The Impact of Magic on Fantasy Worlds

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 20, 2011

Fantasy worlds rarely take into consideration the full ramifications of the effect of magic in the game world. It’s probably easiest to take the approach that magic is rare enough (player-run magic users notwithstanding) that the effect is minimal on the fictional world that it might still resemble our own.

But would it? Imagine a few situations – which were actually somewhat real problems in eras where superstition and fear of witchcraft were more prevalent:

#1 – You are a farmer. Your livelihood – in fact, your very survival – is dependent upon your crop yield. Suddenly, half your crops sicken and die of some kind of disease, which has left your neighbors (so far) untouched. Your family may starve as a result. You know witches who have the power to do exactly this. You suspect a few people in your village of having that power. And one of them has a grudge against you.

#2 – Your spouse is dying of cancer. There are people who absolutely, empirically have the power to heal any disease with a little a 100% success rate with a little hocus-pocus. They are hard to find, however, and the only one you can locate stubbornly refuses to see you. Consequently, your spouse dies of the disease. Is the reluctant healer to blame for murder?

#3 – Someone has the power of telepathy. Not telekenisis / psychokenisis, not the ability to influence decisions directly with their mind, inflict pain or mental anguish, or anything like that which would be valued in your average role-playing game.  But, with very little effort, they can know your secrets, your lies, your thoughts, your hopes, your fears, your “buttons,” and your plans. And use that knowledge against you with you being none the wiser. This person is subtle – he doesn’t need to resort to anything as crude as blackmail or stealing your safe’s combination. He doesn’t need to be, does he? What could he really do? What would he really be capable of? What would happen if there were others like him? And what would happen if people somehow found out?

Actually, that last one was explored in the television show Babylon 5 (and some novels taking place in that universe), and the results weren’t pretty (among the humans). Suspected telepaths were rounded up into camps, and strict regulation and restrictions placed upon them. Telepaths were recruited to hunt down violations by others of their kind. The impact of the appearance of telepaths was overshadowed only by the advent of interstellar travel and meeting alien races.

The creator of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski, actually suggested a use for even the weakest of telekenisis in his comic series, Rising Stars. All it takes is a tiny pinch of the carotid artery to make the perfect assassination. Forget massive impacts and fireballs and hellstorms – a mage with fine control over remote force could kill quite efficiently and secretly.

I found myself wondering about this a little over the weekend, while watching a recent movie where – as often happens in movies taking place in the modern world – cell phone communication played a major role. How different this was from movies from twenty years ago, where trying to get two characters into communication with each other could be half the battle!  The ability to communicate with virtually anyone, anytime, in anywhere in the world (assuming they are near a population center in some spots) is really pretty phenomenal. We now know about things happening on the opposite side of the globe in real-time, and share the experience through Internet videos with the smallest of delays. It’s really pretty incredible, and we’ve transitioned over to the idea pretty seamlessly.

To a medieval villager, the cell phone would be an overwhelmingly powerful magic. But if the Verizon guy (or I guess the newly former-Verizon guy)  dropped in on peasants in the 800s in Europe and started his “Can you hear me now?” schtick, would they reject the scary juju, or would they embrace it quickly and transform the entire concept of medieval life as we know it?

I kinda think the latter. And I think the transformation would have far more ramifications than we can imagine. But it’s a fun exercise to imagine it, anyway.

So how would a traditional medieval European society – the common setting for fantasy RPGs – really be impacted by the presence of these kinds of magical powers, and the people who can use them?

Filed Under: General - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

How to Start an Adventure

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 19, 2011

Back in the heyday of dice-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons, it became somewhat cliché for adventuring parties to begin their big adventure together in a tavern.  It was easy for the Dungeon Master to set up – some bold adventuresome sorts are lifting a pint and being more sociable with strangers than one would expect in reality, and boom – they all discover a desire for adventure, as well as some patron with a plot hook to send them on their way.

Many early computer RPGs did likewise, starting the party in a tavern (Wizardry I, Might & Magic I) or something like unto it (the guild hall in The Bard’s Tale). To be honest, I made the Inn & Tavern in Frayed Knights the central location for most of the plot-critical goings-on in town for just that reason.  But the whole “everybody meets in a tavern thing” is really trite and uninteresting (except as a joke) most of the time, and so games have tried to find different ways explain the motivation for the player’s character(s).

“You are summoned by the king” is another popular one, which I feel is just as creatively barren as the tavern opening. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it forces the action without requiring much by way of background or backstory. The patron with the plot hook is some kind of authority figure, who gives you the quest early on. Variations of that include many of the Ultima titles (which summoned you to the king’s world but didn’t usually put you anywhere near the king),  Magic Candle (if I recall correctly), Neverwinter Nights, the more recent indie title Knights of the Chalice. I guess Diablo and Diablo 2 count as well – the limited story seems to suggest that you voluntarily came to assist a town under siege by darkness, though that motivation is left deliberately fuzzy.

Another opening that seems common enough to be cliché from the realm of jRPGs is the Chrono Trigger opening – the main character awakens on the morning of a big event in town (or the village), only to discover it’s far more interesting than he or she ever expected.  This is a little better than the generic tavern opening, and it still provides a social atmosphere where the primary character can be introduced to other important characters (including potential or future party members).

This may or may not be combined with the “your village is burned down” opening. Which is a quick-and-dirty way of forcing the action. Dungeon Siege and Neverwinter Nights 2 opened this way. Baldur’s Gate had an interesting variation on this theme, wherein your home town itself wasn’t literally burned down, but for all intents and purposes your home was destroyed and you were forced into exile. Ditto for Fallout 1 and 3, where a crisis at home forces you into permanent exile. I haven’t played all of the openings in Dragon Age: Origins, but as my castle was being burned down by bad guys I thought, “I don’t think I’ve had my village burned down quite this well before.”

One opening I can think of which may intersect with some of these others is one I’d call the Shipwrecked Opening. The main character or party find themselves tossed out into a hostile environment with little warning or preparation. In Daggerfall, Knights of the Old Republic, and Wizardry 8, this is caused by a literal shipwreck. Though I think Wizardry 7, Morrowind and Oblivion are also examples of this kind of opening.

While it could be considered a variant on the Shipwrecked intro, there’s also the Amnesia intro. Your character starts with little or no knowledge of his former life, making backstory incredibly easy for the designers. The indie game Eschalon: Book 1, and Fallout: New Vegas are fairly recent examples of this introduction. Unfortunately, this type of introduction (in other media) has had a reputation for being lame and cliché for a lot longer than RPGs have even existed…

A common opening that I’m more fond of (and used in Frayed Knights) is more of an in medias res opening, starting with the character(s) in the middle of a mission or dungeon delve.  Or you are dropped into an interesting situation where Crap Is Going Down. Mass Effect starts this way, as famously does Final Fantasy VII.  And Final Fantasy VI, for that matter (also one of my favorite RPG intros ever).  I’ve recently been playing a little bit of Might & Magic VII, and I love the opening to this one, which has the party on a grand scavenger hunt for which the reward is to become landed lords – complete with a castle. Naturally, the reward isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…

I think there are a lot of variants on these tropes, and probably some unique openings that don’t fit at all (or entire classes of openings that I missed).

What are your favorite CRPG “starters?” Why? Are they unique, or do others have a similar style?

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 25 Comments to Read

Press the X Button to Watch the Game?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 18, 2011

I got a chuckle from a tweet by Brenda Brathwaite complaining about an RPG her kid was playing:

An Old-School RPG Designer Grouses.

Somewhere down the line, game designers discovered that “immersive” no longer had anything to do with “interactive.” It instead meant “cinematic” plus “press a button to see something awesome happen.”

Okay, no, that’s not all fair, it’s hardly a universal complaint, and yes I am a big fan of the series that is generally attributed with starting this trend – Wing Commander. I love a good story in an RPG, with lots of drama and character, and though it detracts from the gameplay, I do enjoy a nicely crafted cut-scene. Otherwise, when the T-Rex appears, you may be too busy rummaging through your backpack to notice. Take your pick of which is the least lame option, or find some better middle ground.

But sometimes I think the most important lessons to be learned from more “old-school” games is how players were able to be not just entertained but thoroughly immersed in something so lacking in qualities often considered essential today. The graphics were practically abstract. The interfaces could probably be called “abusive,” as could the gameplay in some cases. The games were overly simplistic in the the ‘wrong’ ways, and overly complex in equally ‘wrong’ ways.  The mechanics were often imbalanced or downright broken, and they had plenty of their share of annoyances (whadayamean monsters can attack diagonally but I can’t?). But they did consume the imagination.

I maintain that this was largely because the players were willing to invest themselves to the games, and got out of it what they were willing to put in. If we are trending towards more passive gaming experiences, then we need to ask ourselves if we’re gaining more by emulating more popular traditional media than we’re losing  by constraining player interaction. I doubt it’s a simple equation.

As for me, most of you know where my preferences lay. I like my RPGs to have rich, interactive worlds to explore.  I like to poke around in them a bit. I don’t necessarily need big open-ended environments, but I don’t want to be led around by the nose. I’m okay with cutscenes, but I want them to be secondary to actual gameplay (and none of this quick-time event “press buttons to keep watching the movie” B.S. either). I want to labor under the illusion that the world is packed to the gills with interesting and unusual stuff to discover if I just keep poking around. I want to be rewarded for going off the rails and trying an unconventional (or at least indirect) approach with at least an acknowledgment – the neat kind of feeling we get from text adventurers when the designer anticipated our goofier interactions with the world. And I want to feel that the world is sometimes too friggin’ dangerous for me to explore, and that I must tread carefully in a land that isn’t magically tailored to accommodate me. I want to feel like I’m the one in charge of managing my own risk vs. reward.

Is all that a tall order, with even some semi-contradictory wants? Yeah, probably. I’m not quite there myself with my own game in development, at least not to my own satisfaction. But I don’t think it’s an unreasonable list of demands.

How about you?

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

Vacation Coming Up – Guest Posts Requested

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 15, 2011

I’m going on vacation to play tourist in New Orleans in a little over a week. While I always welcome guest blog posts, this is really the time when I may be able to use them the most. If you have something on the topic of indie games, RPGs, adventure games, the games biz, or… well, okay, anything games related (and sometimes not) has been fair game here… and feel like donating it to the cause to be read by millions thousands hundreds an elite group of readers, send it my way and we’ll see if it would work as I put articles up for auto-posting during the week.

If you aren’t sure where to send it, I’m jayb (Short for Jay Barnson). At rampantgames.com.

To be honest, it’s been a little tricky of late – after years of doing this, I’ve already talked about most of the crap I like talking about at least twice, and being so head-down into Frayed Knights debugging & stuff I tend to run dry on anything current and interesting to talk about. (Oh, hey, want to hear about how I changed a “less than” into a “less than or equal to” to fix a problem where the AI wasn’t always targeting the right character for a spell? I didn’t think so…)

So I can always use all the help I can get. Even if just for topic ideas.

Filed Under: General - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Game Design: Small Choices

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 14, 2011

As a gamer, we want deeply meaningful decisions that can change the whole course of the story, a la the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. We want big, dramatic decisions with big, dramatic consequences.

Unfortunately, reality dictates that we must usually settle for something less. Too often it’s a lot less, and we get stupid decisions that feel meaningless for all their overwrought set-up. Worse, these decisions are given all kinds of moral gravity – you are required to choose between goody-two-shoes, evil jerkwad psychopath, or Rhett Butler “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” responses that feel forced and doesn’t often match your (or your characters) interpretation of a situation. (Yeah, I’m picking on Bioware again a little here, but it’s not just them).

It’s like the designers want to give us these great big, dramatic decisions, but it ends up being all sound and fury signifying nothing. Or very little. We get the set-up, but not the payoff.

It doesn’t have to be a big story-changing deal. Way back in the early 1980s, the Ultima series provided some very basic, simple choices between good and evil, without comment. Note that I’m mainly talking Ultima III, as I didn’t play the first two.  Back then, death was more than just a negligible inconvenience, and the game wasn’t scaled to make sure you weren’t overpowered by challenges. Just dealing with poison or starvation was enough to do you in. Your survival was always at stake, and many players felt that the games encouraged – or occasionally even forced – them to kill those not necessarily in need of killing, and to steal from the merchants when they weren’t looking. It wasn’t an explicit decision, it was simply something allowed by the game. And there were some consequences, generally requiring a quick escape from town to avoid a major beat-down. We could determine whether our characters would justify a little theft in the name of survival.

Later, Ultima IV gave us a very simple template for interesting, intelligent choices that were not at all the black-and-white – starting with the gypsy woman letting us choose our character class not by choosing good versus evil, but by choosing priorities of multiple virtues. These decisions were echoed, if sometimes clumsily, through regular choices that made us choose the greater of two goods. Do we show compassion for a fleeing enemy, or show valor by hunting them down and preventing them from doing evil to a less capable travellers?

The game didn’t make it explicit – you had to take regular trips to the castle to find out how your accumulated decisions were panning out. You also weren’t worried about being saddled with “negative rewards.” You didn’t worry about being given a point of Evil if you were trying to be Good. Yes, in a sense you “spent” points of one virtue to obtain points in another, but that felt okay. And most importantly, the constant flow of interesting – if small – choices, knowing they added up somehow to help you on you ultimate goal, really added to the game.

I think it was the last point that was key. You weren’t just seeing numbers accumulate in a faction or karma level which has an unknown effect on how the game plays out. You had a goal, and had to find a balance to get there. You could see how your choices were getting you closer – or further – from your goal.

More recently, in Fallout: New Vegas, I found myself feeling a bit of the ol’ Ultima III vibe with a decision which I’ll try and keep generic to avoid spoilage. Basically, you find yourself with an option to aid a townsperson to find – and take revenge on – a fellow townsperson who has done them wrong. You have a lot of choices here, including blaming the wrong individual. I chose to lead the guilty party to their summary execution. While it’s not something I’d do in real life, but considering the setting – and how I’d dispensed my own justice not always in self-defense out of the barrel of my own gun out in the wasteland – I felt it was something my character would do without much compunction. While non-hostile or threatening, I felt the guilty individual needed killing. Good enough, in my character’s book.

It was a small decision. It changed some things in the game world, and provided me with an extra option that I never took advantage of. It was a small thing, in the scope of the game world and what comes later. But it was meaningful. It was a good moment.

A totally different approach which I also enjoy is found in Soldak’s indie RPGs  Depths of Peril and Din’s Curse. The consequences even for inaction in these games follow sometimes too swiftly, and build on each other to a degree. The game doesn’t dictate moral consequence on your character for whether you choose to rush to the aid of townsfolk under attack, or you instead focus on attacking the problem at the source before dealing with the symptom. But you have to live with the consequences of the choice. Townsfolk may die. In Din’s Curse, the entire town may be lost. These may happen regardless of your choice – it’s second-by-second decision making with ever-changing criteria. And as many gamers have noted, it can get somewhat stressful to be constantly juggling priorities. But it can also be a lot of fun.

And it’s always kind of cool to see long-term effects as well, as the Fallout games showed us. Even for the small things.

I guess what I’m saying is that while big, game-changing decisions with all kinds of dramatic gravity can be a lot of fun if handled correctly, I’m really more interested in having a plethora of small choices and their consequences. Sometimes, it’s the small choices that count. We should see small, relatively immediate, visible results, or a clear cumulative progression towards a particular goal. A few long-term effects won’t hurt either.

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Fan Remakes: Don’t.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 13, 2011

I am personally a huge fan of these kinds of fan-made remakes of beloved older games, and am grateful for the efforts of the dev teams for making them. I really don’t want to be the guy to throw a wet blanket on these efforts at all, but I do feel like I should take note of the sogginess of thrown bedclothes…

Once again, the industry sez: Just don’t.

Or rephrased: Eight years to make it, less than a week to have it shut down.

For every fan remake of a game that gets an official or unofficial nod of approval, six others get a cease & desist. While sometimes it’s possible to re-tool the game to make it legal after the fact, wouldn’t it be better to make an  original title in the first place, and just be “inspired” by an older game?

And maybe even make it something commercially viable?

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 31 Comments to Read

Indie RPG News Roundup, April 2011

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 12, 2011

Time for the latest news that’s fit – or unfit – for online bits. This month seems like it’s the “movie edition,” but that’s just how the dice land sometimes. I’m kind of amused at how we have both an Age of Decadence and an Age of Fear (fear following the decadence?) this month, and goodly supply of both jRPG-style titles and more western-style RPGs to sink our teeth and claws and swords into.

Age of Decadence

The Iron Tower guys are now committing to providing monthly updates, because people tend to assume the worst when they haven’t heard anything in a while.  This month’s update includes information on new combat animations, improved performance, and other little changes and polishing tweaks.

Age of Fear – The Undead King

This is billed as a fantasy turn-based strategy game more than an RPG, though I think RPG fans will find plenty to enjoy about this one. What’s more: It was just released, and for the next few days it is enjoying a pretty steep discount for those bold early adopters! I haven’t played it yet, but with it’s non-gridded open geometry and turn-based tactics, this looks like a game that Jay Isn’t Allowed to Play If He Ever Wants to Go Beta. But I’ll let you watch the trailer and judge for yourself:

Check out the Age of Fear website and try the free demo.

Darkness Springs

This online game is new to me, and is free-to-play up until level 7.  A premium account costs only $9.99, so it’s not exactly a threat to the wallet should one get addicted to the free version. From the website: “A role playing game with more than 100 maps in the default realm – dungeons, forests, villages, cities, secret caves and others, more than 2000 items, 8 trainable skills, 4 trainable attributes and 30 magic spells.”

More information on Darkness Springs is available here.

Dead State

This upcoming indie RPG of survival in a zombie apocalypse keeps looking better and better. The most recent updates provide teasers on character portraits and character models (including some interesting technical details for the developer-types).

Din’s Curse: Demon War

There are a couple of new reviews for Din’s Curse: Demon War – one at i-luv-games, and another at Diehard Gamefan. Additionally, creator Steven Peeler has been interviewed at Indie RPGs, and at Indie Game News.

Driftmoon

Driftmoon is slowly but steadily approaching release, with the latest alpha going out to testers and those who have pre-ordered, and a public beta demo anticipated within about two months. Early feedback is reported to be very positive, and hinted at the existence of a Hoe of Doom. Hoe of Doom? Okay. Interest officially piqued, as I recall the Hoe of Destruction from Ultima VII Part 1. Here’s the new trailer for the game:

I know some folks aren’t super-keen on the top-down perspective, but I’m fine with it. And this game is looking pretty sweet to my eyes.

For more information, visit the Driftmoon website.

Dungeons of Dredmor

I’m getting more and more excited about Dungeons of Dredmor as it gets closer to release. A humorous Roguelike with very polished graphics (is that a contradiction? Some might say so…) it looks like a lot of fun. Here’s an “infomercial” for the game discussing its traps:

Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle

This is a jRPG-style indie RPG with a rather unusual focus. From their webpage: “Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle is a fantasy RPG with an uncommon focus on the relationships between adventurers and the people who have to live with them, with only a fraction of the combat.”  It’s donation-ware, and warns that while cute and amusing, it does contain material that may be considered inappropriate for younger audiences.

You can check Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle out at Wulfhammer.org

Flare

This is a freeware Diablo-esque 2D Isometric action-RPG from Clint Bellanger and other contributors. Or rather, it’s a game engine with an attached game (it stands for Free Libre Action Roleplaying Engine). It’s an interesting approach – Flare sounds like what is effectively a full-fledged game as a “test project” for the game engine.  Sorta like the original campaign for Neverwinter Nights, huh? >:-)

The latest release version, v. 0.12, is now available for playing and testing. The final release is anticipated before the end of the year. I haven’t checked to see what kind of license is on the source, but if the engine proves solid, it may be an interesting platform for other indies to use in the future.

For more information, check out Flare‘s Website

Frayed Knights

Development continues. Much to say, but not much of interest to people who aren’t knee-deep in development.  But there’s been updates on how (and why) Endurance works in the game, changes to how the story and setting are presented, and the amusing pain in the neck that has been the Frayed Knights conversation system.

Inaria

Anthony Salter of Viridian Games reports that his RPG, Inaria, should be released this weekend. Originally a 40-hour game challenge, the game has been massively expanded and improved, sports an awesome retro 8-bit look and sound, with a soundtrack that sounds like a classic chiptune on steroids.

You can have a look (and listen) for yourself at the Inaria Preview at Viridian’s site.

And with a lot of luck, I might have even spelled the game correctly this time.

Legion Games

Legion is a series of RPG Maker VX games for Windows by the appropriately-named Legion Games.  Two are completed, and all of them are free.  You can check them out at the Legion Games website.

Millennium 4: Beyond Sunset

Okay, I’m pretty far behind in this series, now, as I haven’t even played the third one at all yet. It’s not for lack of desire, believe me!  Aldorlea’s upcoming fourth game in the Millennium series is in development, subtitled “Beyond Sunset.” It is expected to ship sometime this month or next, so the wait shouldn’t be very long. I’ve felt the Millennium series has been among the most visually appealing of Aldorlea’s games, and this fourth one, judging from the screenshot on the left, is unlikely to prove an exception to the rule.

You can get more information on this one in the forums at Aldorlea’s website.

Path of Exile

Path of Exile is an upcoming competitive online-only action RPG focused on a dark-fantasy setting with more gritty, realistic graphics that has been in development for five years. In theory, a public beta is supposed to be available sometime this year. The makers do not classify it as an MMORPG, as it features heavily instanced areas with a very small player cap. It’s gameplay features sounds pretty Diablo-esque, but the online focus is something different. We’ll see how this one turns out. The developer recently had an interview with GamePro about the title, which you can read here.

You can check out the Path of Exile website here.

Rainblood 2:  City of Flame

This latest game by Chinese indie Soulframe continues in the tradition of its Wuxia-inspired prequel.  It stands out as being an RPG Maker-based title that doesn’t look much like RPG Maker – showing what’s possible with the engine. Here’s a somewhat lengthy but cool trailer / “making of” video:

There’s some more information at the website, but much of it is in Chinese.

Swords & Sorcery: Underworld

A bit of good news / bad news here… First off, there’s a pretty extensive, thoughtful review of the game by Leszek Wronski at RPG Codex that’s worth a read.  On the bad news side, it sounds like the porting process to the inferior version of Game Maker for the Mac hasn’t been going well, and a comment by Charles suggests that it may be getting put on the back-burner for now (UPDATE: Problems with the Mac version of the engine have been insurmountable, so the project has been indefinitely shelved. Bummer.).

You can check out Swords & Sorcery: Underworld here.

Telepath RPG: Servants of God

Besides some nifty screenshots of a scene in the game, Sinister Design has put up a preview from the game’s soundtrack – final boss music. Featuring the actress who plays Malis singing opera-style… in Arabic.  For your listening pleasure:

Some additional tidbits I managed to pry from a guy frantically trying to wrap up the project (but you can pre-order it and play it right now):

“The mission I’m currently working on begins when you talk to Baz, one of your organization’s wealthiest backers. He suggests that you do a favor for a friend of his in exchange for access to his friend’s private army. He arranges a meeting between the two of you. The friend introduces himself as a businessman. He just wants you to wipe out a group of bandits that have been plaguing his operations. With the formidable private retinue this guy has, you would think he would simply take care of the problem himself, but he doesn’t want himself linked to the attack. Why not? What’s his angle? And if do a little digging and you figure it out, will you turn him down and risk offending Baz in order to avoid doing something morally dubious, or will you go ahead with it anyway and acquire his soldiers in order to accomplish your group’s goals?”

Through

Man, what is this sudden emphasis on roguelikes with graphics and accessibility for newer players? Some hardcore roguelike fans are gonna get annoyed. But I’m not a hardcore roguelike fan, so I’m okay with that.  I think there needs to be more introductory-level RLs in the world. Just so long as the hardcore ones don’t go away. Anyway, Through is a new roguelike created as a master’s thesis at Guildhall, emphasizing tactical combat and resource management. And easy introductory play with 8-bit style graphics.

You can get more information on Through here.  Including a video.

Okay. That is a Really Big List of Indie Games for this month. And, no doubt, I’ve still left some good ones off the list that have had news-worthy events this last month. But if you are a fan of CRPGs, there are some exciting things happening!

And extra-special thanks going out to everybody who sent me links and news this time! Your help was invaluable!

Filed Under: News - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

Game Development: Make Pong

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 11, 2011

To those who are aspiring to make games but have trouble getting started, I have a suggestion you may not like:

Make Pong.

Make it single-player, with AI controlling the other paddle. Finish it, making it ready for release to strangers. This means a complete installer for a downloadable game, or an attractive page for a web-based game, or something ready to upload to an app store. It doesn’t matter what language or engine you are using. Just make Pong. Go a little beyond the original version of the 1970s – jazz it up a bit, but don’t go too far overboard.

WHY? Why start with something that was primitive and retro thirty years ago? What possible value would it be? Especially for someone who is not a programmer? If you want to make the next great MMO or Halo-killer, what could you possibly learn from making Pong?

Lots.

#1 – It’s simple, well-known, and completable. You can expand on the design later if you want, but you’ve got a very fixed scope with very few unknowns. Some of the most difficult skills in game programming involve understanding how to finish a project, and being able to estimate the time it will take to finish it. I still suck at both, particularly the latter. You will probably be surprised with the amount of time and effort it still takes, even for such a trivial game.

#2 – You will learn the basics of game programming. Main loops. Getting player input. Sound. Graphics. Collision detection. Even AI, with an AI player handling the other paddle. Loop timing. Some of these things are mostly handled for you by your chosen platform, but every one is a little different. Whether you are new to programming and just tried your first “Hello, World” program a month ago, or you have been coding up Java business apps your whole career, game programming will have some new things to teach you.

#3 – You will be introduced to every discipline involved in game development. You will have to make your own graphics. If you try to go beyond monocolor blocks for the graphics – especially if you opt to give it an actual menu of some kind (highly recommended), you will learn even more. You may learn about size limitations for graphics with your engine – maybe it requires all images to be sized in the power of two.  You’ll have to learn about what formats work for your chosen platform. As a coder, you’ll get an inkling of what the artists have to do to get pictures to look good on the screen. As an artist, you’ll learn some of the challenges the programmers run into to put your visuals there. You’ll learn about sound tools, sound formats, and how to get audio through the pipeline. You’ll learn about testing and debugging. You’ll learn how to package your game for end users. Hopefully, when the time comes when you are working with other people taking those roles, you’ll know a little better how to work with them and communicate with them.

#4 – You’ll learn about designing AI. Pong AI is about as easy as they come. Making a Pong player that is frustratingly impossible to beat is pretty easy to do.  Making a fun AI opponent that mimics (to some degree) a living opponent can be a bit more challenging.

#5 – You’ll learn about every stage of game development quickly. Even something as small as Pong will have something resembling a complete product development cycle. You may not recognize it at first, but after you have a couple of them under your belt, you’ll begin feeling pretty familiar with the process. And all the pains it entails.

#6 – You’ll get a quick success under your belt. No, it’s not going to sell a million copies (unless you do something really surprising and cool with it, I’d really not expect it to sell any copies). It’s just a learning exercise. But inertia works both ways. Getting a little forward momentum started quickly and early can help, and it’s a satisfying feeling that can build confidence and proficiency.

Pong is perhaps the least exciting game for the modern gamer to try their hand at. But just as you can’t expect to play Beethoven your first time sitting at the keys of a piano, you will need to start with some fundamentals when making games. Make Pong. Then try your hand at one or two more “Game Jam” style projects, but keep them simple.

 

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

A Double Standard for Indies?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 8, 2011

Now that being “indie” has gone from being an almost unknown term to something of a badge of honor (with all the annoying pretension that sometimes accompanies it), there have been some accusations – not entirely unjustified – that gamers and reviewers both have a double standard when it comes to indie games, heaping praise on an indie game merely for the virtue of being indie where a mainstream, traditional  game would earn little but derision.

On the one hand, I bristle at this. In a sense, it’s like people heaping praise on their kid brother’s efforts at writing a story, simply because “he’s trying.” It indicates greatly reduced expectations. I don’t want to expect less of indie games. In many ways, I shouldn’t have to.  ‘Cause there are a lot of places where indie games are breaking new ground, doing what mainstream games are no longer willing to do, and accomplishing some pretty impressive things. And if you want to talk “fun factor” – the pure entertainment value provided for your dollar – my favorite indie games compare favorably to all but the most addictive mainstream games in my library.

But let’s face it: If I truly wanted to erase those distinctions, I wouldn’t be calling them “indie games,” now, would I? Just… games.

But on the other hand, there are no two ways around this fact: Indie games can’t keep up with the production values of the big games. The so-called triple-A development approach has been escalating for three decades now, and the big studio thing is a natural evolution from this. There’s a direct, causal relationship there – perhaps a positive feedback loop between methodology and marketing. Indie is pretty much by definition an abandonment of that runaway train.

The “biz” game has been rigged in favor of the big studio / big game approach. I’ve spent some time reading old game reviews in archived issues of Computer Gaming World from the late 80’s and early 90’s, and those reviewers gushed as much over the graphics and the pushing of the technology envelope back then as they do today. It’s been pretty consistent, reinforcing the message that better graphics, better tech = better game.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is an unnatural development manipulated by shady industry giants conspiring in smoke-filled back rooms conspiring to program the minds of gamers to only respond to the best visuals money can buy. I think to a large degree, they are simply responding to the demands of the market the best they can.

And the demands of going with that particular flow have gotten pretty insane. Or to use a popular (or unpopular) term these days, “unsustainable.” We’re past the point of diminishing returns, but there are still some pretty huge rewards for the behemoths who win those expensive battles. But even Nintendo has bowed out to choose different fights.

The indies are doing the same. The “indie” distinction really is there to change expectations and to draw a different battlefield. You don’t hold a pickup truck to the same standards and requirements you would a sports car, even though the primary purpose of either vehicle might be to take you to and from work each day. The two automobiles address different secondary purposes.

The problem is that “indie” isn’t really a category unto itself. A lot of poorly-informed industry and journalist personalities have made some assumptions about what the “indie” category is, semi-defining it alternately as casual games, free-to-play Flash games, retro-style shooters, social games, “art games,” or … uh, Minecraft.  When you are talking about indie games, you can only really talk about what it isn’t, because what it is is “everything else.”

So in the end, I feel like indie games should be judged differently. But though the criteria might change, I don’t know that it should be a lesser standard. Indie games are still about providing a satisfying interactive experience – they just aren’t (usually) attempting to do so by a brute-force pushing of the technological barriers, or even coming close.  Their success – or failure (and believe me, though I don’t talk much about ’em, there are LOTS of failures) – aren’t quite so simple to judge.

Was The Path, by Tale of Tales, successful as a game? It pretty much threw all video game conventions out the window. My first time playing through it, I followed the instructions, avoided harm to my character… and by doing so, effectively “lost.”  Achieving the objective of getting to grandma’s house safely was not the real goal. The goal was to experience the game.  The jury’s still out on the game for me — it didn’t really hook me, but it was an intriguing experience. And unique. I do like unique, sometimes.

So to me, it’s not so much a double standard so much as being willing to suspend the traditional standards a little bit and take a closer look at what a game is offering without directly comparing it to the most recent best-seller that approximates its category. Sure, comparisons between Din’s Curse and Torchlight and Diablo are inevitable, but the “indie” label is there to remind the player that it’s okay for a game not to contain every single feature of its category peers, and twice the production values to boot. Planet Stronghold is not Mass Effect 2, nor does it try to be.

Let the games stand on their own, and judge them based upon what they are and what they are trying to be — not on what they aren’t. That, to me, is the real purpose behind the “indie” label.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 14 Comments to Read

Wanted: Indie RPG News

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

I’m going to do another indie RPG news round-up next week (Monday?), and could use any help I can get. Know of an indie game I haven’t covered yet that is close to release or has been recently released? Or just anything else that might be of interest to fans of RPGs that is somehow indie related? Please pass ’em my way. You can say something in the comments, send me (jayb) something at rampantgames.com.

Thanks!

Filed Under: General - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: Possessing Endurance!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 7, 2011

Time for another update on Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, likely to be the only game released this year with a stat called “Brains” that isn’t about a zombie apocalypse.

Today, I’m going to talk about endurance. Which is another stat. Probably your second most important stat in combat, next to hit points. I’m writing about it now, because it is my bane right now. Balancing the game system is proving to be mainly about balancing endurance. Endurance is life. For a refresher course on what endurance is all about, here’s an article on Resting, Sleeping, Fatigue, and Exhaustion in Frayed Knights.

From a design perspective, the point is to embrace a bit of old-school-style resource management. There’s no concept of standing around waiting to heal up between combats, or waiting for an ability timer to pop like some kind of predictable whack-a-mole game. You have health, endurance, and expendable items… and gold with which you can buy more expendable items (or other things). You need to ration your resources on any particular foray into a dungeon. Failure to do a good job of it means heading back to town prematurely to buy more potions and sleep it off at an inn. When you return, the “fixed” encounters you’ve already defeated will no longer be there, but you may be harassed by respawned patrols and random encounters.

This isn’t a popular choice these days with RPGs – the tendency is to encourage you to shoot your whole wad with every single battle, thus requiring that every single battle be of relatively high challenge (or else what’s the point?).  Whereas with limited resources, it’s always something of a gamble. Do you hit this “speed bump” encounter with your heavy artillery now, or do you hold back so that you may have enough to tackle the boss a little further in the dungeon? And if you have expended a little more than expected on smaller encounters now, do you turn tail and head back home now to come back refreshed, or do you push your way a little further into the dungeon and take your chances?

Older D&D-style CRPGs often gave you the chance to rest in the wilderness for free, with the risk of an enemy attack while resting.  I liked this mechanic back in the day – it had a good risk / reward balance to it – but it was too often something of a pass / fail situation. You could plop right down pretty much anywhere and rest, and if you succeeded you were as good as new. If you failed, you were likely seriously hosed.

The Frayed Knights endurance system – including easily recoverable fatigue and the more challenging exhaustion  that lowers your maximum endurance – is an attempt to find a little bit of a middle ground in all this. You can “rest” pretty much anywhere for a quick breather to return your party to maximum endurance. But if you let exhaustion creep up to its maximum level, which cuts your top endurance by as much as three-quarters (currently),  your party won’t be able to go more than three or four rounds of combat before getting slowed down by the need to recover endurance.

This is a big deal.  Once your characters start hitting that threshold, their effectiveness in combat drops pretty hard. If your endurance hits zero, not only does your character automatically have to catch their breath on their next action, but until they do and get endurance back into the positive range again, they are slightly more vulnerable to attacks.

Oh, and the same thing applies to enemies, too. You can see their endurance level too, and how quickly it drops based on their various attacks.  While there are a lot more factors in play, whichever side hits low endurance levels first is generally at a pretty distinct disadvantage.

A side benefit of this is that, unlike most other RPGs, the “Defensive” option in combat can actually be somewhat useful! Especially if you have a feat that applies the bonus against spells as well as physical attacks. It uses no endurance, and makes your character harder to hit. You can hunker down and let your enemies blow their endurance on initial, expensive attacks, and then come out swinging once they are having to recover every other round.  It’s not a strategy I’d recommend for most situations, but there are times when it may be appropriate for at least some members of the party.

There are a lot of tricks to managing endurance in Frayed Knights. There are feats which reduce the endurance cost of special attacks and spells. Potions of Liquid Nap often come in handy not only as a quick endurance boost, but to reduce exhaustion immediately. One of the cheapest (and, especially in the early game, most useful) Drama Star powers cuts exhaustion significantly and restores the character to maximum (current) endurance. Less powerful attacks and spells can be used against lesser threats. Other party members can pick up feats and spells to help with the healing, so poor ol’ Benjamin doesn’t have to burn himself out keeping everyone in healed. Potions, scrolls, and wands can be used cheaply in place of the more fatigue-inducing spells. Spells with spellstone components tend to give a bigger bang for their endurance-cost buck than regular spells. The party can move out of a more densely-populated, dangerous part of the dungeon to a less dangerous one before resting.

And so forth.

Managing endurance is almost as important as managing hit points in Frayed Knights. While its possible to play without paying it much attention, skill and attention will reward players with less whining from the deceased party members.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Are Games Becoming More Passive?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 6, 2011

I guess the picture of old-school level design verses modern level design that came out a few months ago has really caught on. I noticed John Romero and Tom Hall even used it in their post-mortem of Doom at the Game Developer’s Conference earlier this year.

(And might I add… what a cool idea, to do classic game post-mortems like that? I imagine those sessions were full the minute the doors opened.)

Now there are a lot of things wrong with this picture. For one thing, there’s still a lot of linearity in 1993 map. My memory is a little fuzzy on this map (E1M6 of Doom), but as I recall in general the maps were still pretty linear in single-player. They opened up a bit more for Deathmatch modes, where you really wanted multiple paths to every area. But while there were plenty of optional and hidden areas with extra goodies and monsters, so you might be able to get a weapon early or something like that, for the most part had to traverse the map in a pretty straightforward fashion, picking up the keys necessary to progress to the next section.

However, you were able to do it at your own pace, without being interrupted by cutscenes. And the level designers (mainly John Romero, Tom Hall, and Sandy Peterson) weren’t afraid of letting the player get a little lost finding their way through the map.  Finding the exit was never a huge challenge, as I recall, but it wasn’t always a given. There wasn’t a marker on the screen showing you which door to go through to get there.

Now, I don’t play too many modern “mainstream” action games, so I’m not much of an authority here. Though of what I’ve played, I can’t deny that A) They often led me by the nose a bit more, through on-screen navigation tools or simply a more constrained environment, or B) I still had fun playing them. But I have to appeal to gamers with more genre experience to point out anything as a “trend.”

Gareth Fouche, creator of the Scars of War RPG in development, recently ranted a bit against a trend that may sum up the situation a little better: a trend towards what he calls passive engagement. It’s maybe not quite the same as passive entertainment, like watching a TV show, but more like reading a book. To extend his analogy, a TV show will progress with no action whatsoever on the part of the viewer – I can fall asleep in front of the tube if I want. But a book does require active effort on the part of the reader.

So there are levels of passivity, and reading a book isn’t really all that passive. Modern games, he contends, are tending to engage the player on more passive levels.

Maybe this is true. I’ve avoided most games that have the dreaded “Quick-Time Events” which I always thought were incredibly lazy game design way back in the day before they had a name – when instead a game had you repeatedly mash a button as fast as you can or something inane like that to succeed.  For me, that kind of thing does not make me feel like I’m now participating in what is effectively a cutscene… it further pulls me out of the game. It makes me feel like I’m the kid brother tagging along in the back seat of the car being given busy-work to keep me occupied while the big kids do their thing.

Barring that particularly annoying exception, though, I have to ask – are games becoming more passive, or simply more focused? Are they dumbing games down, or simply stripping away the parts that are “less fun” to focus on the key aspects of the game? If the core of the game is supposed to be mowing down aliens emerging all around you, then is getting lost in a maze of buildings where the aliens have already been “cleared out” really add to the experience?  In an open-world RPG, would I really prefer to be hunting for a needle in a haystack on some quests without having an indicator to show me where to hunt down a unique item? (My answer: No, but I also say that’s poor quest design for that kind of RPG, but that’s another story).

I didn’t used to worry about these kinds of things. Maybe we’re over-thinking it now. I mean, complaining about reduced complexity or lack of breadth in modern games doesn’t make sense when you compare a modern XBox 360 controller to the old NES controllers, or the one-button joysticks and paddles of the Atari era, now, does it?

I don’t really know the answer to this. Maybe it depends upon the game.  And maybe it’s a side effect of the quality of the production values and modern interfaces. Back then, you really couldn’t play a game without committing yourself to it, to a degree, forcing the engagement.  You had to dig in and find out what the particular colored collection of pixels on the screen was supposed to be, and what it was supposed to do. There was rarely an extensive tutorial to step you through everything.  You were expected to RTFM before you played.  You had to engage your imagination to permit yourself to accept the metaphor the clunky graphics were trying to express. In our RPGs, we were forced to make maps and take notes manually (even if we could record them on-screen, which was nice).

Once you were engaged at that level, everything else clicked into place.

But now the quality bar is so high we can just kind of coast in, mentally. And we do. I’m not sure I’d call this a bad thing, but it does change the dynamics a bit.  Maybe it really is a bit like the difference between watching a TV show and reading a book. Maybe that’s part of the reason many readers prefer books over the movies adapted from them.

So what do you think? Are modern games encouraging the player to engage them on a more passive level? And if so, is it really detrimental to the game experience?

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

Telepath RPG – New Screenshots!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 5, 2011

Craig sent me some new screenshots from his upcoming game Telepath RPG: Servants of God.

SPOILER WARNING!!!!

Read no further if you want to play this game untarnished with spoilers.

The following is a spoiler, but not a big one. More of a teaser as far as I’m concerned, but still, I thought I’d warn you.

Still here? Okay.

Because I’m really lazy and enjoy letting other people write my blog for me, I’m just going to quote his setup:

“The Resistance has had to block off the lower tunnels in its secret desert base due to a sudden, unexplained infestation of (massive, crocodile-sized) desert scorpions. The men are frightened, whispering that they’ve awakened some sort of ancient demon of the desert down there. Lieutenant Al’Salaam doesn’t buy it, but he thinks you should go down there and clear things out, just to keep morale from bottoming out.”

The statue itself.

 

If this were my game, I’d use this alternative dialog (which I’m sure Craig considered):

“You touch it.”

“No way, you touch it.”

“I’ll touch it if you touch it first.”

“I’m not afraid to touch it. But you are. So you touch it first.”

 

And this being a fantasy RPG, of *course* it doesn’t turn out to be a harmless statue after all. These things never are. Except when they are, but if they are it’s merely to distract you from the other thing that’s sneaking up behind you to eat your face.

As always, this is really looking like it is shaping up to be a pretty awesome and meaty title from Sinister Design. It’s available for pre-order, if you feel so inclined to get in early and at a discount.

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

Hardcore Combat Flight Sims Ho!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 4, 2011

I’m a fan of many game genres, including combat flight sims – another genre which was once prosperous but is now an endangered species.Yes, I love delving deep underground dungeons and soaring through virtual unfriendly skies.

Now, I’ve always consider myself a hardcore flight sim fan. But while Falcon 4.0 felt like a flawed Holy Grail to me when it was released over ten years ago, I’ve been a bit intimidated by the few offerings that have come out since then. I’ve been a fan of the IL-2 series, which I can’t play competitively because I’m just not hardcore enough anymore and can’t be bothered with stuff like fuel-air mixtures or setting the prop pitch correctly. So I have guys fly circles around me.

But they are still fun. And I think I’ve rediscovered the secret to enjoying a good hardcore combat flight sim: Even though I’ve loved the crazy-psycho-hardcore-realism in the past, with each new sim I have to ease into it. Start with the more arcade-y “magic” radar models that just work without having to change modes (other than maybe air-to-air vs. air-to-ground), add labels on things within a certain range, and maybe even infinite weapons for my first practice missions so I can learn (or re-learn) the ropes on how to use them effectively. I still usually go for maximum realism on the actual flight model, though, as that’s something I’m generally pretty comfortable with in all modern flight sims.

I recently picked up the Flaming Cliffs 2 “expansion” (more of a full-on upgrade) for old Lock On: Modern Air Combat.  It’s a weird situation, as the original game (LOMAC) is several years old, but FC2 was released only last year. And it really doesn’t feel like an expansion – it’s a whole new game as far as I can see (though I really didn’t play LOMAC all that much). It’s a pretty hardcore “survey” sim that lets you fly several different modern aircraft: The A-10, MiG-29, F-15, Su-25, Su-27, and Su-33. As it’s a “survey” sim, it’s less focused on absolute fidelity for modeling each aircraft, with some systems not working exactly as in the real aircraft but instead according to some common denominator. But let’s be honest here: Compared to just about anything out there released in the consumer market (which is precious little in the last decade), it just doesn’t get any more realistic for most of those planes.

The exception being the A-10, as the same developer just released DCS: A-10 Warthog.  I hope to pick this one up soon. Once upon a time, I remember anxiously awaiting the advertised A-10 game to go along with the Falcon 3.0 “Electronic Battlefield” series  – a collection of multiplayer compatible games that included the original Falcon 3.0, a campaign add-on, a Mig-29 simulator, and an F/A-18 simulator.  The A-10 game never materialized. Interestingly, it seems the DCS series has the same idea in mind as those ancient Spectrum Holobyte / Microprose titles.

I’ve been tempted several times by DCS: KA-50 Black Shark as well. I’ve only ever been into two helicopter sims… the ancient Microprose game Gunship, and the likewise long-in-the-tooth Longbow 2. Longbow 2 was fantastic, and I’ve waited for another game that would be the heir to that title. I don’t know if this one is it, and I’ve not really been into Russian helicopters. So far I keep passing on this one, but one of these days I expect I’ll break down and grab it. Just ‘cuz.

Coming up in the not-too-distant future is another “survey” sim that takes place in the past… the upcoming IL-2: Cliffs of Dover.  This game is from the same guys that made the absolutely incredible IL-2 series, which has been my favorite flight sim after Falcon 4.0.  It’s pretty much the ultimate (to this date) simulator for the Battle of Britain. The name is rather amusing to me, as I cannot recall the Russian IL-2 aircraft having anything to do with the Battle of Britain.  But I guess it’s become a brand name now.

And this trailer video makes me drool:

If you want to check out what makes the IL-2 series so cool, the “platinum edition” of the entire series is available for cheap at GOG.COM – IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946. While the tech is getting a little creaky with age (I had to hand-jam the configuration file to get it to work for my widescreen monitor), until the new game releases, it remains the ultimate World War II combat flight sim, covering many areas in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. And it includes 229 flyable aircraft. No, that is not a typo. Granted, many of these are simply variants of a basic class of aircraft. But if you fly a campaign with a single variant of an aircraft and get to know it pretty well, the differences between the variants will feel quite significant.

I’ve put more time into the IL-2 games over the years than I care to admit, including some time spent getting my butt kick online, but I still feel like I’ve only barely scratched the surface of the game.

Anyway, I don’t know if anybody who reads this blog, which tends to focus more on indie games and RPGs and adventure games, is into flight simulators at all. But I thought I’d share.  It’s good to see another favorite genre of the past seeing action, if hovering a little bit outside the mainstream these days.

Filed Under: Flight Sims - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Thirty Years Ago Today…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 2, 2011

… I played my first game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Kinda strange that I’d remember that kind of anniversary, I guess, but as it was a day where I’d finally acquired the game I’d heard so much about as a present for another anniversary commemorating an event I really don’t remember that involved me being painfully evicted from a reputedly warm, dark, cozy place into a harsh, cold, bright place, I’ve managed to keep the date straight over the years. That afternoon, I was allowed to participate in a very brief example game. As, apparently, possessing any rulebook – even not exactly the same one the guy who’d been roped into running games for far too many players – set me in a superior position to about half of said players.

This event would perhaps be insignificant for other people, but for me it’s influence over the years has been pretty major:

* Part of what first interested me in the woman who would become my wife was that she played D&D, which was a Big Deal for me when I met her. She was also pretty hot and fun to be around, so I doubt that it was a deciding factor, but it was at least a contributing one.

* I’m not sure I would have taken up a career in making games were it not for my love of D&D. Maybe it was a gateway drug or something, I don’t know. I got into video games at about the same time, so I don’t know if I can label it causality or just correlation. But hey, it’s my life story, I’ll at least give it a nod.

* Frayed Knights has been a huge part of my life the last three years. And at its core is the spirit of the game that blew my mind thirty years ago.

* We’re still playing dice-and-paper RPGs on a weekly basis, ever since college. More than I ever played as a kid, to be honest. It’s something of a core aspect of a circle of close friends. The actual people sitting around the living room slinging dice has changed a bit over the years. Even I wasn’t always a part of it. But somehow we’ve managed to keep the tradition alive. It’s something I look forward to all week. I keep thinking I’ll outgrow it – and worry some of our friends will do so – but so far, I haven’t.

The spirit of the game that I experienced way back when – though hopefully improved upon from the silly, often crappy games I participated in back then – is what keeps me playing. It’s what I keep seeking in computer and console games calling themselves RPGs. It’s core tenant was a simple one: While it used dice, paper, and rules as tools, it differed from any other game out there because it was not played on a board, a screen, a table, or a playing field. This was a game that was played in the imagination, a shared imagination between multiple players. And sharing that imaginary world with others made it real, in some way.

It was, and still is, awesome.

We get so caught up in things like graphics, voice-acting, interfaces, whether or not numbers appear on the screen, action-versus-turn-based, rulesets, tutorials, open-world versus linear-story, premade characters, 3D or 2D, and all this other crap for which we all have our preferences. And it’s important to us. But maybe what really matters is how well these games engage our imagination.

It may not matter whether it’s monocolor ASCII characters or high-definition 3D characters voiced by top-drawer Hollywood talent. Maybe there’s no surefire formula that works with me.  But it really depends on whether or not the game lives in my imagination, or only on the computer screen.

Filed Under: Dice & Paper - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Gamestop Buys Impulse

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 1, 2011

Gamestop, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall that their brick-and-mortar business model is becoming, if not obsolete, at least marginalized the way video stores and record stores have been, has bought Impulse, formerly the online games distribution branch of Stardock (reasonably indie makers / publishers of the Galactic Civilizations series, Elemental:War of Magic, etc.).

More information here.

Impulse is direct competitor with Steam, though I don’t believe it’s a very close one. However, I’ve preferred it to Steam for a while for four reasons:

#1 – It allows me to split my game installs between two hard drives, which is important since I have two hard drives, one of which is approaching capacity (especially with newer mainstream games) — and Steam games make up a pretty substantial chunk of what’s installed on there.

#2 – It’s far less obtrusive than Steam. Running a game bought through Impulse is more like running a game bought through retail – it doesn’t take several seconds to get permission from the distribution service or check there for updates first before letting me play my game. While that’s only a few seconds of inconvenience on the Steam side, it’s enough to irritate me.

#3 – It’s indie-friendly. Possibly even more indie-friendly than Steam, which has a tendancy to lowball the indies and release the games as shovelware within weeks of initial release.

#4 – It was started by Brad Wardell, whom I’ve respected ever since he was making an indie game for the OS/2 (I read about it in Computer Gaming World!). I had a good phone conversation with him a looong time ago when he was first launching TotalGaming.net (I think) as a subscription-style service. Okay, I got a little miffed at him when he went on the attack when a game reviewer friend of mine wrote a good-but-not-great review of the first Gal Civ 2 expansion (which, it turns out, was because she’d been given a buggy, incomplete early beta to review, and had thought it was the final). But overall, he’s struck me as a good guy, and passionate about games. And he’s responsible for Gal Civ 2, which with the expansions has pretty much replaced Master of Orion 2 in my heart for favorite space-faring strategy game of all time.

Anyway, with this buyout, it’s now no longer associated with Wardell, so #4 goes away.

Will Gamestop screw up the other two? I hope not. I think it’s got potential to be a good thing. Can they overtake Steam’s lead, or at least give it a really good run for its money? Iffy. They’ve got a lot of cash they can throw in that direction, so the potential’s there.  But they have also proven in the past that they don’t give a crap about the PC market, and have never been at all interested in indie gaming. I think there’s also the potential to turn it into Games for Windows Live – a useless, dessicated wasteland that reeks of “soulless half-baked money grab.”

We’ll see. I’m leaning optimistic, but not very.

Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 8 Comments to Read



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