A Quick Revisit to Serpent Isle
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 10, 2010
I try to devote a certain amount of time each week to playing RPGs. Yeah, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it *g*. I do it to keep myself grounded in what’s out there, what the classics have done, what’s new, what the indies are doing, and to keep my mind working on what I love (and hate) about these games. Old, new, console, PC, mainstream, indie – I try and play a smattering of everything (which means I don’t complete many). They are motivational, inspirational, educational, and … well, just plain fun. The last reason is probably the most important, but the other ones are how I justify it when I’m so friggin’ late getting Frayed Knights out the door.
I generally don’t have a big problem with retro-gaming. It’s not hard for me to look past the graphics of a game, and even (sometimes) the cumbersome interface. But usually I play games that I missed the first time around. It can be a little dangerous revisiting an old friend. Sometimes you don’t want to take off the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia.
In spite of that, I decided to expose myself to harsh reality with an old favorite. I’ve long held that Ultima 7: The Black Gate (and its expansion) is my favorite RPG. I never finished the second one, Serpent Isle, due to a game-killing bug in New Magincia Moonshade that left me waiting forever for a message that would never arrive (UPDATE: D’oh! No wonder the message never I arrived, I was waiting on the wrong continent / world…). The earliest save-game I felt comfortable reverting to also resulted in the same bug occuring, so I was hosed.
So I never really got to know Serpent Isle all that well. Rather than replay The Black Gate, I figured it was finally time to load up the Exult emulator and give it a fairly serious spin in the sequel. Who knows? Maybe this time I’ll get past New Magincia.
Now, I can’t be positive that Exult is truly delivering an authentic experience, and so problems I encounter could be an artifact of the emulator rather than the original. So I kinda rely on old memories to help me out.
So far, having just beaten the Knight’s Challenge in Monitor, I have to say the experience has been a mix of wonderful and disappointing. I don’t remember if the fireballs / lightning traps were as stupidly random-feeling in the original game as this one (though it feels familiar), but the stacking / climbing puzzle? Sheesh. Sloppy and painful even when you know what you are doing. And the combat… Can I have turn-based back, please? Yeesh. So far, I have to say the combat sucks.
And it was designed to run at around 8 frames per second. Ugh. Forgivable in a turn-based game, but in a game where you have to dodge fireballs and perform real-time combat? Sad. And yeah, I rummage through your bag each time, with the items randomly overlapping each other, has become no less painful over time.
The lack of feedback in the interface is also painful. This game also came from an era where you were expected to play the game with the manual off to the side. Otherwise, there’s no way to tell whether a mace or two-handed sword is the better weapon. There is no description of items beyond a one-word name and a low-resolution picture.
On the other hand, storyline, characters, and dialogs have been good. It’s tough to call them “great” and compare them to modern characters and dialog. But I really do like the keyword interface of the Ultimas. I still end up exhausting the entire conversation tree, but it does feel like I have more control over the conversation than in conventional dialog trees of today. And especially over the limited canned dialog of today.
I love how you can click on just about anything in the game and see its name. It’s especially cool that this is how you detect a secret door. Walls are normally named “wall” but a secret door or illusionary wall is a capitalized “Wall.” And again, it may be more of a problem with the emulator than the original game, but I found that a couple of the combats were nearly impossible unless you took advantage of the terrain – leading the cyclops into the hallway with all the fireball traps.
There’s also something to be said for the terseness of some of the explanations. While much of what is going on is explained in dialogs, notes, scrolls, or whatever – there’s a lot that is implied without being explained. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like my imagination gets invited to “fill in the blanks,” and rises to the challenge. I end up seeing a lot of detail that might not actually be there. I think there’s some kind of happy medium (which may be different for each player) between too much exposition and too little. Too little, and things just are just confusing and feel annoyingly random. Too much, and I mentally go to sleep and let the game spoon-feed me whatever I need to know. Or worse, I skip past the “need to know” stuff because it’s long and boring and poorly presented, and so I get the worst of both worlds…
Anyway, I imagine I’ll continue to make forays into old Serpent Isle from time to time. I just found out I gotta go back to the dungeon and pick up the corpse of that wolf I killed so it can be turned into a cloak or something…
Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 10 Comments to Read
Molyneux sez: “Enjoy It While You Can, Indies! We’re Taking Over Soon!”
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 9, 2010
Peter Molyneux warns that indies are living on borrowed time, and their opportunity to thrive on certain platforms – notably the iPhone and Android – will soon come to an end under the domination of a major publisher.
Molyneux: Indie Havens on Borrowed Time
A couple of choice quotes:
“We are just one or two games of high production quality away from all this coming to an end. That’s my belief. It’s inevitable that a Star Wars or Disney game, a five million dollar iPhone project, will be released. And when it does, consumers are going to like it.”
And this one:
“But don’t expect this to last forever. Triple-A is here to stay. When TV came along it didn’t replace the movie industry. Social gaming is like TV. It is going to co-exist because, frankly, there’s too much money in it.
“Slowly the publishers are moving in on this space. They will nibble away at the market. My advice for anyone doing iPhone games is to be original, think about the things the big companies won’t try.”
Ah, Peter… may I call you Peter? Peter… well, given the rest of the context of the interview, it’s hard to say you are entirely wrong on any one point… but you are still a few degrees away from “right” and getting colder by the minute.
Now, if a company like Disney or EA spends $5 million on an iPhone App, is it going to garner attention and market share? Absolutely! But will it take home all the marbles? Will it even make a profit? That’s a lot more questionable.
Sure, the mainstream studios have kinda-sorta taken over XBox Live Arcade. But the indies never really had a foothold there to begin with. From the very beginning, Microsoft acted as a gatekeeper for that service, and wouldn’t deal with any but the most professional, “high-end” independent self-funded development studios. A one-person studio was never going to make it on the service, until they created “community games” (now labeled “indie games”) ghetto-live-arcade on the side. Which, admittedly, they’ve done a pretty reasonable job promoting lately.
But on a more open platform, like the iPhone and Android – well, it’s a lot more like the PC. And where are all the mainstream developers on the PC these days? Oh, yeah. They’ve fled back to the safety of the consoles, where gatekeepers hand-pick the competitors. The PC is ugly-crowded. While I really can’t call that a “good thing” when gems get buried in crap, it does make it harder to just buy success. And the door is always open for the indies to keep making games – and a few keep succeeding in spite of fierce top-drawer competition.
It’s not like the iPhone and Android are Nirvana for indies as it is. The vast majority of games for these platforms sink. Only the very top games actually do well (or even make a profit). If the top slots are occupied by mainstream games, then yeah. It’ll get tighter. But at this point, I don’t see it ending an era. Not even close.
And in reality – there’s another issue. Maybe an iPhone game that cost $20,000 to make can end up making a million dollars in sales, which is totally awesome. But — would a $5 million game end up ALSO just selling $1 million? Or $2 million? Or even $4 million? That’s not a winning strategy. So far, profit has been made only because the game makers have kept costs down low enough to make it worthwhile. Will a couple of mainstream, big-budget games REALLY change the rules of the game that much?
It’s possible. But I wouldn’t call it likely. Or anything close to “inevitable,” as you proclaim it.
I don’t know if the big studios will be able to scale. Or if they’ll just buy up some successful indies and let them at it. Or – on a very positive note – if they can manage to drive up the price of iPhone / Android games, which would be a good thing for all involved. I really don’t know.
But you are right about one thing, Peter. In the face of competition that can spend you into oblivion in a toe-to-toe fight, the indies should generally attack from the sides, as skirmishers, rather than taking the competition head-on. Make games that the big guys aren’t. That’s what we do. But just because a handful of dinosaurs decide to come stomping into a field doesn’t mean that all the bugs and small mammals and birds are going to disappear. Taken collectively, we’re actually a hell of a lot better at adapting to changing market conditions than you are.
Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
Eternal Twilight Price Reduction
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 8, 2010
Cheap entertainment just got cheaper.
Oliveair Games’ Eternal Twilight is now only $10.99.
I guess with the savings you can buy a bag of chips to go with it. Though the game will probably still last longer.
Check out Eternal Twilight here!
Filed Under: Deals - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Frayed Knights – Is the Light at the End of the Tunnel an Oncoming Dragon?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 6, 2010
While the saga of Frayed Knights’ development isn’t even close to an end, we’re staring down the throat of a milestone. That counts for something, right?
If Frayed Knights was a house, this would be the point where the foundation is long complete, the house is framed, the exterior walls are up, the wiring and plumbing have been done, and we’re almost finished hanging the drywall. Which means if you squint really hard, you can see a whole game – er, house – there. But there would still be a lot of painting, trimming, carpet-laying, tiling, fixture-hanging, cabinet-installation, and all that other fun stuff ahead.
Anyway, we’ve got a long list of issues to address immediately, and one dungeon requiring a complete remake (now marked with a sign that says “closed for construction,”), but in the next week or two I plan to start playing the game through from start to finish. Or as close to I can get. Up until now, I’ve been playing through the game in pieces – a quest at a time, a dungeon at a time, etc. There are still some holes in those pieces – missing content, stand-in-monsters, incomplete spell lists, missing special effects, chests with really lame stand-in treasure, houses with no doors or furniture, etc. But it is all playable in a piecemeal fashion now.
Or at least, it was the last time I checked. “Bit rot” tends to happen in code you haven’t tested in a long time. Bugs sneak in behind you in places you THINK you haven’t touched in over a year. But anyway…
Now we get to try and pull the first game together as a whole and see how it hangs together. There are going to be balance issues. Lots of balance issues. Story issues. Transitions that just don’t work. Inconsistencies. And lots and lots of bugs that aren’t noticeable when you are just testing the game in chunks.
So what’s that mean to you? When’s the release date? How soon am I going to be bringing more external testers on board? How soon will the second and third games be released?
I don’t have exact answers to those questions, I’m afraid. Content has become an issue again (like when WASN’T it?), and I don’t have the artistic skills to do it myself or the money to needed to get it done quickly. I can take a few months off to work on my own character-modeling and dungeon-making skills, but … well, that wouldn’t be quick, either. Even that might prove a faster path to completion in the long run for all three games.
There’s an old saying that you can have have it fast, you can have it cheap, and you can have it of high quality, but you can only pick two of the three. I guess “cheap” is a requirement, and time is of the essence, so it’s now just a case of getting whatever quality I can get at this point.
I don’t know. It’s kinda frustrating to be in this “so close, and yet so far” stage. I’ve been there many a time, though, so I should be used to it by now. Oncoming dragon or no, there’s not much left to do but charge full speed ahead, plan on shipping with crappy programmer art if need be, and get this baby to alpha – and beta – and out the door in as few weeks / months as possible.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Game Development - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
The Game That Wasn’t There
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 5, 2010
Joel Haddock has a “hankering lately to play a game that doesn’t exist … (s)pecifically, a Western RPG as they used to be.”
Strange, for an indie game developer, that he doesn’t look amongst the indie RPG releases to discover that what he wants really does exist, after all. But we’ll forgive him that mistake this once, as his sentiments are in the right place. The Kotaku reprint of the article has been making its rounds over the last 24 hours, but I thought I’d link to the original:
How could I resist commenting on this?
I’ll start with a big, “AMEN Brother!”
Okay – a few thoughts:
Ultimately, he’s calling for a return – with modern trappings – to turn-based combat, party-based adventuring, and direct player control over the characters from creation onwards. These are simple requests, but they are hard to make “sexy” for modern mainstream game developers.
Now, one of the reasons RPGs were very prematurely declared dead is that there was, for a time, a glut of games of the kind he is describing here – a glut of pretty mediocre, unimaginative games, I should add. I didn’t play a lot of them. I foolishly assumed that the days of plenty would last forever, and that there’d always be another significant PC RPG appearing on the shelf of my local PC Game Store in the mall the following month. The glut killed sales because a lot of gamers thought as I did, and soon the river dried up to a trickle – until games like Diablo and Baldur’s Gate “reinvented” the genre.
But the fact that there was such a glut fifteen years ago that bored players doesn’t mean more can’t be done with the concept today. I generally believe that ground left fallow long enough can once again bear fruit.
And – in the indie arena, it is. I still got my socks blown off by Knights of the Chalice, Eschalon: Book 1 and its sequel, and I enjoyed some delightful hours playing Underworld or the more-or-less annual Spiderweb releases. While they may not be exactly what Haddock is calling for, they are all in the same ballpark and – at least for me – scratching the same itch.
But there’s still plenty of room for creative use of these once-staple western RPG traditions – both in indie and mainstream games. I hope more designers take note of this article. There’s still an audience hungry for good games like this. At least a couple of us… 🙂
Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
Adventure Game Histories
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
I don’t know if this stuff is just very cool, or just makes me feel old. But if you are an adventuring game aficionado, there’s a documentary and history book JUST for you.
For those who are fans of the written word, the long-awaited documentary, Get Lamp, has finally been released. A two-DVD set is available for the non-mainstream price of 40 bucks, plus shipping / handling. It ain’t cheap, but I’m still pretty tempted. The set comes with the complete documentary plus lots of extras. Here’s the trailer (which has been kicking around for a while):
If you are interested, go check it out:
The second item on the list is for whom the words “Adventure Game” conjures images of the LucasArts and Sierra graphic adventure classics of the late 80’s and 90’s – King’s Quest, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. Entitled, “Graphic Adventures: Being a Mostly Correct History of the Adventure Game Classics By Lucasfilm, Sierra and Others, from the Pages of Wikipedia,” it began as a simple compilation and re-editing / standardization of Wikipedia entries about these classic games. As such projects often do, it evolved substantially from its simple premise, and includes many additional screenshots, interviews, notes, and articles. It’s all published according to the appropriate licenses for derivative works, and even includes a free HTML version (beyond, of course, hitting up Wikipedia). But the paperback is available for $29, and besides being an interesting read can serve as a coffee-table adornment to prove your geek cred.
Filed Under: Adventure Games - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Torchlight 2?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 4, 2010
Hat tip to RPGWatch for this one –
Huh. I thought they were going straight into MMO-land with this. But they are saying Torchlight II will include peer-to-peer matchmaking. That’s kind of an unusual MMO strategy.
Or maybe they realized an MMO would take a lot more time than they anticipated, and they did so incredibly well with the first one that it was easier and more profitable to just make a multiplayer-capable sequel.
Well, either way – as I wrote yesterday, Torchlight didn’t have the legs I’d hoped it would have, but I definitely got my money’s worth out of it. I won’t hesitate to pick up the sequel.
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
Game PR: Indie Versus Mainstream
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Brian Mitsoda recently penned a design update for Doublebear’s upcoming “Zombie RPG” entitled, “To Here Knows When.” I think the title is completely lost on me, but the subject is terribly familiar (especially as my “quickie” game is going into its fourth year of development – ouch, that hurts…)
Now, people have a very good reason for being suspicious of indie games being vaporware. The truth is, something north of 95% of indie projects never make it to release. Okay, that number’s only an educated guess, but it’s based on experience. Anyone who’s ever spent time on amateur game development forums can tell you of dozens of promising games that were never released in finished form for every one that actually made it to a full and complete release.
But that number changes drastically for those who have already had one full release under their belt. And in the case of formerly-mainstream developers, the math changes as well. Though development and release of an indie game is drastically different from that of a mainstream, triple-A game, there is still a lot of carry-over for people who’ve been through the process before in a larger studio. Which describes the Mitsodas at Doublebear.
But he touches briefly on a whole ‘nother subject worth discussing – how marketing and PR and everything works in the indie world as opposed to the mainstream world.
Lemme tell you – things have changed a lot since I started in the game back in the mid 90’s. The mainstream (or even off-the-mainstream) world has gotten even more paranoid and obsessive about controlling the “messaging” about an upcoming title. While I was never directly involved with what the guys back at HQ were doing with respect to marketing and launching a “product,” the gist we got back in the trenches was that the bigger the publisher, the more critical the pipeline and the control over information about the game.
For example, a big publisher has to worry about their own titles competing with each other. You want two realistic modern warfare shooters released in the same quarter. More than that, you don’t want to build up the hype for game Y to be released in four months so much that it saps the sales from game X which is launching next week. It gets complicated.
And – as Brian Mitsoda notes – the games biz is filled with canceled games. I’ve worked on probably less than my share, but I have been in design and development on projects shot down at various stages. I worked on a sequel to Warhawk (the original Playstation 1 release) that was never green-lit for full development, a sequel to Outwars that was canceled in early development, but morphed into an even cooler project I wasn’t involved in which was canceled in late development, a small proof-of-concept project for the Nintendo 64, several more designs which were never green-lit, an ATV racing game that was shuttered in mid-development, and a totally cute & cool XBLA game that I’m still not sure I can talk about which was about two weeks away from Beta.
Companies really don’t want their audience to build up faith and expectations in a game that won’t see the light of day. AND they don’t want a repeat of the original Starcraft PR disaster, where the early screenshots of Starcraft resembled nothing so much as a re-texturing of Warcraft II (which probably wasn’t the case). They want relatively firm release dates (which still tend to slip) so they can build the hype so the distribution channels get excited and pre-order a zillion copies. And they are fully aware of the law of diminishing returns on building that hype, where a game may get over-exposed and the audience grows weary of the marketing.
And they sure as hell don’t want those unwashed DEVELOPERS talking about the game in advance of their announcements. That can totally screw up their messaging, their narrative, build false expectations, and cause them to lose control over the press. As the recent kerfuffle at the Develop “Microstudios” panel between Cliff Harris and Mark Rein indicated, big publishers in need of mainstream press coverage have to dole out the news in a very measured way to maximize coverage.
Then you go indie.
Hoo boy.
Now, on the one hand, it is still a tremendous embarrassment to announce a game that gets canceled. It erodes the faith of your customers for future games, etc. So game announcements should still wait until things are past a certain stage of development. We do share a few other similarities. I mean, I worry people are sick of hearing anything more about Frayed Knights until I say, “Hey, it’s out!” So there’s that.
But so many of those other aspects of mainstream game marketing are completely and utterly useless to indie game studios. We often are not pumping a pipeline full of our own competition that fast. We are usually beneath the attention of the mainstream press, as they are quite overwhelmed as it is writing about the latest titles from Epic and Nintendo. We don’t have a marketing team worrying about “messaging.” Really, we have no choice other than to talk directly to our potential customers, gamer-to-gamer.
And cut the BS.
For some gamers, this can be a shock. If you are used to the polished marketing-and-release cycle of the big-budget, big-publisher titles, with its showroom glitz and booth-babes and TV spots and four-page previews that sound like they were written by the publisher’s PR man himself, the peek behind the curtain at the reality of game development can be a little off-putting. Features get changed, replaced, or eliminated altogether. Things don’t work out quite like the developers planned. And for the part-time indies, real life intrudes. It’s not a smooth, magical process.
But bottom-line, that’s really how we have to operate. The privileges of being a loaded publisher don’t apply to us, but neither do their rules. When you have to operate on streetcorners and back alleys of the industry, you can’t afford to be aloof.
And yeah, it comes with its problems and misunderstandings, as this article indicates. Maybe it’s something only the true enthusiasts can appreciate, and the indies hope those folks are willing to spread the word. I’m not ashamed of what’s behind the curtain. My personal hope is that the whole indie approach brings – a closer relationship between the gamers and the guys and gals that make the games they play – makes that trouble sports worth it in the end.
Filed Under: Game Development, Production - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
Indie RPG Updates…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 3, 2010
There have been several game updates / patches over the last few weeks for popular indie RPGs:
Din’s Curse – There’s a beta 1.004 patch, as well as a new v. 1.004 demo version. The big changes from the last official release – including the 1.003 release changes – include a new perspective view, improved UI graphics, an option for better shadows, and a bunch of bug fixes.
Eschalon: Book II has been updated to version 1.04. It includes preliminary “language pack” support, and a lot of balance changes and bug fixes.
Swords & Sorcery: Underworld has been updated to version 1.05. The updates have principally addressed some overall gameplay and balance issues, especially at higher level. And it’s save-game compatible with the last couple of versions.
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Flickering Torchlight and Replayability
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 2, 2010
I chatted with a bunch of folks last week and over the weekend about Torchlight. Torchlight impressed the heck out of me when I first played it. I managed to snag it while it was sale, but it would have been well worth it at full price. It’s an excellent action-RPG, and I think I spent about thirty hours with it, having a great time.
But it faded pretty fast for me after I defeated the final boss with my main character. The whole retiring-a-PC thing didn’t do a whole lot for me (I forget the exact terminology), and neither did the bonus dungeon that you get access to after winning the game. I’ve played it a few times since then, but Torchlight definitely lost its charm – even for alt characters of different classes – after that.
I guess there’s something to be said for being able to take on higher-level worlds in Diablo.
Maybe I am too much of a goal-oriented player or something. I dunno. I’ve put a like number of hours into Din’s Curse already, and while it lacks such an overriding goal and I am not playing it as much as I was when it was first released, I’m still enjoying it in a way that I’m not when I boot up Torchlight. Go figger. I guess those dynamically generated bad guys and the time pressures of Din’s Curse end up counting for something. My main character regained his freedom / soul some time ago, which was pretty much a non-event. Like my character, I just kept on going.
This isn’t really a condemnation of Torchlight. I’m just musing over my own reaction to two games which are designed for replayability or extended play.
How about you? What gives a game more replayability for you? Did you keep playing Oblivion long after winning it? What does it take besides just being able to make totally different character builds to make a game compelling after the final Foozle has been defeated and peace restored to the kingdom?
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 14 Comments to Read
So What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 31, 2010
So – just out of curiosity here, what games are YOU playing this weekend?
I mean besides Starcraft 2. 🙂 (I don’t have it, myself, and don’t have time to play. )
Just kinda curious where tastes and spare time is running…
As for me – besides Frayed Knights, I’m planning on putting a little time into Underworld.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 26 Comments to Read
Utah Indie Night, Summer 2010
Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 30, 2010
On Thursday evening we had our quarterly Utah Indie Night, held at ITT Tech. It was probably our most lightly attended indie night we’ve had since the very first year. Maybe it’s because Greg announced there’d be no pizza this time. Tight budgets at ITT these days…
Mike Rubin of Orange River Studio, who continues development on Vesper 3D, kicked off the evening with an encore presentation of the talk he gave at GDC Austin last year entitled, “Game Design Innovations in Interactive Fiction.” The talk went long, which may have irritated ;some folks, but I was fascinated.
His emphasis was on improving storytelling in games – yes, the Holy Grail. He cited several mainstream games praised for their storytelling (Half Life 2, Final Fantasy VII, Dreamfall, Deus Ex, and Fallout), and noted some very character-focused indie games that have experimented with storytelling technique (Braid, Façade,and The Path). He didn’t have much to say about these, as the talk was concerned with the innovations in Interactive Fiction. But he wanted to note some of the crossover potential, even as he acknowledged the difficulties in taking these innovations from the Interactive Fiction (aka “Text Adventure”) realm into other game genres – a problem he is all too familiar with in his 3D remake of the award winning IF Vespers.
He focused on advances that have been made to provide better text-based interfaces with Interactive Fiction, creating more believable characters, and providing meaningful choices. He cited the innovations in several games (which, if they weren’t exactly THE original innovator, did a fantastic job of highlighting it).
Blue Lacuna: It provides an even simpler / smarter parser for beginners with highlighted words, simple keyword entry, and keywords that expire to provide a more organic conversation. Also, the game is just amazingly huge and flexible, with far-reaching reactions to player choice. Also, the game is likely the largest work of Interactive Fiction ever created.
Blighted Isle: Also included hyperlinks and topic suggestions for players.
Varicella: A “disturbing” IF work that experimented with the use of emotional modifiers (voice tones) when dealing with NPCs.
Galatea: Multilinear conversation with states, tracking past conversation options, and past actions / conversations modify current responses.
Alabaster: Expanded a lot upon Galatea, including even more advanced conversation handling with multiple kinds of quip priorities, random elements mixed into conversations to vary responses about the same topic, and the NPC will notice and remark on repetition of topics.
De Baron (The Baron): Another highly disturbing game (I’m told), De Baron is a short game which includes not only moral dilemmas, but asks multiple choice questions to query the player on their motivations behind those choices.
After Rubin’s talk, we broke out into the game demos. Games included:
Tile Factory: A puzzle game by Jonathan Duerig (I hope I spelled his name right), this was actually a pretty clever Flash title where you make a factory to mass-produce a tile matching your goal.
Flexitris: A Tetris (ish) game with dozens of different selectable rules permutations. You can check this one out at Flexitris.com.
The Game Formerly Known as Zombie Defense: It no longer involves zombies, but instead includes a cute anime girl. But it’s still a tower defense game in development.
Gost: A very simple experiment by Josh Jones, it’s basically a game of figuring out what to do.
There were also the very valuable discussions taking place throughout the meeting which were generally at least peripherally associated with games and indie-dom.
Filed Under: Adventure Games, Utah Indie Game Night - Comments: Read the First Comment
What Makes Game Programming Awesome
Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 29, 2010
It was the summer of ’83. Or so I think. Up late on the Commodore 64, music turned low so as not to wake my parents. After making a few little Space Invaders and Missile Command clones, I was going to tackle something in the adventure / RPG genre (the two weren’t quite so separate back in those days). I was having to figure out how to do it from scratch, using some generic data structures rather than hardcoding each room and command in code in this text-adventure-y thing. It was all in BASIC, and I’d studied some source code from games like Wumpus 2 and Nomad (from Creative Computing’s “More Basic Computer Games“) and had some ideas on how to build a generic world.
It was Black Triangle work, all the way. But around midnight, things ran correctly for the first time. I was able to walk around, adventure-game style with commands like “N”, “S”, and “D” (North, South, and Down), and look around at the crappy room descriptions I’d created. I had something like 8 rooms in my little world, but I realized what this meant. I could create entire worlds. With HUNDREDS of locations. I mean, hey, I had a floppy disk drive with 256 K of disk space — that was almost UNLIMITED!
I rode a high made of a cocktail of emotions. First of all, there was the the source of programmer’s satisfaction: Not only coming up with a solution to a problem, but building a device to solve an entire class of problems. Secondly, there was the surge of megalomaniacal euphoria realizing how I had tools to build entire WORLDS out of this thing! I could even store it on disk – 256 KILObytes of storage space! Practically unlimited. And – perhaps the coolest of all – was being able to play with the results of my labors.
I’d built something cool. Even if it was only cool in my own mind.
I never actually created a full game out of my little 8-room world I built that night, but I remembered the feeling I had when I saw it finally work. The black triangle was live. This was how game programming SHOULD feel. I think in some ways, my career has been about trying to recapture that feeling. Sometimes I get it. Sometimes I’m there. Sometimes I’m not quite there, but I get a piece of it. Like last night. It wasn’t anything earth-shattering … just a significant refactor of how equipped magical items in my latest RPG work and are incorporated into the game rules.
But then seeing it all work, seeing it on the screen, seeing the Helm of Minor Awesomeness take effect properly when worn and mixing with other spell effects exactly as it should to make the Rules of the Game World all mesh together in a complex but predictable way. I felt that familiar feeling of Awesome again. I’d built something cool. Or possibly it was the virtual effect of the helmet on me late at night. But I’m gonna assume it was the former.
Game programming can be a lot of butt-in-chair work. It can be slow, painful, and not particularly exciting. But moments like that are what I live for. They take me back over twenty-five years, and remind me why I love it.
Filed Under: Programming - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
“Text Adventure” Mini-Playthrough of Age of Decadence
Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 28, 2010
For your amusement:
A play-through of one of the several text-adventure sequences in Age of Decadence. It’s already started, so it’s a little late to be one of the players I think. But it’s fun to see what they are doing with their choices.
Filed Under: General - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Best. Bollywood. Video. Ever.
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Except it’s not really Bollywood. It’s The Guild…
But as I’ve been subjected to some Bollywood flicks because my wife and several friends are fans, this had me in stitches. I especially loved “Forward Slash – Almost Kiss!”
Better than “Do You Want to Date My Avatar?” Man, I dunno, hard to choose.
It does occur to me that I need to catch up on watching The Guild, though. I don’t think I ever finished watching Season 3.
Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
Almost Half of PC Game Sales Are Now Downloads…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 27, 2010
We’re living in an immaterial world, and I am an immaterial gir… uh, guy, er, whatever.
NPD: Full-Game PC Downloads Reaching Parity With Physical Purchases
I think if you were to add in things like downloadable content and in-game transactions for virtual items, and especially subscriptions to games like World of Warcraft, the number shifts out of retail’s favor.
It doesn’t help that you can’t buy PC games in half the game stores anymore. I remember many winters ago, walking into places like Babbage’s and Electronics Boutique and noting that they had nothing – or almost nothing – for the consoles. It was all PC stuff, baby… mainly games.
Ah, those were the days. I’d look over the boxes fondly – back when they were full-sized boxes with real documentation. And accessories like maps. I’d look over the screenshots on the back of the box, note the system requirements, and sometimes even wipe my drool off the shrink-wrap before replacing it on the shelf and moving on to the next game.
Oh, did I mention I didn’t have any money in those days? Yeah. Most of those good-ole-days were spent with me as a poor starving high-school or college student. So I could only look at the games and read reviews of them in magazines – monthly periodicals printed on paper, for you younguns. I drooled over a lot more games than I actually bought.
I actually really do prefer things the way they are now.
And incidentally, if you think this is isolated to just the PC, and that consoles aren’t only a generation or two behind, you’ve got your head in the sand.
Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
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