Guest Post: In Search of Sub-Creation
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 9, 2011
And now time for a guest post – this time from Anthony Salter, AKA GameDevDad, of Viridian Games. He’s currently finishing up work on the upcoming indie RPG Inaria, which will hopefully see release very soon now. I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did. It speaks to the kind of detail – or at least implied detail – that has always been an inspiration to me when playing CRPGs. Enjoy:
“The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers
of Middle-Earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot.”
– Peter S. Beagle
While writing his various books, J. R. R. Tolkien became acutely aware of the fact that he wasn’t just writing books – he was chronicling the history of a world. A world that never existed, and yet he seemed compelled to describe it in every detail. Languages, history, races, creatures, artifacts and how they all interacted became a near-obsession with him…perhaps because so few had done it before.
After much work, Tolkien coined the term sub-creation to describe the construction of an imaginary world. A devout man, he considered it a near-religious act – the member of a created world creating a world in turn.
And let’s be honest – what he did has resonated deeply with us. Even if you can’t stand Lord of the Rings, if you’re reading this blog the odds are very good that you’re a fan of the impact it had on
our society.
But I didn’t really come here to talk about Tolkien himself…just the trend he started.
“Unique among Science Fiction novels.. I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.”
– Arthur C. Clarke, about Dune
First off, a change in terminology. Rather than the term sub-creation, I’ve taken to using the word “verisimilitude” to describe this phenomenon in polite conversation. First, because it’s a fun word to say, and second, because it can actually be looked up in the dictionary.
Games have the ability to provide verisimilitude like almost nothing else…and yet all too often I feel that developers take the cheap and easy way out – f’rinstance, this trailer:
If you initially thought “Oh, wow, I’m going to get to explore a futuristic version of Kowloon!” and then got to :50 and was disappointed when the game became a fairly average first-person shooter then you know what I’m talking about.
If you arrived at the Citadel in Mass Effect 1 and was disappointed by how little of it you could visit, you know what I’m talking about.
If you’ve ever stared out the window at the high-tech city below you as everyone else deathmatched in Unreal Tournament 3 and wondered what the people down there were having for dinner, then you know what I’m talking about.
In the end, I think there are three questions that, if your game answers, means you have created a world, no matter how small.
What do the people there eat?
Where do the people there sleep?
What do the people there do all day?
Of course, there are games that provide wonderful verisimilitude – and they aren’t even all RPGs! Shenmue‘s sense of place was sublime. System Shock 2 did a great job of answering all three questions despite the fact that everyone is, well, dead.
And Japanese RPGs usually don’t even bother with verisimilitude; I recall playing Final Fantasy VII and being attacked by a house while walking Aeris home. A house. It stood up and attacked me.
A house.
That was the point at which I realized that while I was probably going to enjoy Final Fantasy VII, it wasn’t going to scratch my verisimilitude itch.
But RPGs do have the best shot at creating coherent worlds and YES WE ARE GOING TO TALK ABOUT ULTIMA VII AGAIN.
Ultima VII answered all three questions better than practically any other game I’ve ever played.
What do they eat? Grain grows in the fields, cows graze in their pens. Foodstuffs are plentiful and varied. You can even mill your own wheat and bake it into bread!
Where do they sleep? Every single NPC has a bed. They kind of have to, because of the answer to the next question…
What do they do all day? Every single NPC has a daily schedule, so just follow them around and find out! Following NPCs on their daily rounds can be quite fun, especially when you discover things like the fact that the mayor of Britain is getting a little somethin’-somethin’ on the side.
With just a bit more thought, a bit more detail, games could move to being worlds rather than just “arenas”. A lot of developers will say that it’s too much work, or overkill for the kind of game they are making.
But the truth is, most every fan of the Ultima series would like to visit Britannia. Most every fan of Morrowind would like to visit Vvardenfell, and most every fan of Oblivion would like to visit Cyrodiil.
I would myself, like a shot.
Wouldn’t you like your players to want to live in the worlds you create?
Filed Under: Design, Guest Posts - Comments: 18 Comments to Read
Roll a D6!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 6, 2011
This is pretty much the video of the week.
Yeah, we could nitpick the details (like why is the DM fighting alongside the players?!?!?), and I might ding them a point for playing 4th edition because I’m opinionated and petty. But really, it’s just a good, fun geek parody music video.
And no, I’d never heard the original song (“Like a G6”) before, either.
Filed Under: Dice & Paper, Geek Life - Comments: 22 Comments to Read
Design: Game Balance is Overrated
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 5, 2011
I swear I’m not writing this article to justify any laziness on my part in balancing Frayed Knights. Honest! But I sometimes think that of the failings of modern RPGs to capture some of the magic of older games (and face it: as a jaded gamer who’s been playing CRPGs for decades now, it’s always going to be hard to capture that magic) has been that they are simply too streamlined and balanced.
Now, balance is a good thing in general. It’s important to make sure a games’ challenge doesn’t become so easy it becomes boring, or so difficult it becomes frustrating. It comes in many forms.You’ve got level-scaling, made notorious by The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. You have item restrictions that prevent you from obtaining too-powerful items early in the game which would make combat boringly unchallenging for your current level. You’ve got class balancing to make sure the game isn’t too easy or difficult for a particular class (in single player) and that all classes can compete on reasonably equal footing for slots in groups and raids in multiplayer games. And then there’s the effort that gets put into making sure that the various abilities and powers don’t interact in such a way that they create a serious loophole or exploit that nullifies the game’s challenge.
But taken too far, it makes the game too even, too balanced, and boring. I want a game to have spiky, imbalanced edges. Not something that wrecks the game, obviously, but I’m a believer that not every power should scale equally, and not every encounter should be defeatable at your current level. And finding magic items should be – well, magical. Nothing helps that sense of discovery and anticipation more than knowing that maybe – just maybe – you will find an item that’s truly a game-changer – at least for a while.
A couple of years ago, I spent a couple of weeks tinkering with a remake of Telengard, one of the first CRPGs I ever played. It’s an ancient game, and it shows. It’s pretty generic and random game – so much so that it makes “exploration” of the dungeon pretty useless (as there’s little advantage to doing anything beyond finding the next stairway down, as waiting in place will cause encounters to come to you). A misstep took me to a teleportation trap that dropped me many levels below. I had a scroll of recall to return to the surface, but rather than using it I figured I’d see what happened. After all, unlike the original, I could restore a saved game if I died, right? (And using the scroll of recall would make me lose all my gold). I had to flee from a couple of encounters, but in my hanging-out I found a really over-powered suit of armor in a pile on the floor, and a high-level elf decided he liked my body and gave me an extremely powerful ring of regeneration. Upon my eventual return to the surface, I was hell on wheels. The two items gave me a huge advantage, but it didn’t take long before I had partly ‘caught up’ to my equipment and their advantage was reduced to merely exceptional. You know what? It was a lot of fun. It felt like an adventure.
Many years ago, when I was first starting to play Dungeons & Dragons, a friend of mine in another group had come across what he called a “freeze wand.” He was only third or fourth level, and the magical wand he’d discovered was really overpowered for his magic user. But for two weeks, if you brought up the topic of D&D, he’d want to tell you about his freeze wand. Until it ran out of (very limited) charges, he got to be a superhero. Yeah, you can complain about Monty Haul Dungeon Masters all you want. But it was fun. It made the game for him. And while it would be arguably “inappropriate” for game balance at his level, it didn’t really wreck the game after all.
A feature of many older CRPGs that is too often missing today is a “soft boundary” of an improbably difficult gatekeeper preventing your progress to another part of the world. Now, it is possible for a good player to defeat the gatekeeper and progress deeper into the game before the game designer thinks they are ready or have hit all their marks. HORROR! Or, not. Unfortunately, players these days have become trained to expect that any monster they encounter in a game is there because it is supposed to be fought and defeated, now. And they will get extremely frustrated if it is somehow unbeatable at their current level.
The late Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, wrote about an experience he had running his “killer” module Tomb of Horrors at a convention many years after its initial release. It has a reputation for being unfair and deadly, but many of the players were not only long-term veterans, but had actually played the module before. Much to everyone’s surprise, they fared very poorly. Much, much worse than players (sometimes the same ones) almost two decades earlier. Why? The players had gotten used to a much more even, fair, “balanced” approach to the game which assumed players would run through room-by-room, trying everything out, defeating every monster, and overcoming each obstacle as it was encountered. They’d gotten used to a gaming style that didn’t reward a cautious, thoughtful approach. They’d gotten used to a game that was, effectively, too carefully balanced and even-handed. They were no longer used to running away from danger that was beyond their character’s abilities to resist. They had forgotten how death could come instantly and without a saving throw. In my experience, they’d forgotten how those divination spells could be far more powerful than the fireball spells in figuring out how to approach otherwise unfair, nasty surprises.
“Iggy Chaos” recently wrote about this as well, in his blog post “Here. Have a Sword Sandwich.” In his major example, the game was broken by a bug, which eventually led to his losing interest in it. But it sounds like it compares favorably in his eyes to the ho-hum progression of Borderlands (which I’ve not personally played). But even up until the bug made his character uber-powerful (programmers will get a kick out of this one – I wish I knew which game he was talking about), this kind of exploration and chance of getting in over your head (and stumbling into power Beyond Your Station) in an RPG is the sort of experience I crave.
Balance is important. But too much balance makes things feel static, and — well, boring. Designers need to loosen up – balance is overrated. Let players run off the rails a little more. So what if they get the Sword of Disaster a few levels early, or manage to nuke the Vampire Lord in two rounds due to a clever combination of spells and a good chunk of luck? Those are the kinds of things stories are made of, not that carefully measured incremental advancement you’ve so painstakingly worked out on spreadsheets and flow charts.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 21 Comments to Read
Guest Post: The Roguelikes, Part 2
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 4, 2011
Brian “Skavenhorde” Critser continues his investigation into popular or influential roguelikes here, in part 2. The dude has done some serious dungeon-delving for this report, and it shows. He’s been privately sending me links to some more interesting roguelikes he’s found over the last few months, some of which have been included in my indie game news round-up articles if there’s anything new happening with them. But I’m really happy to let him share his discoveries with everybody else.
You can read Part 1 here.
I’ll be continuing my list of Angband variants (which there seem to be an endless amount) and NetHack variants.
Before I begin there is a newbie guide for Angband that I didn’t mention in the previous article. I found out about it while researching the many variants to Angband. You can find it here.
ANGBAND VARIANTS
XAngband: XAngband is a ZAngband variant from Japan. It’s author says it’s easier than the other variants with main features such as ego stores that sells excellent arms, increased ego item powers, new classes, new items, rearranged 2 magic realms and added 1 new one which assists in melee attacks and lastly races.
There are 15 races most of which you would find in Angband with the addition of a few others like the mindflayer and nibelung. There is now an added class called sniper. As you may have guessed this class specializes in shooting like the archer. Unlike the archer class they do not fire as quickly, but can deal more damage.
The schools of magic are Life, Sorcery and Combat Realm. Under Life you have Book of Common Prayer, High Mass and Godly Insight. Under Sorcery there is Beginner’s Handbook, Master of Sorcerer’s Handbook and Tome of Destruction. Unfortunately I can’t tell you what’s in the Combat Realm because the link to it is gone.
TinyAngband: From the same author as XAngband. It’s just a shortened Angband. You only need to go down to level 27 and kill the big bad foozle. (Editor’s note: Only 27 now, is it? Piece of cake! Yeesh…)
MAngband: We have for your playing pleasure a multiplayer Angband. I mentioned in the beginning of these articles that I was somewhat new to the joy that are roguelikes, well what I never expected to find was that someone took one of these complex games online.
It’s real-time instead of turnbased and while on your adventure you can meet up with other players. Diablo 2 eat your heart out.
MAngband’s Newbie Guide – A MAngband guide similar to Chris Weisiger’s Newbie Guide, but in the words of it’s author, “It has simply been “MAngbandised“.
Sangband: Skills Angband is one of the few variants that didn’t get abandoned during development and seems to be finished with the 1.0.0 Final release or well it was until October of 2010. Sangband is now up to 1.01 build 129.
The homepage doesn’t really tell you much, but from what I can gather from searching around the forums and other sites, Sangband offers new spells, monsters, items, outside combat experience awards such as drinking an unknown potion, monster AI and interface changes on top of a ton of other changes.
Final 1.0.0 game or the latest game
Oangband: Opinion Angband offers rules changes, more classes, better monster AI and items. The emphasis seems to be on deadlier and smarter monsters. There is no homepage, but you can get it here.
NPPangband: What little information there is on this one says that it takes ideas from other Angbands and tries to incorporate them into this one while rebalancing it to take into account these new changes. The only reason I mention this one here is that the next variant is based off of this one. The current version is Beta 0.5.0
Ironband: An ironman game from the variant NPPangband. You can never go up stairs, only down. You start in the dungeon and can never go to town. There are no classes. You create the character you want by increasing logical stats, like in Dungeon Siege. There are fewer SP, cheaper spells and no spell regen. Definitely not a game for newbies like myself. I’d give this one a try only if I was bored out of my mind with the other roguelikes out there. That may happen in about 50 years or so.
Entroband: A variant of Hengband that attempts to improve it. No homepage or much information on this one, but you can get it here.
DaJAngband: Monster list are redone, new magic effects, dungeon features and a lot of new character classes and races. When I say ‘a lot’ I mean it. With 18 races and 20 character classes to choose from the replayability of this variant seems endless. Plus as a nice bonus you can change the display to a tileset in the game. It’s as easy as a click of the mouse to go from ASCII to a choice of three different tilesets. However, I could only get one of them to work.
There is supposedly an online help file, but my Windows 7 operating system might be playing havoc with its ability to read it. I couldn’t get that working either.
Overall it seems like a nice variant to vanilla Angband and it’s one of the few that are still being updated.
CatHangband: Cat-and-the-Hack Angband. This one change the rules, new items, new races and interface changes. An almost complete list of all the new features can be found here.
Hellband: Based off of CthAngband. The setting for this Angband is that of Dante’s Inferno. You travel down into hell and need to cross the Infernal City ‘Dis’ to slay Lillith and Lucifer. Appropriate monsters and items are added to this Angband.
That’s the last of the variants I’ll be listing. I hope I got most of the more popular and interesting ones, but there are just too many to list for the purposes of this article.
NETHACK VARIANTS
Slash’ Em: Slash’ Em stands for “Super Lots of Added Stuff Hack with Extended Magic.” Now how could you not love a title like that? It adds new characters, graphics, monsters, items, spells. Basically you think of something and they’ve added it to the game.
UnNetHack: It features more randomness, levels, UI improvements and game play related changes. The homepage has a list of all of the many changes.
Falcon’s Eye: Falcon’s Eye is a Nethack variant that gave the game something unique. It gave it some nicely done isometric graphics with real-time lighting. It makes a huge difference when going from ASCII to actually seeing your character and pet in all their isometric glory.
In addition to the graphics the game offers a mouse-driven interface, sound effects and a MIDI soundtrack. It does all this while keeping all of NetHack’s features.
The developer of Falcon’s Eye, Jaakko Peltonen, hasn’t worked on it in some time. However, you can still read about it and download the game over at the Falcon’s Eye website.
Sporkhack: A Nethack variant that you play through a server. Some of the major changes include a new dungeon leves generate rooms, knights can be chaotic, new items and changes to some of the old ones, new spells, monster and a lot of little tweaks here and there.
Vulture: Vulture is an isometric graphical interface for NetHack, Slash’Em and UnNetHack that is still being worked on. Like Falcon’s Eye it isn’t so much a variant as it is a nice facelift.
That’ll do it for this time around. In the next article I’ll be covering something I know more about like Crawl, Crawl Stone Soup, Ledgermain, UnReal World, Rogue Survivor and a few others.
Filed Under: Free Games, Guest Posts, Roguelikes - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Guest Post: Hardcore Versus Casual (Versus Fun)
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 3, 2011
I may be back from vacation, but I’m not back from being lazy. I’ve still got some great guest posts to share over the next several days. Today’s guest post is by Chance Gibbs, who’s bio line reads, “Chance Gibbs once played Gameboy during a college English class, and that makes him more than qualified to write about stuff on the internet.” Works for me! Today, he’s putting the “hardcore” and “casual” gamer descriptors under the crosshairs and opens fire.
Everyone has that friend. The one guy (or girl, in theory) that plays one game WAY too much. To be fair, everyone has one genre where they really shine, and in that genre, they have their favorite game. But this person picked up a game (let’s use Super Smash Bros as an example), and their world changed. If ever a person could be born for a purpose, this is the who and the why. They’ve been playing Smash Bros since they were six months old, and God forbid you want to just have fun; maybe you want to play as Jigglypuff and float around. At some point, you will be called out as a scrub, or a noob, or a casual. He leaps from the couch, fists in the air, reveling in victory. “I’m just too hardcore,” he says, as you leave him to his victory. EVERYONE has that friend.
Games (and gamers) are often categorized into two groups: Casual and Hardcore. The boundaries between the two groups are tenuous at best, and based heavily on opinion. Any gamer can be hardcore about any game. I know a guy who swears Carmageddon is the pinnacle of hardcore gaming. The chaos, the struggle for first place, the pedestrians on your hood… All of these add up to the ultimate “hardcore” experience. However, I know another guy that scoffs at racing games like Carmageddon and Burnout. “You can’t even change your engine!” He scoffs over his shoulder as he tunes his Formula Car for optimal performance in Gran Turismo. “How can you call THAT hardcore?” These two guys argue frequently, and I’ve never seen an argument end without the inevitable label: “fucking casual”.
The hardcore (in relation to the second case) market is narrow, but gamers flock to games like Gran Turismo, Dwarf Fortress, and several others. Why? For the challenge, the glory, and the label. Being “hardcore” now means being in-depth. It now means full control over every possible feature and variable. And oftentimes, it means the fun knob gets cranked down, then torn off and thrown away.
I play Dwarf Fortress, so I’ll be using it as an example. If you don’t know, it’s sort of a hybrid between Nethack/Rogue and Sim City (that’s a very ham-handed description, but bear with me). You get a number of dwarves in the beginning, and you’re tasked with their survival. This is an in-depth game. This is the MOST in-depth game I’ve ever played, and if you try it, you’ll agree. Dwarf Fortress crams incredible detail into a small game. By selecting a dwarf for closer examination, you can see every scrap of clothing worn (and everything has a specific material, i.e. leather vest, silk socks, steel boots), a brief background on the dwarf, how the dwarf is feeling (Urist McFisher has been elated lately! He saw a nice statue inside! Etc, etc.), and every other facet of this tiny person’s life. Your whole purpose in the game is to craft an elaborate fortress underground, and keep all of your precious dwarves safe from the evil outside. And underground. And in the air. And in the fortress. Like The Sims, dwarves are incredibly stupid. But rather than piss themselves, or forget to eat, dwarves tend to do more dangerous things, like petting giant spiders, or swimming in lava. It is up to you as their caretaker to keep them from hurting themselves, and it is FUCKING. HARD. I’ve seen dwarves fall into wells and drown; I’ve seen dwarves build a wall, only to realize they’re on the other side, isolated from food, shelter, and safety. Dwarf Fortress’s motto is “Losing is Fun!”, and it’s true. However, it’s also the ONLY thing you’ll be doing.
In contrast, let’s look at Animal Crossing. Some of you have never played it, and that’s okay. It is, for lack of a better term, casual. There is no way to lose. There’s only one real, concrete goal (to pay off a debt), and no real challenge. The game can be completed at any pace. I’m certain that if you could convince your granny to play this game, someday she would raise a wrinkled fist in triumph. Don’t get me wrong, Animal Crossing is fun, and the gameplay is more or less structured, but it can’t even be called easy, as that would imply that there would be something even close to challenge involved. However, it’s incredibly fun, and has been compared to a drug, because once it gets its hooks into you, you’ll play for a ridiculous amount of time.
I promise there’s a point to this.
The problem with Dwarf Fortress is something you may have already figured out: it can quickly get mind-numbing. Games with too much linearity can feel cramped, and may leave you feeling led by the nose; but too much freedom is overwhelming. In Dwarf Fortress, I rarely make it past the third in-game year. The game bogs itself down with choices, and options, and necessary details that I just don’t have the time or patience for. The game is too hardcore for me. Does that make ME less hardcore? Of course not. If you think I’m not hardcore, we’ll play some Smash Bros Melee (oh yeah, that gamer in the first paragraph you hate? I’m the example.). The point I’m dancing around is that separating games and gamers into hardcore and casual is an unfair categorization of a medium already overloaded with niches and subdivisions. It also brings discrimination and disrespect, which the gaming community is already filled with. We don’t need to hate each other because of gaming differences, especially if the difference is how “hardcore” a game is. The gaming community should revel in itself, in the fact that we play games, we love games, we LIVE games. And for Pete’s sake, stop calling your game hardcore just because you can change the brake pads on your car, or choose which socks your dwarves wear. Most of you are just playing it to feel superior, and that’s kind of silly, when you think about it. Games are made for entertainment, not to be compared as badges of endurance. And I’m not hating on your favorite game. I just want you to not be so smug about your dwarves’ underwear.
Besides, we all know that if you can’t Short-Hop Fast Fall L-Cancel in Smash Bros Melee, then you aren’t hardcore like me.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 10 Comments to Read
You Mean Gabriel Knight Wasn’t Completely Accurate?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 2, 2011
My interest in visiting New Orleans probably originated with Anne Rice back in the late 80s. But sometime in the early-ish 90s, I played Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, which gave me another shot in the arm to some day visit the historic location. Some movies, stories, and playing an RPG set in Crescent City all helped feed the desire.
I finally got to visit the city fer realz last week. It was a kick in the pants to finally go visit the historic city, five years after Katrina did her best to trash the place. We went on tours. We took a short cruise down the Mississippi river in a steamboat (which called to mind another influential novel of my life – Huckleberry Finn). We ate some really great food, enjoyed some great music (and suffered through a couple short rounds of not-so-great music), and did a bit of exploring. We generally avoided Bourbon Street, as we don’t drink, we weren’t interested in strip clubs, and the smell was pretty bad.
The French Quarter was a bit smaller than I expected. Yes, I knew it was only a few blocks by a few blocks, but I didn’t realize the streets and blocks would be that tiny. Likewise, I expected Saint Louis Cemetery #1 to be quite a bit larger than it was. St. Louis Cathedral, on the other hand, was even more impressive in real life than I’d imagined.
Gabriel Knight, it turns out, wasn’t 100% accurate. Yes, I know, SHOCKING. I’d been replaying it just a little bit after grabbing it for sale from GOG.COM, so I was a little amused comparing it to the real thing. Yes, silly, but it’s actually pretty cool how the game did manage to capture the look and feel of the city.
Oh, and alligator tastes great. Crawfish didn’t do as much for me – it was okay, but not something I’d seek out in the future.
Anyway, I am now back, but that doesn’t mean the guest posts are done. A lot of folks jumped in to help with the posts, and I’d really like to have this be a more regular thing around here. So I will continue to post guest articles (including two more parts of Skavenhorde’s look at roguelikes) interspersed with my less interesting drivel for the next couple of weeks. And I’m continuing to accept guest posts as well, if’n you feel so inclined.
Filed Under: Adventure Games, Geek Life - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
Guest Post: Are Games Art?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 29, 2011
Today’s guest post comes from Travis Bassett, of the new website PC RPG News. Travis tackles the thorny issue of whether or not games are art. Travis takes a thoughtfully subjective approach, one I don’t feel I can refute. If a game truly moves and inspires you, does it really matter if some ivory tower blowhard dumps on it by refusing to label it capital-A Art? I’ll let Travis suggest an answer:
There are few debates that have animated the gaming community more than this question: Are video games art?
The reason for this animation is straight forward. Gamers enjoy their hobby, and gamers want to see its merits recognized. We have been misrepresented as anti-social types, addicts, and violent freaks over the last few years, and unfairly so. By answering yes we reject the misinformed notions of gaming’s strongest critics.
I think games can be art, but arriving at that conclusion requires gaming experience. What you read here isn’t going to convince your great uncle Hester to boot up the latest indie masterpiece, but it might help you see gaming in a new light.
I’ve wrestled with the question of “what is art” many times, and to figure out the status of gaming, we have to. I’ve never come up with a perfect answer, but I have realized a few important factoids about art.
First of all, it’s subjective. What one person christens as art another despises. Go to an art museum or gallery, and see for yourself. I guarantee you’ll see at least one piece that you don’t think belongs there. That’s because each individual IS an individual. You and I may be looking at the same piece, or hearing the same song, but we will not be experiencing it in the same way. You may hear a turn of phrase that reminds you of your first love, I might hear a bass line that reminds me of an embarrassing moment. That diversity makes life exciting, it makes us human.
Another point: Art raises your consciousness. It exposes you to new ideas and perspectives, and it conveys these things in creative ways. The observations of a narrator will prompt a new and exciting train of thought in the reader’s mind, and the use of black and red in your child’s painting will influence your future perspective of that color scheme.
I may never have figured out a perfect definition of art, but these two points have helped me get close. By realizing that art is subjective, while taking into account that it exposes it’s audience to new ideas and perspective, we arrive at a definition for art.
Art is any product of creativity that elevates the consciousness of it’s audience.
Faulkner fits that definition for me, so do the Ziggurats, and the paintings of Jan van Eyck. And so do some games. The original Deus Ex, the Sith academy level in Knights of the Old Republic, the assassin missions in Baldur’s Gate 2; they have all helped enrich and inform my worldview. Roger Ebert might not understand that, but he doesn’t have to. These games didn’t single-handedly shape my consciousness, but that doesn’t matter. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
What game has expanded your horizons?
Travis
PC RPG News
Filed Under: Guest Posts - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
The Story Behind “The Rainstorm”
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 28, 2011
Today’s guest post comes from fellow Utah indie J. Alan Atherton. I’m fond of this particular story as it involves one indie’s crusade to actually ship a title. And he did. Plus, this post comes with a new game you can play! What’s not to like? So here’s Alan:
The story behind how a game comes to be is often more interesting than the game itself, at least to some people. And so I will tell you the possibly interesting tale behind the only mildly interesting game I wrote called “The Rainstorm.”
It all started when I was 13 years old, and I saw some books on game programming. Wait. That’s a little too far back. Uhhh, (shuffling papers) ok here we go. It all started when a friend of mine pointed out a promotion by Blackberry to win a free tablet device (called the Playbook, it’s like an iPad) for submitting an app to their app store. At first I wasn’t too interested, but then I realized that it wasn’t for the best app, or the first app, it was any app (except the usual flashlight apps or hi-fi flatulence simulators). And then I noticed that they supported flash. Now things were getting interesting, because I had been making a feature-creep-infested flash game over the past year and a half, so I was familiar with the territory.
As a hobbyist game developer, of course my first thought was to make a game. Something I could manage in a couple months of scarce work, and something that would work really well on a tablet device. For some reason, I thought back to a special effect I put in a game I made 12 years ago. The effect was a rather nice looking water ripple thing, as if it was raining on some virtual water. And it ran pretty fast, so that’s good for flash, and for a mobile device. Then I tried to think of what kind of game was possible with rippling water. I went through lots of little ideas over the course of a couple days, and settled on pushing a little paper boat around with the little waves that you make with your fingers on the touch-screen tablet. I still didn’t know for sure what the actual gameplay was going to be, since making waves and pushing a boat around is a cool toy, but not a game.
Coding started, and the first attempt ended up in something way too slow to be playable. Then I found some genius who did the water ripple effect in a clever way in flash, and I was up and running again. I had to modify the genius’s code to allow for pushing a boat around, but then I had a working prototype. And it was magical. Well, as magical as things can be clicking a mouse on a computer screen to make ripples on a pretend pond. But wow, you’d drag the mouse to make a little wave, and that boat would surf on that wave for as long as the wave was going. I was pretty stoked. My little idea was working!
Then I decided it was about time to make sure it would work in Blackberry’s environment. Making apps for a totally new device before the device is finished is quite an adventure. It’s probably something like living on the frontier in the old west, or building an airplane while it’s flying. See, there aren’t any “hold my hand” tutorials to make games in such situations. You basically have to know how to make games beforehand, and adapt what you know to the weird rules that any device has. It’s getting a lot better over time, but any pre-release experience is going to be a little rocky. So after a few days of messing around with the Blackberry SDK and workflow, I actually got it working in their simulator. Hooray!
The time was the middle of February. That’s important because the deadline to submit was March 15, but I had to go to an academic research conference March 5-11. I didn’t want to cut things too close, lest I miss out on the free tablet action. So I decided a good deadline would be March 1. But like all good deadlines, it was hard to beat, and things weren’t done by then.
I had to spend time preparing for the conference, and my family’s important too, so I made very little progress up until the research conference. I had at least decided on a theme for the game or atmosphere of sorts. It would be raining. Deadly leaves (to your little paper boat) would float by. Lighting would flash, and thunder would sound. For whatever reason, coins would appear under the water for you to collect by moving your boat over them. With all of that decided, there really wasn’t a whole lot left to do, so I still had high hopes.
At the research conference, I presented my work the first day, and then I could basically turn into a vegetable. I did listen to a lot of the other presentations, but evenings were open, so I went back to the hotel and worked on my game. In addition, as a sort of mixed blessing, my roommate had somehow developed a remarkable skill of snoring so loud, you couldn’t even hear yourself think with earplugs in, and any dreams that might have come about would be of lumberjacks or dirtbikes. Since sleeping seemed like a bad thing to even attempt, I stayed up extra late and got lots of work on my game done. In the end, I’d say about half the game was developed in the US, and half was developed in Switzerland, all by the same person.
Thinking I still had to submit by March 15, I even worked on it in the airport and for an hour on the airplane (until the battery died). I resolved to not have jet lag so I could finish it within a couple days. Settling in for an extreme programming sprint on March 13, I noticed while sifting through forums for documentation that the deadline was extended to March 31. I promptly got rid of the resolution to not have jet lag, and was tired.
With the extra time I thought it would be good to add some kind of simple story, including an end-game sequence. That didn’t end up happening (although I still want to), but I did make a pretty nice little title screen. And I was able to polish the game a lot more, including balancing the gameplay a little more.
So I submitted the game on March 23, and got notice that it qualified for the free Playbook on March 30. Whew! And now it should be arriving in the next couple of weeks.
Since then I uploaded the game to Kongregate, an online flash game community, where it didn’t fit their weird unwritten rules that “all games must have upgrades, achievements, simple graphics, teenage humor, and either be tower defense or a platformer, otherwise we’ll only give you 1/5 stars.” Since all my friends naturally gave it 5 stars, it balanced out to a nice 2.6/5 stars. You can play it here:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/cycletronic/the-rainstorm?sfa=permalink&referrer=cycletronic
Or if you happen to have a Blackberry Playbook, you can buy it here:
https://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/35668?lang=en&curr=USD
I hope to eventually polish the gameplay a little more (make it more exciting), then port it to iOS and android.
I’m proud of my little game, which rocks because I SHIPPED IT!
– J. Alan Atherton
Filed Under: Game Development, Guest Posts, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
“Kivi Was a Mistake”
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 27, 2011
Steven Peeler of Soldak Entertainment writes a long-overdue postmortem on their more casual-friendly RPG, Kivi’s Underworld. Which is, incidentally, marked down to only $9.99 – and Depths of Peril is down to only $14.99 – though I won’t have the new prices up on the website until I return home.
Anyway, here’s the postmortem – good and bad – about Kivi’s Underworld.
Soldak Entertainment: Kivi was a Mistake
He notes that that he’s very proud of Kivi’s Underworld and very happy with it overall, and the bulk of the article is about the successes of the game and what a valuable experience it was for him, personally. But he also explains why it was probably a mistake for Soldak to go after a more “casual” kind of game like that, rather than the more hard-core offerings like Depths of Peril and Din’s Curse. While I enjoyed Kivi’s Underworld, the others are two of my personal favorite indie RPGs – so stick with your passion, dude!
Anyway, this is valuable insight, and my thanks to Steven for his candid perspective into this game.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Guest Post: The Roguelikes, Part 1
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
All I can say is, “Holy cow!” Brian Critser, AKA Skavenhorde, turned a quick research into roguelikes for a guest post into nearly a Master’s Thesis. It’s awesome. And it’s good for multiple post, the next one arriving hopefully next week. Well worth the read, even if (or especially if) you aren’t all that much up on your roguelikes!
So here’s Skavenhorde’s guest post – The Roguelikes, Part 1.
You can read Part 2 here.
A long time ago – back in 80’s – there was this little game called Rogue. To this 9 year old eyes it looked ugly and was quickly dismissed as an inferior game. What I didn’t know was that Rogue in all its ugliness offered a more rich RPG game than any of the others I had played before. I wish I could go back and smack that 9 year old upside the head and tell him its what he has been looking for in a computer roleplaying game.
Rogue uses ASCII graphics (hence the ugliness). In essence it is a turn-based, single player dungeon romp with a basic goal. Your simple quest is to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor back from the evil Dungeon Lord. He’s hiding the the deepest reaches of the Dungeon of Doom. Your basic cookie cutter plot if I ever heard one.
The attraction of Rogue wasn’t in the plot, but it was in the details. That old saying, “The devil is in the details.” fits so well when describing Rogue and especially the later “roguelikes” that I would have a hard time believing that idiom wasn’t specifically designed with Rogue in mind. At the very least the people who worked on Rogue took that idiom to heart.
Rogue offered a wide variety of monsters, loot and random dungeon levels. The details in Rogue have been far surpassed by games like ADOM, Nethack, and Angband, but Rogue was the first and inspired all the rest to follow in its footsteps.
For those of you who bought the Epyx game here is a trip down memory lane: Epyx Rogue Manual. Gotta love the art in those manuals……well what little there was 🙂
Mostly all Roguelikes are free, with a few exceptions, but one thing they all have in common is that they offer an amazingly deep game.
Here is a list of all the major, and not so major, roguelikes that are available today:
Ancient Domains of Mystery: This is the roguelike that smashed any concerns I had with graphics and made me realize when you take away the graphics then you have more time to deal with gameplay. This may seem like common sense to some of you who already have played many roguelikes, but for me I was blown away by just how much there was to do in this game. I regret having judged rogues based on the ASCII art.
ADOM is a whole world with quests, plenty of character building, stories to follow and choices to make. It’s closer to a usual RPG than some of the other roguelikes. I’ve played. The charatcer building alone will keep you coming back for more. It offers ten different races and twenty different classes.
I’ve read that this roguelike is brutal on beginners and while I do agree I don’t think of that as a negative. Like other roguelikes it will also punish you through death. It’s the main way you learn from your mistakes. If you don’t like to read spoilers then you will die and die a lot before you figure out what creatures to be careful of and how to deal with them. Everything you first encounter will be a mystery to you and should be treated with kid gloves until you learn more about them. For me, that is part of the appeal to this roguelike or roguelikes in general. There are creative ways to handle situations. For example: are you low on food? Well try eating that corpse of that monster you just killed, but be aware that meat isn’t just meat in this game. There can be some unexpected consequences or bonuses when trying something for the first time.
What makes ADOM stand apart from the rest are its skill system, quests, an honest to goodness plot, monster behavior and other tiny little things like the random bonus you get when creating your character. There are other little things like a wilderness, talking to NPCs to get information about quests, weather and corruption.
I would like to point out again just how difficult this game is. I’ve read review after review, post after post about how people have had a hard time surviving in this game. I do agree with them, but can’t understand them at the same time.
I was a total newb to roguelikes when I first fired up ADOM. On top of that handicap I played a rather weak character, a dark elf necromancer. I got kicked around like a ragdoll at first, but over time I started wising up on how to survive with such a weak character. I was kicking butt and taking names for awhile until, of course, I got too cocky and was killed for my stupidity. Poor Rincewind just couldn’t handle those Iron Golems the first time I encountered them, but I did learn a lesson when dealing with Iron Golems.
I expect that I will die again when I come across a rather nasty creature for the first time, but I do survive a lot longer than I did at first.
Reviews:
Add ons & Extras
An absolute must for any new ADOM adventurer is to read the manual and parts of the Improved Guide Book. You will be totally lost without some working knowledge of what is going on in this world. For example: it would never had occurred to me to sacrifice to altars other than ones of my own alignment or that you had to be careful with what you sacrifice to the altars. It’s little details that makes these type of roguelikes truly amazing.
Downloads:
Online References:
Nethack : Nethack has been around for a long time. Unlike ADOM it is in a single dungeon called the Mazes of Menace. You have been given a quest by the gods to get the Amulet of Yendor and escape the Maze alive. Simple quest, but the magic of his game and any good roguelike is in the details.
The setting is your typical fantasy environment. You thirteen different character classes to choose from and five different races. The usual dwarves, humans, orcs, gnomes and elves. The character classes are a little different, but have some of the usual ones like wizard, rogue, priest and some not so usual ones like samurai, valkyrie, tourist and archeologist.
You are allowed to have pets which will follow you around and help out when needed. You’ll need to keep them fed and keep them tame.
Most of the dungeon levels are randomly generated upon first entering them. The levels may contain altars, shops, fountains, traps, etc. There are a few special levels which are fixed in every game.
The game is logical in what it can do (and it can do a lot). Take the cockatrice for example: In a normal D&D adventure they are a nuisance because they can turn you to stone, but Nethack takes that simple idea and expands upon it. I would highly recommend that you do not eat a cockatrice corpse or even touch it with your bare hands because the outcome will not be something you enjoy. If you really want to fool around with a cockatrice corpse (the reward for doing this is great) then take precautions like wearing gloves, but be careful if you keep it. You never know when you could fall down. If any unprotected part of you touches the corpse….well you’ll be starting a new game and learned a valuable lesson when dealing with them.
That is just one tiny aspect to this game. The great thing about the game is that everything you do makes sense if you think creatively. This game rewards players for thinking outside the box.
Essential Reading:
Absolute Beginner’s Guide for Nethack 3.4.1 (no spoilers)
Reviews:
Downloads:
Ali’s Nethack Page (tons of resources for nethack)
Angband: I’ve never played this one, but I’ve heard it’s loosely based upon J. R. R. Tolkien’s work. The goal to Angband is to survive the dungeon and get to level 100. There you will need to defeat Morgoth.
There are elven different races to choose from. Anyone familiar with J. R. R. Tolkien (who isn’t?) will recognize the races. Once again you have your usual ones like human, elf, dwarf, half-orc and a few inspired the books like the Dunadan and of course hobbits. Kobolds also make a showing here.
The are only six character classes to choose from. You have warrior, mage, priest, rogue, ranger and paladin.
Unlike Nethack you start off in a town and not directly in the dungeon. In the town you will find a general store, armory, weapon smith, temple, alchemy shop, magic shop, The black market and the most essential place of all your home. You can store your equipment here, but the space is limited so choose wisely in what you wish to leave there for future use.
The dungeons levels are randomly generated when the player moves up or down the stairs. The monsters and resources you’ll discover are infinite. There doesn’t seem to be any pressure time wise.
There are many variants to angband and will list them all later. I have no personal experience with any of them, but will try to give a brief overview on each.
Essential Reading:
Downloads:
Graphic Tiles (Under Extra files)
Variants:
Zangband– Widely accepted as the most successful of the many variants. Zangband is heavily influenced by the world of Amber created by Roger Zelazny. I’ve found both an ASCII version and one with a tileset (I’m sure there are a lot more tilesets for this game available). The graphics are passable, but who really cares about the graphics in a roguelike anyways? It’s all about the gameplay.
From what I read the goal is similar to Angband, but the antagonist has changed to the Serpent of Chaos. There are now 30 races and 11 character classes to choose from with 7 varieties of magic. If you like to know more about it there is an excellent review for ZangbandTK over at Abandonia Reloaded.
The rest of the variants will be listed in no particular order. Basically first found first posted:
T.o.M.E. – This game has had many reincarnations. T.o.M.E.now stands for Tales of Maj’Eyal, but it was previously known as Tales of Middle Earth and before that I believe it was Pernangband. Tome has graphical tiles, music and sound effects.
It’s modular based so that it is easier for fans to make their own game so that a layman like myself could make their own adventures.
It features a skill point based character system, activated combat abilities with cooldowns, resource management, runes, infusions, freeform quests, special levels, multiple dungeons, towns with a wilderness and schools of magic based spell system.
There are races and subraces you can choose from such as an Undead Skeleton. Yes, you can play as the undead in this game which is interesting since I love playing a necromancer. They also have something called a Yeek. I have no idea what that is since the information for it doesn’t exist in their online help. This one does sound interesting and seems to be pretty popular. However this next variant has caught my attention.
sCthangband – A Cthulhu-inspired angband. I don’t know that much about it since the homepage is down, but it is up to build 1.0.18 and from forum posts over at Angband.oook.cz it sounds interesting with a wilderness, cities, dungeons, quests towers and Cthulhu monsters. You can get it here.
FuryBand – Furyband focuses on combat with more races, character classes, monsters, spells and objects. It’s up to version 5.0/gold. Not sure what the gold stands for, but its got to be good 🙂
This one takes angband and expands upon the rather limited character classes and races. There is a mini review for it over at gamespy.
FAangband – FAangband is in Tolkien’s world set in the late First Age hence the FA. It features a wilderness, multiple towns and multiple dungeons. The are also three big bad foozles you need to kill this time around.
The biggest difference is that it tries to take away everything that was not in the First Age. So there are no Rings of Power, Saruman, Witch-king, ect. The author has replaced them with other unique weapons and, I would believe, monsters to battle.
Steamband – This is one of the few betas I’ll be listing here for one simple reason, it’s steampunk! There are too few steampunk games out there and finding this just made my day. Between the Cthulhu inspired angband and this one I’m kicking myself now for not searching through these variants earlier. I ignored angband because truth be told I’m a little tired of Middle Earth.
Unfortunately I don’t think this is updated anymore since the last update was in 2007, but from the forum threads I read on it it is quite playable and fun. There are quite a few races and nationalities you can choose from. You have the realworld African, American, Arabic, etc. nationalities, but you also have brownies, ghosts, old one (please be a reference to cthulhu), trolls, etc. There are two additional races that you won’t find in other angbands or even roguelikes for that matter. Those are automaton and steam-mecha.
There aren’t as many classes as there are races, but who really cares about a class when you can play as a steam-mecha. A few of the classes are adventurer, engineer, medium and of course rogue. They had to throw at least one cookie cutter class in there.
Gumband – Replaces Amber elements of Zangband with those of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books. A few other changes are increased damage from magical effects, some of the dungeon generation, added in monster vulnerabilities and a few other rebalances.
There doesn’t seem to be a homepage, but you can get it here.
Hengband – A Japanese variant to Zangband. There is not really that much information on it, but the description over at angband.ook.cz seemed to love it calling it highly original with some impressive interface developments. I guess I’ll have to check this out if I want to get any details on it other than a huge list of changes from the homepage.
I’ll wrap it up here for now. This article is taking on mammoth proportions and I’ve just got started. In the next post expect more variants on Angband and Nethack plus other roguelike not based around those two games.
Filed Under: Free Games, Guest Posts, Roguelikes - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
Guest Post: Lessons I Learned While Working at Bioware
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 26, 2011
The Rampant One is off running rampant in New Orleans, and while I’m away, the community gets to play. Actually, they can play any time they want – I love to add extra voices here to Tales of the Rampant Coyote. Today’s post is a wonderful bit of insight from a man who’s been in the belly of the beast. Or, rather, in the belly of one of the most celebrated CRPG makers in North America. He’s recently left his dream job for a dream shot of another kind: Going “rogue” as an indie.
I give you Dan, of GameDevGoneRogue. Enjoy:
Hi All! My name’s Daniel, and Jay graciously invited me to write a guest post on his blog while he’s away. I’m a former BioWare employee of 7 years, who’s recently decided to take the indie plunge. And I’ve started a blog about my experiences during the transition.
When I first spoke with Jay about the guest post, he indicated that he’d be interested in hearing about lessons I’ve learned while at BioWare. It’s an interesting question. I actually owe BioWare a lot in that respect. I feel I’ve learned a ton during my time there, but it’s tricky separating what one knows now from what one knew before. There are a couple that spring to mind, however. I’ll start with the biggest question I had when starting out.
Where do BioWare games come from?
Before I joined the industry, I had visions that a handful of people sat in a meeting room, possibly into late hours and over empty pizza boxes, and hashed out what the next game would be. Coke would be consumed, and ideas “spitballed.” Then, when satisfied and at a consensus, they would gather the team, make an announcement, and employees would dash off to make it a reality.
And my dream was to eventually, through hard work and diligence, to be invited to one of those spitballing meetings.
It doesn’t quite work that way, but it’s not completely wrong either. The truth is, each game comes to be in a different way. Most often, the core leadership of one project moves on to spitball the next. It makes sense. If you’ve got a good bunch finishing up game A, you might as well let them take a crack at game B. They’ve proven themselves, so it’s a good bet they’ll do well again. Especially if game B is similar in nature to game A. Some project leaders involve their teams more. Other times, these are very closed meetings.
In some cases, project leadership teams lose members or fragment to do different projects. Or a project appears first, and a team must be assembled to make it. When these situations happen, new leaders have to be chosen. Usually, these leaders are chosen from within the company. People who have experience, have learned the culture, and have proven themselves reliable. I guess this is where I thought I could get through the door.
So did I? At the end of my 6th year, I’m happy to say I got a taste of it. Part of it was luck: I happened to hear about an up-and-coming project as I was finishing DA:O, and I happened to know the guy running it. I did a metric poop-ton of research and preparation to make myself as valuable as possible, and I approached him at a party to ask how it was going. We had a good chat, and that eventually turned into a new role on his team.
Let me tell you, it was everything I hoped for. It was brainstorming, market research, business planning, you name it. We tossed ideas around, we prototyped, we spent late nights chatting over beers about our ideas. I felt more invigorated and engaged than any other time in my career. Unfortunately, reality sometimes has other plans. In our case, market conditions and studio needs meant that we had to put those ideas on hold to work on more pressing projects. It was a blast while it lasted, though!
I also got to see one other game ideation process from a slightly different angle: I pitched a game to BioWare. It was a small game. Less than a man-year of total work. I figured I was still fairly newbish, so smaller would be a safer bet. But, as it turned out…
Small games aren’t necessarily an easier sell than big games
The thing about studios is, they’re expensive to run. And more to the point, employees are expensive to keep. Employees need salaries, sure. But they also need benefits. And equipment. And space to work in. And support staff. This all adds up, unsurprisingly. A useful “napkin math” figure I learned while in the industry is that your average employee costs twice their salary over a year. Think about that, for a moment. Let’s say your average employee is making $50k per year. That probably means you cost your employer $100k annually. That’s over $8k per month!
So when it came to pitching my small game idea, the question of money inevitably came up. I met with our director of finance, and we started working some numbers. Suffice to say, even a small team over a small time adds up. And that doesn’t include overhead for a product website, marketing, community management, etc. It became pretty evident to me that my barrier to profit was much higher than I realized.
And that wasn’t even my pitch’s fatal flaw. In fact, the pitch itself was quite well received. I was shocked by what good sports they were, entertaining my pitch, hashing out the finance plan, bringing in other project leads for input. In actual fact, my flaw was gameplay. I have to admit, even I didn’t have a clear idea how the “core nugget” of gameplay worked. My pitch and my prototype both sort of danced around it, and implied something fun would happen. But it wasn’t there yet.
It was a big lesson for me, and I had a lot of fun learning it. And it’s safe to say, the bug bit me hard during this process. Shaping a product; its game mechanics; its art style; its business plan; its market strategy…I was hooked.
But if I wanted BioWare to make my game, I would have to make it something BioWare fans would love. This, it turns out, is a tricky proposition because…
You can’t please all the fans all the time
BioWare wants to do right by its fans. It really does. Many of its employees (if not most, nowadays) are former fans of BioWare games. So they have an inherent interest in making quality games.
The trouble is, fans. Yeah, that isn’t a complete sentence. Its incomplete for a reason. “Fans” means a lot of things. Take a look at TV Tropes’s list of fandom sub tropes. Reading just a few of those will alternately make your heart soar, or harden like stone. It’s hard to summarize the effect fans have on game development in one word or sentence. When one creates a work that becomes popular, there are a lot of people watching you closely to see what you make next. And not all of these people want the same thing. So when your next product inevitably lands slightly outside their circle of expectations, they become disappointed. And often vocal.
I can’t tell you how many times we, as employees, scoured the internet for reviews, forums, anything to tell us what the world thought of our work. Did we do right? What can we improve? You have to have a thick skin to deal with what you find. There’s a saying. I’m not sure who said it first, but I first heard it while at BioWare. It goes, “If we could give people a magic hat that would create for them the exact RPG experience they’d always dreamed of, they’d complain about the color of the hat.”
That about sums up where most employees arrive after reading too many forums. You just lose heart, and stop reading forums. There are a few who soldier on, taking the flak, and trying to get to the bottom of the feedback. There are even those BioWare hired to do so. But most devs eventually lose heart and just tune it out. Which is probably a good thing, frankly. Because if everything you do is going to piss someone off anyway, you might as well do what feels right. You’ll be more engaged in something you believe in, and probably make a better product for those who actually want it.
I think I’ll stop there. There are other lessons I’ve learned, to be sure. I could talk a bit about humility as a core value, the need for tools and pipeline specialists, and intra-studio communications. But I’m getting rather long-winded already. Perhaps I’ll follow-up with a second batch during Jay’s next vacation!
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading, and thanks again to Jay for the opportunity to guest-post! I welcome any feedback you might have, both on the topics and the writing. Maybe you have contrary wisdom to contribute, maybe you saw a grammar mistake, or maybe you experienced the same things. Let us know! (I promise to read this forum if you do 😉
Filed Under: Biz, Game Development, Guest Posts - Comments: 25 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights Update: How Buggy Can You Get?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 25, 2011
As I’m about to take a few days off from both the day job and Frayed Knights development, I figured it was time for another update on this tongue-in-cheek indie RPG which I at one point imagined would be a “quick and dirty” project capable of being completed in “only a few months.”
If all goes well, we should be out of alpha and into beta around February 1st. Oh, wait, we missed that one: I meant March 1st. April 1st? May 1st. Er, let’s call it early May, then. I’m building what I hope will be the final alpha build tonight, assuming it actually, you know, works. Always a little iffy. We’ve STILL got some stand-in art that needs to be replaced, and I expect there will still be a few additional details getting added even through early beta. The big question is how long beta will take – which really comes down to how well we nailed the bugs in alpha.
So what does “beta” mean, really? It is really kinda fuzzy throughout the industry. In the old hardware days, alpha was used for component testing, and beta for integration testing. However, in software, best practices suggest constant integration and testing on both the component and integration level. So for some studios, it’s become kind of a big ball of wibbley-wobbley, buggy-wuggy … stuff.
It’s not particularly exciting, except that there’s a certain feel to it as things change. One day it’s still a mess of broken code, stand-in content, and tediously un-fun horribly imbalanced “gameplay.” And then one day – many weeks later – it’s suddenly starting to feel like a game. Still buggy, still unbalanced, still missing bits and pieces, but… you can see something cool in there. Things start to click, work, and feel right. It’s not ready for prime-time, but it’s now a game.
That’s about where we are.
The other milestone I use is when – to the best of my knowledge – there’s no more changes that I forsee that will impact the core of the game. Not that all changes from here on out will be strictly cosmetic or bug-fixes, but I don’t see anything getting added or changed anymore that will invalidate the balance testing that has been done before.
While I can’t see how anybody would be interested, I thought I’d list some of the changes that have happened since we went alpha a little over six months ago:
* Changed spell-casting feats significantly, to make it less complicated and arbitrary, yet also make it so non-caster classes can’t be in the same “league” as the caster classes.
* Overhaul on spell endurance costs. Actually, lots of tweaks to endurance rules in general, as endurance is the key to combat.
* Added two new dungeons. Yeah, totally new dungeons – smaller, optional dungeons with some nice rewards for players to make surviving the latter part of the game easier.
* Added “quick heal” option for non-combat resting… those who can cast healing spells or who have the Bind Wounds or Battle Dressing skill will use their abilities to heal the party. Doing it manually will probably be more efficient, but for those times you don’t care so much, it’s a time-saver.
* Added about a dozen new quests, and another dozen “quest-like” activities to fill put the game. There’s no real distinction in Frayed Knights about what constitutes a “quest” – it’s kind of a big ball of wibbley-wobbley, puzzley-wuzzley stuff. Some activities are more like adventure game puzzle things, and others are like standard RPG quests, and some fall in the realm between.
* Serious overhaul to the end-game story flow and quest line.
* About a dozen new monsters. Many are variants on existing creatures, so it’s not THAT big of a deal.
* Added a “monster journal” to automatically track and fill-in information on monsters encountered in the game.
* Added lots and lots of new items and spells. Like quadrupling the count of each.
* Modified the storyline a bit. As the game grew into three games, I had to modify the first ‘act’ into something that could stand completely on its own.
* Lots of fleshing out of all the locations in the game. I hate walking too far without running into something interesting to do or to click on. It should NOT be all combat. This is an ongoing job for me, but things are getting better.
* Overhaul on how weapon and spell attacks and damages take effect, especially with respect to defenses.
* Actually filling in information in the “quest journal.” While it was technically functional before, there were only about a half-dozen quest updates that would appear there automatically (everything else had to be player-supplied). It’s far, far more verbose now.
* Overhauled trap disarming mechanics. Made it simpler and more interesting. Added lots of equipment that can be used to help.
* Completely changed the spell-casting interface. Added “Quick spell” buttons to simplify spell-casting navigation for the player’s favorite spells (including enhancements)
* Lots of tweaks to how level-up progression works.
* So much additional dialog I can’t even think straight about it anymore. And still more to do…
* Changed initiative / haste rules (a pretty fundamental rules change)
* Auto-Save / Continue: The game automatically saves a special version of the game state when you exit, allowing you the option to continue where you left off. Unlike regular saves, this preserves drama star stages.
* Added ability to flee from non-location-based encounters.
* Adding new special effects / feedback for game events. Like when you get a drama star or level up. It really helps to call attention to the kinds of things that are going on in the game, because there’s usually a lot going on. I’m still not doing half as good a job as I’d like, but it’s better.
* Added the planned differences with how different weapon damage types are affected by armor.
* Major AI overhauls for enemy combat tactics – especially with respect to spellcasting, target selection, and feat usage.
* Added icons for indicating status effects, beneficial spells, and debilitating spells for both AI and player characters.
* Added key customizations
* Added the ability to click on monsters directly (or their combat stat bar) to select them as the active target in combat.
* Implemented a bunch of feats that weren’t working when I declared alpha (oops!)
* Added “spellstones” for casting certain spells that are more powerful than their equally-leveled kin.
* Tons and tons of bug-fixing and balancing and replacing stand-in artwork with… less stand-in artwork.
There’s a lot more I’m forgetting, no doubt. And a lot of these items involved a ton of sub-tasks pieces.
There’s also still a lot to do, though mostly now it is getting into the “progressive refinement” stage – I’m fixing problems, replacing stand-in content with final versions, constantly rebalancing the gameplay.
How soon will we get there? We’ll see. With each release lately, I’ve tried to add at least one new tester, to get a fresh pair of eyes on it. While not everyone has played it to completion (especially without using cheat-codes), it’s been handy getting a different perspective on what works and what doesn’t.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
Scars of War Development On Hiatus
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 22, 2011
Gareth hinted that this might be coming for some time, but now it’s official…
Gareth Fouche Going Full-Time Indie, Pausing Development of Scars of War
It’s disappointing that Scars of War is going to be further delayed. And, let’s be honest here, there’s a very definite chance we won’t see it at all. But, by Gareth’s explanation, things weren’t progressing very well as they were.
I definitely feel for the guy. Indie development combined with a full-time job (and, in my case, family and church and regular blog posts) is a rough road. My wife is ultra-supportive, but it’s still a challenge to juggle all of these. Yeah, I’ve made a big deal about how I only sleep around 5.5 hours a night — but developing software right before bed is problematic. The last hour or two can often be pretty unproductive if you aren’t working on something particularly exciting.
And even though it’s game development, much of what you are working on isn’t particularly exciting.
Anyway, it’s an exciting move for him, and I wish him the best. Getting a game started, completed, and out to market – even as a full-time gig – is a major challenge. Whether Scars of War sees the light of day or not, he still envisions indie RPGs as his focus. And making it as a full-time indie… well, that’s just freakin’ cool.
Good luck, dude!
Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
Preview of Avadon: The Black Fortress
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Okay, Mac owners may continue their gloating, as this indie RPG is old news for them. But Windows RPG fans can read this preview of the upcoming Windows port of the first game in Spiderweb’s new RPG series, Avadon, provided by Brother None at GameBanshee…
Avadon: The Black Fortress Preview
The game is still slated for a “late April release,” which could mean it’ll be available later this afternoon, or could run late into sometime in May. Based on Spiderweb’s track record, I’m kinda figuring closer to the former.
I’m looking forward to playing the game.
Filed Under: Impressions - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
Jousting Competition in Texas
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Hey, if you happen to live near Austin, Texas, there’s a pretty massive three-day jousting competition going on near you in about a week. I don’t, but if I did, I’d be going:
“Lysts on the Lake” Jousting Competition, April 29th – May 1st.
I’ve seen a few real jousts before, though never a full tournament. They are a lot of fun, and quite impressive. I have never seen an unhorsing, though I did see a guy’s shoulder-plate get knocked off and bent so badly it couldn’t be re-attached without major work. They were going to call the match, but he was dumb and decided to continue the match without it.
Plus, I didn’t know they made horses that big. 🙂
Also note that the event is being hosted by Richard “Lord British” Garriott, a name familiar to most of us, on his private estate. Very cool.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
Matt Chat Interview with Scott Miller
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 21, 2011
If you don’t know who shareware pioneer and long-time game entrepreneur Scott Miller is, you should definitely watch this interview. And if you do know who Scott Miller is, then you should watch this interview … uh… even more definitely. Yeah, okay. It’s just good.
For those who don’t know: Think Apogee Software, 3D Realms… Kingdom of Kroz (that’s Kroz, not Zork!), Commander Keen, Rise of the Triad, Wolfenstein 3D, Raptor, Duke Nukem 3D, and more recently stuff like Prey and Max Payne.He’s pretty much the guy who lit the fire under the principles who founded id Software. And he’s got some very interesting views on game studios, maintaining independence, marketing, and the like.
This interview focuses on his new efforts with Radar, and the very early days of his game development experience leading up to the creation of Apogee and recruiting other game authors. Interesting points here include discussion on making movies based on games (and vice versa), why Star Wars is a better film property for transforming into an interactive game than Star Trek, programming on a 1975 Wang desktop computer, and how the fight against piracy helped form his episodic shareware success formula.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the interview. I offer big kudos to Matt Barton of Armchair Arcade for these interviews!
Filed Under: Interviews - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
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