Weekend Links

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 13, 2011

Just some miscellaneous bits and pieces discovered this week:

John Carmack announced the superiority of  Direct3D over OpenGL. Didn’t start that way, if you remember. The funny thing is, we were an early user of Direct3D, and we voiced the same complaints to Microsoft. They ignored us. They listened to Carmack. I can’t blame them, I guess, but I have always felt an internal “neener, neener” coming on when I reflect back on that. A couple years later, the guy in charge of DirectX 7 explained to a room full of game developers that his goal with 7 and 8 was to make DirectX “suck less.” I guess they succeeded.

A Day in the Life of Minecraft Creator Mojang. I am re-reading “Masters of Doom” right now. Two indie companies flush with rapid success and riches. Totally different stories.

Top Tips for XBLIG Marketing. About half are specific to XBLIG, but the core principles of most are at least adaptable in some way to other platforms.

Might & Magic 7: For Blood and Honor was released at GOG.COM.  Funny how I get so excited about these re-releases of games that were old news a decade ago.  But they are new to me (already snagged my copy earlier this week), and that’s just how I roll.  And I know a lot of you do, too…

CRPGAddict talks about the most annoying CRPG enemies of all time.  I’m happy to see a picture of one of those @#%$! Cliff Racers from Morrowind at the top of the article. I’d add food-stealing gremlins from early Ultimas to that list, too. I’d be tempted to add those friggin’ leprechauns from Din’s Curse into the mix, except you can usually splat them and get more money from them than they were trying to steal.

This has been in the news quite a bit this weekend, but apparently a Dragon Age 2 player who was rude on the Bioware forums was banned not only from the forums, but also “accidentally” banned from playing his game, too. A single-player game, which he’d bought and played in the privacy of his own home. You want to know why people think these new, draconian DRM schemes are destroying games? That’s it, right there. Just the fact that EA *can* do this to your games is a problem. And then there’s this little tidbit about them sneaking an install of SecureRom onto your computer without disclosing this information to the public.

Bad, EA. At least no evil company can sneak their fingers through the Intertubes to disable that copy of Might & Magic 7 I just bought.

 

 

 

Filed Under: General - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

How To Become Fantastically Successful and Rich at Indie Game Development Without Even Trying…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 12, 2011

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Puzzles and RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 11, 2011

It felt somewhat serendipitous that I found this excellent interview with Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games – maker of commercial indie graphic adventure games – while I was in the middle of adding some more adventure-game-esque puzzles to Frayed Knights.  It provided extra fodder for thought on things I’ve been a-pondering lately, including puzzles in RPGs.

Dave talks about how he stumbled into becoming an indie, and from there stumbled into becoming something of an indie publisher. And he talks about the adventure game genre – with some really choice quotes about them. Including what sucks. Like getting stuck in puzzles. And it’s very true. There are a number of adventure games (and RPGs, for that matter) that I simply quit after banging my head against the wall on a puzzle a few times.

But I also think back on some of my favorite moments of these games, and they often involve solving said puzzles. They are a blessing and a curse. I love beating them, I hate being beaten by them. Dave’s sentiments echo those of Jeff Vogel, recently, when he discussed RPG difficulty. No matter what happens, somebody’s going to get stuck on whatever challenge you throw at them in the game, and they’ll probably not be too happy about it.

I know this has been done before by many other people, but I’ll try detailing the different types of “puzzles” that I find myself  working with in my RPG…

The Self-Contained Puzzle: This is a classic puzzle or logic game that requires no external tools to resolve.  Worst-case, these may often be resolved by brute force. Some players hate these. Some players think they are kind of fun.  Sometimes they take the form of a mini-game.  Examples that I’m dredging up from past games might include the riddle-protected chests in Betrayal at Krondor, or a mastermind-style puzzle in Wizardry 7. Or a twisty maze of little passages, all different.

The Sequence Puzzle: Sort of a variation on The Self-Contained Puzzle above, this is a puzzle that requires the player to take actions (often, simply moving) in a specific sequence.  Failure may result in having to start over. The key to making these puzzles not suck is twofold: Making sure that there are clues to the correct sequence so that it’s not a pure trial-and-error experience; and making sure that failure is not too punitive. If each stage of an 8-stage sequence takes a full minute to complete, it’s going to piss off players.

The Inventory (“Lock and Key”) Puzzle: This is a challenge where you need to use a specific inventory item on an object to acquire… well, whatever is needed. You can abstract this down as Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame)  did to the idea of an inventory item being a key by any other name to be used on a lock. This is pretty standard adventure game fare, but can also among the more boring (and potentially frustrating) puzzles.

The Flexible Solution: This is a puzzle that has a fixed solution, but isn’t quite so specific on how the solution is resolved. I’m thinking of things like the pressure-plate puzzles in the Eye of the Beholder games, where you had to find something to weigh down pressure plates to hold the right doors open. What you used to weigh down the the pressure plates was up to you – discarded weapons, skulls, stones, whatever you felt you could part with.

The Multiple-Choice Problem: This is a problem wherein the player is given a number of fixed options (usually two or three) to resolve it (or bypass it). You can fight the dragon, or sneak past the dragon, or solve an adventure-gamey puzzle to convince it to move to the right spot so you can drop a loosened ceiling block on its head.

The Open-Ended Solution: If the game has a complex enough system to support these kinds of puzzles, they are my favorite. This is a puzzle that is more of a problem-solving exercise, which may have a preferred approach to solving the problem without barring alternative approaches.  Games with a physics system often have puzzles like these, where an out-of-reach item can be acquired by any number of weird approaches.

Just Using The Right Tool for the Job: Another favorite of mine is really not considered a puzzle – it’s more frequently dubbed something like “tactics.” These are simply situations that normally occur in the game mechanics or mini-games (like combat… and in Frayed Knights, traps) which may have tricks or preferred approaches that make it far easier. This can be as simple as finding Armbands of Fire Resistance for the party before taking on the fire-breathing dragon.

I don’t think puzzles are anything that should be avoided in an RPG. Going back and replaying the first few levels of Eye of the Beholder reminded me how much fun and entertainment puzzles and puzzle-like challenges can add to a game. If they don’t piss the player off.

How can they avoid pissing off a player? As Dave says in the interview, “If the player has to Google it, you are doing it wrong.”

Some thoughts:

• RPGs should provide in-game hints. Sometimes it’s just the right keyword that an NPC might suggest that will help the player figure out the solution.
• RPGs should make more challenging puzzles optional. They should either relegated to optional side-quests, or be capable of being bypassed entirely (made “multiple choice”).
• RPGs should use a variety of different puzzle types from the above list. Just to make sure things don’t get stale.
• RPGs should recognize that brute force is not a sin. If the player can’t figure out what the designer thinks of as a “simple” sequence to get through an array of pits, he shouldn’t be forced to go back to the beginning of the sequence each time. Let the player power through the traps and get to the end.
• If it’s not an action game, RPGs should not have a mandatory action sequence / timed puzzle.  If you want chocobo races on the side, fine. But a more “cerebrally paced” game shouldn’t suddenly require a high-speed rat chase through a maze. Fortunately, I don’t recall seeing those much anymore (probably because there aren’t many “cerebrally paced” mainstream RPGs being made anymore).
• The designers should assume that while 25% of their customers will love getting to use their brain more in the game, another 25% will hate and resent these puzzles and will want to get back to moving along the story or beating the crap out of monsters as quickly as possible. The games should always find ways to please one group without pissing off the latter.

These are the kinds of ideas that help me enjoy puzzle-solving in RPGs, instead of being filled with anger and resentment. Fortunately, I don’t recall too many RPGs that have really failed in this respect.

And by the way, you should check out the demo for  Gemini Rue, published by Wadjet Eye. I need to do a write-up on it. I was pretty dang impressed. It really did make me feel like I was playing a new Sierra adventure game in 1992. Only – in some ways – better.

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Design - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Indie RPG News Round-Up, March 2011

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 10, 2011

It’s time (past time) for a round-up of news, and info on the indie computer role-playing games in development or recently released / updated.  This time, we’ve got an iPad game that may or may not be coming to the PC, some awesome recent releases, and whatever else might be remotely newsworthy (or that I actually know anything about).  Note that this isn’t an exhaustive list of indie RPGs in development – just ones that have, well, something to talk about recently:

Avadon: The Black Fortress

The Mac version of Spiderweb’s newest RPG – and the start of a brand new series – is now out, with the PC version coming hopefully around May or so. Early reports seem positive – it’s a technological improvement over Spiderweb’s previous titles, but not a revolutionary one. But it features a new game system, a new world, and the standard Spiderweb attention to the qualities that make a story-rich “old-school” flavor RPG.

In Avadon: The Black Fortress, you play a spy / warrior of Avadon, fighting to preserve a fragile alliance of nations. But besides conventional attacks, someone is assassinating Avadon’s defenders, one by one. And you could be next.

Mac gamers can check out the free demo right here.  We Windows users will have to wait a little bit longer.

Planet Stronghold

Winter Wolves’ new combination of sci-fi RPG and “virtual novel” has finally been released. While sporting the manga visual style, it also bolts from many of the jRPG conventions, serving up a unique experience.  I’ll post more when I’ve had more of an opportunity to play it. But here are the basics:

Planet Stronghold is a story-heavy single-player RPG where you can play a character of either gender and one of four character classes. The gender thing can be important, as there are three unique romance storylines for each gender.  The dynamic story is dependent upon player choices, so it should not be yet another linear RPG. The battles are turn-based with abstract positioning (sounds familiar… 😉 ) with plenty of detail and tactical choices with up to 8 NPCs that can join you. The game advertises up to 50 hours of gameplay, so it’s a good bargain.

I’m looking forward to spending some more time playing this one.

You can check out the Planet Stronghold free demo here.

Dungeon Legend

A third-person dungeon-crawler made in Unity for Mac / PC, this game advertises turn-based combat. The video shows very satisfying dice-roll sounds when you search for loot. It’s due this summer, and is currently in alpha testing. This is a pretty exciting little development that looks awesome. Hopefully it will play as well as it looks.

You can check out their new website at DungeonLegend.com

Dungeon Brawl

This is an “Arcade RPG” drawing some definite inspiration from the original game of Gauntlet. The free demo is web-playable, so you don’t even have to download and install anything.

It throws a few more cRPG elements into the mix than the original arcade game, however, as you do level up and can spend your hard-earned gold at a shop for better equipment (making it a little more like the later 3D games in that respect). Anyway, it’s a fun little game you can enjoy in short increments of time, which some days is all I have…

Check out Dungeon Brawl.

Witchcraft Adventure

Inspired by Dungeon Master, this is a free, hybrid first-person 3D / 2D RPG from Catbone Software. An amusing gameplay change in this one is that when you die, you become a ghost, and the game continues.

Witchcraft Adventure

Companions

This is an iPad title, from Smuttlework Interactive, to be released in May. It’s a top-down graphical dungeon crawler inspired by roguelikes. It looks good, but there’s no word on plans to bring it to the PC. I don’t normally talk about iPad games here, and have no intention of following iPad-only games at this point (I have my work cut out for me as it is), but I’m happy to share any information on them that drop into my lap like this one.

From the video on their website, it looks a little like a slower-paced Gauntlet-esque action-RPG.  With a freaking huge dragon in there somewhere, which is cool.  I don’t know if it is a true RPG or not, but it looks interesting and fun regardless.

Din’s Curse: Demon War

Yeah. I’ve talked about this one already. I can’t stress enough that if you haven’t tried it, download the demo (which now includes the expanded Demon War content) and give it a shot. I know it doesn’t appeal to everybody. But for others, it’s a very impressive, compelling game that works great for playing in short segments (though they often go longer than intended, for me…)

Darklight Dungeon Eternity

The sequel to the recent first-person dungeon crawler from ZoellerSoft, this features a number of enhancements over the original. The shallowness of combat was one complaint over the original, so he’s made some additional efforts to provide greater depth with better AI and more monster & player options in combat. The spell system has been expanded and improved.  Rooms can be larger with more interesting layouts (and more on-screen objects).  The game promises to be much, much bigger than the first one, with each level being about a third larger, and with — well, the number of levels is not set in stone, but from the discussion on the forums, it sounds like there will be considerably more levels than the first game (and the first game was not small).

You can check out more information at the Darklight Dungeon website.

Age of Decadence

This highly anticipated turn-based indie RPG from Iron Tower Studios has recently undergone some performance tweaks to make it run better on less-than-cutting-edge machines. Is this a sign that they are entering late development stages?

More information available at Iron Tower Studios website.

Frayed Knights

Additional content is sneaking its way in, mostly in the form of side-quests and optional locations, but most of the work right now is on bug-fixing. Lots of bug-fixing.  And with the most disastrous, game-wrecking bugs mostly licked, we’re beginning the first, tentative steps into balancing this monstrosity.  Much work was done at the beginning to take a stab at balancing the game mathematically in design. Then things changed. And changed some more. And changed some more.  And now the game is a delightful mess of imbalance and exploits.

Most of the fine-tuning for balancing will be done during beta, but the team is working to get it all into the same ballpark by then.  Scope-wise, I haven’t done a full tally yet, but there are now 16 “dungeon” locations, six playable wilderness areas, a crudload of basic spells (well over 100) and feats (rapidly approaching 100), and over ten levels of anticipated progression through the game. And a heck of a lot of things that can go horribly, horribly wrong. Some of it unintentionally.

Leah’s Tale

This is the next title by Eridani Games, creators of The Witch and the Warrior and Ella’s Hope – both of which I felt were delightful little “casual” JRPGs . According to the developer, “In a quiet little village there’s a party planned and one young girl has a big birthday treat in store for her. With her family and friends about her Leah stands no chance of knowing how this day will transform her life forever. From land, to deep underground, to the clouds high above Estis you can adventure with Leah as she makes startling discoveries about herself, her identity and the true nature of those around her.”

You can find out more information on Leah’s Tale here.

Infernal Veil I

This is the latest  RPG from Oliveair Games, involving fiends from a mysterious “shadow army” threatening a kingdom. One departure from traditional RPG Maker titles is more randomized treasure, and a skill system allowing better character customization. You can check out the free demo here.

Terra Aegrus: Rise of the Lich King

I just found out about this one myself, so I don’t have much information. This is a game from GrayCore software, the sequel to Terra Aegrus I.  The gameplay from this video reminds me a little of the 1980s-era Ultima games.

More information available at the GrayCore website.

Ilemi’s Curse

This is a dungeon-crawling  Game Maker project by community member Unit, currently in development. Originally given the term “Dungeon RTS,” it’s been renamed and is starting to take more form. The newest version should be available in the next few days.  You can check out a previous version (and more information) here: Ilemi’s Curse at the Game Maker forums.

Dead State

A closer look at the pole arm weapon class, and it’s representative weapon… the deadly pitchfork! And as a bonus, I imagine it can be used to toss dead enemies onto a wheelbarrow for easy disposal later…

— UPDATE —

Knights of the Chalice 2

I can’t believe I somehow forgot this one. The first game is one of my favorite indie RPGs.  The new one – well, Blue Salamander is going for something a little different with this one in terms of style and visuals, which I’m not so keen on, but if the gameplay remains solid I’m sure I’ll be a fan. But he’s finally posted an update on how the new rules systems will be expanded for the sequel, and it’s pretty exciting stuff.

You can check out the updates on the Knights of the Chalice 2 webpage.

 

 

Aaaaaand….

That’s all I have for now, though I am sure folks will have more updates and things I missed noted here in the comments. Still, that is A Lot of Games! Sheesh.

Happy hacking and slashing!

Filed Under: News - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Advice From Experienced Indie Developers…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 9, 2011

‘Tis very sound… though I think the quotes at the beginning of the article are a little bit misleading.

Indie Revelations from Experienced Developers

These guys do manage to smack around a few stereotypes, though.  The bottom line is that unless you are making games as a pure hobby (and that is completely awesome in its own right), being an indie game developer is still a business. And – at it’s heart – it’s making stuff for other people.

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Armchair Arcade Podcast – On Going Indie, Game Remakes, First RPGs, and More

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Okay, I really enjoyed hearing Matt go off on what an awesome time it is today to go indie and make your own games. While it’s not quite that easy (and I’m sure he recognizes this), he does offer a great perspective as someone who has interviewed many game developers from an era where they were almost all what we’d call “indie” today — but without the advantages of modern tools and online distribution. When you had to duplicate your own cassette tapes and disks and package them in Ziploc baggies.

The other segments were lots of fun too, talking about the use of games in medicine, Bill Loguidice’s first CRPG – SSI’s Phantasie, remakes of classic games (something which I never really thought I’d see…), and a service for die-hard Commodore 64 fan (I’m a fan… I loved that machine… but I haven’t really gone back to it other than to play a few games.)

Armchair Arcade Podcast Episode 8

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RPS on Din’s Curse & Demon War

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 8, 2011

All I can say is, it’s about time…  Rock Paper Shotgun reviews Din’s Curse and Demon War:

Wot I Think — Din’s Curse: Demon War at Rock Paper Shotgun

The verdict? “I prefer Din’s Curse to Torchlight. Pop that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Yeah. Me, too. And I really liked Torchlight. For about the twenty hours it took to play it, win it, play it some more, and get bored. I got my money’s worth out of it. But I have several characters in Din’s Curse, and a couple of them have more than twenty hours in each.  I’m nowhere near bored with it.

Here’s a tasty excerpt from the above review:

Foremost in my mind, though, are the towns where I made the awesome mistake of cranking up the monster level away from “normal” and towards “hard”. Playing a game like Din’s Curse where you’ve got everything to lose is one thing. Playing it on a hard difficulty setting where you will, in all probability, go ahead and lose it makes for a fascinating experience.

It’s awesomely bleak, and a real test of will. Pushing deeper into the dungeon is as slow and tiring as tearing through its composite sod and stones with your bare hands, and all the while you’re getting messages in your chat ticker announcing your failure. He’s dead, she’s hungry, the bad guy is winning, and you’re down there with dirt packed tight under your fingernails and an imp gnawing at your ankle. Nobody said being a hero would be easy. But I’ll tell you something- when you finally do hit your stride, and you pick out some armour that gives you the right resistances, and you arrive at that enormous bad guy and- Jesus Christ- the game’s decided that he’s four times as big as any monster you’ve ever seen, and you go toe to toe with him and fell him with a final, desperate blow from your sword- that’s everything dungeon crawling can, and should be.

And to the commenter who’s immediate response was, “Why isn’t this game on Steam?” – he’ll have to ask Steam. They aren’t an open market, and they reject a lot of quality indie games for their own mysterious reasons. I know getting a game up on my website is even more byzantine, because a lot of it depends upon how busy I am with other things…  Those who live in glass houses and all that. Still, while I’m grateful to Steam for introducing hardcore gamers to many indie games, I wish people would be more willing to buy directly from developers and affiliates. Yes, I’m biased, but not only does that more directly reward the developer, but it also sets up a closer relationship with the developer and customers that is valuable for both — and not just because it’s easier for the developer to push out expansions and updates to his direct customers.

But I digress.

Anyway, I’ve not played Din’s Curse in multiplayer yet.  Has anybody here done that? (Besides Steven, if he’s reading this… 😉  ) How well does it work? My guess would be “fun as hell,” but scheduling time to meet up with friends online and play can be tricky.

I have played the hardcore more game, though. Now THAT is an intimidating way to play. Din’s Curse can be outright punishing at times, particularly if you fail to prevent a boss monster’s rise in power.  In hardcore mode, death is permanent — game over, start a new character. When you are racing against the clock, or hit a teleport trap, it’s easy to find yourself surrounded, pinned, and unable to escape or effectively fight off an attack. Throw in a bunch of totems that raise the monster’s power, and a boss who not only does the same but can kill you in three hits on his own, and things turn sour very quickly. Whereas in Diablo 2 you can afford to take things slowly and methodically with a hardcore character, you may not get that option in Din’s Curse. If you are too cautious the enemy WILL come to you.  Or at least to the town you are supposed to save.

Once again, while the game isn’t necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, it’s is a great example of a major reason I get excited about indie RPGs in the first place.  It’s the uniqueness and willingness to go out on a limb and push the boundaries a bit in new and interesting directions.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Steel Swords and Grass Roots

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 7, 2011

As I’ve said before, I reject the notion that computer RPGs have been “evolving.” I will stop short of saying that a devolution is taking place, as the mainstream game companies continue to design for the lowest common denominator. I actually think there’s a bit of a good thing going on there, as while said games may feel watered down or “dumbed down” by long-time fans (and to the author of this rant, I say, “Welcome to the party, pal!”), I think it is awesome that RPG-style games are being made accessible to a larger audience.

The only problem is that it has been become all-or-nothing affair. Business realities being what they are, nobody’s willing to gamble with the formula too much these days.  It’s a big sucking gravity well that pulls developers towards a zone of safety, and the bigger they are they more forcefully they get pulled in. So instead of seeing just some mainstream role-playing games going one way, they all seem to be doing that.

There is an (unfortunately decreasing, I think) audience out there that fondly remembers the games of yesteryear, and have been long awaiting the release of the next AAA game that addresses their needs. Many haven’t discovered indie games that are making just those kinds of games. Many others are already familiar with (some) indies, but they reject the indie games because they lack the production values and budgets of the big game studios… who are making games for a different audience and only throwing the occasional bone to the old fanbase. Instead, they just are waiting for the big boys to finally come around and make that old-school, classic western- style RPGs with modern AAA production values.

Hey, I’d love that too, I won’t lie. But I’m not holding my breath.

Let’s look at the economic realities: Let’s say there is a potential audience out there of 100,000 old-school CRPG fans who would love to play something like that feels like an old-school dungeon crawler like … Oh, let’s pick Might & Magic VI: Mandate of Heaven, but upgraded with modern AAA production values along the lines of Bioware’s and Bethesda’s latest.  I’m talking a big, epic production with old-school gameplay, top-tier graphics, and really focused on the PC gamer instead of being “consolized.”

The minimum development budget for a game of this quality would probably be about $10 million today. Ten million divided by 100,000 comes out to $100 per copy of the game… assuming 100% of the audience buys the game, and the company in question doesn’t want to make a profit (or have a safety margin). Nobody’s going to do that.  Could the company get 50,000 people to pay $200 – $400 for the game? I doubt it. They’d get a lot of people pirating it using the justification that it is “too expensive,” I’m sure.

Now, back in the day games like Ultima IV (I think) cost $80 a copy. Adjusted for inflation since 1985, that comes out to about $165 in today’s dollars. I don’t think a game developer’s going to be able to get away with that today. But I could be wrong. Hey, if I could be convinced that the game is my dream come true, I might be willing to pay that much, but that would take some serious convincing. I don’t think that’s very likely today.

So then you’ve got the indies – the small studios. I think they are only real hope for making these kinds of RPGs – the kind the big publishers are unwilling to make anymore.  But economic realities govern the indies, too. They have to put food on the table and pay the rent or mortgage just like everybody else. I don’t think any indie RPG developer out there is getting rich making these things. The numbers I’ve seen – shared with the public and privately with me – don’t seem to indicate huge potential riches waiting to shower upon the indies who “just get it right.” At least not immediately.

But they do indicate potential for growth, I think. As the mainstream, AAA industry goes further and further in one direction, they are leaving a lot of gamers behind, and a lot of fertile territory left to be moved into by the indies. I believe the audience is still there.  I think there’s potential for a new audience as well.

I think we’re gonna get there. As the market grows, as more people become aware of indie games, budgets will grow and the number of new experiments will increase. It won’t be perfect. A lot of expensive, painful messes will be made in the meantime. But I see the indies – players as well as game-makers (and in the indie world, the line between the two is very thin…) lurching in that direction… and in totally new directions as well.

That’s exciting to me. Somewhere out there, someone is getting an idea for an RPG that does something totally cool that I’ve never seen before, and haven’t even considered. I really hope they finish it and that I actually end up hearing about it.

But as this is kind of a grass-roots thing, gamers need to do their part. Indie developers don’t have the budgets to compete with the big boys for attention, or to compete against the marketing messages that quality is synonymous with detailed blood-splatter effects and expensive, famous vocal talent. So it’s going to take gamers getting vocal about their games – on forums, blogs, wherever –  and voting with their wallets for the kind of games they want to see more of. And getting vocal with developers as well. Indies are typically far more accessible than the big publishers, and it’s even possible for fans to take a direct involvement in the development (and even sales – and, believe it or not, profits, through affiliate programs) of the games.

These are exciting times. The games “industry” seems to be changing in a fundamental way.  And we’re all a part of it – gamers and game developers. Consider yourself invited to participate.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

TRON: Uprising Trailer

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 6, 2011

So I guess this series is scheduled to appear on the Disney XD channel next year. From the trailer… uh, well, I can’t really make any judgments based on the trailer at all. “Competent CGI,” I guess. But I’m glad they have Bruce Boxleitner and Elijah Wood involved.

I’d probably be more excited about it if TRON Legacy had been better. Not that I disliked the film. I enjoyed it, but it felt to me like two good but half-finished movies spliced together at the last minute to make one movie. It was fun to watch, but it pained me to see the movie so often almost reach its potential, only to give up and go do something flashy for a beat instead.

Filed Under: General, Movies - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Weekend Game Developer Articles

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 5, 2011

A lot happened this week, partly courtesy of the Game Developer’s Conference, and partly just… inspired by stuff.

Too much for me to share. But I’ll take a stab at it. For example:

Craig  Stern (Telepath RPG) is the latest to step up to the plate to try and define the Computer Role-Playing Game. I doubt this question will ever be fully resolved. In fact, I hope it isn’t. It’s the discussion and ideas it brings up that is so much fun.

Brenda Brathwaite (Wizardry, Playboy Mansion, Ravenwood Fair) addressed the growing animosity among game developers towards social games. As one of many former hardcore game devs now in the social gaming field, she responded with a surprisingly awesome anti-rant. She had an equally awesome article and lecture on the need for game designers to learn to code. Really code.

Celso Riva (Vera Blanc, Magic Stones, Planet Stronghold) was inspired by the speech by Andy Schatz at the IGF awards, and wrote about The Tao of Indies. I completely agree.

Gareth Fouche (Scars of War) decided to riff a bit on an article of mine by asking Why NOT Orcs?

Jeff Vogel (Geneforge, Avernum, Avadon) released the first game of a new series for the Mac last week – Avadon: The Black Fortress – and looks back on the fifteen month process that staked his company’s entire future on a brand-new series.

Gamasutra reported on one workshop at GDC that sounded awesome – a “Failure Workshop” where popular (and successful) game devs talk about the games that were utter and complete failures that (fortunately) never saw the light of day. If I could pick out just one piece of advice from the synopsis, it is that the coolest concept and coolest design mean NOTHING if you don’t build and play your prototype early and often.

“I’ve got this idea (for a game) – if you make it for me, I’ll give you 25%.” Yeah. I have heard variations this before, though not recently. The prices he quotes seem pretty gouging to me, but it really depends on the product and how much is being spent to market it — I imagine it costs a fortune just to get noticed in the ocean of titles for that system. The author isn’t necessarily talking about games here, but I’ve applied it them mentally. One thing I’ve come to recognize over the years is that the difference between a great idea and a terrible idea is often all in the details and the implementation.

 

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

Frayed Knights: Talking Too Much

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 4, 2011

I’m overdue for some updates on Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, the indie RPG coming later this year from Rampant Games which refuses to treat RPGs with the seriousness they deserve.

I’m still (after all this time) feeling like kind of a n00b when it comes to making a CRPG. I feel like I’m learning hard lessons that those who came before me have already learned, internalized, and understand so implicitly that they don’t even think about it.  Though those hard lessons may very well be the reason that some modern, big-budget RPGs feel so streamlined and “dumbed down” – as these games grow in complexity and features, design concepts which are merely ‘complicated’ in a smaller game might become really nightmarish to manage.

This is purely conjecture on my part, but I can imagine this is a factor.

This is kinda delving deeper into a subject I’ve talked about before, but I tend to ramble about what’s on my mind lately, which has been consumed with “filling out” a lot of the world, NPC dialog, and lots of bug-fixing. A type of issue I keep running into in Frayed Knights 1 comes from two design decisions:

#1 – I decided to have conversations be full-fledged scripted conversations between all characters in the party, both among themselves and with NPCs, rather than the traditional approach of letting the NPC do all the talking in big blocks with a few one-line choices that will usually all be selected anyway. I can pull more characterization and humor out that way.

#2 – I have a lot of optional events or events that can occur in a free-form order.

These two design features have a somewhat complicated relationship. To understand this, you should recognize that traditional dialogs with NPCs in moden(ish) RPGs tend to be fairly generic and relatively context-free. The game simply locks out dialog options that no longer make sense, and the NPC spouts off blocks of exposition that only occasionally seem out-of-place given the current game state, and then only by player request.  The player’s brain can fill in it’s own context to form the other side of the conversation, and even work itself into knots suspending disbelief when an NPC is talking about a dead villain as if he was still alive.

But when writing two-sided (or more-sided) conversations, having only one side be an active participant in the conversation sounds weird.  Plus, I’m trying to make the dialogs at least somewhat amusing some of the time (though too many dialogs do get played pretty straight – there’s just not much I can do with them).

So for me, at least my style of writing for this game, this means the dialogs should be much more context-sensitive and refer back to the current game state and choices the player has made.

And combined with #2, this means a heck of a lot of variations of conversations, because while I do provide some choke-points in the game, I try to leave what I can pretty free-form and organic, which means players may totally screw up my imagined narrative progression ALL THE FRICKIN’ TIME, and my dialogs need to relate to that. And so I end up writing several variations of a full dialog navigation tree in a traditional system.

So – a hypothetical example quest (to avoid too many spoilers, though similar formulas abound) with some of the variants I might have to write. This is an easier, linear example… which gets more complicated as players might have A and C but not B and D, etc. :

Variant 1

John Enpicee: Greetings adventurers! I was wondering if you’d do a favor for me. I want the legendary Shoelace of Despair, which is found in…

Dirk: Oh, that thing? Already got it, and we sold it to a merchant for about fifty silver. If you hurry, he may still have it.

John Enpicee: Uh, oh. Okay, thanks. Bye.

Variant 2:

John Enpicee: Greetings adventurers! I was wondering if you’d do a favor for me. I want the legendary Shoelace of Despair, which is found in…

Dirk: Oh, we’ve got one of those…

John Enpicee: Oh, do you? Great. Um… can I have it? I will offer you two-hundred silver and this Sword of Infinite Destruction I’ve got laying around. Plus you can rest assured it won’t fall into the hands of somebody evil who might do terrible things with it…

Chloe*happy: Really? What kind of terrible things could someone do with it?

Arianna: Um, Chloe…

Chloe*neutral: Right. Nevermind.

Arianna: We’ll absolutely consider your offer.

Variant 3:

John Enpicee: Greetings adventurers! I was wondering if you’d do a favor for me. I want the legendary Shoelace of Despair, which is found in the Dungeon of Facepunch, found in the North Caverns of Anarchy…

Chloe: Oh, yeah, we’ve been there.

John Enpicee: You did? Oh. Well, did you happen to run across the Shoelace of Despair?

Benjamin: Uh… no?

Arianna: Not to my recollection.

Chloe: Is it cool?

Dirk*sly: Is it valuable?

John Enpicee: I will offer you two-hundred silver and this Sword of Infinite Destruction I’ve got laying around. Plus you can rest assured it won’t fall into the hands of somebody evil who might do terrible things with it…

Chloe*happy: Really? What kind of terrible things could someone do with it?

Arianna: Um, Chloe…

John Enpicee: Will you go back to the dungeon and see if you can find it for me?

Dirk: We will absolutely maybe consider it!

Variant 4:

John Enpicee: Greetings adventurers! I was wondering if you’d do a favor for me. I want the legendary Shoelace of Despair, which is found in the Dungeon of Facepunch, found in the North Caverns of Anarchy. In order to get into the dungeon, you will need to obtain the Lens of Myopia to get past the Maze of Macrame…

Benjamin: So that’s what that lens is for!

Chloe: I was wondering.

John Enpicee: Oh, so you got the lens already, did you?

Arianna: Yes, from the Mystic north of the river.

John Enpicee: Oh. I was totally going to tell you that. But hey, since you have it already, would you mind going into the Dungeon of Facepunch and getting the Shoelace of Despair for me?  If you do, I will give you two-hundred silver and this Sword of Infinite Destruction. Plus you can rest assured it won’t fall into the hands of somebody evil who might do terrible things with it.

Arianna: Fine. Dungeon of Facepunch in North Caverns of Anarchy. Use the lens to get through the Maze of Macrame. Get you the Shoelace of Despair. Is that it?

John Enpicee: Pretty much, yes.

Dirk: Cool.

 

And so on….

Granted, the dialogs themselves aren’t horribly difficult to write, though polishing and finding and fixing typos make them a lot more work than they might appear. But hooking up all the logic to drive them – and then testing each of the possibilities, one-by-one, to make sure they all work right (even with cheat codes and / or save points to speed up the process) can be pretty time-consuming and prone to errors.

I still get a lot of holes (often identified by my testers) where they note that a dialog assumes something has already taken place that hasn’t, and vice-versa – particularly for dialogs written earlier in the development process when I didn’t have quite the handle on things I do now.

Where things get really crazy, I do tend to pull the same stunt of breaking the conversations into smaller, shorter pieces that can be mixed-and-matched with greater freedom.  For Frayed Knights 2, I will definitely have to improve that process and make better tools for handling those conversation choices.

It could be worse, I guess. At least I’m not doing voice-overs for all the dialog.

These days, when I hear someone say that “it’s only text” or that writing dialog for an RPG is trivial, I want to tie them up with the Shoelace of Despair and throw them into the Dungeon of Facepunch. Even for traditional RPG dialog trees, it’s nowhere near as quick and easy as it looks.  And for the way I’m doing it, it’s crazier still. But if I’d choose the same approach if I was starting over today… I’d just have been more clever about it. I’m tired of doing it the hard way.

But that’s what sequels are for, right?

 

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

Of Minecraft, Awards, and the Meaning of Indie

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 3, 2011

Can’t say I’m terribly surprised…

Minecraft walked away with two IGF awards Wednesday night – the Audience award and the Seamus McNalley Grand Prize. In addition, they managed to score three Game Developer’s Choice awards – the Innovation Award, the Best Debut Game, and the Best Downloadable Game award. The Game Developer’s Choice awards include mainstream games – all games, really – but it shows that indies can still compete. Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson quipped, “Apparently we are a real game now.” Mojang managing director Carl Manneh snapped the picture to the right at the end of the ceremonies of their five awards for Minecraft. The whole team was there, though Persson was the sole developer of the game for most of its development.

Amnesia was another big winner in the indie awards, winning Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and the Direct2Drive award.

Additional IGF winners included Nidhogg (Nuovo award), Desktop Dungeons (Excellence in Design), Bit.Trip Runner (Excellence in Visual Art), Fract (Best Student Game), and Helsing’s Fire (Best Mobile Award),

When Minecraft won the grand prize, the host joked about how they’ve had a tough year and could really use the money. Taken on it’s own, the comment was amusing. Unfortunately, however, it underscored some resentment I’ve caught a couple whiffs of concerning Minecraft’s participation at IGF, especially with its inclusion (and domination) in the more “mainstream” competition.

To such concerns I say: Bull!

You really don’t get more indie than Minecraft. Yeah, the dude has made millions and now has a “real” company with real employees and their working on a new game before Minecraft is even “done.”  Yeah, the game is perhaps the most talked-about title in the PC games field.  But success has no bearing on a game’s “indie-ness.” And I have no problem with an indie game being able to compete head-to-head with the big boys. That has a long and storied tradition, for those of us who remember the golden age of shareware games from the early to mid 90s.

Yes, there is a certain point at which a company is so successful – and so big – that it ceases to be an indie and has gone to join the “big boys.” Long before it sold itself to Zenimax, id Software was no longer really considered “indie.” This happened before anybody was even using the word “indie” to describe game developers, and were still depending on the increasingly obsolete term “shareware.”

Minecraft hasn’t been there. Mojang, having exploded to a whopping — what, seven employees? — isn’t even in the neighborhood. Yet. Maybe after they have a track record of raking in millions from another title or two, but not yet. But Minecraft – Minecraft is just the latest indie legend, joining the rock-star status of games like Bejeweled, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D.

In my opinion, the grousing about its classification is from people who don’t want other indie games to have to compete against it.  This has been a popular sport for years. The kid who makes a game on a budget of nothing doesn’t want to compete with the two guys making a game in their basements for $10,000. Those guys, in turn, don’t want to compete with the established professional team of three making a game for $75,000. Especially when there are competitions involved with real cash prizes and – more importantly – significant attention.

The extremely broad meaning of the “indie” label led Anna Anthropy (AKA “Auntie Pixelante”) to rant about its uselessness and a desire to drop the term altogether. I respectfully disagree, though I understand the sentiment. But in my perspective, it’s spawned from a viewpoint mired to heavily in the so-called “indie scene,” which has in recent years emphasized exclusion rather than inclusion.  This has led to many “more indie than thou” arguments, which remain pretty much crap.

I do agree that the term “indie” has diminished value now that the indies have effectively won the war. The revolution is over, though the fighting continues. But as a mainstream refugee, I believe the label is still useful – it’s only the extremes of the attitude that need to be dropped.

I mean, yeah, ripping on the mainstream industry has been a popular sport since it really became an “industry” instead of a hobby (game journalism has been doing that since it first became a viable part-time endeavor). And there’s a whole collection of sins the industry remains guilty of – which it propagandizes at every opportunity – that substitute gloss and glitz for actual game quality and value. It’s been selling books based on gold-plated covers and page count instead of the actual words on the pages. I think the “indie” label helps push the reset button on audience expectation, reminding them to look past the marketing message they’ve been hearing since the days of Colecovision and look instead at the qualities that made games so great in the first place.

Indie doesn’t mean Flash, casual, pixellated, low-budget, trendy, amateur, experimental, downloadable, mobile, web-based, part of a “scene,” inexpensive, niche, free, or obscure. It naturally can include all of these things, and much more. It’s a broad term, will remain broad, and should remain broad. Maybe, as it grows, we may find ourselves with sub-categories of indie that may prove useful.

For me, the key part of “indie” is really about the freedom from the “industry” and its barriers to development of ideas. If a game was developed outside of that control, it’s probably indie.

Minecraft is definitely indie. Notch seems to be a guy who was honestly as overwhelmed and surprised by his success as anybody else. Shame on any indies who resent him and attack him for it.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Quick Take – Din’s Curse: Demon War

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 2, 2011

I played a bit of the new expansion for Din’s Curse – Demon War over the weekend. I call it “work” as a justification. You know, so I could tell you about it and stuff. In reality, I’ve gotten myself hooked all over again. Sigh.

I’ve gushed a bit in the past about the original game. But for those who may have missed it, here’s the summary:

Din’s Curse is an action-RPG that takes the Diablo formula as a foundation, but then builds upon it in a way no other action RPG to my knowledge has ever done. It adds layers of replayability and dynamic events that unfold as you are playing the game. The course of events depends upon your actions – or inaction. Neglect something important long enough, and a natural progression of events will occur. Bad guys won’t wait in the dungeon forever for you to come and smite them. They’ll amass armies and attack the town you are charged with defending; or unleash some some sort of hellish invention or plague upon you. Or something. I don’t think I’ve seen all the variations of what can happen (I try hard not to let them escalate that far, but it still happens), but it really increases the pace of the game and makes your choices all the more challenging.

As for replayability, there are 18 skill sets (“specialties”) categorized by six different base classes. Each skill set has several unique skills which you can increase as you level – with no “cap” that I’ve found. They aren’t “trees” – but the more powerful skills cost more points to increase (and each level you raise them increases the cost a little more). You can mix and match freely between your classes’ specialties. You can also create a custom hybrid class that can choose from any two specialties in the game. This works pretty well, as I rarely buy skills from more than two specialties anyway. While this may muddle the uniqueness of each class somewhat, it makes for a pretty interesting variety of play styles.

On top of this, there are several game variants you can choose from, including a “hardcore” mode with permadeath, and a mode where your character is “cursed” and can only equip cursed items. Speaking of which, the variety of equipment – normal, common, rare, “elite” (unique), artifacts, legendary, fragile, intelligent (ego),  cursed (powerful but saddled with a penalty) – are pretty staggering. While it lacks the crafting ability (so far that I’ve seen) from Diablo II and Torchlight, the variety otherwise puts those games to shame. And the game includes cooperative multiplayer right out of the (virtual) box.

Okay, that’s the basics. The overall plot is dirt-simple: You are serving the god, Din, to redeem yourself by saving town after town from certain doom. Unfortunately, you won’t win them all, unless you are a better player than I am. It’s not quite as pretty and polished as mainstream games of the genre. But under the hood is where it really counts for players like me, and there the game is meaty and original. It’s a game where you still feel like a noob a dozen hours (and a half-dozen saved towns) into the game.

So what does Demon War add to the package?

To start off, it adds new monsters – three new base demon types and their dozens of variants.  And it adds a new class – Demon Hunter – with three new specializations with several skills / abilities each.  Bringing the total to 21 specializations, and about 196 possible variations on classes.  The Demon Hunter seems to want to be more of a melee character, but that may be more due to the specialization I’ve focused on.

There are more quests, more environments, environmental effects in the town, and a slew of new world modifiers to make the experience different. I tried one which had waves of enemies attacking the town every few minutes. I abandoned that city eventually, as I didn’t have the patience for it after I’d beaten all the dungeon challenges and there were only a handful of survivors in town for me to protect.

The townspeople are probably going to be the most immediately noticeable difference in the game, if you are playing with a character without Demon Hunter skills.  I’m still getting a grip on understanding these guys. They are a much bigger part of the game. Occasionally, in the past, they’d fight (and die) in attacks on the town, or get sick and die due to a plague or magical attack or whatever. And you’d have to check around town to see if there were some optional quests being offered by regular townsfolk instead of just the main quest-givers and vendors near the town center.

Now they are a lot more active, with personality types and happiness levels and relationships with each other and stuff like that. In practice, unfortunately, that meant I have had to go around town a lot giving handouts to keep them from starving:

I can’t say I fully understand everything going on in the towns after just a few hours of play of Demon War.  The end effect has been that the towns are a lot busier and the NPCs play a much bigger role in what’s going on. I’ve seen married townsfolk get divorces, get so hungry or destitute that they start stealing from other NPCs. I’ve even had one woman in town become so grieved over the death of a loved one (even though I avenged the murder) that she turn traitor, poisoned the water supply (spiking the cost of water & drink in town), and when discovered fled into the dungeon to join forces with the bad guys. And then I was sent to go kill her. All in a day’s work.

You have a lot more options to interact with the NPCs, including donating money to them, inspecting their gear, and challenging them to a fight (I haven’t tried that one yet… I only fight them when they turn hostile). I’ve explored some of their dialog a little more, as it seems their dialog gives some indication as to their motivations and state. The game can get pretty chaotic, so it’s hard to keep track of what everyone is doing in town. But you can see the NPCs now walking around doing their activities. Apparently some of the more adventurous types, if they decide you aren’t doing enough,  may take up sword and armor and head down into the dungeon to complete your quests for you!

I’ve seen notices of gossip going on and other things happening between NPCs. The downside is – as with the dungeons – it gets so busy and difficult to tease out the feedback for that it’s easy for it all to just seem too chaotic and hard to follow. However, some of the modifiers (which I haven’t tried) for each new town include options to slow the event progress down a bit, which may make it easier in the end to spend some time above ground interacting with people before things get too crazy to follow.

In a recent session, I had just completed a quest when the town above was attacked. I raced back to a portal to get back to town, to find a powerful “boss” fire-thrower laying waste to a lot of the main quest-givers and vendors in the town square. The NPCs were valiantly giving it all the had, including the Warmaster, who had given me the quest I’d just completed. I raced to their rescue, but the monster was seriously nasty, and managed to kill both NPCs in short order, and me as well as I went overboard trying to kill him. I was resurrected and managed to kill the invader before he slew anyone else in town, but in the meantime I had a completed quest in my queue that I couldn’t end. I considered dropping it, but held on. In short order, the steward had a new quest for me – a new potential warmaster had been found, but I had to do a quest to shut down some demonic gateways in order to seal the deal. Maybe I had to prove the town’s worth to him or something. Anyway – I did so, a new warmaster was brought on board, and fortunately for me his predecessor had taken very good notes. The new warmaster accepted my old completed quest that his predecessor had given me, and rewarded me appropriately. To be honest, this is actually something that could have happened pre-expansion,  but it illustrates the sort of emerging narratives that come through in the game.

All told, Demon War is taking the already incredibly detailed, dynamic gameplay of Din’s Curse (much of it first introduced in Depths of Peril) to the next level, across the board. On the surface, it sounds like holy grail kinds of stuff… the kind of “dream RPG” type stuff I would have laughed at a decade ago if someone suggesting stuffing all of it into a game. It’s not perfect; it’s easy to see there’s stuff going on and to see the causality for sequences of events taking place the way they do, and to get a feel for all this incredible simulation taking place under the surface, but it can be hard to do much more than simply react all the time like it is some kind of time management game pushed into hardcore mode. But at under $10 for an already killer-fun game, it’s a bargain and a must-have for anybody who already owns and enjoys Din’s Curse.

And if you aren’t sure, particularly if you haven’t played the original… the new demo includes the enhancements from the Demon War expansion. You are level-capped pretty low, but it does give you a taste of how the world works. Click the linky-thing below:

Din’s Curse – New Demo Including Demon War

If you already have the game… I recommend the expansion, which you can buy at this link.

Filed Under: Game Announcements, Impressions - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

How Much of a CRPG Should Be “Optional?”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 1, 2011

I asked this on Twitter yesterday, with a couple of responses, but I thought I’d post this on the ol’ blog as well, as I’ve noted that the masochistic folks who hang around here tend to be pretty educated on the subject of RPG design.

So today, I wanted to talk about optional content.

Generally speaking, in an RPG you have a start-point at the beginning of the game, and one or more final goals or conclusions. Maybe there’s a choice at the end  – destroy the evil wizard, or join him, or something, but the final “end” goals tend to be somewhat related and take you on a similar path. Now, that path is the key point. It may be pretty rigid and linear, as it is in most jRPGs, with events or tasks following in a pretty specific order. Or there may be a number of “checkpoints” that must be achieved in an order that is less rigidly defined to get you to the endgame.  In some cases, not all the checkpoints / sub-goals need to be achieved – some may be mutually exclusive, or it may simply be a case of you needing to obtain X of the Y necessary steps.

And then, there are things to do in the world that are completely optional. They may help you towards your main goal only indirectly (by helping you to obtain more power / knowledge / items / troops, etc.)  and add some story-based awards. But they can be safely bypassed by the player completely.

As a game developer, this is a little scary if you are developing any custom content for the optional areas of the game. Why would you spend all that time and effort making something that maybe only 10% of the players will ever see? If game-players were living in a vacuum, that would be a much bigger deal, but we gamers – contrary to how the media likes to portray us – tend to be pretty social. We talk. And we love games that allow us to compare different experiences.

But how much of that experience should be “optional?” The approach even among the classics are pretty widely varied. Even the games we celebrate as being so free-form typically had very little “interesting” content that was completely optional. If you found a dungeon in the game, there was usually some reason you’d have to visit it at some point in the game in your chain of tasks leading to the conclusion. That is, unless you have spoilers handy and are able to bypass certain vital clues / passwords.

In Shay Addam’s book, The Official Book of Ultima, he records industry legend Warren Spector’s surprise when joining the Ultima VI team:

… Spector ran into an unfamiliar problem, even for a game designer with such a varied background as his. “I was thinking in terms of how one would write a novel or a paper-and-pencil role-playing game — you know, with subplots and things that don’t really related to the major task at hand.” Spector had imagined being able to incorporate a diversity of characters who, though they added shading and nuance to the game world, were not essential to the main goal. Spector found it hard to believe that, as [Richard] Garriott had warned him, every single character they created would wind up playing a decisive role.

“I said, no, we’ll have subplots, and it will be great,” as Spector recalls. “We’ll have little side quests that people can go on.” But as their work progressed and they delved deeper into the process of turning the Ultima VI notebook into a full-blown game, it became clear to Spector that Garriott knew precisely what he was doing. “Everybody in the realm ended up being a crucial link in a chain that adds up to this immense, huge, wonderful, colossal world,” Spector said, reliving an unmistakable sense of awe at having participated in the project. “It was a remarkably complicated process, and that notebook was the key to keeping it all together.”

In some ways, this kind of backfired. In a retrospective play-through and review of the following game in the series, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, Noah Antwiler lampooned the convoluted chain of tasks that players must perform to accomplish one small, critical task. And a serious criticism fairly leveled at one of my favorites CRPGs, Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption was its extreme linearity, with pretty much zero optional content.

On the flip side, you have games like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, where most of the game seems to be made of optional content, and nobody will explore it all in a single play-through.  With procedural content generation or mutually exclusive quest lines, it’s often impossible.

And then you get everything in-between.  With an additional complication that a first-time player, working without cheating, may not be sure what’s optional and what isn’t.  And you have people who like to replay a game and make “100% runs,” or speed-runs. And then there’s how I became annoyed with Fallout 3 when I discovered that I was on the end-game track long before I was ready to give up exploring all the optional content, so I quit and went back to an earlier save-game deliberately avoided the final quest chain for a while. Particularly since, in that game, the final quest-chain pretty much SUCKED.

So in your view, how much of a CRPG should be “optional?” Are you a goal-oriented player who focuses on the main quest line, or are you the kind who kicks around and explores the game a bit, meandering around and following the storyline almost by accident? Or somewhere in-between? Do you like to fully explore the game and as much optional content (locations / quests) as possible on a single playthrough, or do you save that for a later replay?

Bringing it all home to why I’m asking these questions – Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. I’ve found that I now have a significant number of dungeons and quests that are not required to complete the game. Hitting all the subquests and “mini-dungeons” may help you have an easier time of parts of the mid-game or end-game, but they can be completely bypassed.  Part of this was by design, but part of it has just accrued over time as parts of the world have gotten more “fleshed out.”  Some of it provides alternative means of accomplishing tasks in the game. As an example of the latter, in the pilot, it’s quite possible to bypass a whole bunch of rooms and make a beeline for the boss battle. You’ll be in for a real tough fight (and a tough lock to pick) if you do this, but it’s a viable alternative which I’m fairly pleased with.

But I get worried about the kinds of things Jeff Vogel recently noted about game difficulty. Not about combat difficulty per se, but about the realization of how different players will play – and possibly get stuck in a particular mode. Making a beeline for the ending, and then finding yourself poorly equipped and under-leveled for the final fights… will that make the game too difficult for some players who don’t realize they should probably have taken a more scenic route? Or, particularly with tricks like drama stars or possible balance holes in my admittedly pretty complex game mechanics, will players find the optional spots completely unnecessary, the final conflicts relatively easy, and the overall game annoyingly short? Will they get stuck and pissed off on a puzzle that they don’t realize can be bypassed via a clue given in an optional area?

I don’t really expect an answer to questions above given in abstract, but it is the kind of thing I’m feeling out.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 16 Comments to Read

King’s Quest – New, Old, and Reduxed

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 28, 2011

Yeah, this one’s been all over the news this last week, but I figured I’d provide the link here as well. Whether you were a fan of the original, or if this will be your first experience with the King’s Quest games, this high-quality fan-made remake looks pretty dang awesome:

King’s Quest III Redux: To Heir is Human

On top of that, the big news over the last couple of weeks is that indie developer Telltale Games is rebooting the series, as they did with Tales of Monkey Island recently.

If you really want to check out the original series in all it’s 1980s / 1990s glory, all eight games are available in three packs via GOG.COM.

I gotta tell ya… after enduring more than a decade of hearing adventure games called a “dead genre,” I’m pretty thrilled by the comeback I’m seeing. Telltale Games is on fire, the new Gemini Rue from Wadjet Eye Games looks nothing short of spectacular, and a new generation of gamers is getting introduced to some classics via remakes (official and unofficial) and re-releases of old classics over digital platforms.

And then there are the stalwarts like Frogwares and Microids who’ve been pushing adventure games with little fanfare for years now which appear to be getting a little more attention lately.  Maybe it’s because of the casual games that have been borrowing from the genre? I dunno. I’m not sure if it’s time to party like it’s 1992 or anything, but it’s great to see so much happening now.

Filed Under: Adventure Games - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

You Know Your Game Is Too Long When It Takes 17 Years to Play It…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 25, 2011

Okay, that’s not exactly the case. Or not even remotely. But I amused myself with the title, and that’s what this blog is all about, really… 😉

Cleve, developer of the legendary vaporware RPG Grimoire has apparently finally played through the entire game, start-to-finish, without cheat codes, for the first time in the seventeen years he’s been working on it.

That is a long time.

Lotta bugs can build up in seventeen years, you know…

Anyway, I need to be very careful about throwing bricks from inside my glass house.  I’m actually really, really hoping this game sees the light of day. And then I hope it doesn’t suck. Unfortunately, the likelihood of it sucking is high, only because it would be so ironic after spending so many years in development, and irony can be a real jerk sometimes. At least that’s my working theory, lacking much information on this game other than hearing from people who actually tested it YEARS ago who said it was pretty good back then.

Anyway, good luck Cleve. I hope this game finally sees release this year! Just not at the same time as Frayed Knights, ‘k? Thx.

Filed Under: Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 16 Comments to Read



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