Indie Game Pricing – Minecraft Creator Weighs In

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 25, 2011

So how much SHOULD an indie game cost?

There’s a fun interview interview with the indie dude who’s made perhaps the biggest splash on the indie scene since a bunch of guys released a game called Doom on the unsuspecting public 17 years ago. You can check it out at Gamasutra:

Markus Persson on Bringing Achievements to Minecraft

He comments on a number of ideas – including adding achievements to Minecraft, and the possibility of moving it to the XBox. But I was particularly interested on his point about the price change. He notes, “We thought that when we moved the price up from 10 to 15 euros, we thought sales would decline by a third. But it was like the opposite — it went up from four to five thousand sales a day to ten thousand sales a day. It kind of went against everything that I’d be told by other developers.”

Which developers? As counter-intuitive as it might seem, what I’ve heard from the veteran developers in the scene – the ones that actually, you know, produce and sell games – pretty much match this observation. As a customer, of course, I like to see prices come down. And temporary sale pricing – that works wonders.  I bought an insane number of indie games in November & December because of the holiday sales.

But for permanent pricing — within a certain “indie” range, it’s been demonstrated time and time again that lower prices often don’t often yield anything close to proportionally equivalent sales numbers. In general, after an initial flurry of new purchases, things often settle down to being just a little higher than they had been before.  And some developers have reported similar results to Persson’s … price increases astonishingly yielded higher sales.

I guess this explains why Jeff Vogel’s earlier Geneforge and Avernum games aren’t selling for $5 now. But then he’s talked about indie game pricing a few times before.

But this is really murky territory. I know people selling higher-quality, higher-priced games on the iPhone usually found themselves clobbered on sales.  Terry Cavenagh of Distractionware has expressed his regrets over the initial, overly-high price point of $15 for VVVVVV, and seems to feel it cost him sales in the long run.  And I’ve known some indie RPGs (besides Vogels) that seemed to get mired because they charged too much, in spite of having pretty high production values and targeting a niche audience.

So what accounts for the difference? I wish I had the answer, but I doubt anyone does – at least not the complete answer. I think to some degree, there may be something like the sale price idea here. A game that is undergoing changes and improvements, and receives an increase in price, may be perceived similarly to a game that has gone on sale. Get it now before the price goes up again, right?

There’s also a psychological effect people have based on price – it sends signals as to quality. If you see two games that appear similar, but one is $25 and the other is $5, what is your assumption on quality? We tend to make assumptions that there is a very good reason one game costs 1/5th as much as the other. I think that way too, and I should know better! I’ve worked for a “network marketing” company that sold a nutritional supplement that was – in my opinion – a quality product but WAY overpriced.

I guess in the end, suggesting the best price for an indie game is about like suggesting the best length for a piece of string. It really depends on the type and quality of the game, the size of the audience, type of distribution (and monetization, for that matter), and the market realities. While $15 might be too much for a retro-8-bit styled game like VVVVVV, it’d be a major bargain for a role-playing game like Eschalon: Book 2. But even though it’d be a tremendous bargain as low as $10, Eschalon: Book 2 probably wouldn’t sell on the iPhone at that price. At least not yet.

But as for me — well, I jumped in and bought Minecraft right before beta, because I heard that the price (and terms) were about to change. It often takes a time-limited bargain to get me to take action, too.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Hanako Understands the Problem with Dragon Age. Bioware Doesn’t.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 24, 2011

I got riled up about this article.  I was planning a big retort, though I still feel kinda bad commenting on a game I feel I’ve barely played.  But that was kind of the point. I was one of those people who quit only a few hours in. And my reasons were almost the exact opposite of what Bioware thinks they were.

I was preparing to rant on how the stats and stuff were what kept me going a good hour after I’d gotten bored, as it promised potential that I’m sure is there, based on reports from other players.  But apparently I’m not alone, and Hanako (Whiner) already hit the nail right on the head.  So rather than repeat her, I’ll just point you to her short rant:

*Miming Overhead Whoosh* at I Whine About Games

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Bioware put all this stats-reporting crap into their game, and then interpreted the data exactly the way they wanted and expected to see it.  At least that’s my take. Maybe their stats are all console-based, and they are discovering console players are suffering an allergic reaction to seeing numbers on the screen, and are throwing the controllers down in disgust the third time they get to level up.  I dunno.

What I do know is that I’m losing faith in Bioware.

Filed Under: Design, Mainstream Games - Comments: 23 Comments to Read

Demon War Now Available

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

I’ll do a bigger post on it once I have a chance to play it, but Soldak Entertainment has now officially released the expansion for their butt-kicking highly dynamic action-RPG Din’s Curse.  Of which I am a fan. I am a little terrified of the expansion, as I remember how many hours I lost ‘reviewing’ the game after I’d already added my affiliate webpage and a couple of blog posts talking about it.  I’ve been able to put down the game for weeks at a time, but every time I pick it up again (to “refresh my memory” about it or something…) I find myself hooked. Again.

I’ll call that a sign of a pretty good game.

Anyway, Din’s Curse: Demon War has now been officially released for both Windows and Mac.

It’s an expansion, which means you need the original game to play. If you don’t have the original game, do yourself a favor and check it out. I can’t guarantee that it’s for everybody,  but it’s one of the games I have no problem holding up as an example of the potential indies have to make a mark in the RPG genre.

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

What Does a Game Producer / Manager / Leader Actually Do?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 23, 2011

When I was in the trenches of game development early in my career, I was lucky enough to have some producers / managers who were pretty good at their job. Later on, in other jobs (including many outside of the games biz), I wasn’t always so lucky. A couple of days ago, in response to my little commentary on interesting bug reports, we got into a lively discussion about some producers in the games biz who are pretty much useless. Late White Rabbit even asked – as an experienced Marine with a business degree – questioned the value of managers or “producers” (as they were called in my first company) at all.

One of the things that really shocked me when I released my first indie game was how much of my time – particularly during the latter stages of the project – I spent doing “management” type things. Here I thought, as an indie with a principle team of one (plus contracted help), I’d be rid of that entirely. So I figured I’d post on this – based on my experiences (good and bad), and my ideals of what I think management SHOULD be like in my own little imaginary world. But I was spending a lot of time emailing or talking to contractors, signing paperwork with e-commerce and distribution sites, working out launch & marketing plans (evidently I didn’t do so well, as the game was never a big seller), talking to journalists, working on the website, etc.

So this is valuable stuff for indies, too.

First – a quick review. How things work in theory. These lessons come directly from Mount Obvious, so you should already be familiar with them.

Let’s say you are a “lone wolf” developer. You are really good at just about everything. I hate talented guys (and gals) like you. 🙂 (Actually, I want to be a guy like that, but I hide my aspirations with jealousy.) Anyway, you the lone-wolf can devote your full attention in a  day to your game  – whether that’s a full-time day, or a 2-hour evening working part time, doesn’t matter. Let’s call that amount of work a “zot.” So your productivity is 1.0 zots, and the game gets the full zot. Life is awesome. Ain’t being a lone-wolf indie grand?

Now lets say you are awesome at programming, but not so good at art. Maybe that part of the game development process only has you operating at 0.25 zot efficiency. Or maybe you think you can only achieve your full productivity if you don’t have to be distracted by things like level design, dialog, and so forth. Whatever the case, you decide it’s best if you have a partner. Now there’s two of you working on the game. Should get things done twice as fast, right? Well, not quite. As soon as you have other people working on the game, there’s some overhead introduced involving communicating and coordinating with each other. Let’s say it’s a cost of 0.1 zot. Believe me, it’s cheap compared to the alternative – major, major disasters have been caused by teams NOT paying that cost and the project descending into utter chaos. While not a disaster, we ran into similar issues when I was working on Jet Moto, where some team members had a different vision of the game than others, and ended up generating assets that were totally incongruous with the expected gameplay (and code).

Anyway, both of you are now spending 0.1 zot coordinating and communicating, and then putting 0.9 zots into the game. Now the game is receiving a combined total of 1.8 zots, for 2 people. Not too bad.

Rev it up to three people – say a designer who is also taking on the role of tester, an art guy, and a programmer. With everyone spending 0.1 zot talking to each of their other two team members, that leaves them 0.8 zots working on the game . That’s 2.4 zots spent per day on the game, total. Four guys, the total is 2.9. Five guys, it goes up only a tiny bit, to 5 x 0.6 = 3.0. And then… we bring the team size of six people. same values. If every team member is spending 0.1 zot coordinating and communicating with the other five members, then they are spending 0.5 zots on overhead, and only 0.5 zots on the game itself – for a total of still only 3.0 zots per day.

What? No improvement at all over a team size of five guys? And it gets worse! As the team size expands above six, productivity drops even more with a flat team hierarchy.

I may be pulling numbers out of the air, and in reality guys may spend more time talking to some and not to others, but in my experience the break-down usually starts occurring somewhere between four and six team members where “flat” fails. Also, once you get more than two people involved, politics may happen. Democracies are great for getting people to coexist freely and peacefully with each other, but they don’t work well for getting  a job done. And the more people you have with different roles, the more potential there is for something “falling through the cracks” and not getting done until it’s a bad, expensive surprise.

And that’s where you get some kind of management involved. You break things into a hierarchy. Even something as dumb as the picture to the left will work — now we have seven people working, but only “talking” to the producer (who is probably, in reality, facilitating coordination between members rather than just acting as a single point of communication — this is all theoretical here…) So in this example, adding a seventh person as the producer theoretically brings everybody up to 6 x 0.9 = 5.4 zots. And even the producer may have 0.2 zots left over to do some direct work on the game himself, right?

This gets even more important with larger teams that may have two projects in development at a time.  As studios grow, this is key, as games have different manpower needs during development. Having someone at a higher level who can perceive the “greatest need” and shuffle resources as needed can be very helpful.

Obviously, there are probably much better ways of doing this that would be cleaner than having one dude doing little more than just “managing,” especially for a very small team.  But this was a theoretical exercise to illustrate about where a “flat” model breaks down very quickly, and why some kind of hierarchy gets needed after about three or four people. Anyway, that’s the basic theory, if you have a good producer managing a team. Now we’re going to some personal theories / ideals of my own –  based loosely on what I’ve seen work.

First of all – the rank or position of the manager. This is a tricky situation. And this is why I drew the picture with the team surrounding the manager instead of being “under” him. I do believe, especially for small companies, that management should be pretty much equal in pay / rank to the rest of the team – or at least no different from any of the other “stakeholders.” It’s not unheard of that a small team might actually hire someone to manage them – making the manager their employee. I do acknowledge that the lack of authority may cost them some of their tools. But I do not believe that is necessarily the case, and I think there’s something inherently healthy about the “leader” of a team also being answerable to the people he leads.

Secondly – there are lots of leadership roles on even a small team. Or maybe especially on a small team. Not all belong to one person, but I do believe there should be one person for whom the buck stops with them.  That person is the project lead / manager / producer / whatever. But whenever more than one person may be involved in a task, one person should have the leadership role related to that task. You have the art lead. The programming lead. The design lead (or “keeper of the vision.”) Someone leading marketing efforts. Someone handling the business end of things – particularly when it comes to setting up contracts with third-parties or distributors.  You could have one person doing that role. For many indies it comes exactly down to that, as there’s one person running the show and working with contractors.

But the role is always there, even for lone wolves who must wear a dozen hats daily. Someone needs to be making sure the project ships in a timely manner, doesn’t blow its budget too badly, is of reasonable quality and addresses the needs of its intended audience. In other words, they have to lead the team to success.  Someone needs to have both the will and the authority to cut features and make other hard decisions necessary. It shouldn’t be done in a vacuum, but someone has to have the final say.

One final role I admired in team leads / managers was to be the “mother hen.”  This person, whoever they are, may also be in charge of removing obstacles to the team’s success – whether it is in internal argument between art and programming, or deciding whether or not to buy a new tool for the team that would theoretically boost their productivity.

Unfortunately, as Late White Rabbit noted in his comments, this isn’t all “industry standard” even in the software industry as a whole, let alone the games biz.  Too often they end up doing the opposite of  what I feel their jobs should be. They create long meetings to feel busy and collect information so they can report to their own superiors as if they actually knew what was going on. They nitpick the small stuff, and are afraid to make a decision on the big stuff. Or worse, they play tyrant, and make fiat decisions without gathering information from the rest of the team.  And worst of all, they don’t seem to consider themselves part of the team, but rather someone aloof to the fray.

But then I’ve always been a “lead from the front” kind of guy.

(Updated: Capitalized “Marine.” ‘Cuz it’s right, and ‘cuz they deserve it!)

Filed Under: Biz, Production - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Podcast Interview – Dungeons of Dredmor (Gaslamp Games)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 22, 2011

Okay, I confess – I’m not a big fan of podcasts. Yes, I’ve been in ’em… but it’s not my thing. The reason is that I can’t work and listen to a podcast at the same time. I can do it if I’m playing a familiar game that doesn’t have any necessary dialog to read or listen to… say, a familiar RTS game or something. But otherwise, it’s REALLY hard to fit something like a podcast that lasts more than about fifteen minutes into my schedule.  I can’t write dialog or program while I’m listening to someone talk.

So for this one, recommended to me by getter77, I ended up getting some much-needed gaming in while I listened to it:

Podcast Interview with Gaslamp Games, Makers of Dungeons of Dredmor at Immortal Machines

Dungeons of Dredmor is an upcoming indie roguelike with a sense of humor and high production values. It looks like a lot of fun, and hearing them talk about the development of the game it sounds like something I’d enjoy. I felt a particularly familiar pain where they mention how they thought it would only take a month or so to complete the existing code & get it ready for release. This was back in 2008…

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Game Development, Interviews, Production - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

The Best Bugs of Ultima Underworld

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 21, 2011

As I’m in the midst of serious bug-fixing and last-minute changes to Frayed Knights, this article by Dan Schmidt, one of the programmers for Ultima Underworld (and a couple of little-known game series called “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band“) arrived at a perfect time and gave me a good laugh. I’m sure both developers and fans of the game will get a kick out of this one:

Ultima Underworld Bugs at dfan says

The last bug, in particular, cracked me up. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen a similar bug report. Usually, the producer on our team would trim those out before the rest of the team would see them, but when we’d catch them on the list they’d inspire some serious WTF musings. One of the examples I remember was how the tester reported that since we have a pond in the Twisted Metal 1,  we should naturally have ducks in there which you should be able to shoot with your machine guns.

I’m still playing Ultima Underworld II infrequently on my laptop, as I never finished the game and always figured I’d get around to finishing it “someday.” Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. It’s still a little jarring learning to “drive” all over again when I fire it up, due to a control scheme imagined back when the mouse was just starting to become standard equipment for PCs.  And the graphics haven’t aged well, either.

But I still get a little thrill every time I play. Some of it due to nostalgia and a reminiscence of how awe-inspiring the games were when they were released, no doubt, and some if it is probably rooted in simply being able to go back and revisit Lord British’s Britannia again. But part of it is simply due to the fact that even in an era where we’re playing its descendants which have realistic facial expressions for characters, it remains a great game with an engrossing world of its own.

The music from these games (some of it, I believe, composed by Dan Schmidt as well) remains part of my inspirational playlist when I’m working on Frayed Knights as well.

Filed Under: Game Development, Retro - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

It’s Not Really a Day Off

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 18, 2011

For me, at least, being a part-time indie game developer means taking the occasional day off work so I can stay home and… work.

Yes, aside from fixing a fence that was damaged in a wind storm a couple of days ago, my day is going to be spent frantically fixing bugs. As will much of the rest of my weekend. And the holiday (as my day job actually counts President’s Day as a paid holiday). So a four day weekend doing… work.

It’s a little embarrassing how much time I’ve devoted to this one project – which was supposed to be a quick & dirty little project to help me get my feet wet on the whole CRPG-making experience.  I guess that’s part of the learning experience – learning how these kinds of things can explode in workload AND size on you.

For every small, insignificant feature added to the list, there are suddenly eight other changes that should be made to make the existing features consistent with the new one, and then there are another half-dozen little corner-case bugs that must be fixed relating with the minor new feature. And before you know it, you’ve spent 16 hours on this little minor feature. Sixteen hours doesn’t sound like a whole lot,  but when you are doing this kind of thing part-time instead of sleeping at night, it’s a significant chunk of time out of your week.

Of these little drops are the thousands of man-hours made that have been put into this project thus far.

I doubt the average gamer will be able to tell. I doubt they’d care. And honestly, I don’t know that they should, other than realizing that just because it doesn’t come in a box doesn’t mean it should come “free.” It’s not the money or time I’ve put into it, it’s the value they get out of it.

Filed Under: Production - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Why Orcs?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 17, 2011

Stories rooted in the modern world or familiar historical periods are (relatively) easy to explain to audiences. You can slap a year and location on the screen, and you are done. “Hong Kong, 1928.” Boom. Not many people playing a game were ever in Hong Kong in 1928, but most of us are familiar enough with the era and geography and historical events that we can build a working mental model of the setting with that short line, with blanks ready to be filled in by game / movie / book / whatever.

If we know we’re playing a superhero game, or reading an urban fantasy book, we expect some major ahistorical elements to be introduced. But we’ve got our foundation built in precious few words. Likewise, a familiar setting set in the not-too-distant future isn’t hard to keep up with. London 2015, Chiba City 2058 – the player can simply take what we currently know of the location and extrapolate changes based on current trends. The nearer the future date, the more comfortable we feel with the setting and less exposition we know we’ll require to understand what’s going on. I really don’t expect London in 2015 to be that strikingly different from London today.

But how about, “Khevegas City, Year 168 of the Fourth Age?”

We’ve got nothing. Or almost nothing. Maybe we know it’s a city (… of mutant lobsters?) and can formulate some questions about what the first three ages were all about. But as an audience, we’re immediately lost at sea. Fantasy games not based on the real world are pretty dang alien.

With any storytelling medium, creators need to understand that their audience is only going to give them a limited window of attention with which to establish the setting and make the audience feel comfortable moving on to the more important stuff… character and plot. That window of attention may vary from individual to individual, but it’s never unlimited.

Any experienced, successful game developer (or writer) will tell you that you do NOT want your player to spend their first several minutes of a game being bombarded with exposition. That will use up the attention window in a hurry. Very few players want to spend fifteen minutes at the beginning of a game hearing backstory. It’s certainly possible to make a game for the niche that represents the exception to the rule, but most players want a minimum of exposition before getting to the good stuff (which, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t necessarily mean either action or some kind of tutorial).

For me, as a player, I want just enough background at the outset to know why I should care.  The rest I can take in as I need it. The world should not be one that requires a massive info-dump at the outset.

Tolkienesque or D&D-style fantasy worlds have had decades to simmer in the popular geek culture’s mythology. That makes it very easy to use as a foundation for a setting and provide shortcuts to the player’s understanding. With just a few visuals or lines of exposition, you can effectively say, “Medieval fantasy world. Elves. Dragons. The orcs are named ‘borks’ but are functionally identical. We’ll tell you more later.” Done. You can then explain the critical importance of the annual Bork Pride Parade in the capital city of Sniffleheim at some point prior to the player needing this information.

It’s really hard to present a really unique fantasy world to players. Quite honestly, we tend to lose interest early on because it’s hard to construct that new mental model of the setting. This is why we keep falling back to variants on this traditional setting.

It can be and has been done. One of the most strikingly original (non-RPG) worlds I’ve ever enjoyed (until it beat me too often and I quit playing) was the game Out of This World (AKA Another World) by Eric Chahi. The solution with that game was to put the player in the shoes of a character just as mystified by the alienness of another dimension as the player. I have always felt that Final Fantasy VII offered a fantastic introduction for the player into an unusual world that mixed mid-20th-century industrialized civilization (which players had an immediate understanding of) with a magical, strange one with a bizarre history. While it stumbled a lot in late game exposition, in the beginning the details were provided as the player needed them, and there were enough familiar metaphors for modern life that we never felt too lost. And I’m looking forward to the upcoming indie RPG Age of Decadence, which has adopted a world based on ancient Rome rather than medieval Europe. It is a historical location that should still be familiar enough to most gamers that they can understand the setting without requiring too much explanation.

I applaud the efforts to go beyond orcs, elves, and dragons. But I’m also fairly comfortable in those worlds, so I won’t hold the games that stay there in contempt or anything. But please, designers, just because it’s a perfectly reasonable starting point and foundation for a setting, it’s not a setting by itself. It’s only a starting point.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

3DFX – Lest We Forget…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 16, 2011

Aw, man, remember when companies still talked about gaming on the PC and it had nothing to do with Facebook? I sure do…

I loved these commercials.

“Blast his freaking head off!”

And this one starts out a little more over-the-top, with giant all-white-meat chickens and flying children…

What’s kinda funny is I remember at GDC (I think the last year or second-from-last year it was still called CGDC) meeting one of the head guys at this tiny little upstart company who was trying desperately to compete with the juggernaut that was 3DFX. Unfortunately, their little card didn’t quite cut the mustard. However, we really liked him, and we thought his card was the strongest (but still distant) second place  among a sea of contenders, so we did what we could to support it.

‘Cuz they seemed like scrappy little punks with some good ideas and a developer-friendly attitude, and we liked ’em. Even though we didn’t expect them to survive.

Who was the  scrappy little company we didn’t expect to make it? It was NVidia, of course. Duh!

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: Read the First Comment

Indie Game Developers: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 15, 2011

We won’t get fooled again!

Gamespot ran an article yesterday featuring comments from the developers of hit indie games Minecraft, Monaco, Braid, Flower, and others about the impact and growth of indie gaming in an age that where the indie developer was once, not many years ago, declared extinct. “Oops.”

The Rise of the Indie Game Developer at GameSpot.

Some interesting quotes from the developers:

“I think part of the label of ‘indie’ is that you make games for the sake of making good games rather than just to make money, so there’s an inherent will there to be experimental and original” – Markus Persson (Minecraft).

“Big-budget games are boring. Even the best ones are boring. Indie games often suck too. But because there are no corporate dollars involved, indie developers can make games that they are passionate about. Good indie games are never built for a demographic: they are built with the passion of the developer.” – Andy Schatz (Monaco, Venture Africa).

“I am not going to try and craft a game to please critics, just like I am not trying to craft a game to please players. I am just trying to make the thing that is the best that I know how to make it, which seems to mean something different for every game I work on.” – Jonathan Blow (Braid).

And what I think is the money quote comes from Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy): “I think it’s important to understand that in the 1980s and 1990s studios were doing things the way indies are doing things right now–they just made cool games.”

Now, I don’t know if the author of the above article, Laura Parker, was prompting the devs in any way to give these kinds of quotes. Maybe. But they all speak to something that has been on my mind quite a bit over the last several weeks, and that is how the whole surge of indie development today may actually be the completion of one cycle of the business.

It really does feel like we’ve come around full circle.  Edmund McMillen’s quote feels right on target to me.  I read up a bit on the history of video game development, and it certainly feels like what we’re doing here as indies is really getting back to the roots of the hobby. Before it really became a full-fledged “industry.”

It was an era of passionate game development, individual vision, wild experimentation, and rapid change. It wasn’t all “hugs and puppies,” I should note.  People were still out to make a buck. The environment was a high-speed experiment in Darwinism – survival of the fittest – and outright copying, cloning, piracy, and crap games were rampant. But out of that chaos came some really, really awesome games – and experiences that we old-schoolers are still inspired by today.

We’re seeing the creative furnace get fired up again with the indies, and that’s exciting. We’d never have seen a Minecraft come out of a mainstream studio (though now that it’s caught on, we may see some clones come out of the big publishers at some point).  And a 2D game like Monaco? No way! And Armand K., author of the last week’s article “Can We Get Another Turn-Based RPG Already?” need only look as far as the indies to discover that his wish is already being granted. Maybe not exactly as he hoped, but they are getting there.

Will the pendulum swing back? Will the furnace cool back down, the indies consolidate, going to fewer, more polished (and expensive) games? Probably. But I don’t think it’ll get as bad as it was in the late 90’s / early 2000’s.  I believe the indies are here to stay – it’s the industry and hobby around them that will keep shifting and changing.

The important part is that we need to keep having these small developers with vision and a willingness to experiment and follow their own passion rather than just the dictates of established marketing & demographic analysis (and dogma).  That’s where the games we love come from. Sure, it’s possible for that to come from a big-budget mainstream team. But I think the indies are definitely giving the hobby the much-needed creative shot in the arm.

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

Quick Take – Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 14, 2011

“Think of it as an RPG gone wrong.”

That’s part of the description of the Torque (TGEA) – based indie parody RPG, Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch.  I’ve raised a few eyebrows when I’ve told people the title of  what I’ve been squandering my miniscule-and-still-diminishing “spare time” on, but hey — it’s a humor-oriented indie RPG! It’s, like, research and stuff!

As you can probably deduce from the title alone, it’s a pretty wild ride. Mixing live-action video for some cutscenes with “toon-shaded” graphics, the game starts you in a world in which you get into mortal combat with kittens, squirrels, and “giant rabbits” who resemble big guys in rabbit suits. Particularly if you are all-too-familiar with the more modern console RPGs, the game feels both familiar and amusing. It  spoofs not only jRPGs, but also whatever seemed to have tickled the developers’ fancy, from Pokemon to anti-videogame activist Jack Thompson to the current economic downturn and even Skittles commercials. It lays the smack down on anything it can lay its paws on.

It’s a strange and silly game. Okay, “strange and silly” doesn’t begin to cover it. Crank those up to eleven, and you’ve got an idea. Think Monty Python levels of raw absurdism mixed with the sensibilities of the video game generation and the unpolished exuberance of a young indie developer who hasn’t learned the word “no” yet. The game has you hunting red sofas in the wilderness to save your game. Breaking up with an ex-girlfriend with a mustache who turns into a dog. Fighting a villain who looks like Ronald McDonald and acts like Heath Ledger’s Joker. And abusing and splatter cute animals. Apparently, it was this latter part that cost real-life Mark Leung a couple of friendships, as they felt he was promoting cruelty to animals.

So does it stand on its own as a game?

Mechanically, I think so.  The gameplay is a basic but reasonably well-handled mix of exploration, questing, and combat. The combat seems fairly well balanced, in general, and the characters you can add to your party follow the conventions of most jRPG-style games, including straight-up attacks, general sorcery, and custom abilities for each party member – from healing to combat ice-skating. The determination about who gets to go first in combat is made by a very squirrely action move where you have to manage to sneak up behind the monsters in the world exploration area and hit them with an attack before they spot you and attack you.  Unfortunately, it’s very tricky to do this and not be either too late or too far away when you attack, so in practice I found the enemies going first the majority of the time.

The different attacks and monsters can be very amusing. I particularly enjoyed the combat above, where the Pikachub (if I got the name correct) throws out a box from which springs a young boy (“Ash”) to slap the player characters. The quests and exploration aspect of the game weren’t quite as well done, IMO, following pretty conventional lines. For example, an early quest has you accepting a commission from a character called “Panda Hater” to deal with the panda overpopulation problem by killing ten pandas. Again, it’s parody, and the idea of an endangered species of the real world having an overpopulation problem in the game world typifies this games’ humor.

But humor can be a personal thing, and this style of humor may not appeal to everybody. The game can get a bit rude and crude, which usually leaves me cold, so there were many parts I found more annoying than enjoyable. There’s probably something in there to offend pretty much everybody. But I also enjoyed some laugh-out-loud moments as well.

I’m still waiting for the characters, story, and world to grab me, though. But I’ve still got a ways to go.

It’s hard not to admire what new developer Uglysoft (whose name is made more amusing to me because they bleep out the part between the s and the t in the opening titles – yes, in this I ‘m mentally a fourteen-year-old, and I don’t care!) for their technical and artistic accomplishments with this game. It’s a solid, professional-feeling game. I feel it invites direct comparison to Hothouse Games’ Penny Arcade Adventures, which shares the same core game engine, and a similar sense of humor. It may not come out on top in a direct match-up with the PA titles, it is also a “bigger” game made by a far less experienced team.  And whatever polish it may lack, it makes up for it in sheer ballsiness.

If you are easily offended, I’d steer clear. But if you aren’t too proud to enjoy a little juvenile humor or a game that goes for the audacious, I’d recommend trying out the free demo and see what you think:

Try out Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch

And here’s the trailer, if you haven’t caught it already:

Filed Under: Impressions - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Indie RPGs I’m Looking Forward to in 2011 – and Beyond

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 11, 2011

I have so little time to play these games, but there are still a slew of indie RPGs on the horizon that MAY be released this year – it’s so uncertain with indie games – that I’m really, really looking forward to. Between RPG Watch’s Most Promising RPGs of 2011 list, and doing the write-ups for some of the indie games that won Game Banshee’s Game of the Year Awards, it got me thinking about what an awesome year 2011 is shaping up to be for fans of indie RPGs.

Which would be me, except I’m also a competitor, which makes me feel a little bit squeezed in. I HAD to pick 2011, didn’t I? But nevertheless, I’m still excited. So excited, I’m pointing out my competitors to you right now.

Age of Decadence

This one is late, but while no release date has been made official, I think it’s a probable release for 2011.  This is an extremely ambitious title taking place in a world resembling ancient Europe during the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire – a little different from the typical Dark-Age / Medieval period.  If there’s a foundational element to this game, it’s the idea of meaningful choices and consequences.  From the design comments made during the development process, a huge effort has been made to leave all quests open to a variety of approaches – including double-crossing the quest giver. It also features some pretty kick-butt tactical turn-based combat, which makes it a double win. More info here.

Avadon: The Black Fortress

The first in Spiderweb Software’s new planned series, this should prove to be a departure from the game systems we grew familiar with through the Avernum and Geneforge series, as well as a step up in production values. Most importantly, it’s a refinement of Vogel’s 17 years or so of indie RPG development experience. More info here.

Darklight Dungeon 2 (AKA Darklight Dungeon – Eternity)

While the first one was pretty bare-bones, I still enjoyed playing this old-school first-person dungeon-crawler  RPG. The second game, Darklight Dungeon – Eternity, promises to be everything the first game was, and more, and is scheduled for a Q4 2011 release.  More info here.

Din’s Curse: Demon War

An expansion already available for pre-order and beta play, this looks to be a pretty sizable expansion to an already awesome game. Besides a new class with three new skill trees, new monsters (demons), and a ton of new quests and world modifiers to give more variety to the game, the biggest enhancement to the game is in the NPCs. The townspeople were already a bit more dynamic than your garden-variety Diablo clone, but now they are given a variety of motivations and emotional states and actions they can take. Including launching plots of their own, and betraying their neighbors in the cities. They are much more active participants in the game world and evolving, dynamic storyline. I haven’t played it yet, but I’m still playing Din’s Curse and looking forward to expanding on the universe. More info here.

Frayed Knights

What can I say about this game that I haven’t blathered on about for years now?  Actually, quite a bit, but I’m saving it for later. Or something. Anyway – for obvious reasons, I’m more excited to see this game go out the door than anybody else.  It is a tongue-in-cheek first-person-perspective party-based RPG with turn-based combat that is part parody, part homage to both old-school CRPGs like the Wizardry, Bard’s Tale, and Dungeon Master series, but also to old-school dice-and-paper gaming. It’s the first of a planned trilogy that begins with a group of down-on-their-luck adventurers trying to earn a slot in the Adventurer’s Guild. More info… uh, right here at this blog. Or in this forum.  Or watch the soon-to-be-updated-I-promise webpage at www.frayedknights.com for upcoming news.

Grimoire

Okay, while this has been vaporware for years, so was Duke Nukem Forever, and that one’s finally seeing the light of day. Some comments have come out lately that development could actually be drawing to a close on this one, so a 2011 release is distinctly possible. It’s currently scheduled for a Fall 2010 release… oops. Well, maybe Fall 2011? Assuming this one sees the light of day, it looks very promising. Like the ultimate evolution of Wizardy 6 and 7, if they hadn’t gone full 3D for Wizardry 8.  More info here.

Magical Diary

By the creator of the Cute Knight series,  this is a story/sim/rpg about a high school for young wizards. It promises to include tons of replayability, dungeon-delving, creative spellcasting, and all the drama one would expect from a high-school experience.  More info here.

Planet Stronghold

A sci-fi RPG that’s nearing final release (and already in pre-release / beta play). It’s (very) heavy on dialog and story, stylistically like a jRPG, and features turn-based combat and multiple endings.  More info here.

Telepath RPG: Servants of God

Now available for pre-order / early (beta) play, this game combines some of the story-heavy elements of jRPGs with an unusual steampunk / middle-eastern setting, open-ended western RPG progression, and turn-based tactical combat.  With telepaths. More info here.

Bonus Section: Maybe not, but ….

And in the Probably Won’t Make It In 2011 But If They Did It Would Be Cool department, here are some much-anticipated (by me) games that seem unlikely to ship this year, but I won’t rule them out as possibilities:

Dead State

By veteran mainstream RPG devs Brian and Annie Mitsoda, this is a RPG set after a zombie apocalypse. Yes, I know, it seems that the zombie apocalypse is everywhere these days, but this game promises to treat it with a heck of a lot more thoughtfulness than… well, than anything else. It’s really a role-playing game about leading a tribe of survivors in a hostile, competitive world.  It’s designed to be extremely open-ended, and the zombies tend to represent more of an active environmental hazard than enemies. The enemies, it seems, are more likely to be found among your fellow survivors, with competing bands of humans vying for scavenged necessities for survival. This has the potential to be reallyfreakingbig. More info here.

Eschalon: Book 3

The game to wrap up the trilogy. It’s not actually been officially announced yet, but unofficially it sounds like it has been in development for several months (when making updates and free expansions for Eschalon Book 2 were not overwhelming the developer). More info here.

Knights of the Chalice 2

There’s been little news on this front, but I’m a huge fan of the original, and development has been ongoing.  Interestingly enough, while it was inspired by The Temple of Elemental Evil, I’ve found I’ve enjoyed this game more. More info here.

Scars of War

Still refusing to be lost in the cloud of vaporware of other forgotten planned indie RPGs, Gareth Fouche’s “low-fantasy” RPG Scars of War continues development. He’s recently had to scale way, way back on scope in order to… well, in order to allow completion within a part-time indie’s budget and time frame. Believe me, I’m well acquainted with the issue. But I’ve still got this one in the “likely to see the light of day” category, and I’m holding out hope for a release in the not-too-distant future. More info here.

Sword & Sorcery – Somethin’

The sequel to Sword & Sorcery: Underworld.  After the rapid creation of the first game, heavily inspired by early Might & Magic titles, the developer suffered some major personal setbacks which slowed updates of the original, and development of the sequel. Nevertheless, a sequel is planned, right after the Mac port of Underworld. More info here.

Okay, that’s what I’ve got, but now I’m afraid there’s something really, really major that I’ve totally forgotten about above. We’ll see if you guys jog my memory.  And no, I don’t consider Torchlight II to be an indie game. But I am looking forward to it as well. And Dungeons, which I hope to find time to play sometime in the very near future.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

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

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 10, 2011

It’s been a little bit since the latest development update on that little piece of vaporware we like to call Frayed Knights.

Or, as we have only recently decided to call it –

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon

As beta is only weeks  away, it seemed fitting that we’d actually give Frayed Knights 1 an official title and stuff.

Who was S’makh-Daon? According to legend, she was a bit of a boogey-man (boogey-woman?) before Nepharides took the title. Legend has it that her mastery of magic was so complete, so effortless, that they took little more than an idle thought to cast powerful sorceries. Some stories even say that she could kill with a mere wink. Scholars dispute these stories, but affirm that S’makh-Daon was likely a very real person, and a very potent sorceress.

We passed something of a milestone this week, where the “fixed” bug list finally exceeded the length of the “Open” bugs. That’s not necessarily as meaningful as it sounds, as we’re still finding bugs almost as fast as we’re fixing them. And a lot of what we’re fixing has proven to be “low-hanging fruit.” We’ve been dealing with a bunch of problems related to save-games and exiting to the main menu and re-loading a game.  And we’re still jamming in a small handful of high-priority, highly requested features and content in places where the game feels a little sparse. Unfortunately, that’s still quite a few areas, particularly in the late-game, so I’ve still got a bit of work to do.

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

R.I.P. Guitar Hero

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 9, 2011

Okay, so I haven’t played Guitar Hero since GH3, so I can’t say I’m really gonna miss it all that much…

Activision Dissolves Guitar Hero Business

Now I feel a sudden urge to dust off the PS2 controllers and rock out to the original. It had a good run.

Not like the original game-maker Harmonix is having it easy, with recent layoffs. But I always felt like they held the soul of the series. The “true” heir to the Guitar Hero legacy was Rock Band, in my mind. But even so… they are running into the limits of the genre, I guess.

Ah, well. I’m still having fun with Rock Band 3.

Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Feeding the Hunger

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

A copy of Fallout: New Vegas arrived for me in the mail yesterday. I debated putting it on the shelf and avoiding it entirely.  How weird is that?

It’s where my head is right now, though I’m still carving out time to play games on an (almost) daily basis. I can’t afford to get sucked into a game. Part of my brain accepts that.  But what the other part really, really wants to do is just dive into another game and play it straight through for a couple of weeks.  That would be cool. I remember doing that not so long ago. It’s not like I’m lacking candidates.

“Jack” Nilssen (@DarkAcreJack) made a comment yesterday on Twitter that amused me. He said, “Sometimes, a game developer playing games for research is like a narcotics officer doing coke for research.” Yep. I have to set boundaries for myself, and even then I end up breaking them.  Since I can kinda justify playing RPGs as “research” and “competitive analysis” and “blog fodder,” it can get especially dangerous and act as a psychological substitute for real work. I set strict boundaries for myself, and yet still break them.

The danger with RPGs, specifically, is that it’s easy for me to get lost in their worlds.  That’s the experience I really want out of most RPGs, honestly – the whole escapist fantasy thing that lasts hours a day, many days at a time. It’s not quite the same as my turn-based-strategy addiction, but it’s probably related. For some reason, it feels like the “proper” way to play an RPG.

It’s why Origin’s motto, “We create worlds,” always resonated with me.

But alas, it’s not happening right now. I’m playing through games very, very slowly these days, and playing several at once.  Maybe at some point after FK1 releases, I’ll take some time out to do just that. But in the meantime, I get to be totally behind the curve on the latest and greatest RPGs are out there. Dragon Age 3 will be old news while I’m still in the middle of the first one.  Or worse, I’ll be whooping and hollering more about getting to another milestone in Might & Magic 1 – which was released before some of the readers here were even born. Doesn’t matter much to me. I just want to find the time and the right game to get lost in again.

If you are an RPG fan (and since that’s more than half of what I tend to talk about here these days, I assume most readers at least enjoy the genre), what is it that appeals to you? What do you hope for when you hear of a new release? What’s the core of your hunger?

Filed Under: General - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Global Game Jam Keynote Speeches

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 8, 2011

Brenda Brathwaite, John Romero, Graeme Devine, and Tom Lehman gave speeches prior to the start of the Global Game Jam a week and a half ago. While they were specific to the whole “make a game in 48 hours” thing, many of the principles they spoke to were applicable for indies all over.

Graeme Devine may go on record as being the first major game developer to publicly pronounce the death of the mainstream games biz. Raph Koster spoke some time ago predicting an “extinction-level event”  in the AAA games industry, and it sounds like Graeme is pronouncing it “indies.”

Even I won’t go quite that far. But it does seem like the rise of indies over the last few years has been transformative even at the lofty heights of AAA development. Maybe if there hadn’t been a global recession, it wouldn’t have had so much of an impact. I don’t think the incredibly big-budget games are going to go away – there’s far to much money to be had for the top winners in the high-stakes game.

By far, my favorite speech was Brenda Brathwaite’s.  While it was the most tuned to the challenges of a 48-hour experience, it was also spoke to the more general issues of working with a team, and scoping your design to fit reality.

Many thanks to Gareth Fouche (@GarethNN) of Scars of War for pointing this out.

Global Game Jam at UCSC

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: Read the First Comment



« previous top next »