little bit about booting up different kinds of machines. That made me a “whiz kid” and earned me some measure of respect and awe from adults. Which was of course, very cool.

But it also came with the expectation that when an adult didn’t know how to make their computer work, I’d be able to help.

One Saturday a woman from our church needed help with her computer, and had asked my parents if I could come over and take a look at it. She lived a distance away, so my dad dropped me off to take a look at it, promising to be back in a few hours.

This lady was very gracious, but had no clue what to do with this machine on her kitchen table. This was a “portable computer.” Back in 1983 or so, a “portable computer” was jokingly referred to as a “luggable.” They were about 25 pounds or so, had a built-in 4″ screen, and were about the size of a small suitcase.

I spent about 20 minutes fiddling around with the system, asking the lady for her boot disks and anything else that came with her system. I figured out the problem, but I wasn’t able to fix it (I think it was a bad disk, and she didn’t have a backup). I gave her my best advice, and I was done. And… I still had a few hours to wait before my dad would pick me up. She gave me some lemonade, and said that she thought there was a couple of games on her assortment of floppies.

The one game I found held my interest for a few minutes (it was some game about a garden maze full of monsters – all ASCII characters), but then I found a disk with a version of BASIC. I booted it up, and began programming.

By the time my dad arrived to pick me up, I’d written a short little text-adventure game. I only had time to do a really simple text parser, and it had something like 20 areas and a dozen items scattered through them. I left the computer running, and forgot about it. The lady thanked me again for my help and advice (what little I’d done), and I went home and forgot about it.

Shortly after dinner that night, we got a phone call from this lady. It was for me. I was wondering if there was something else wrong with her computer. I answered the call.

“How do I get past the harpies?!?” she begged me.

It took me a few seconds to realize what she was talking about. She’d discovered my little adventure game — and had gotten most of the way through it. She was stuck at the harpies, which kept killing her.

“Oh, you get the wax from the candles and put them in your ears. Just ‘Use wax.’ That way you won’t be affected by their song,” I responded.

“Thank you!” she said. And she explained that she’d been playing it all evening, and had been trying to get past the harpies for over an hour, and it had been driving her nuts. She thanked me for the solution, and hung up – presumably to finish the game. It had taken her as long to play as it had taken me to write. Boy, that doesn’t happen anymore…

As for me, I felt GREAT. This was the first time someone else had played one of my games – and she’d apparently been hooked on it the entire evening. She’d liked it. And she was not a geeky computer-game addict like me… just some woman who used her computer for her home business. But my little invention was of worth to her.

There have been a lot of games since then, and a lot of players. And the feeling hasn’t changed much.

It still feels great.

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Geek Life, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights Update: News from the Front, and The Reason Why…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 1, 2011

Time for an update on Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, that dumb little humorous indie RPG that was supposed to be knocked out in a hurry, and ended up becoming a big ol’ epic project.

News from the Front:

Our first beta release has gone pretty well, and did what it was supposed to do. Which is to say, it generated a lot of bug reports which I still haven’t managed to completely address.  I could blame crunch mode at the day job for the last two weeks, but… well, okay, yeah, that’s a main culprit. It’s just not really possible for me to put in a 12+ hour day and then another 6+ hour evening working on FK. I’m lucky if I get two.

The beta has been very limited so far, but the non-bug feedback has been extremely positive. I’m beginning to think this game might not have been a waste of four years of my life after all.

Brian “Skavenhorde” Critser managed to be the first player to finish the full game without needed (or even possessing) developer codes and cheat menus. He proved it could be done, and also demonstrated that I’d spent so much time trying to make the first part of the game not *too* tough that I neglected to balance the latter half of the game very well. I had “boss” enemies that were weaker than rank-and-file enemies in the same area, and high-level magic-using threats that were actually quite low-level and severely lacking in magic. And by “severely lacking” I mean I forgot to give them spells to use. But they died so fast that Brian hadn’t actually noticed.

Oops.

There are a couple of quests that have confused players and have caused extra backtracking and hunting for something that might have been missed. While that theoretically extends play-time, that’s not fun gameplay, so I’m trying to fix those. I’ve taken those as work items, adding additional hints in conversations, journal pages, or environmental clues to make sure other players don’t find themselves getting too lost. I love throwing adventure-game style puzzles into the game, but I don’t want them to be too difficult. One interesting tidbit is that DGM (my other epic-tester) found the minotaur maze to be frustrating, whereas Skavenhorde (who maybe is used to being run through a maze, I dunno…) thought it was pretty easy and not very maze-like. (Neither of them were playing with auto-maps, since those haven’t worked since the pilot. I know, they are on my “to do” list…)

There have been a several significant changes to the game that have either evolved or been deliberately put in place as a result of feedback. Most will be meaningless to you, but a few I’ve talked about here. Spellstones are gaining importance. You will want to make sure your party has an ample supply spread among the casters. Most group-based spells will require them.  At least one of the merchants has an unlimited supply, and they are frequently found as treasure, so they aren’t exactly hard to come by. But putting an entire opposing force to sleep is going to require some cash expenditure.

Upgraded spells are becoming a bigger and bigger element in the game. For a while, I didn’t have enemies using spell upgrades.  As with spellstones, if you ignore that aspect of casting, you are really limiting your party’s potential. I realized this applied just as well to enemies, and they are definitely more effective for it.

The Reason Why

And finally, there’s a question I’ve answered a few times, but the answer bears repeating. I’ve had several people ask me why I’ve bothered working so hard to provide a hard-core, old-school, serious game system as the foundation for what is a fairly light-hearted, comic, story-heavy game.  It seems like a waste, right? All this work into something that people are going to play because it’s kinda funny and stuff. Or something that hard-core gamers won’t play because it’s kinda funny and stuff.

The answer is that, fundamentally, I want to have Frayed Knights stand on its own as a game (series), even if the humor fell completely flat. I want it to be a great game that happens to be funny. I mean, it’s a low-budget indie title, so it’s not going to win any beauty contests with the latest Unreal 3 Engine – powered extravaganza. But a solid, entertaining game doesn’t need a big budget, and so that’s where I’m focusing my effort. And for me, while a “great RPG” can mean a lot of things, in this case I wanted a game that captured the feel of the old games that made me fall in love with the genre in the first place.  I wanted a game that made me feel like I was only seeing a piece of a really deep, “crunchy” world with lots and lots of detail, and that I was only scratching the surface.  I wanted that detail to be as much on the system level, to appeal to me intellectually, as it was at the world level to appeal to me emotionally.

Maybe it’s a bad combination, but I really don’t think I would be satisfied with a “lite” RPG. Not at this time. Sure, someday in the future I’d enjoy tossing out a jRPG-style game with simple mechanics that are mostly there just to make you work for the story, but not today. Frayed Knights is kind of a hard-core game with old-school sensibilities that just happens to have its tongue planted in its cheek much of the time. But for all that it doesn’t take itself (or the genre) seriously, it has a serious game under the hood. I hope you’ll like it.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

Character Skill vs. Player Skill

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 30, 2011

 

I’m going to get a little basic right now, since not everybody who reads this blog is a computer role-playing game expert. But mainly because I’ve been putting in 12+ hour days for the day job the last two weeks, and then working on the game instead of sleeping, so “basic” is about all I have the brain power left over to talk about. Besides, it’ll probably still generate some interesting discussion in the comments, which is really where the good stuff can be found in almost every post. So I want to talk about the concept of character skill vs. player skill.

The mix of player skill and character skill is a defining element of an RPG. In an RPG, you are playing one or more characters – characters who have defined (but dynamic) abilities and limitations that change over time as you make progress through the game.

If success is principally dictated by your actions and skill as a player, then it’s not an RPG. So if your character is supposed to be a mediocre shot, but as a player you are lining up and endless stream of head-shots for critical hits, then chances are that at least that aspect of the game is really not very RPG-ish. An RPG may blend the two elements by making your hits based on player skill and your damage based on character skill to try and strike a balance, which may satisfy many players. But there has to be some kind of cooperative give-and-take going where the actions (and skills) of the player are filtered by the character’s abilities and limitations.

These days, that’s a really, really fuzzy area, and not much of a dividing line. Are better weapons and armor an attribute of your character? Many games include “RPG elements” including some kind of upgrade mechanic. It’s not a hard-and-fast delineation. It’s a spectrum.

On the flip side, a game can’t be all about character skill either, or it’s not a game. It’s Progress Quest.

Sometimes you will get rants by inexperienced gamers who argue that there is no player skill involved in in turn-based RPGs. I don’t know if they are just trolling or truly ignorant, but they do say this. I can only assume said kids have never played a game of Chess, let alone completed the original Pool of Radiance. Or read the CRPG Addict’s account of tactics necessary in the original Wizardry. I guess I do understand a little of where they are coming from. I used to think NetHack was all about luck, not player skill. Then I saw guys who knew what they were doing playing the game. Yes, luck still plays a significant roll. Skilled play was all about risk management.

In a turn-based tactical game, it may be about adequate preparation, choice of battles, and of course making appropriate tactical decisions during battle. In an action game, it may be about speed and accuracy and knowing when to down healing potions or turn tail and run. It’s always about making choices, based on either  role-playing preferences or careful gameplay considerations.

Ultimately, role-playing games are about a synthesis between a player’s skill and that of the character he or she is playing. So what we really come down to, next, is what kinds of player skills the game demands, and how we mix those with the character’s abilities to get interesting and challenging gameplay.

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Stupid Female Armor…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 29, 2011

College Humor tells it like it is…

Definitely watch to the very end. “Oooo! Right in the shiny part!”

Filed Under: General - Comments: 18 Comments to Read

Preserving Video Games – and the Right Way to Handle Abandonware?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

An interesting article about the problem of preserving old video games:

Grassroots Game Preservation Through Abandonware

The focus is (duh!) on abandonware sites. That’s a gray area with me, though it’s not gray with respect to U.S. copyright laws.  Still, it’s largely tolerated by the industry, so long as the sites will take down games on request by the copyright holders, or automatically when the games become supported again through some means (It’s no fair for the publisher to have to track down every single site and contact them). The copyright owners are no longer receiving any revenue from them anyway, and can’t afford to even try and support the games. But the abandonware sites keep the IP alive for them. So if it’s not a good thing, it’s at least a neutral thing. Chaotic neutral to chaotic good, depending on the site, for those of us who obsess over such things. I’ve yet to meet a developer who hasn’t been pleased that his or her older titles are still kept alive through these sites. Though I guess if their game really sucked and they are embarrassed about it they might feel bad about it.

I absolutely love this excerpt about how GOG.COM handled their “competition” – the abandonware sites that offered free downloads of the games GOG.COM would sell:

“[Abandonware] is something we knew we had to deal with to make Good Old Games a success.” Says Rambourg. “Rather than making them our opponents and thus turning the noble cause of retro gaming into a battlefield where everyone would lose, we decided to team up with the abandonware scene. We got in touch with some of the most famous abandonware websites and proposed that they become our affiliates. [The sites] take down the titles we sign for Good Old Games and ask their visitors to purchase a legal copy from us. We then pay our affiliates for every purchase done thanks to them. It’s basically a win-win situation that benefits the end consumer.”

Rather than treating abandonware sites with hostility, Good Old Games turned potential competitors into allies. In going this route, GOG also acknowledges the continued importance of the abandonware community. The growth of legitimate distributors is doubtless a preferred alternative to the violation of copyright law. But the legal system is frequently too sluggish to be relied on by itself. While Good Old Games’ efforts should be applauded, they’re still a business venture; at some point they have to be mindful of their bottom line, and in turn their focus is more likely to fall on retro titles with economic viability.

There’s even more symbiosis than the article mentions. I know GOG.COM has tested and used some cracks out there to deal with copy protection for older games – some of which simply will not work with modern hardware. I had a copy of The Temple of Elemental Evil that I’d never been able to play on account of that, and re-purchased it from GOG.COM to finally be able to play it. It was worth it to have them do the research and test the crack for safety for me. While they maybe could have created a crack themselves, they took advantage of what was already out there.

Now, this isn’t a broad approach that would be a general solution to pirate (ahem – copyright infringement – douchebaggery – whatever) sites. As noted in the article, many abandonware sites have long made pains to separate themselves from pirate sites. For the most part, abandonware sites (at least the ones I’ve visited… all, like, three of them…) have been good about taking down games at the request of the copyright owner. The sites I’m familiar with make a big deal out of supporting the industry, not cheating it. That’s what makes them work for me.

And once again, I’m impressed with CD Projekt as a whole, and their attitude and approach. So yeah, I guess I’ve forgiven them for the whole GOG.COM fake-death week-long outage joke.

But the point at the end of the article  is also correct. Good Old Games has a focus on – well, good old games. Should only the good / great / popular  ones be preserved? I don’t think so.  Reading the CRPG Addict’s blog, I’m often surprised by titles I’ve never or barely heard of – and which would probably never sell on GOG.COM, particularly those from the 1980s – which have some pretty redeeming qualities and moments of greatness. It would be awful if these games were lost forever.

But there’s also no way to make them economically viable to preserve individually. I mean, how many people a year would pay even a single dollar to buy Scavengers of the Mutant World? Not enough to be worth the time just to track down and secure the rights. But I’m glad it’s available so that some historian out there could at least provide a synopsis of the game for my benefit.

Filed Under: Biz, Retro - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Video Games: Protected Expression

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 28, 2011

For those who follow video game news (and if you don’t, I don’t blame you) here in the United States, there was one piece of news that overwhelmed the rest on Monday: The Supreme Court finally weighed in, declaring in a 7:2 decision that California’s anti-video-game law was unconstitutional.

In this decision, they declared that video games were a form of speech granted protection by the first amendment. They declared that restrictions on the freedom of said speech were only granted in narrowly defined terms, and the California law was extremely broad (as with almost every bill attempting to restrict video game sales).  They cited the lack of evidence of any sort of threat that would make restriction of the medium a compelling state interest. They noted the number of double standards brought into focus by this law, noting how California wants to have it both ways in their imposition of nanny-state laws in particular areas where something should be either a compelling state interest and applied universally, nor not.

The video games industry – and gamers – are elated. They should be. This draws to a close a very frustrating chapter for the medium in this country.  Though it’s been less of an issue once the economy went into the toilet and legislators had bigger things to worry about (hey, I search long and hard for silver linings!), the last decade-and-a-half has been a rough one, legally, for us. I remember when Columbine happened, and the media – baffled that two middle class WHITE KIDS would go on a murder spree (talking about the “soft” racism of the media is a topic for somewhere other than this blog) – cast about to try and find something to blame, and anchored onto the video game Doom as the “real” culprit behind the killings. For a while there, we expressed a gallows humor in my studio about how it would be safer to state in polite company that you were a drug dealer than a video game developer.

I remember the insanity surrounding the “Hot Coffee” scandal, where a lame sex-based mini-game had been disabled from a Grand Theft Auto game but not deleted entirely, and gamers found a way to manipulate the  program to re-activate the content.  Oh, the uproar! Oh the sudden surge in legislation by politicians looking to capitalize on the scandal to score “family values” points.

And oh, the chilling effect these bills and laws would have had on the industry! Especially on indies, had the laws gained traction.

Now, I’m personally a socially conservative person. I’m a religious guy. I have issues with some of the content in many games.  But I don’t consider my mindset to be a political viewpoint, because I feel most of the time it is none of the government’s business.  While there are certainly exceptions, in general I feel that this is the role of religion (and philosophy), not the state, brought about by persuasion rather than compulsion. And the ham-handed rules set forth by the attempts at videogame legislation by politicians who didn’t have a clue what they were attempting to regulate universally did for more “collateral damage” than any effect on the games they were specifically targeting.

So I am thrilled by this ruling. Does this mean video games are in the clear? The war is over? A lot of folks are skeptical, and I acknowledge that some people aren’t going to rest until they’ve castrated the medium. Defenders need to remain vigilant. But I think time is on our side.New media and styles inevitably come under attack, and the onslaught against video games is in direct proportion to its growth as a medium. But the longer they survive, the more the culture becomes acclimated to it. I think that most politicians will consider the cost of trying to fight or bypass the Supreme Court decision. As the Nintendo Generation becomes parents and politically active, video games become a harder and harder target. And more of our elected officials have been gamers themselves.

I hope that this decision will have a ripple effect in many other nations. But for here in the U.S., this feels like an incredibly substantial victory, and one less thing to worry about as a gamer or game developer.

Filed Under: Politics - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

My Kobayashi Maru Moment

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 27, 2011

“I need all the power you can give me to the engines.”

“What about shields?”

“Shields are dead. If we don’t get power to the engines, so will we.”

That’s how that dialog plays out in my mind. I don’t think I was quite that clever most of the time when I was the captain of the UGS Valiant, a Magellan class cruiser on a “diplomatic” mission to the tyrant-dominated planet of New Earth. But when you’ve got twenty-five seconds until an incoming torpedo hits your defenseless ship, pretty much all I had time for was ordering maximum available power to the engines, demanding full speed as soon as possible, and telling the weapons officer to try and target the torpedo with guns as a last resort (he couldn’t).

Pictured to the upper right is me doing my best constipated William Shatner pose. I think I nailed it…  But I almost never sat in that chair.

My wife won an experience at iWorlds, a sci-fi simulation experience that opened up a couple months ago. It’s based on some older simulations that were part of a school district that had proven popular not only for school field trips and summer camps, but also for companies doing leadership training exercises and whatnot.  So they’ve put together newer, somewhat more advanced (but still not quite state-of-the-art) systems together with a trained cast and a bunch of different scenarios. Our “crew” included sixteen of us – mainly our Saturday night gaming crew plus some of our kids. Geeks all. And boy, did we geek out.

Our particular mission involved an espionage mission under cover of a diplomatic mission. The planet of New Earth had been mostly neutral during a war between the terran Union and the warlike Protectorate, but when the Union had begun to show signs of being the victor they switched to the winning side – but were seized by the Protectorate before the end of the war. The protectorate installed a puppet government ruled by the minority faction.

Now the government of the planet was extremely corrupt and tyrannical, putting dissenters to death and generally making the planet hellish. The ruling party hadn’t worked out so well for the Protectorate, either, as our spies had uncovered evidence that they’d been double-dealing behind the Protectorate’s back as well. New Earth had demanded that the Union leave the planet, vacating our embassy, so our cover mission was to pick up the evacuating embassy staff. Our extra bonus missions involved us arriving two hours early to pick up spies and their evidence, to pick up a thousand dissidents who were hidden at the embassy, and to deliver the evidence to the Protectorate, who by prior arrangement with the Union would arrest the governing body, and pave the way for an actual democratic election to take place.

Naturally, the whole mission started going to crap from the get-go, as the New Earth government had already discovered our plot before we’d even arrived, and apprehended our spies and our critical documents before we could get into transporter range…

Everybody except the captain and first officer (my wife – who didn’t want to be captain) had a station on board the simulator. Each station included, from what I could tell, some kind of mini-game to make the role challenging – and give the person at that station something to do even when their roll wasn’t critical to the current phase of the adventure.  Pretty much everybody but the captain had some “busy work.” My daughters, who played the two security officers, told us they had some kind of mystery they were trying to solve involving a stolen wedding ring among the crew until their part of the mission became critical.

The captain and first officer were focused on the whole adventure pretty much the entire time. There were still times when I didn’t have much to do, like when we let our ambassador do the talking. But she was such an entertaining role-player that there was no chance of me getting bored.

As a game designer, I couldn’t help but try and understand what was going on “behind the curtain.” Based on my own guesstimates, the mission was only one part simulation to three or four parts Adventure Game.  They designers had set up the mission so that it demanded all of the sixteen crew members to have their chance to shine. Unfortunately, this meant that we had to figure out the “right” next move, rather than being able to pursue alternatives. This prevented us from being overly reliant upon one strategy or subset of the crew, and it also meant that the scenario would play out in a more-or-less planned fashion so the supporting cast could keep to the script. However, even within that script, there was a lot of room for improvisation on their side, which was occasionally hilarious.

But there were times where I was trying to formulate a “Plan B” – like shooting incoming torpedoes, or targeting the communication systems of the repair ship in case we were unable to transport the repairman before he got back to his ship to warn of our approach to the planet. His ship didn’t even exist on the weapons officer’s console, even though he had the option (normally) of targeting a ship’s communications systems.  Sometimes, however, we could do something interesting. Our transporter officer lost count of how many people she was supposed to beam aboard our ship when we were evacuating the embassy (with fighters approaching). She ended up accidentally beaming up an extra hundred people – government soldiers who had been attacking the embassy. They immediately began attacking inside of our ship, overwhelming our security teams — but then our transport officer redeemed herself by beaming them back off again – out into space.  Now if only she’d been able to beam them into the path of the oncoming torpedoes from the enemy fighters…

We even had “auto-save. There were some points in the mission where things would have terminated prematurely – which happened twice, when we failed to navigate through what was effectively a minefield of cloaked, heavily armed satellites. When things ended badly, the cast reset the game to right before we entered the satellite area and we got to do it over again. It took some coordination between the navigator, engines officer, and me. With everyone else in the crew leaning in their seats like the scene in “Galaxy Quest” when they are leaving the station and drift a little too close to the edge…

While I felt somewhat prompted, my big ideas that helped the day was getting the computer to speak Protectorate to give the passcode to a sentry ship, and reminding a Protectorate captain that New Earth’s attack on the Union embassy was considered an invasion of Union territory and an act of war… securing his temporary cooperation in lieu of providing him the needed documentation of New Earth’s crimes against both our nations.

Anyway, it sounds like the odds were slanted in our favor, making it kind of an anti-Kobayashi Maru. I guess if I want a more simulation-esque experience, there’s a better option available with the Artemis Bridge Simulator. But this experience offered real people to talk to, some fun improvisation, and a nicely decorated bridge and tunics to wear. It was a much more social / improvisational / adventure-gamey kind of experience. Grown-ups and kids all had an equally fun experience.  I definitely recommend it – it costs about twice as much as going to the movies (and takes about the same length of time – two hours), but is very, very worth it. We’re ready to do it again any time.

My wife has a write-up of our adventure on her blog as well, if you’d like to learn more details about our experience.

And just for an added bonus – the Kobayashi Maru – both versions…

 

 

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 14 Comments to Read

Ultima 9 – How It Might Have Been

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 26, 2011

Yet more historical Ultima development goodies are now avaialable at Ultima Aiera: The original documents for the “Bob White” plot for Ultima IX: Ascension.  This has been rumored and discussed for over a decade. Now you can find the … well, not the original plot for Ultima IX, but a plot that might have been.

You can grab the PDF – and get more background information – here.

This version still has the whole “Guardian is the dark half of the Avatar” thing going on. So that was a planned plot development for a while.  Le Sigh. I never did play Ultima IX – the series kinda lost me with Ultima 8: Pagan.  Maybe it will be forthcoming from GOG.COM and I’ll get the chance soon.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Jon Blow on Indie Game Programming

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 24, 2011

Apparently I’m appealing to programmers this week, talking about source control and rapid indie game programming. My apologies to the coders out there, but sometimes we code-monkeys  need to yap.

Today, Jonathan “Braid” Blow talks about how to program indie games. He’s talking to a bunch of computer science students, and what he says might amount to heresy in many areas of academia. It’s pretty much the opposite of what I was taught, yet it’s entirely inline with what I’ve learned “the hard way,” especially thanks to working in an Agile Development environment.

For a while, I found myself feeling guilty, especially when I was working alongside some young programmer fresh out of school who immediately wanted to talk about multi-threaded AI or elaborate data structures for handling level data. I was like that too. In fact, it took a long conversation one day at a (non-gaming) job and weeks of having it proven to me by experience that often writing nice, general-purpose, reusable code like I’d been taught at school (that was a big part of the reason for object-oriented programming, after all, which was the hot paradigm when I was a student) was often NOT the best answer.

Blow talks about optimizing for life – which I would also suggest means “optimizing for schedule.” Getting stuff done of reasonable quality and performance as quickly as possible. This really comes down to the KISS principle. Most of the time, it is still the best approach. So I guess I no longer have to feel embarrassed that 95% of my “data structures” are simply arrays of structures / objects. Or that most of the remaining 5% are likewise very basic things like linked lists.

To beginner programmers: This is a good news / bad news situation. The bad news is that a lot of this efficiency and understanding of the “right thing” as he is talking about only comes from experience. There are no shortcuts there, but doing a lot of programming will get you there faster. But the good news is that a lot of the fancy-schmancy advanced techniques that you might hear about but not understand are probably not essential, or even all that useful. They are good to know, eventually, because of their rare practical usage or (more likely) because being familiar with them will help suggest approaches to solving problems even if you don’t implement that particular concept or pattern. But what you really need to know is pretty basic.

I didn’t listen to the entire Q&A session. But his main talk is worthwhile listening if you are a programmer.

How to Program Independent Games

Filed Under: General - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Rolling Your Own

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 23, 2011

Making your own character(s): For some, this is essential to the RPG experience. For others – like me – it’s no big deal. For some, it’s daunting and a reason to avoid playing RPGs altogether.

I remember tournaments back in the glory days of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons where players were assigned pre-generated characters.  Or other times when a pre-gen might be in order. Then, as now in CRPGs, there was something more satisfying about making your own character from scratch, giving him or her a unique name, and calling them your own. Back then, I had binders full of characters for various RPG systems – some only played once or twice, some deceased, and even a few that were created for one reason or another but never played.

One character that I’d created but never played ended up getting “loaned” to another player. She hadn’t had time to create a character of the appropriate level for a game, so I handed the sheet to her. She became a regular in the campaign, and the character became her own – and one of her favorites. I didn’t miss the character too much. I ended up marrying that player, so I kept the character in the family or something. 🙂

I’ve played and enjoyed a lot of CRPGs where I little or no say in what character I played, and often little control over their progression as they increased in levels. I’ve played CRPGs where I had full control over their stats (even to the point of being able to enter any values I wanted to “import” my D&D character into the game) from the get-go, and even “had” to create an entire party of characters from scratch. Let me tell you, I almost didn’t get started playing Icewind Dale 2 because I was having so much fun making characters!

I don’t really consider one style superior to the other, or gauge the “RPG-ness” of a game based upon whether it gives me a pre-generated character and background or not.  With a pregen, the game can do some nifty things with story that are much harder to do when the player’s character is a blank slate.  There are some tricks to give you a little benefit of both worlds, like how Knights of the Old Republic gave you a back-story you didn’t know about, or how Dragon Age: Origins gave you a selection of possible backgrounds. Or – well, Planescape: Torment. Almost any RPG at least hints at some background you are expected to drop your character concept into.   For some reason, you’ve answered the kings’ summons or something. You figure out why.

And, like my wife’s pregen, there’s no reason you can’t take the character concept and make it your own. Okay, yeah, maybe in some jRPGs it gets a little heavy handed, with your character only given the choice between saying something acerbic or nothing at all, and so forth. But while somewhat constrained, my version of Geralt in The Witcher games is different – and may have different adventures – than yours (or the one in the books, which I have never read). I’m still playing a role.

None of this means that CRPGs with player-generated characters must be weak on storyline, or that players can’t be just as enthralled with a game where they are playing the same character as everybody else.  Both scratch the RPG itch for me just fine.

Though if I can get a request through, game dev dudes (indie and mainstream) – I’d like more party-based RPGs. Especially the kind where you roll your own characters, though I’m cool either way. Those kinds of RPGs seem to be in shortest supply in these days of action-RPGs where you play a solo character plus NPC henchmen. Or pets. Playing Knights of the Chalice, or going back to play some older party-based games like the Might & Magic series (not to mention all the Frayed Knights testing) has really reminded me how fun that is. It’s more of a party with a party, right?

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 21 Comments to Read

Troll Doll Source Control

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 22, 2011

For those unfamiliar with it, source control is – at its most basic level – a system for archiving and managing updates to the source code for software. It’s particularly useful when you have multiple people working on the software, and you’d like to make sure that they don’t accidentally and irrevocably step on each other’s changes and wipe out each other’s hard work. It’s handy for keeping backups of your own work even if you are working alone, but it’s really critical for projects involving multiple developers.

For my first few months at SingleTrac, working on the games Twisted Metal and Warhawk, we didn’t have source control. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not true – we had a source control system in place, but it was a manual system. We called it “Troll Doll Source Control.” It consisted of one of those troll dolls – the cute, chubby kind with the wild blue or pink hair. Whomever ho had the troll doll was in charge of the master repository and merging in their code changes – very carefully – with the master.

We’d regularly merge the updated code repository into our own code – you could always grab changes from the master, you just couldn’t make changes to the master repository unless you were the keeper of the troll doll. We did this frequently was to make sure we stayed relatively up-to-date so there wouldn’t be too many surprises when it was our turn to have the troll doll. The goal was not to hold onto the troll doll too long. Inevitably there was at least one other person waiting for the troll doll after you, and anybody who had the troll doll sitting on their desk too long would start getting dirty looks.

Sony, when they asked about our source control system, was not too pleased. It wasn’t exactly a robust source control system.

Then again, neither was Microsoft Visual Source Safe, which we eventually replaced the troll doll system with.

There was one time the system failed – spectacularly – for me. I don’t know if this was a factor motivating  our change to use Source Safe, though I imagine Sony’s disapproval accounted for more. But I stupidly did a merge where I ignored changes to files that I wasn’t actively modifying… and then discovered some recently checked-in features and bug fixes were no longer there! Someone who had possessed the troll doll after me had done a poor job of merging code and had wiped out three days of work!

I went around the office trying to see if anybody had a copy of the source code from in-between the time I’d checked in my changes, and when they’d been wiped out. I don’t remember that being successful. I re-did the changes, and gave up my witch hunt to figure out who had destroyed my work.

As I said before, the troll doll was eventually retired, replaced by Visual Source Safe. That was a small improvement. But a couple of years later, working on another game, Visual Source Safe decided to do one better and completely corrupted the archive. After many efforts to recover the files, I think we eventually just had to replace that archive with the most recent one we could fine from one of our machines. It was still an improvement, but not much of one.

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

Indie RPG News Round-Up, June 2011

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 21, 2011

A little grab-bag of news of indie RPGs from all over. Due to time and exhaustion constraints, I’m keeping this quick… But hey! Videos!

Magical Diary

Hanako’s long-awaited game that sounds like it combines Cute Knight with a story-based high school / dating sim with a heavy dose of interesting magic (it’s a school for sorcerers) has finally been released. You can check it out here. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but considering how much I enjoyed Cute Knight, I suspect I’ll really enjoy this one.

Alternate Reality – The Remake Project

This is a planned full port of the classic RPGs Alternate Reality: The Dungeon and Alternate Reality: The City to modern systems. I never played ’em, though I have a friend who speaks very highly of them. You can find more information here.

Sylia

This is the newest jRPG-style game from Aldorlea Games, partnered with developer Ensorcelled Games. I have just started playing this one, and hope to have a “quick take” for you in a few days. The party banter at the beginning of the game All I can say is that it has a very cute, amusing twist right from the get-go, but I’m afraid anything I say about it will be a spoiler. You can try this one out for yourself here.

Driftmoon

Driftmoon is now entering alpha 5.  It’s now available for pre-order. This update includes some really, really slick support for creating and distributing user mods, which you can see in this video:

 

Dead State

Death scenes are the topic of the latest discussion of the upcoming zombie RPG Dead State.

Vagrant Hearts

The latest jRPG-style game from Warfare Studios has been out for a few weeks. Entitled Vagrant Hearts, it follows the story of two sisters – one with the power to heal with a mere touch – in a fantasy world. You can check out the free demo here.

Avadon

Avadon has now been released for iPad.  It is somewhat scaled down from the Windows / Mac release, but also comes at a significantly reduced price, which Spiderweb Software boss Jeff Vogel addresses here. There’s also an interview with Vogel to be found at IndieRPGs.com.

Frayed Knights

As mentioned last week, Frayed Knights is now beta. Woot.  Testers have been unleashed upon it, and are now filling my inbox with reasons the game is still not quite ready for release.  As if my horrid efforts to replace some stand-in monster art wasn’t reason enough.

Eschalon

Since I haven’t mentioned this yet, Thomas Reigsecker was interviewed by Gaming Irresponsibly last month. A few hints about the upcoming Eschalon: Book III are noted, in particular his plans to release his tools to the community to create mods and new adventures for the game.

Age of Decadence

The monthly update for Age of Decadence is up, showing the “Civil AI and animations,” and discussing the quest status and displaying the mocked-up revamped gui. I guess it’s time for another video, huh? Here it is:

Okay, yeah, they do look better than my dead-bird animation. But I like my dead-bird animation.

Dungeons of Dredmor

There’s an interview about this upcoming humorous graphical roguelike RPG from Gaslamp Games over at RPGWatch.  You can read it here.

Soldak’s Untitled Space-RPG

I am a fan of Soldak’s previous RPGs, and so I have a lot of faith in their upcoming space-adventure RPG. The latest blog updates are on components and crew for your roving spaceship.

ArcMagi

ArcMagi is sort of a strategy-RPG mix with some of the sensibilities of a fighting game by MoaCube. It’s a sequel – or more of a complete re-imagining – of a smaller game called Magi that they did some time ago (and is currently on sale).  The video looks pretty dang cool.

 

Well, that’s about all I have time for right now. Please post about all the games I missed in the comments! I’m sure I’ll smack myself in the forehead for having missed ’em, too…

Filed Under: News - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

That Old-School Feelin’: Contest Winners

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 20, 2011

Last week’s contest concluded at midnight Saturday on the forums. The three winners were determined by random dice roll:

DGM, Maklak, and McTeddy!

All three get a copy of Viridian Games’ Inaria. PM me with your name / email you want the game sent to. If you already have it and want to gift it to someone else, let me know.

Inaria is a short but fun little indie RPG that hearkens back to the old-school RPGs of the early-to-mid 80’s. An evil overlord is taking over the world, and only one kingdom has managed to push back his attacks – but only barely. But you, a lowly but heroic adventurer, may be able to do what the armies cannot – defeat the evil overlord and by doing so put an end to his plans for world domination. Inaria has that low-tech look and feel, but with more complex mechanics and some modern essentials like mouse support.

So how about those old-school game moments? The titles (and the ages of the games) were all across the board, going from playing Zork on a mainframe to…  well, we had a mention of a particular game with some old-school flavor that hasn’t even been released yet. And one that the author couldn’t even remember the name of!

Some moments, described in much greater detail by their authors:

* Getting attacked by the floor and grass in Ultima III.

* Discovering that it’s possible to both defeat the four groups of 99 berserkers or avoid them entirely in The Bard’s Tale.

* Learning the Lizardman language in Ultima Underworld (I totally forgot about that!)

* Skillfully working around a scripted event in Final Fantasy V. Too bad the story still demanded the script be followed.

* Moments from Pool of Radiance, Gothic, Morrowind, and more.

Enjoy! And though the contest is over, feel free to contribute your own memories!

Filed Under: General - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Why Dungeons?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 17, 2011

“Dungeons” – underground or otherwise deeply confined environments – are a staple of fantasy CRPGs. Of course, the dungeons we explore in fantasy RPGs bear little resemblance to real-world dungeons, but we’ve managed to broaden the term quite a bit.

But why do we keep going back? We’ve been exploring dungeons for something like forty years, now. Besides the fact that the first role-playing game had “Dungeons” as half the title, are there any other reasons why we seem to endlessly delve into underground tunnels with swords and sorcery?

Maybe. Here are some suggestions:

A) They make structuring adventures easy
As a designer (pen-and-paper or computer/console game designer), the confining nature of a dungeon makes things a bit easier to structure. Dungeons are not open-ended environments, and form natural barriers requiring predictable navigation. This means designers don’t have to jump through all kinds of contortions to structure an interesting adventure without imposing arbitrary limits on players. Dungeons form natural tree structures (at least well-designed ones do), albeit with loops, which lends itself easily to creating ordered events, choke points, and so forth.

Of course, in many games the players can take some extraordinary measures to bypass them, like spells to pass through walls or teleport. This is very cool if the adventure is structured flexibly enough to tolerate this  -it rewards the player for taking initiative. But it’s still an extraordinary event, not the preferred means of navigation. Whereas in an outdoor environment, it’s harder to justify why the player can’t just take a shortcut through the woods to go straight to the next castle.

B) They make player exploration easy
While limiting player options sounds bad, the simplified structure is usually of benefit to the players, so long as it’s not an incredibly boring linear dungeon. Players don’t get quite so lost in a sea of possibilities. As a player, you can look at a map and say, “Oh, I haven’t been THERE yet. Let’s try that,” instead of saying, “Uh, what do I do now?” The choices may be limited, but they are also relatively clear. That’s a good thing.

C) “Dungeons” are inherently oppressive and hostile
Human beings aren’t well adapted to living underground. We are built for being active during the day, in the sunlight. Yes, even we gaming geeks. In our deep subconsciousness that hasn’t quite evolved out of our species from more primitive eras, we recognize that in the darkness, we are prey. This is why it can be a thrill to go to these places of eternal darkness that we instinctively fear, and bring light with us. I think that’s one key that made Minecraft so successful, actually – as that’s what half the game is about. But this is also what makes dungeons so fun.

I’ve been dungeon-delving in one form or another for more years than I care to admit nowadays. I’m not bored of it yet. Sure, some particular dungeons (or game systems) are boring, but a well-designed underground complex still thrills me as much today as the first day I grabbed a handful of dice armed with a character sheet and imagination.  And in the world of computer RPGs (and console RPGs as well, to be fair), as a whole they’ve gotten better and better.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

Shocker! Retail Game Sales Decrease, Digital Game Sales Increase!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 16, 2011

Who woulda thunk, huh?

So almost a quarter of game sales are now through digital distribution. When that number exceeds 50%… well, you are already seeing interesting things happen, you will just see more of it.

I suspect that for PC games, that number is even higher. Rock Paper Shotgun opines, “You might still be able to get a cheap boxed copy from a mail-order outlet, but the chances are you won’t find PC games at all in the shops at all. And as far as PC developers are concerned, digital is all. Retail is over. Which reminds me, I really must write that thing about Steam’s hegemony…”

It’s been both a blessing and a curse. Yes, digital distribution has also been the bane of PC gaming, making piracy ridiculously easy compared to the bad ol’ days I remember when it was done through cracked copies burned on CD-ROMs, and before that copied onto floppy disks. As a side note, I remember talking to someone at Origin circa 1991 about getting a job with them, and being told that they were considering CD-ROM to be the future of the industry, because they were impractical to pirate. Hah! That lasted maybe a year after CD-ROMs became a dominant distribution medium.

But now games are freed of physical constraints all but entirely. Yes, it means pirates have a field day, and its overwhelming presence makes it much harder to profit – or even break even – on a game. But it also means that the stranglehold of the gatekeepers is – well, not destroyed (see the above comment about Steam’s hegemony), but definitely weakened. It means the barriers to entry imposed by distribution have been practically eliminated. It has effectively made each sale more profitable, and as a counterpoint has probably done a bit to keep game prices down.

And it means indies can exist in a significant form.  And you’d have to be living in a cave to not recognize that indies have become a major influence on gaming today.

Another concern of mine is that the boundless new medium dictates or restrict the kinds of games being made. I love how it’s made things like social gaming and mobile gaming possible. But as a player, I don’t want to be marooned by developers (as I already have been in many game genres I have loved…) as they race off on the latest gold rush. Solo games, according to folks like Richard Garriott, are obsolete relics of a previous era.

But I’m not overly worried. The more open medium has provided a solution to it’s own problem: Indies will come to fill the void. They’ll find ways to make it work. The old brick-and-mortar model is dead, but the old style of games that thrived during that era doesn’t have to be.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

Contest Time – Swappin’ Stories About Old-School CRPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 15, 2011

To celebrate the whole going-beta thing, and the fact that the Rampant Games forums are back in business, I figured I’d run a little contest or three with indie games as the prize.

It’s a simple one, though it does require forum membership. Yes, this is my devlish plan to get people talking on the forums. Muhahahah! The prizes are copies of Viridian Games’ Inaria. It’s a short but fun old-school game I’ve talked about here on the blog, which deliberately invokes some of the look of 80s era CRPGs (especially with the Ultima-style hidden area shadowing).

The contest is on this thread.

The contest is to respond to the thread with your short tale of a memory or moment you really enjoyed playing an old-school CRPG. I’m leaving the definition of “old school” deliberately vague – if the most retro CRPG you’ve played was Fallout 3, so be it. And it doesn’t matter if you played it when the game was new or last week. Just share an anecdote or two. I may borrow your quotes for a future blog post.

The contest will last until midnight Mountain Time on Saturday, June 18th. Then I’ll pick the winners by random drawing among all those who responded with anything close to being on topic.  And yes, it’s “winners” – I’m giving away three copies of the game.

Share your stories!

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



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