Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 26, 2010
Okay, I’m being a total fanboy here, but…
I actually had *some* time with my extended weekend to delve deeper into the Advanced Player’s Guide for the Pathfinder RPG (a pen-and-paper RPG which is based heavily on the D20 3.5 rules). I’m way impressed. Okay, maybe not so much with the Alchemist class, but the book is otherwise packed with the kind of flexibility and fun-sounding options that made me excited about D&D 3.x in the first place, over ten years.
But I couldn’t help but think: If this had been a product by Wizards of the Coast for Dungeons & Dragons, the same material would have been scattered across six different rule books, bulked out with filler.
Back in the day, I really liked how they married the old-school class-based system of D&D with skill-based rules. It seemed like a best-of-both-worlds approach. But over time, it became clear that the makers of D&D really wanted to downplay feats and skills because new classes sold more books. After all, if you make some cool ability a feat, you’ve only filled up maybe 1/6th of a page. But if you turned it into a class ability for a brand new class, then you can fill 3 pages with largely redundant information. And then you could also make it a class ability for three or four more classes, with minor variations, and put them all in separate books!
Pathfinder isn’t doing that (at least not so far). I especially like the class variant idea. Want to be a fighter that specializes in archery? No biggy, just choose fighter and this variant, which exchanges a couple of class abilities with new ones, and you are done! No need for a whole new base class or prestige class.
Maybe it’s just the programmer side of me that says, “Oh, efficiency!” I dunno. The other thing that this seems to be doing is setting a precedent for DMs that feels a little more like old-school gaming, where GMs (Game Masters) felt more free to throw simple house-rules into their game rather than depending upon an official release to introduce needed mechanics to the system. Swap a few abilities around, and voila! Or viola. Or trombone. Something like that.
Filed Under: Dice & Paper - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
How Much Should an Indie Game Cost… Revisited
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 24, 2010
Jeff Vogel puts his $0.02 in, again… which I guess makes it $0.04, total:
Indie Games Should Be Too Cheap or Too Expensive
It’s a curious situation. Generally speaking, “niche” products tend to cost more than those with broad markets. This is for exactly the same reasons Vogel mentions: “Suppose the market for my retro RPGs is ten thousand people. If I charge each of them one or three dollars for a game, I go bankrupt in one year.”
In games (with the exception of some very specific “simulations” – which aren’t really games but more training products), and I guess some other entertainment products, this doesn’t hold. First of all, there’s the perception that indie games are inferior. And if you judge strictly by scope and production value, you are probably not wrong if you do. There’s no way to go head-to-head like that on 1/100th (or less) of the budget! Which is exactly why indie games need to go after underserved niches.
XBLA, iPhone, and the casual game portals have definitely exerted some downward pressure on game pricing. Though in the larger scheme of things, what they’ve really done is exerted some downward pressure on the size and scope of the kinds of games they sell. (Although many have noted that the casual portals are now backing off and letting prices rise after their bloody price war of the last couple of years). Initially, they fit the price to match the game and the market, but eventually they fit the game to the price & market. That’s why you don’t find many huge, epic RPGs on the iPhone selling for $0.99 each.
I don’t know the answer. It could be that if Vogel cut his prices in half, he might triple the sales. Though in general, within indie game pricing, that rarely pans out. Temporary sales work, but permanent price drops don’t. Of course, as a consumer, I want high-quality games that are all ultra-cheap or free. As a game developer and affiliate, I want to sell hundreds of thousands of games for $100 a pop (Hey, it worked for the early Ultimas, if you adjust for inflation…). 🙂 Neither’s gonna happen. There’s a realistic and happy medium in there somewhere, but it’s a fluid and moving target involving lots of variables.
If you have an easy answer, please let us know.
Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
A Commercial Game in One Month? It’s ON Like Donkey Kong!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 23, 2010
Well, maybe not for me personally since I’m frantically working on another commercial title that’s way overdue… but I’m oh-so-tempted. With an idea… heh… I had back in the 90s. In fact, it got me my job in the mainstream biz. Could be cool to dust it off. See, it’s this cyberpunk action RPG…
No. No. I must not. I’m afraid… I’m afraid I must sit this one out. Until Frayed Knights is released. But… this is a great idea.
Ludlum Dare’s October Challenge – Make a Game, Take It To Market, Sell 1 Copy…
This is how it should be. Okay, no, I don’t know how to make a commercial, sellable game and bring it to market in just over 30 days. I know some iPhone guys do it all the time, though. So it’s possible. How’s that?
My guess would be that this should be a game that you could create in a single week. These things always take twice as long as you expect, so it’ll actually take two weeks. Then another week for bug-fixing and polishing. Another week for setting it up for sale, adding a demo mode or whatever, releasing, and marketing it. Although the marketing should start earlier. And then you’ve got a few days to try and get your one sale.
That’s a big, fat, hairy, audacious goal.
I love it.
So here’s your chance to kickstart yourself into being a pro indie game developer.
Filed Under: Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment
Is the “Old School Goodness” Now Poison?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
‘ … the vast majority was utterly flummoxed by the game. As one of them put it, “I’d say for gamers of our generation, an RPG like Ultima IV is boring and pretty much unplayable.” After removing the arrow from my chest, I asked them to explain why.‘
I’ve been chewing on this and many similar articles / discussions / thoughts for the last few weeks. Rock Paper Shotgun published a piece several weeks ago asking similarly hard questions about the disappearance of the once uber-popular genre, the combat flight sim. Time was that Flight Sims shared thrones with RPGs and Adventure Games over the land of PC gaming.Things have changed a lot since then. It’s bothersome. I feel the same arrow in the chest, as not only do I remember loving the game when it first came out (playing a friend’s copy), but I actually didn’t finish it until many years later … when it was my first major “retrogaming” experience. And I loved it then, too.
He tries to get to the heart of the matter. There’s a lot to be said about it. There’s a lot I could say about it. Ashamed as I am to admit it, going back and playing some of these older titles has been a little rough for me sometimes. I wrote “The Seven Stages of Retro-Gaming” based on personal experience, and I think I’ve been reprogrammed by modern gameplay quite a bit. Once upon a time, pulling out a pad of graph paper to map a dungeon by hand seemed Part of the Fun. Digging into the manual – ditto.
To modern audiences, this all feels like work. And actually, yeah, it was. Ditto for many other kinds of games back then – flight sims, strategy / war games, etc. All the best-known and best-loved for the PC platform after the consoles became king of the hill for action / arcade-style games.
So what gives? Were we all stupid back then? We didn’t mind being abused? Maybe. But there was definitely something else. And there’s a reason why these games are still so beloved by us old-schoolers.
While it was largely an accident borne of technological limitations, I think that these games demanded a level of investment on the part of the players. You couldn’t just “jump into” the Wizardry dungeon for a quick 15-minute session. You would get lost. You would die. While an experienced player could maybe make a quick foray without adequate preparation, to actually have a prayer of medium-term success you needed to commit to the game. You needed to invest a chunk of yourself into it. You needed to take action outside the pressing of buttons on the keyboard. You needed to grok the manual. You needed to map. You needed to take notes. You needed to plan.
But here’s the thing – I keep calling it an “investment” for a reason. As players, we got out of it what we put into it. Our investment into these games made them “real” in some small ways. We willed them into an existence beyond the monitor and floppy drive when we committed to studying up on flight maneuvers and what all those switches, dials, and gauges in the cockpit meant and how to use them. We gave them life when we drew out our maps on graph paper, and wrote up notes and connections of clues by hand like a real-life mystery. And we didn’t have an Internet full of spoilers to do all the work for us, either.
And that made the games all more satisfying for us. Shooting down an enemy MiG using systems that were extremely close to and just as complex as their real-world analogs was infinitely more satisfying that chomping them down like Doritos in an arcade game. And recovering the Codex felt like it had been dearly earned.
It’s not just that today’s games lead you by the nose, or are too easy. And you don’t finish an 80-hour RPG without a major feeling of satisfaction at having invested some serious time into its conclusion. But they don’t require that up-front commitment. They are about the immediate gratification, not the delayed, gradual payoff.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Either way. But I think that this perspective might help explain the phenomenon that The Brainy Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun and many others are reporting.
So the question is, I guess, is can we somehow get the best of both worlds?
I think we have, sometimes, in MMOs. The “shared hallucination” of fellow gamers and implicit social aspects encourage a great deal of side-band participation and effort into the game that goes beyond the basic game mechanics. We’re seeing it now in games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, but that may go back to the games “demanding” that level of investment just to be able to play them competently.
I guess the key point here is “encourage” rather than “demand.” The old-school games demanded that level of investment, commitment, participation, whatever you want to call it. In many newer games, everything is so straightforward there’s not much more you could do with them if you wanted to. Where’s the happy medium?
And since this post is long enough already, I’m going to leave it at that, and maybe revisit it later. Maybe leave it as an exercise to the reader (if you don’t think I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely). How could modern games, emphasizing ease-of-use and streamlined play, also offer and encourage a great deal more commitment?
Have fun.
Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 13 Comments to Read
It Really Was Just a Publicity Stunt
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 22, 2010
Dear GOG.COM –
Next time you choose a PR stunt, try one that doesn’t abuse your customers, okay? Kind of a jackass move that I thought was beneath you. Faking your own death was merely lame, but not allowing downloads of purchased games was not cool. That being said, I’m glad you are still around, and dressing up in monk robes was kinda amusing.
UPDATE: Video
Filed Under: Biz, Retro - Comments: 17 Comments to Read
Derek Yu on How to Finish a Game
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
I think I need to permanently bookmark this piece and re-read it weekly. Derek Yu offers fifteen solid tips for actually finishing a game. It’s called, mysteriously enough:
I have been known to actually finish games from time to time. So I do have some perspective on this, though probably not as much as he. But from what I can tell, he’s pretty much spot-on on every single point. He notes that there are exceptions to every rule, stating, “I don’t believe that there’s a right way to make games. It’s a creative endeavor, so there are no hard and fast rules that can’t be broken at some point. But as a game developer who has discussed this problem with other game developers, I feel like there are some mental traps that we all fall into at some point, especially when we’re starting out. Being aware of these traps is a great first step towards finishing something.”
These are some incredibly valuable guidelines. Indie devs and potential indie devs, take note!
Filed Under: Game Development, Production - Comments: Read the First Comment
Indie RPG News Roundup – Sepember 21, 2010
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 21, 2010
Back in the early 90’s, I was a poor struggling college student, and felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity and quality of computer RPGs coming out at the time. This was just on the PC (and, to a lesser degree, on friends’ Macs and Amigas). I really had no clue what the console world offered. Frankly, I couldn’t keep up with all the cool stuff coming out of the industry to feed my desire for some dungeon-crawling, role-playing action. I was delighted by choice, but really couldn’t keep up.
I’m kinda feeling that way again, with some really cool (if over-processed, by some tastes) big-budget mainstream titles out now, and some great indie titles competing for my time, attention, and money. As a gamer, it’s the right kind of problem to have, at least. I spent way too much time last night playing the delightfully weird indie RPG-and-shop-simulation Recettear, and the beta of Darklight Dungeon (mentioned below).
I think it’s a pretty good time to be a CRPG fan. (Even better if we get GOG.COM back… ) Where the mainstream game studios are leaving off, the indies are picking up – with a vengeance. Anyway, here are some tidbits on some indie computer RPGs that you might be interested in:
Dead State (Formerly Zombie RPG)
Game Banshee has interviewed Brian Mitsdoda of Doublebear. It’s a great read. In addition, Brian and Annie are sponsoring a Q&A with fans from now until Monday. So if you have questions about their upcoming – and eminently awesome-sounding – indie RPG, go over to their forums and ask away.
Telepath RPG
Work continues in this highly tactical RPG with a distinctive setting. Craig interviews a voice actress about her character in the game. Yes, it’s got voice acting, apparently. I’m really looking forward to this one, but the full version of the game is still quite a ways off (mid-2011 is the current estimate).
Darklight Dungeon
I’m a latecomer to hearing about this one. This is a very old-school dungeon crawler that mixes “real” 3D graphics with old school cardinal-direction exploration and turn-based combat. The beta download is now available! Please try it out and provide feedback to the developer, Jesse Zoeller. It’s got potential.
Cyclopean
Another Iron Tower Studio production, this H. P. Lovecraft-inspired indie RPG has been – at least for now – canceled. As a possible bright spot, Scott has suggested that he’s going to pursue a smaller, easier project in the immediate future, and Vince has suggested that once Age of Decadence is shipped and complete, they may shift resources to resurrect the project. I sure hope so.
Grimoire Chronicles
Freshman indie RPG & Adventure studio Gongoria has released their first RPG, Grimoire Chronicles. It is a JRPG-style game focusing on the adventure of Myra, a young witch, to save a friend. It features ten playable characters, and looks pretty cute.
Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge
I don’t normally cover mods, but since I had people email me about this one, I thought I’d mention it here. Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge is a fan-made major, super-extensive conversion of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and has finally been completely translated into English. If you have Oblivion, this free download will essentially give you an all-new game to play. Enjoy!
Eschalon Book 2: The Secret of Fathamurk
I just realized that I totally dropped the ball on passing along this announcement. Well, it may be (two-week) old news, but Basilisk Games has announced an add-on to their hit indie RPG, Eschalon: Book 2. Entitled The Secret of Fathamurk, it should add an additional 5-10 hours of high-level play to the original game independent of the main storyline. It will require you to own the original game to play. However, it is also going to be a FREE expansion, automatically included in an upcoming expansion. As if you actually needed ANOTHER reason to pick up this game…
Din’s Curse
Speaking of expansions, Steven Peeler has been tweeting about his work on an upcoming expansion for Din’s Curse. No title yet that I’ve found, and nothing is set in stone, but he has been working on a lot of world modifiers (with names like Gigantism, Berserk, Poor Town, and Temporal Flux), anti-magic areas, advanced character modes and options, new monsters, and new classes. No word yet on the expected release date or price, but this sounds like it has been packed with a lot of playability.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, News - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Minecraft – Playing With Fire
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Okay, I’ve only dabbled in the runaway indie hit Minecraft. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid getting sucked up into its soul-consuming vacuum of endless possibilities.
However, this particular tutorial video had me laughing so hard I started coughing at the end.
Hat tip to Indie Games – The Weblog for this one!
Filed Under: General - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
R.I.P. Cyclopean?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 20, 2010
Cyclopean, the indie RPG based on the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, has been canceled. Quoth Scott, the developer, that after two years, “What I’ve got is basically a ton of writing and nothing else. And Ted, still the only other member of Team Omega, just isn’t able to dedicate those 20+ hours/week to keep things rolling. Vince has got a relentless, driving ambition to see AoD completed, but I need to know my investment of hundreds-into-thousands of hours is actually going to result in a finished product, and I don’t have that confidence in Cyclopean, in fact nothing near it.”
However, there remains a tiny little glimmer of hope. Vince, the champion indie who created Iron Tower Studios and who is heading up development of the hopefully soon-to-be-released indie RPG Age of Decadence, “I respect Scott for being honest with everyone, but I hope him and I will be able to revisit the status of the project when AoD is released. Scott has done a lot of work and it would be a shame to let it go to waste.”
I gotta admit, over this last year, I was getting a little skeptical myself. When things go quiet for a short time, it can often mean the developers are so friggin’ busy that they cannot keep followers up-to-date. But when things go quiet for a long time, it often means development has ground to a standstill.
Anyway – I hope the project can be resurrected at some point. The concept was awesome.
Crap.
Hat tip to RPG Codex for catching the announcement.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment
R.I.P. GOG.COM?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 19, 2010
Please, say it ain’t so! But this is what is on the gog.com website today:
Dear GOG users,
We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.
We’re very grateful for all support we’ve received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.
This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.
On a technical note, this week we’ll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.
All the best,
GOG.com Team
All I can say is: SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually, I can probably say more than that. So I will. ‘Cuz I’m gonna vent.
Okay, I loved GOG.COM and all that they were doing. That should come as no surprise to regular readers. I eagerly anticipated each “new” (old) release. Classic games, available legally, and for peanuts. Already fixed up to work fine under Windows (courtesy of the awesomeness that is DOSBox, for DOS-based titles). I took advantage of several sales, and picked up a ton of old classics that I am not even close to finishing.
If they are truly shuttering for financial reasons, I can say, “It’s not my fault!” I was a regular customer.
And I can also say that I am happy to have taken advantage of them while I could. I got a nice supply of classic games that I can continue to enjoy for a long time to come. I’m just sad I can’t keep getting more.
Now – are they closing for good? The jury is out, but there’s a lot of speculation and rumors and comments from the guys themselves suggesting that GOG.COM isn’t going away entirely. Some folks are calling this a PR Stunt – and if that was the case, I’d be sorely, sorely disappointed. It’d be a horrible and incredibly stupid stunt.
More likely, based on this message and some others on Twitter, is the possibility that they are undergoing a massive overhaul of their service. That the GOG.COM as it previously existed will be no more, and that they are using this to offer a clean break between the old service (and licenses) and whatever the new construct will be. Part of some other service, perhaps? Maybe with (GAG!) DRM and stuff?
I mean, they’ve taken GREAT pains thus far to obtain licenses, test and modify games, and get everything working as-is. They could simply pull the plug on adding new games and continue to generate money forever with their existing library. Probably more than it would cost to keep the website available. But who knows?
And – to really try for a glass-half-full approach … maybe the successor to GOG.COM will make previously unobtainable classics available. Like the Black Isle Studios titles. Or the Wizardry series.
We’ll see. But – for now – we’re in a state of suck. Whether or not it somehow arises Phoenix-like from its own ashes in a similar or highly mutated form, GOG.COM is dead as of right now.
Crap.
UPDATE:
GOG.COM claims that users will be fully able to download their previous purchases including all bonus materials again starting on Thursday, citing the sudden closure was due to “business and technical reasons.” The update is at their site, but here’s the bulk of the update:
First of all, we apologize everyone for the whole situation and closing GOG.com. We do understand the timing for taking down the site caused confusion and many users didn’t manage to download all their games. Unfortunately we had to close the service due to business and technical reasons.
At the same time we guarantee that every user who bought any game on GOG.com will be able to download all their games with bonus materials, DRM-free and as many times as they need starting this Thursday.
The official statement from GOG.com’s management concerning the ongoing events is planned on Wednesday.
Huh.
Filed Under: Biz, Retro - Comments: 21 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights: Tool Time
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 17, 2010
Time for another update on Frayed Knights, the “quick” and “easy” indie RPG that was somehow going to magically take only a few months of my spare time to complete. This update is going to be super-ultra-sexy. Which in this case means, “Totally boring unless you are a programming or design geek.” My apologies.
Abraham Lincoln reportedly said something along the lines of, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe.”
I feel like I’ve been spending the last six hours trying to chop down a tree with a blunt axe, and am only now thinking of sharpening. But that’s not quite the case, as I’ve spent a great deal of time getting all the systems and functionality of the game working. I’ve spent a lot of time working on things manually, and in so doing have evolved those systems a bit. But after spending an inordinate amount of time rolling all the content by hand (and often having to re-learn how to do so each time I do), I figured it was well past time to sharpen the axe. After all, I’ve got two more games like this one to finish, too.
And I haven’t gotten to the serious debugging & balancing stages yet. Inspecting and debugging this much content is going to be a serious pain. I need all the help I can get. So I’ve been focusing on making and improving tools the last three weeks. I hope it is time well spent.
The other reason for developing these tools was a much more subtle one. I’ve spent a good deal of time with Frayed Knights working on what I consider some reasonably innovative game mechanics. These were part of the design from – well, if not day one, than early in development. But going through the existing content in the game, I’ve noticed how I’ve gotten lazy. Those cool mechanics that were so front-and-center in the design are getting ignored in favor of stuff like plain ol’ combat encounters. Why?
It is because I’ve made tools to simplify the creation of some kinds of combat encounters (the straightforward kind). And what is easier to do gets done more. It’s really as simple as that. I should consider that some kind of law of game design right there.
So do I want more trap-and-lock puzzles? Yeah? Then I’d better make an editor for them. (Done!)
Do I want more full, rich quests? Better make some tools to make it easier to build, track, and test them.
Do I want more party banter? Sure. What can I build, or what process can I follow, to make those easier to develop and maintain?
Do I need more interactivity in the dialogs with NPCs – giving players choices in the dialog, or opportunities to exercise special abilities? I should probably consider some kind of tool.
What about making all the in-game equipment more balanced (and priced / introduced appropriately)? Yep, you guessed it. I could use a tool for that, too, to help measure things and view them as a whole. Or for drama star or experience point distribution, spell balance, quest balance, monster challenge, all that good stuff. I don’t mean that I’m going to be building tools for all that, but those are all candidates.
Now tools don’t necessarily mean in-game editors. A tool can be as simple as a process followed on a spreadsheet. Or even just some rules of thumb and methods of tracking things. Whatever the case is – the fundamental rule is that your tool / process / whatever should make work easier to do in the long run.
With so much of the content “done” already with the first Frayed Knights game, will these late tools really help me all that much? That I can’t say. But I imagine they’ll help a lot with the next two titles.
Filed Under: Design, Frayed Knights - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
Best Game Cover Art?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 16, 2010
One annoying tendency I’ve discovered with some indie digital download games is that there’s a depressing lack of cover art sometimes. It seems this is more often an issue with newer indies on their first release, as they tend to be far more willing to invest in an impressive cover piece on their second or third releases. As a digital download, indie games don’t have box covers like their shelf-bound brethren, but the art does serve the same purpose as it would on a box. And it can usually double for main screen art.
The fact that second and subsequent games by successful indies tend to have cover art indicates that it does have value to sellers.
Several different kinds of box art styles emerged over the years, from the old Atari cartridges offering some idealized representation of what the action of the game might represent (as some say, pretty dang misleading), to Activision’s faked-up screenshots with things like motion-blurred monocolor rectangles. Then you’ve got Ultima VII Part 1: The Black Gate, which was, like, a black box with the title on the front.
Some of my favorites included:
The Secret of Monkey Island: The box art for this one looked a lot like a movie poster, circa early 80s. Think Indiana Jones. Which is, I’m sure, not a coincidence as this game was by LucasArts.
Grim Fandango: Ditto, but even better. It looked like a film noir movie poster. With stylized skeletons. That’s, like, triple the awesome.
F.E.A.R. – More like a modern movie poster, except it’s got freaky Alma front-and-center. Man, can you imagine this on an old Atari cartridge back in the day? We would have had parental freak-outs much earlier. Oh, wait, we had this crap. Never mind.
Akalabeth: World of Doom. I don’t know if I was out of elementary school yet when this game came out. I never played this game until much, much later (like, two years ago), but I just loved the box art used for magazine ads. But I wasn’t even out of elementary school when this game was released. So I couldn’t afford it. Nor did I have an Apple computer to play it on – I think a few months later we’d actually get a Sinclair ZX80 with 1K of RAM which could run nothing. But even if we were proud Apple owners, there was no way I would have been able to convince my parents to get me this game with a cover like that. So I just imagined what it could have been like based on the cover. From what little I’ve played – well, it was pretty much nothing like the cover. I would have been very disappointed.
However, the box art from Ultima VI: The False Prophet really looked like this same demon-dude (now a smaller gargoyle) vanquished by a hero. So there’s some kind of continuity. The game scored extra cool points for having an instruction book cover showing the opposite – said knight being vanquished by a heroic-looking gargoyle.
Karateka: This one wasn’t misleading – the artwork was pretty much about the game, but boy everything looked cooler on the box cover.
Everquest: Okay, any artwork by Keith Parkinson was pretty much awesome by default. All of the series had some outstanding cover art, but as I still have the original poster hanging over my desk, it’s still my favorite of the bunch.
Alone in the Dark: Man, they had their whole H.P. Lovecraft thing going on with this one. Actually, the cover reminded me lot of the original Call of Cthulhu pen-and-paper RPG cover art. What do you think?
Aveyond 2: Ean’s Quest – possibly my favorite indie game “box art.” As frequently happens, the art style is not like that of the actual game, but it’s still some incredible artwork for an outstanding RPG.
So there are some of my favorites. What are yours?
Incidentally, the fake Frayed Knights Atari Cartridge image was made by this convenient tool.
And indies: Please don’t neglect your cover art!
Filed Under: Art, General - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
Behind the Mask
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 15, 2010
While I may lose a few geek points by this admission, I was never a huge comic book fan. There were a couple of titles I collected (particularly those written by Chris Claremont), and a few others I followed as I could afford them or read friends’ copies. I’ve gotten into passionate arguments over Marvel vs. DC, played a lot of the Champions RPG (then pen-and-paper version, not the MMO), read and been greatly educated by Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics, read some collections of older works, and have at least a passing understanding of the history of the medium in the U.S.
So I can’t give up all my geek cred. I just recognize that I’m no authority on the subject. So I hope those scholars on the subject can tolerate my unschooled
So that being said, my appreciation for comics came largely during the 1980s, when certain trends became popular. I’ve read many of the older comics, and they’ve done little for me. And during the 90s, it seemed like the trend became too extreme, and the themes too dark and gritty. But during the era I got into them, the superhero comics I preferred tended to focus almost as much attention on the “secret identity” of the heroes than their super-powered exploits once their masks were donned.
Perhaps they were taking cues from the popularity of Spider-Man, which lavished attention on the unlikely persona of Peter Parker. Parker was very much an unheroic nerd who represented his target audience on many levels. He was picked-on when not ignored entirely, felt like a loser, but was secretly more awesome than any of his peers could imagine. Once the mask was on, however, he was the wise-cracking, quick-thinking, death-defying hero who put it all on the line to do what was right in spite of an inner monologue expressing his own self-doubt. Peter Parker wasn’t just an act, like Superman’s Clark Kent. No, Spider-Man was Peter Parker. And it was the banal problems of his “real life” that made Spider-Man so special. At least to me.
That was why I enjoyed reading the titles I did. I think I was more interested in the stories of their “off-duty” lives while lounging around Xavier’s school or whatnot than their terrific near-magical battles against evil. But of course, it was the latter that made the former interesting. It’s probably the same reason I enjoy some Urban Fantasy today. I love seeing the mundane against the backdrop of the fantastic.
But more than that, I realized not much later, that this was really how character was developed. Superheroes battling stereotypical evil in the gold and silver age of comics was all well and good, but it was also very one-dimensional. And boring, in the long run. Being faster than a speeding bullet and stronger than a locomotive might be good enough for a pre-adolescent for a short time. But it’s not enough for an audience with more life experience to really care.
The movies have figured this out. Mostly. Even as far back as the late 1970s when the blockbuster Superman II was mainly about the conflict between Clark Kent’s love life versus his assumed duty. Ditto for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. The recent Iron Man movies were all about what could drive a hedonistic playboy to assume – and fight to maintain – that kind of responsibility that nobody in their right mind would want to have. Best of them all (IMO, of course) was Pixar’s The Incredibles, which explored the theme of family relationships in the heat of a blast furnace. This made the movies about humans who happened to be heroes, not heroes who were incidentally also humans.
Call it the maturing of the genre, if you want. Maybe it is. A twelve-year-old might call it adding more “boring parts.” But it has made comic-book superhero fiction — still typically associated with an unsophisticated pre-adolescent male audience — richer and better. And certainly more popular on the silver screen.
So let’s talk games.
The press and fans are always buzzing about having better story in games. There’s a fundamental problem with the protagonist in games being controlled by a player who is not so concerned about plot and character development as simply winning. But even taking that out of the equation, we’re still kinda stuck in the Silver Age comic book era as far as plot is concerned.
We’re fortunately taking some very interesting strides beyond this point, but for the most part games retreat to what they do best – which is to focus on the highly interactive action-y parts. The on-duty stuff. Maybe we get some cut-scenes to reveal more about the character behind the mask, but there’s usually not much.
I’ve harped plenty on the Persona games, but that’s in part because they did find a way to break the mold. A sizable chunk of those games involved what you did during the off hours. Building character, literally. Although the relationships with other characters developed along a fairly linear script (with some greater deviation allowed in Persona 4 – relationships with members of the opposite sex of the same age groups didn’t automatically turn romantic, for example), there were choices to be made of what relationships to pursue, what skills to improve, and what activities to engage in.
The brilliance of these games was that this “boring stuff” was tied directly into the core game mechanics. Relationships gave you strength and new options. Bonds of friendship with your teammates gave them strength, new powers, and a willingness to literally take a bullet for you. While your avatar remained something of a “silent hero” who was a blank slate for you to project whatever character you wanted to see, this really made the other characters in the game come alive.
We talk about games giving us the power to make important decisions with consequences. But maybe we need to see more of the unimportant decisions – with consequences of their own. I’d like to see the characters when they aren’t busy saving the world or being kidnapped or cursing the hero for putting a crimp in their plans for world domination. Better stories may begin with better characters, and that may involve seeing them when their guard is down and their masks are off.
Filed Under: Design, Geek Life - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
“Jet Lamp” Report
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 14, 2010
Muke Rubin wrote up some thoughts on the “Jet Lamp” event I announced here last week – the showing of the text adventure documentary “Get Lamp” and the Q&A session with the creator here in Salt Lake. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it, but a lot of other people could…
JET LAMP SLC – A Few Thoughts About the Event
Filed Under: Adventure Games - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Steam Whine
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 13, 2010
You know what would make Steam a whole lot better?
If it wasn’t actually there.
I don’t normally leave Steam running on my machine in the background. And I’ve found, recently, that I’ve got a little bit of reluctance to run a game on Steam simply because of the overhead involved in it loading Steam, serving up the “What’s New” ad (which takes FOREVER, it feels), setting up its messenger service, and all the other garbage it wants to do.
This became noticeable to me this weekend when I found myself reluctant to buy Racettear through Steam – I gravitated towards buying it through Impulse instead. Although I’d really prefer to buy direct from the developer, but that’s apparently not an option. I tried to examine my rationale, as I already own several games through Steam (those sales are hard to resist), and one of our awesome forum members works for Valve, but it kept coming down to me feeling an aversion for that extra, painful start-time and other annoyances.
Steam is kind of a pig.
But it’s a pig that everybody seems to be using these days, so I guess a bloated pain in the butt is really the way to go.
Filed Under: Biz, Geek Life - Comments: 21 Comments to Read
Freaky Discovery of the Weekend – and Using Urban Mythology as Game Plots
Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 12, 2010
Okay, I thought I was having my leg pulled actually following up on what sounded like a freaky-deaky conspiracy theory, but after being told that the signature line on all my checks wasn’t actually a line at all here in the U.S., I decided to play the sucker and go ahead and inspect the line with a magnifying glass.
Yeah, sure enough, it’s “Micro Print.” That’s what the “MP” at the side of the signature line stands for. All this time, I thought it was just a line. Didn’t help that this discovery was accompanied by a strange explanation for why it’s there (and the reason the checking account name is always in all-caps) that made my head spin. Was there any truth in that? Heck if I know. But it kinda sounds like it could have been dreamed up by the same kind of financial geniuses that brought us unregulated runaway credit default swaps and the subprime mortgage collapse. While it’s not exactly sinister stuff, it is definitely on the weird side.
However, to bring this (slightly) back to gaming, you know what would be kinda cool? Taking stuff like this and working it into a bizarre conspiracy-theory plot of a game. Maybe one with fantastical elements. Like, what if instead of saying, “Authorized Signature,” the microprint actually had some wording of arcane (or diabolic) impact? Just enough reality to be freaky, but solid fodder for something a little different from standard elf-and-orc fare.
Why not use some modern urban mythology as a storyline? We’ve got tons of it. Snopes.com and Mythbusters could be a wonderful launch point for a hundred storylines that would be unique yet feel familiar to players. Throw in some creative twists (such as was done in the National Treasure movies and Dan Brown’s books) or even older mythology for extra flare. It doesn’t take much to make a fascinating little MacGuffin.
Filed Under: Design, Geek Life - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
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