Warren Spector: “We Are In Absolutely a Golden Age Right Now.”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 12, 2010

Warren Spector was the producer of many games well-loved by members of this community (like Thief, Deus Ex, Ultima Underworld, etc…)  He’s been interviewed by Portfolios.com, and has some great quotes about the past and present of the games industry, and of his own career (now with Disney). I particularly loved this quote about project costs back in the day… which really doesn’t sound like that long ago, but I guess it was:

The first [Computer] game I worked on, on my own, it was called Martian Dreams and it was budgeted at $225,000. I had a team of about a dozen people, which was enormous. I remember I got reamed by the VP of product development for that because I spent $273,000 total, from start to finish. And the reality is, I don’t even have to work to spend that much in a week now and we used to spend that much on an entire project. It was a completely different business back then.

And the title comes from the money quote here, which I wholeheartedly endorse.

The most important thing and the coolest thing about the game business right now is that there have never been more ways to reach an audience or more audiences to reach than ever before, ever. We are in absolutely a golden age right now. And anybody who doesn’t see that isn’t paying attention. I make big triple A games, that’s all I really know how to do and it’s all I’m kind of interested in doing … But there is room in the marketplace right now for four guys or gals in a garage making an iPhone app for kids, or doing an ARG (alternative reality game) to promote a movie, or doing something for the iPad, or doing an XBLA (X-Box Live Archade) game, the small team-low cost, downloadable. There are people doing episodic content that you can only get by downloading it. There are so many ways to reach so many audiences, that there’s absolutely room for entrepreneurs now.

Heh. The funny thing is, when I met Richard Garriott, I think I shocked him by almost immediately asking if he could introduce me to Warren Spector. Yeah, screwed up priorities, who would be more excited to meet Warren Spector than Richard Garriott? But I was a total Wing Commander junkie at the time…

Sigh.

Anyway, check out the entire interview here:

Warren Spector Interview at Portfolio.com

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Blizzard Jumps the Shark?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 11, 2010

Is this for real?

Suspending or banning people and revoking their CD-Key for cheating in single-player against the AI?

If it’s for real, that’s beyond the pale. Maybe I’m just an old fossil who remembers some games that were so buggy and poorly balanced or just plain vicious that they couldn’t really be won without a little bit of not-so-clever trickery. But seriously, guys… it’s their game, they bought it, they should be able to play it however they want if they are playing by themselves.

Oh, wait, I forgot. That was the old world.

In this brave new world, you only rent your games from the publishers.

Screw that.

Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Game Design: Character-Building Exercise

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Modern CRPG design philosophy, at least so far as I can grasp from interviews and games, seems to hold that it is a sin to make a player wade through the character generation process prior to letting them get to “the fun part.” Character generation should be as streamlined as possible, minimized, and preferably delayed until after the adventure started. Players want story and action, not to be confronted with statistics.

Hey, I get it. It makes sense. You are promised on the box a game of adventure and discovery. But it starts out with a screen of numbers and unfamiliar terms that you are somehow expected to assign, balance, and not shoot yourself in the foot by making a magic user with an intelligence so low he can only cast the beginner spells. Oh, and rolling dice to create a character? Letting chance dictate that your character may be underpowered? Extra bad with bad sauce!

With some designers being very vocal about eliminating these design horrors of a bygone era, it’s easy to forget all those times I used to keep myself awake in Mr. Droneburg’s Geometry class (no lie: That was actually his name) making Champions characters. Or the little feeling of glee I experienced going through Eschalon‘s old-school character generation system (I only really played one character, but I made five).

Last week, I picked up Icewind Dale Complete, a late-90s RPG using the 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. It is a less story-driven, more hack-and-slashy, and somewhat less famous little brother to Baldur’s Gate. It lets you create an entire party of six adventurers. Actually, it kinda requires it (I forget if it provides pre-generated parties, like its sequel).  I thought I’d play through the first twenty minutes of the game, just to get a feel once again for a new (to me) old-school Bioware-style RPG experience.

As often happens with a good RPG, my quick trip to the fantasy world lasted considerably longer than I intended. Like, closer to two-and-a-half hours. At least half of that time was spent creating characters. I had no idea that much time had been passing, but I was completely entertained. And the random dice rolls were a big part of the entertainment factor. I was exploring the possibility space, trying to decide on the best arrangement of stats which, with a little bit of tweaking, could help describe someone filling a key role in my awesome adventuring party. It was challenging and gave me a gambler’s rush. I was having a blast, and I hadn’t even started “playing” yet.

Okay. Maybe there’s only a niche  geeky old-school gamers that find deep, involved character generation to be fun. And sometimes I’m not all that into it, either. But I suspect that it’s more of a case of presentation and expectations. We old school tabletop gamers immediately recognize the page of stats for what it is and represents, but other gamers may wonder if they’d accidentally ran accounting software instead of a game.

Making – and growing – a character is a key element of the RPGs genre. And it can be FUN. Rather than simply delaying, hiding, and minimizing it, turning it into just a bonus point to drop into a skill tree, maybe designers can focus on enhancing this aspect of the genre. Make it more fun, make it easier to use, make it more interesting, and make it deeper. It’s been done, to a degree. Fallout 3 at least tried something kinda interesting with it. In the dice-and-paper world, there have been several systems and supplements that created a very detailed character generation system that combined random dice rolls and personal choices into creating not just your character’s “starting stats,” but an actual skeleton of a history, waiting to be fleshed out by a little bit of imagination. Why can’t CRPGs do the same? If you played the Cute Knight games, that’s pretty much the core gameplay right there. Okay, it’s not so much character generation as building one over time, admittedly, but there are some interesting ideas there.  And it was for anyone but the traditional, hardcore audience.

I’d like to see more of that.

And I’d like to see more building entire parties for adventuring rather than just one character, but that’s a whole ‘nother rant.

Filed Under: General - Comments: 18 Comments to Read

Bejeweled 2 FREE Today Only

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 10, 2010

Okay, the site is like TOTALLY slammed right now with people right now, but until 10:10 PM Tonight Pacific time, Bejeweled 2 is FREE at popcap.com to celebrate the 10th birthday of Bejeweled!

(And, as we know, thus began the casual game phenomenon….)

Filed Under: Casual Games, Free Games - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Old-School RPGs Revisited – Blog Recommendation

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 8, 2010

As much of a fan as I am of old-school western RPGs, I can’t hold a candle to this guy. I discovered him recently and have been going through his candid play-throughs and semi-reviews of old computer RPGs, and have enjoyed them thoroughly. Even when he completely disses on Ultima II (I never played the first two Ultimas, so my fanboy hackles weren’t raised).

I think this is also a great companion piece / counter to the articles from a couple of weeks ago about how Ultima IV is “unplayable” by modern gamers.

You can check it out here:

CRPG Addict Blog

What I’ve really enjoyed about CRPG Addict is that he  “gets it.” He can compare The Bard’s Tale in the same paragraph with Neverwinter Nights, and it’s not necessarily the oldest game that comes up wanting.  As he is giving all of these game “the old college try” in a reasonable approximation of their original environment in which they were released – and refuses to use any form of cheat or or walkthrough – he’s basically recreating the experience of players a quarter century ago, and taking the games at face value.

The rose-colored glasses come off, but then so does the modern bias. He “gets” why not being able to just reload a saved game or respawn a few feet away makes for a more entertaining challenge, though he’s also frustrated when it gets to be Too Much. He enjoys a good, solid challenge, but also resents it when the game just becomes unfairly punishing just to extend the gameplay. He re-experiences why we loved these games, and also gets reintroduced to the things we hated back in the day.

In-between games, he offers commentary on RPG design, which as an indie RPG designer I find invaluable. Even if I don’t necessarily agree with him on everything, it’s a valuable perspective.

Anyway, I just thought I’d pass along this recommendation.

Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Making Games Is Easy! And Kinda Like Playing a JRPG…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 7, 2010

This is a few months old, but still a fun and motivational blog post from Sophie Houlden:

Making Games Is Easy, and I Won Apparently…

She makes a few analogies to playing through a JRPG (and not just the amount of necessary grinding). Her point really is that if you have the desire to make games, there’s nothing stopping you. You have to start somewhere, and nowadays its easier than ever to get started. No,  you won’t be making the epic blockbuster supergame of your dreams right off the bat, but making *a* game and getting the ball rolling isn’t really that big of a deal.

So get started.

Good advice.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Turn-Based Combat – Tactics Versus Execution

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 6, 2010

As she was cleaning up our storage closet this week (making room for Christmas presents, I guess), my wife pulled out an old wargame of mine that has been preserved over the decades – the TSR release of the hard-core air combat game Air War. I’ve never been much of a wargamer, but Air War was one of the few I’ve played. And I loved it. I couldn’t help but pop open the box and look over the contents – zillions of chits, blank hex maps, laminated ‘control panels’, and booklets of rules, scenarios, and aircraft stats.

I mainly played it with my younger brother, and a couple of friends. This game was complex in the extreme, or so I have been told (having not played a lot of war games, I have to take people’s word for these things). The guy who sold it too me said it was almost – but not quite – the complexity of the popular and highly detailed war game of the era, Squad Leader.

Keeping track of all the factors at work with multiple jet-age warplanes (and missiles in flight) was quite the task. The game did a good job – within the rules, certain maneuvers usually came out pretty close to what could be accomplished in the real aircraft.  Of course, the game took three hours to simulate thirty seconds of combat, but it was an awesome way to learn about air combat tactics.

I haven’t had the heart to toss the game or sell it at a yard sale or anything yet. But consciously and subconsciously, I know that my likelihood of ever playing the game again is pretty much nil.

Why? Due to the complexity of the game, it’s really limited to small tactical engagements. I think the most I ever played in this game was a 4-on-4 battle.  It was difficult to maintain that many aircraft (especially with missiles). For an engagement that small, there’s not a whole lot the turn-based tabletop game can offer than can’t be handled better in a modern computer-based flight simulator in real-time. Especially with multiplayer, and the ability to record the entire battle and play it back from any camera angle.  Sure, the simulator adds real imperfections to the tactical side of things by participants not executing perfectly, or not even following the plan or orders correctly, but for me, modern flight sims really scratch all the itches that Air War once did back in 1983, and do it better.

So when it comes to air combat, I’ll take real-time over turn-based.

Strangely, my preferences invert somewhat when it comes to RPGs. And I’ve spent many, many hours running around wearing chain mail wielding padded swords, shields, and foam-tipped arrows for my bow, participating in combat that was about as visceral and as close to the real thing as you can get and still be relatively safe. I’ve enjoyed fencing with epee and rapier (thought I’d love saber fencing, too, but so far I haven’t warmed up to it). One would think that after a taste of real-time simulated combat, my preference for the weird abstraction of turn-based combat would also fail.

Not so. Maybe it’s because action RPGs feel nothing like the simulated combat I’ve participated in, but while I don’t mind a good action-RPG, I don’t salivate over them like I do over a good tactics-based RPG. Think Knights of the Chalice or the old D&D Gold Box games. But in simulated fights, especially when I was commanding a group of fighters on the battlefield, my mind tends to go into a place that feels more like turn-based combat than the twitchy-arcade feel and clicking mechanic of your average action-RPG. Yes, timing is everything, but a lot of it feels more akin to something like, I dunno … speed chess, maybe. Not that I’m a speed chess player, so I’m guessing.  But a lot of it is planning three or four “moves” ahead, moves and counter-moves, attempting to force your opponent into likely maneuvers and preparing the appropriate responses, including contingencies for the occasions they don’t play along with your script, and trying to fake them out concerning your own habits and tendencies so they can’t do the same to you.

With a small team of combatants, it feels even more like a tactical war game.  Again, timing is everything – which probably makes it feel more like a real-time strategy game than an action-RPG – but it’s still a case of move and countermove, each side trying to match their strength against the opposing team’s weakness in a dynamic, changing situation.  The “Real-Time With Pause” approach to combat popularized by the Baldur’s Gate series felt a lot like this, though turn-based combat still often better mimics the “ideal” in my head – the constant solving of tactical puzzles.

This assumes party-based combat. With a single-character, or a single character plus a henchman / pet / summoned help, I’m still a lot more on the fence over preferences between turn-based and real-time combat. But I really enjoy the tactical interaction of an entire party of characters — and that dynamic, sadly, has begun to disappear because it’s too hard to do it in real-time.

I’m not sure of why I have that shift in preferences. Maybe I prefer the execution of flying versus the tactics in terrain-free air, but don’t get that same visceral feel in fantasy combat. Maybe it’s something else. As I said, I do enjoy a good action-RPG. But they leave some major itches unscratched.

(Image by BoardGameGeek.com)

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

How Much Money Can an Indie Game Make? The 2010 Edition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 5, 2010

Minecraft continues to defy all expectations. It’s now selling as much as 10,000 copies per day (It actually spiked to over 25,000 one day, after a few days of the server being down).  It’s sold over 300,000 copies total as of several days ago. But just think about it. Thousands of sales.

Per. Day.

At about $13.50 USD per hit (depending on  exchange rate), and assuming a 15% transaction cost, that’s still around $11.50 per sale times 7,000 to 10,000 copies. Per Day.

Most indies I know would be thrilled to make half that much in an entire year for a single game.

Now, it’s a fluke. An inspirational fluke. It’s reset some expectations.  But an indie can’t just go out and expect that they could just sell “half as much” as Minecraft. In all likelihood, it ain’t happenin’. But it’s nice to know what’s possible. And while it’s the current poster child for runaway indie success (and every article about it, like this one, helps its success just a little bit more), its story is not entirely unique. Just of the largest magnitude that I’m aware of to date.

But let’s not focus on the aberration.  Let’s look at some more numbers:

Jeff Vogel explained that he sold a little under 4,000 copies of his science-fantasy RPG Geneforge 4 in a little over a year. And it’s a pretty typical game for him in terms of sales.

A quick look at the XBox Live Indie Games sales charts for 2009 shows that the top-selling game enjoys ten times the sales of the 17th best-selling indie game, at approximately the same price-point (the 18th best-selling game sold a little less than 1/10th as much, but its price was ten times higher, resulting in sales in the same ballpark by dollar amount). But in the “other sales” category, we see games that have only sold a few hundred copies.

I know many, many indie games that never sold a single copy. Or only sold a handful. Literally. You could count the sales on both hands. Many times, these indies give up in disgust. After putting hundreds of hours into a game, only to have it completely rejected on the market… it’s hard.

You can find some more indie sales statistics at GameProducer.com.  Many are painful. Some are inspiring.

I just wanted to point out what kinds of extreme variation exists in indie game sales.  When prospective indie game developers start asking about how much money they could expect to make on their game, they are putting forth a serious effort to try and understand the business so they can work around those expectations. You don’t want to spend $15,000 of your own money out-of-pocket (or out of your credit cards’ max limit) on a game with which you can’t expect to make more than $10,000.

But the problem is that it’s very much of a “how long is a piece of string?” type of question. There are a heck of a lot of variables at work, not the least of which is a factor of pure old-fashioned luck.

With all this in mind, I wanted to note again Mike Kasprzak’s October Challenge. I’ve found that this is inspiring a lot of people – from absolute newbies to some fairly high-profile indies – to jump in and try to get a game to market by the end of the month.  There’s no real “point” to winning the challenge other than bragging rights and personal satisfaction, but the pros all know that having a solid deadline in mind really makes a difference. I’m not even planning on releasing in October, but I’ve found that some of the thrill of this challenge is wearing off on me and helping me move towards my goal more quickly.

Even if the end of the month seems an impossible goal, I’d say shoot for the moon anyway. With whatever time, effort, and budget you can spare if it turns out you never sell a single copy. Maybe you won’t. Probably, you won’t sell many. Maybe you could be the next Minecraft.

But the thing is, the mainstream games biz has become stale. Not totally – there are still some great games coming out from big publishers through traditional channels that have been great fun.  But I do feel that the huge budgets and risk-aversion has caused the industry to lose a lot of the vibrancy and creativity it once possessed.  Indies are a major source of new blood and fresh ideas that we need. So I hope this challenge does inspire a bunch of creative, fun-loving people to take the plunge, break the ice, and begin their journey.

Good luck.

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

Sintel

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

If you haven’t yet seen the short film Sintel on YouTube,  here it is:

The coolest part?

It was made by independent funding from donations, and was created using Blender – the free open-source 3D modeling package. In fact, the goal of the project was “to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender.”

I think they’ve managed to prove their point – the an untrained eye like mine, I really can’t tell the difference between this and a major CGI-animated blockbuster out of Hollywood. Blender really is a very powerful tool.  I just wish they’d focus a little more on its low-poly real-time graphics modeling issues instead of this fancy high-end movie-making capabilities, but that’s just me.

Not that it would make much difference for me. My models in Blender don’t look anything near this awesome.

Filed Under: Art, Movies - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

State of CRPGs This Summer: Lucky Thing I’ve Been Too Busy To Notice…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 4, 2010

RPGWatch contributor VoxClamant states that for CRPG fans, it has been a long and disappointing summer:

“…it was largely a summer of disappointments and failures.  And it was matched by some discouraging trends in the game industry that are slowly trying to sap the life out of gaming.  Were it not for mods to old games, indies such as Eschalon: Book 2 and Underworld – and DLs of some classics now available – I might have had to actually do something as distasteful as step outside into the real world, or fix my shed, or trim the hedge.”

Perish the thought!

As to the trends he is referring to, those disturb me too.

For one thing, he notes how games are being released buggy and badly in need of patches from day 1. This is not a new trend, however. This has been complained about ever since that Internet thing caught on, and patches became a possibility. It’s now going to consoles, too, which is both humorous and sad.

He also notes the horrible, horrible trend with premium downloadable content (DLC). I have nothing against DLC or expansions, but charging $5 to $10 for something that is less impressive (and offers less gameplay) than a free fan-built mod is ridiculous. My own personal concern is being asked to pay extra to get what really should have been with the core game in the first place.

Intrusive DRM is another issue, although when he mentions the increasingly casual attitude towards “game theft” (he does not refer to it as piracy), it sure seems like it’s a response to a losing war. Even $5 for an amazing game is too much for games for younger consumers, because they know it is a trivial matter to find illegal versions for free.

And for RPGs specifically, he notes a general trend towards the “dumbing down” of the mechanics.  I should comment on this, but it would require a whole ‘nother entry, so I’m going to hold off for now. The long and short of it is that I think the pendulum has swung too far in what was a previously needed direction.

Anyway, the rant is worth reading, and it ends on a happy note – there are some great-looking RPGs on the horizon.

But as for me, I’ve been so busy with my own game and playing a wide cross-section of recent and older games, I’ve really not noticed much. I’ve even missed some indie RPG offerings, for which I need to repent as soon as I get a chance…

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

Frayed Knights: Part-Time Indie Blues

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 1, 2010

I took a day off of the day job last week just to focus on Frayed Knights development. I was able to pretend to be a “full-time indie” for a day.  It’s amazing how much more productive eight hours of semi-uninterrupted time in a single day is for development than the same amount of time scattered across several evenings when you are part-time. It really helped me get over a hump. The distant light at the end of the tunnel felt distinctly closer.

So maybe I was feeling a little overconfident when, in spite of the tons of missing or placeholder content and little missing things like major character abilities, I told  Kevin (Xenovore)  in chat, “You know, if I were to really push it and go crazy, I could have Frayed Knights playable, start-to-finish, by the end of the week.”  Playable is a far cry from “complete,” but we’re still talking about a major milestone here. My schedule seemed clear enough, and I was kinda feeling like I was on a roll.

I probably jinxed myself by saying that.

The gods of game development conspired against me. My wife and I had completely forgotten about a Tuesday evening get-together we’d committed to. And Wednesday night we had an emergency at work that required a late night, which left less time and a lot less energy to work on the game. Real life does that, and it can play havok with part-time indie dev efforts.

So that didn’t work out quite the way I’d hoped. The good news is that after I whined last time about needing more and better tools for putting together all the diverse elements needed to make an RPG work, this week I spent some time enjoying all the groundwork (and previous “black triangles”) and tools I’d already built. I really do feel like I’ve crossed some kind of threshold, and may finally be on the downward slope. Hopefully that means things will continue to accelerate, in spite of little complications of part-time indie life.

The big challenge now is tying things together. While all these different pieces of story and gameplay were part of a cohesive story arc in my mind and design doc, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to convey this to the player, who may experience them all in a completely different order than I envisioned. I have almost no budget and precious few assets to work with, so I am making do.

Occasionally, I’m pretty happy with the results.

What, you were expecting the Lord of the Rings movies or something?

Okay, yeah – I’m definitely annoyed that after so much time in development, I’m not delivering some kind of masterpiece. It’s not gonna be that. I’m using decades-old low-tech, low-budget storytelling tricks, building on an antique game engine  in my part time to make something that’s kinda goofy and cheesey. But hopefully it’ll prove amusing, unique, and most importantly fun.

And maybe by NEXT week, I’ll be able to play the whole thing from start to finish, and see it as a whole. I’m kinda terrified.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Spiderweb Fifteen-Year Anniversary Sale

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

You know what I don’t do enough of? Reposting press releases. Probably because I receive so few of them. But here’s one that’s got ME excited, and by excited I mean, “Searching for loose change under the couch.” Spiderweb Software, the original “indie RPG” studio, is making this a very special October sale. ‘Cuz they are, like, fifteen, which is a number evenly divisible by five, and this officially makes them older than 99% of all game studios out there, and 99.9% older than all game studios NOT owned by a major publisher.  And they also have finally completed two major game series, which means the entire collection is on sale. So – here’s the deal:

October 1, 2010 – It was fifteen years ago that fledgling Indie game developer Spiderweb Software released its first game out into the wild. This was, by game industry standards, a long time ago. Back then, small developers sold something called “shareware.” The World Wide Web barely existed. People took photographs on “film.” Cell phones were the size of loaves of bread. Also, dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

Yes, the past millennium was a dark and confusing time. And yet, we prevailed, making many fine Retro fantasy role-playing games for Windows and Macintosh. Now we invite all to celebrate our continued survival by offering hefty discounts on the fruits of our labors. For the whole month of October, all collections of our games are 25% off, and everything else we sell is 10% off. CDs containing three or five deep, full-length RPGs, already sold at a discount, are now even cheaper!

Whether you need a big pile of distractions from the recession and the cold and dark of winter, or you need a nice CD to give as a gift to a gamer friend, or you just like collecting shiny discs, we are eager to help.

Not convinced? Try out one of our huge, free demos:

http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/products.html

And here’s hoping for another fifteen years. With any luck, our 30th birthday e-mail will be sent out from inside our Pleasure Pod and will celebrate flying cars and the Cure For Death.

Spiderweb Software, Inc., an independent game-design company based in Seattle, WA, is fanatically dedicated to creating fun, exciting fantasy role-playing games for Windows and Macintosh. Past titles include the award-winning Geneforge and Avernum series. More information on the company is available at http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/.

The CDs option may be especially interesting to folks looking for possible Christmas gifts. I mean, what better gift than to start a friend on a lifetime of addiction to appreciation of indie role-playing games?

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

Getting Over Gaming Guilt

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 30, 2010

Many years ago, listening to the radio on my commute to my day job at the video game studio,  I heard a report on the radio about how the average American watches over 25 hours of television a week. I was instantly seized upon by a feeling of some kind of moral superiority. Why, I maybe watched 2 or 3 hours, total, and that was only during the “on” season.

After a moment of reflection, however, I considered how many hours I spent playing video games. Ah, there were the rest of the hours. My sense of moral superiority fled. Mostly. I still considered gaming to be more-or-less superior to passive TV viewing, but still – that was a big chunk of time spent each week on my hobby!

I spend significantly less time actually playing games since then. There’s just not that much time in the day, especially since I have a full-time job and a family and side-business other hobbies and responsibilities and stuff. This is a problem most adult gamers run into, eventually. There’s always more to do than time to do it.

But I still game. I love gaming. I don’t want to be one of those game developers who don’t actually, you know, play games anymore.

But what I’ve found, lately, is that I feel a little guilty spending time gaming. ‘Cuz, you know, time spent playing games is time not spent finishing up Frayed Knights. Or hunting down and setting up affiliate indie games for the Rampant Games website. Or writing a quality article about games and indies, instead of the usual bashed-together stream-of-consciousness crud I normally slap up here daily. Yes, I fully recognize that in order to write about games, I should be playing them.  And I do, but I just feel guilty about it.

That’s not the way to play games. They are meant to be enjoyed and loved.

Plus, games are a major – and important – part of my life. They are how I let off steam and retain my sanity. Games are, for me, a release, an escape, a palette cleanser for my brain, a source of material for this blog, a source of inspiration in my development work, a social activity with friends, a badly needed break from the routine, and a healthy little dose of adventure and excitement in my day. These are not things to feel guilty about!

So how to get over the little nagging feeling that I should be some kind of robot that is 100% productive 100% of the time?

My solution – I think – was borrowed from a trick I learned about personal finance from a seminar a couple of years ago. I had the same kind of misgivings “wasting” money on fun but pricey stuff, like taking the entire family to see a the symphony performing an evening of video game music, or enjoying a more expensive restaurant. They presented a simple budgeting plan (with, of course, aggressive portions allocated to savings and investment), but a portion had to be allocated each paycheck to “play money.” Play money has to be spent on frivolous, fun activities or purchases. It couldn’t be saved too long.

It was money meant to be blown. Without guilt. That was the trick. We’d have blown it anyway… we could just do it without feeling bad about it. That’s what that supply of cash was FOR.

So I’m trying the same thing with time management, and gaming. I don’t think I’m spending any less time playing them now than I did a few weeks ago, but now I think, “I am supposed to spend this time playing games,” (particularly RPGs) so I don’t have to worry about what I could have otherwise been doing with my time.

I’m still working out the kinks in this system, as it’s awfully easy for  a quick 20-minute session to turn into two hours.  And then there’s the issue of finding the best time to game. When I’m dragging, a half-campaign of Left 4 Dead 2 can often be exactly what the doctor ordered for a needed break that helps me get another solid hour or two of work done afterwords. Sometimes. So what time is the best play-time?

So am I unique in my little mental disorder? Somebody please tell me I’ve not been alone in this…

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Shoot ‘Em Up (SHMUP) Interviews, and Boss Design

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 29, 2010

What makes a great shoot-em-up (shmup)?

I’m not sure I have an answer now after reading this interview with two extremely veteran shmup creators Matthew Doucette and Christopher “udderdude” Emirzian,  but maybe I am a bit closer:

Diametrically Opposed Indie Shmups Fight for Justice

Some fascinating excerpts:

On innovation: “This is one of the most difficult genres to innovate because (almost) everything has been done before, as this genre was the most popular genre in the past.”

On indie efforts in this arena: “Most indie devs do it wrong mostly because they are not shmup fans and just don’t get it. Some of them do it wrong because they try to capture the mainstream gamers and, in failing to do so, lose the shmup fans and are left with no love.”

Man, talk about a hardcore genre!

As an added, somewhat-related bonus: Here’s a great article on boss design.

Filed Under: Interviews - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Planescape: Torment Available from GOG.COM

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 28, 2010

Okay, I guess all is forgiven now.

Planescape: Torment is now available from GOG.COM

I guess this means I can finally give my buddy his copy back.  I’ve had it for many moons now…

Yeah, I was one of the idiots who let this one slip past when it was first released. And it’s a pretty fair representation of the kinds of things I keep asking for in CRPGs. Totally non-traditional setting. Deep characters and storyline. Combining a familiar and popular game system (Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, as converted to CRPG-dom via the Baldur’s Gate engine) with a refreshingly original story.

Of course, I still haven’t finished it yet, so I’ve not entirely repented of my idiocy.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

With Video Games, “Old” is Kind of a Relative Thing, Right?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 27, 2010

April 2, 1996… I was sitting on a bus at CGDC (before it was renamed “GDC”) getting ready to go to Microsoft’s big DirectX party (turned out to be a big toga party). I overheard snippets of conversations around me. A couple of seats behind me, I heard this exchange:

Developer 1: So what have you worked on?

Developer 2: I worked on Pitfall.

Developer 1: Wow! Really? I loved that game!

I didn’t hear the rest of it, but I don’t think that Developer 2 was actually David Crane. He sounded too young. It was probably someone who worked on Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, which had been released about 18 months earlier.  Still, considering the number of game development luminaries in attendance, the possibility that Crane may have been among us was tantalizing. I mean – that game was a very old classic at the time. The history! Why, at the time, Pitfall was… about fourteen years old! Ancient history by video game standards!

I thought about that this weekend, and then had a shocking revelation.

My first game, Twisted Metal, is about to turn fifteen years old.

Yeah. Okay. I’m feeling very old and unproductive now.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



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