New Fan-Made Ultima Remakes!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 7, 2010

First off:

Ultima IV: Flash Version

I’m actually pretty impressed with what I’ve seen of this. Besides porting the (now public domain, courtesy of EA) Apple II version of Ultima IV to Flash for browser play, the author – Blair Legget, an out-of-work mainstream games industry veteran – also took it upon himself to make some enhancements to the game.

Now, I’m not a purist, though I do consider Ultima IV to be one of the most significant milestones in CRPG design. Looking through the list of changes that he’s made, I’m not seeing anything that doesn’t strike me as an enhancement. Honestly, I’m pretty friggin’ impressed.

Next up, a remake of another classic Ultima game:

The Ultima VI Project – Version 1.0 Released

They’ve finally hit the “final” version. Until version 1.01, of course. I’ve not played this one yet, but it may finally justify my purchase so many years ago of Dungeon Siege, a game I just never warmed up to in spite of trying to play it through three times. Then again, I never actually completed Ultima VI: The False Prophet, either, in spite of multiple attempts to play it through (I kept getting bored and annoyed while searching for the pieces of the pirate map).  Could this fan-made mod for Dungeon Siege actually solve the ennui problem with both games?

Hat tip to RPGWatch for the heads-up on both these announcements!

Filed Under: General - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Old 666

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 6, 2010

In addition to RPGs, I’m also an aviation and flight sim buff, and I get a little geeked over military history. Yes, I could totally grow a beard and become a wargamer. But I won’t.

Probably.

Over the weekend, I discovered the story of “Old 666.” I was watching an old episode of the History Channel’s “Dogfights,” and we were amazed by this story of a very unique B-17 bomber and its crew in World War II. I had to look up more details, and discovered that almost as amazing as the story of the plane and her crew and the “mapping mission” was that Hollywood still hasn’t turned it into a movie.

But maybe the reason nobody has made the movie yet is that the story would sound so incredibly cliche and formulaic. It’s not just a case of life imitating art, but life imitating the most over-the-top storyline Hollywood hacks could come up with. I’m sure that there are a lot more details to make it even more interesting, but here’s the story as I understand it (and you can read a much more lengthy version of it here).

A Pilot Without a Plane

So you’ve got this very likable protagonist pilot, Jay Zeamer, who had a dramatic need problem. He kept failing his certification on the bombers of his squadron. He was bounced around, filling in anywhere when a crewmember was absent. What he really wanted to do was to be a the pilot with his own crew. But while he had a reputation for being very cool under fire and in an emergency, but it didn’t mix well with his growing boredom and frustration with being stuck in the second seat. With very little to do, he’d often just fall asleep in the copilots chair, even – in one instance – in the middle of being attacked with anti-aircraft fire.

He was transferred to a new squadron flying B-17s – the “Flying Fortress.” His reputation followed him, and he again found himself as something of a “temp” guy. However, through this, he became something of a jack-of-all-trades. Eventually, he even found himself filling in as a pilot on some flights, in spite of never having successfully passed off his certification for that aircraft. But he was still just “filling in,” a “rover” without a plane or crew of his own.

“Renegades and Screwoffs” and a Cursed Plane

At the bottom of the list to receive a plane or crew, he took matters into his own hands. He put together a crew of similar misfits from the squadron – the men that no one else wanted — a bunch of “renegades and screwoffs,” a fellow pilot called them.  Soon, he had a crew, but no plane. Then one day, a friend told him, “I know where there’s a bomber, but no one will fly it anymore because every time it goes out it gets shot to hell!” It was an old B-17 that had been grounded after sustaining so much damage that it had been towed to the “bone yard” to be cannibalized by other crews for spare parts.

Zeamer and his misfit crew seized the plane, and worked to restore it and make it airworthy again. Not just restore it – they decided to customize it. They added nearly 50% more guns to the bird, including a forward-firing machinegun so Zeamer could also shoot, like a fighter pilot. They replaced the .30 caliber machine guns with bigger .50 caliber guns – or, in some cases, twin .50 caliber guns. When they were done, their aircraft – number 41-2666 (or 12666, depending on the account) was the most heavily armed bomber in the entire Pacific theater of World War II. They never added customary nose-art to the bomber, leaving it unadorned. So it became known by its serial number on its tail – “Old 666.”

These guys were nicknamed “The Eager Beavers” because they consistently volunteered for the most dangerous, crazy missions. They’d frequently come back shot full of holes, but they made it home. Zeamer and crew of renegades gained a new reputation for courage and incredible airmanship. In one night mission, for example, the enemy troops managed to fix the entire flight of bombers with large searchlights, illuminating them so they could be shot down by anti-aircraft guns. Zeamer used his giant aircraft as a fighter, diving on the searchlight positions and using his forward-firing machine guns to destroy three of them and damage two others, saving the other planes and their crews.

The Mapping Mission

Their final mission together was a critical reconnaissance mission – a solo flight deep into enemy airspace. It was a purely a volunteer operation, as it was far too dangerous to be assigned. Zeamer and his crew volunteered (except the ones sick with malaria) – even the bombardier, Joe Sarnoski, whose position would not be required on this mission. Sarnoski was, in fact, had already packed his bags, as his tour of duty was over. He was ordered home to serve as an instructor.

As they approached their targets in the early dawn, seventeen enemy aircraft were scrambled to intercept. The smart thing to do at that point would have been to turn around and fly home. Zeamer decided to complete the mission.  As they were completing their photography run, they were jumped. The enemy fighters focused on attacking the front of the B-17, which was traditionally lightly armed. They hadn’t accounted for the customization of the “Eager Beavers”.

Two fighters were shot down immediately, however, both Zeamer and Sarnoski were badly injured. In Sarnoski’s case, the wound was mortal. He’d been blown out of his chair and nearly cut in half. He crawled, bleeding, back to his guns, and shot down one more attacking fighter before passing out, still clenching the gun controls. Zeamer’s wrists were severely lacerated by shrapnel, pumping blood with every heartbeat, and his feet had been shattered by an exploding shell beneath them which had also destroyed his rudder pedals. The oxygen system had been destroyed, necessitating a dive from 25,000 feet down to 8,000 feet to keep the crew breathing. Somehow, Zeamer maintained consciousness, and fought to weave in and out of the attacks as they zig-zagged for home.

The combat lasted a grueling 45 minutes. When the co-pilot brought the plane in for a landing and the medical crew came, they believed Zeamer was dead. Sarnoski had finally died during the flight. Old 666 had taken 187 bullets and bore the gaping holes from five explosive 20 mm rounds. But they’d completed their mission, and brought back mapping photos that may have saved the lives of hundreds or even thousands of marines in the upcoming attack several months later.

While it was the end of Jay Zeamer’s combat career,  he survived, enduring fifteen months of hospitalization for his injuries. Both Zeamer and Sarnoski (posthumously) received the Medal of Honor for the mission, and the other seven crewmembers each received the Distinguished Service Cross. They also received five Purple Hearts for injuries they received from the battle, as more than half the crew were wounded in the engagement.

It’s a heck of a story. It sounds like it would make a great movie, too.  But people would probably complain about how unrealistic it was. But here’s the excerpt from the Dogfights documentary:

Filed Under: General - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Building Character

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 5, 2010

I used to love making characters for RPGs. Both for pen-and-paper RPGs and for computer RPGs. Making your character was half the fun. Then it got old. Kinda. I assumed it was just that the problem was that I had been getting older, and less patient, more “mainstream,” or something. And so for years, I almost bought into the standard argument made by many game designers that the old-school character generation in CRPGs was just a tedious exercise of a bygone era.

And then… I discovered some games where it was fun again. While perhaps less patient than I was at age thirteen, I found I still enjoy making characters for some games. So what makes character creation fun for me?

Holding Out For a Hero

The old-school D&D method of making a character by random dice rolls is supposed to be horrible and completely unfair. Your otherwise awesome character, due to one bad roll, gets saddled with a 7 wisdom or something. The “enlightened” game systems eschew this sort of randomness in favor of assigning points exactly as you want them.

Except… there’s a little bit of our brain that loves the gamble. Look at random-content games like Diablo. Frankly, the randomized loot is half the fun of the game. It’s the same sort of compulsion that works for me in games that throw some randomness into the character creation process. Do I hit, or stand? Is this current collection of points sufficient for what I need to do? Maybe I was trying to make a wizard, but I just got some great fighter stats I should save off for another party member (in games where you play a party).

For some reason, this also appeals to me as more interesting decision-making than point-buy systems. Maybe it’s because I constrain myself too much to avoid weaknesses, and thus always end up with characters with very similar characteristics.

I spoke to a friend the other day who evidently feels the same way. He spent the first hour of his time playing Eschalon: Book 2 just experimenting with making characters. As with other “old school” indie RPGs, it includes some random dice rolls in character generation.

Knowing What We’re Getting Into

Back in the day, it wasn’t hard to create characters, because as a full-on geek I knew the D&D rules very well. And most of the CRPGs used rule systems based heavily on D&D. “Dexterity” might be renamed “Agility” or something, but we all knew what it meant and what it would probably be good for. It wouldn’t take too much to read through the manual on the classes (so you knew exactly what a Ranger in this game could do). It wasn’t too hard to figure out what should be your dump stat. 🙂

I’m happy that modern games have a much broader range of rule systems that aren’t all derived from an older edition of Dungeons & Dragons. But making a character can be a lot more frustrating if you don’t have any clue how valuable Willpower might be in the game system, or whether or not there will be much call for your Advanced Larceny perk.

Unfortunately, the only real way to understand the game system well enough to make informed decisions in the character creation process  is by playing. And once we’re played enough to understand the game system, we’re not too inclined to want to jump back to the beginning of the process to re-make our characters. Fallout 3 recently handled this in an interesting way by letting you completely re-spec your character after completing the intro sequence. Unfortunately, by that point you still didn’t really understand the game system (at that point in the game for example, you’d be convinced that Energy Weapons was a useless skill). See “Taking a Test Drive”.

Jumping Into the Deep End

Even though it had no random rolls whatsoever, making characters for the Champions RPG fascinated me when I was in junior high. Mainly because of the sheer amount of depth there was to character generation. That’s not the same as complexity, but the two are often related. For character generation, it means that your choices have dependencies on each other. At a simple level, your skill options may have dependencies on a class selection. At a much deeper level, maybe you have some deep, circular dependencies that offer unlimited opportunity for tweaking, adjustment, and other tricks to fine-tune a character.

Maybe it’s just geeky engineer / programmer types that get into that, but I know I certainly do.

Choices Matter

After all that fun of choosing character stats that might be sub-optimal, and making lots of decisions in a deep character creation process, there’s no better way to make me feel ripped off as a player than to discover that my choices have been neutered by a game that doesn’t take my decisions into consideration in the game.  If I take a low intelligence, it should play out somehow in the game (with more limited conversation options, perhaps).

And if the Underwater Basket Weaving costs the same number of points as Small Arms, I should reasonably expect to be able to get roughly similar amount of value from both skill. While one could argue that throwing points away on a useless skill might be a choice that matters,  that’s not really what I’m talking about. I would want to see that my Underwater Basket Weaving skill has a cool and interesting place in the story. Or I want to have the opportunities available to make it so.

Taking a Test Drive

Back in the old days, you could very quickly “test drive” a new character and see how they played. This was the other half of what made experimentation fun – you could quickly learn that although you used Strength as a dump stat for your mage, the huge limitations on carrying capacity were going to be frustrating for you throughout the game. So you could go back to the drawing board without having invested too much time into a character that didn’t play the way you wanted them too.You went from Character Generation to Level 1 of a Really Big Dungeon in seconds.

Too many games now have such lengthy introductory and tutorial sections (I haven’t played it yet, but I hear Final Fantasy XIII is that way almost until the end of the game!), so that by the time you are actually able to jump in and really freely test out your character against “typical” experiences representative of the rest of the game, you are already three or four hours into it.

Optimization Not Required

Finally – if a game is designed to be “challenging” by making it so that only a well-optimized character (or party) has a prayer of succeeding, then there really is no point in making a character in the first place. If all options but one will lead to failure, then there’s really only one option, isn’t there? Alas, when this problem rears its ugly head, it’s usually far too late to consider going back and starting over with a better-optimized character.

Fortunately, most RPGs allow some grinding and money-making (for all those healing potions) opportunities for the special-needs adventurers to make up for not having chosen the “Combat God” class, so this is an infrequent problem.  But nothing will kill the joy of making your own characters more than discovering the hard way that your character was destined to failure from the first hour.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Happy 4th of July!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 4, 2010

While it may be just another day in the rest of the world, here in the U.S., this is a special day…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

I just wanted to thank and tip my hat to the folks who, 234 years ago, put their butts on the line for a chance for us to chart our own destiny in a grand experiment. As with anything worthwhile, it’s not always been smooth sailing. But it’s been good.

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The Triumph of 2D

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 2, 2010

It’s become pretty obvious by now, but Kotaku has a very nice article up about the return of 2D in gaming:

The Revenge of 2D

Not that it was ever really gone. But while it wasn’t entirely dead (in spite of the wishes of companies like Sony and Microsoft), it’s epitaph and eulogy were written, and it was generally dismissed among most journalists and industry folks as an antique, a relic of a bygone era.

While 3D games are in no danger of being overtaken by their 2D counterparts (as far as I can tell), 2D has proven pretty resilient and is making a comeback. If survival was the goal, 2D games can declare a resounding victory.

Of course, I say this with a 3D game in development. I’ve been a 3D geek since 3D was being done in vector graphics in games like Red Baron and Battlezone. I’ll always geek out over lush, awesome 3D environments. It’s how I roll.

But I think my own appreciation for 2D gameplay increased once it became an endangered species for a while.  There are a lot of styles of games – many not even created yet – that simply work better in 2D.  And the technology for making beautiful, deep 2D games has never been better, or more accessible. And improving daily.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Diablo II – Ten Years Old?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 1, 2010

RPS reminds us that Diablo II just turned ten years old.

I still have the collector’s edition box in my closet. It’s, uh… collecting. Dust.

I make my snide remarks about action RPGs, but I still love ’em – the good ones, that is. And Diablo II is definitely an example of excellence, and is still quite playable ten years later. Well, I assume so. It’s been about two years since I last played, but even then I found myself getting into it and having a joyous time.

My first character, an Amazon, got up to somewhere around level 65. The sad thing is, I got very lucky on a weapon drop around 25th level, picking up a pike that did insane amounts of damage on a hit. She was still using that same pike when I last played her. With the expansion, I’d been able to upgrade it a little bit (and get her name engraved on it), but I’d never found a successor. Sometimes the random number generator was just – you know, nice.

And while the official successor, Diablo III, is on the horizon, the series has left us a pretty awesome legacy in the meantime.  Including the indies!

Unfortunately, most games that seek to emulate Diablo pretty much stop there. I’ve recounted the story before, but when I first heard about Steven Peeler’s Depths of Peril, I wasn’t terribly excited.  It sounded like “just” another Diablo clone. I was pleasantly surprised. Its successor, Din’s Curse, is one of my favorite indie RPGs (yes, in spite of being an action RPG). These games took the compelling gameplay of Diablo (which is basically good ol’ fashioned hacking-and-slashing mixed with the fun of random loot discovery) as a foundation, and built upon it. These games weren’t just a feature-by-feature emulation of the classic, but rather threw some very interesting ideas, both new and old, into the mix. The results were some of the finest action-RPG dungeon-crawling to be had on the PC, indie or otherwise.

I loved Torchlight, which was authored by some of the original Diablo II team (plus some of the Fate team).  Unfortunately, it runs out of gas pretty quickly, and replaying as a different character class doesn’t provide enough of a different experience for me. However, the game is priced at the level of an indie game, which means it still provides more than enough bang for the buck for recommendation. Plus, the soundtrack is by Matt Uelmen, the composer for the first two Diablo games, so it also sounds like a Diablo. Eventually, they plan to turn this thing into an MMO, and I could probably go for that.

No, I don’t consider Torchlight an indie title – but it is occupying a nebulous zone where it doesn’t really qualify as a full-fledged “mainstream” title either. I love that it could be successful in spite of making an end-run around the traditional mainstream gatekeepers. I expect to see this sort of thing happening a lot more as the industry continues to change, partly driven by guys like the indies and Runic Games.

Those are just a few recent  examples.  All this from a game that was – at one point – planned as a turn-based title. (It’s true!). While I get annoyed at the mainstream industry slavishly aping Diablo for so many years to the exclusion of most other RPG concepts, they were truly landmark games that I enjoyed a great deal. Kudos and happy (belated) birthday, Diablo II!

Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games, Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

“DROP YOUR WEAPONS!”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 30, 2010

Well, this wouldn’t actually be the first time something like this has happened. Some dude’s LARP gear was confiscated by police as evidence of violent intent:

Weapons Seized in G20 Arrests Not What They Seem

Here’s a big hint to those Toronto police officers: Those arrows with the heads replaced by foam and cloth? They’ve got a range and speed of, like, nothing. I know, I’ve used ’em enough. A molotov cocktail would be much more effective, and far easier to make.

But this ain’t the first time. And it won’t be the last.

When I was a teenager, my little group (“unit”) got the cops called on them in the middle of a practice. They were a little too close to an apartment complex at the time. Suddenly, they found the cruiser-mounted spotlights shining on them, guns trained on them, with a loud voice booming “DROP YOUR WEAPONS!” I wasn’t there at the time, but my friends swore that they maintained bladder control when that happened. One friend was still wearing a sheathed knife, however, which he’d forgotten about in his haste to drop his foam-padded gear and raise his hands up in a non-threatening position. The cop gave him a hard time about the knife, but ultimately they came to their senses (unlike the chief in the above article) and let them go.

Years later, we started practices twice a week (later once a week) down in a park in Provo.  The practices are still being held there, I’m told. We chose that park because it was, at the time, right across the street from our apartment.  Almost every week, the cops were called about possible gang violence occurring in that park. They were required to respond every time. But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, they knew what to expect. Those were the two nights of the week they DIDN’T have to worry about gangs and drug deals. We basically scared the gangs and drug dealers. Too much attention, I guess. But the cops would often hang out and watch us practice for a little while. I think they wanted to play, too…

(Yeah, I know, Provo sounds like Mayberry when talking about gang violence and drug dealers, but it’s there, just as everywhere else).

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Casual Games: After the Gold Rush

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 29, 2010

As an indie who came on the scene just before casual games pretty much took over and convinced many in the industry that “indie” meant “casual” (now it seems to mean, “pretentious experimental web games”), I must confess a tiny bit of schadenfreude at seeing the air rushing out of the casual gaming balloon. But it really was inevitable. Everybody saw it coming. The growth in that area was unsustainable. The big jockeying-for-position that you saw among the portals over the last several years wasn’t just cashing in on the boom – it was to position themselves for safety when the time came to hunker down and survive the bust.

And now I can pat myself on the back for resisting  the temptation to rush in and join it. Though – um – I’ve been at this long enough I probably could have made and released three or four games in that time and cashed in. Except, I wouldn’t have anyway, as I doubt I could have made it into the top 10% that made ALL the money. And… man, I just suck. Nevermind.

But in spite of social games apparently eating casual games’ lunch, I don’t think casual gaming is done. Not at all. It’s just that the boom has… boomed. The gold rush is over. The faddish side of it has faded. Now they get to work on a sustainable future.

The top casual games will probably STILL make tons more than all of the hard-core indie RPGs combined.

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

M&M 6: Why Play Retro?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 28, 2010

One other wrinkle in my little motion sickness issue with the classic 1998 RPG, Might & Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven — I had a bad cold all last week. I’m sure that didn’t help any.

I experimented with the game in small doses (all I *should* allow myself, anyway) this weekend, and found myself capable of handling the game just fine. I made my constitution roll, I guess.

Now of course, as I play a game like this, part of me says, “What can I possibly learn from this game? What can I possibly see that I’ve not seen done better in other games?” To be honest, I’m not sure. But it’s not really the point. While technically I’m playing it for “research” – and I really am – it’s not just looking at mechanics in isolation with any expectation of emulating them.

A lot of it is getting a good taste of the whole enchilada. In a good RPG, it’s all about how all these little systems work together. The balance of spell system against the trading mechanics. Hey, if you have to choose whether to put the points in leveling up Fire Magic or Merchant skills, this is important.

And one of the joys of retro-gaming for me – whether playing games I missed the first time around or revisiting old favorites for the nth time –  is just getting a feel for the game world. I like seeing how the narrative unfolds, how the NPCs react, why the dungeons are laid out the way they are, etc. I also like seeing how designers worked around the limitations of their platform – and with or around the expectations of the era.

It’s a lot like why I enjoy indie games. Maybe the modern mainstream games are more slick, enjoy 100x better production values, and are based on well-established design concepts and models that are so deeply ingrained that designers don’t even understand why they exist anymore.  But there’s something to the rawness of an older era or from the indies of today, where the makeup isn’t layered on quite so thick, that can be pretty refreshing to play.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Heartsick and Motion Sick

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 25, 2010

It’s no secret around here that I do enjoy retrogaming. While I appreciate lush graphics as much as the next gamer, I guess I still consider it non-essential to my gaming experience. I can turn off that part of my brain that goes, “Oooh, pretty!” and still appreciate an indie game or retro experience which doesn’t quite push the technological envelope. And I understand the difference between attractive visuals and photo-realistic, or technologically overwhelming, visuals.

But there is an exception I’d forgotten about. Back in the 90s,  I could only play first-person perspective games – the ones with Doom-like or Duke Nukem-like engines – in small doses. No more than an hour, generally.  Because they made me sick. Something about how they rendered the world just didn’t work in my brain. I neglected this danger once when Descent first came out. We played it multiplayer for about three hours straight the day it came out. I really never played the game again after that, because I was so incredibly dog-sick for the rest of the day. I couldn’t eat, and was worried about holding down what I already had. I went straight to bed that night, anxious for relief. The next morning, when I woke up, I was still feeling a little motion-sick.

It’s been a long time since I had to worry about that. The problem hasn’t entirely gone away with modern first-person games, but it has to be a pretty extended session before I even feel the first hints of a problem.

I recently re-discovered Might & Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven. I bought it from GOG.COM some time ago, and played it a little. I try to spend a little bit of time each week playing CRPGs of all kinds (yes, even when you love games, when you are neck-deep in making them, it’s easy to forget to play.)  This one came up, and – unsurprisingly – I’ve found myself really getting into it.

I had had a rough evening in the real world. We’d received the news that we’d lost a good friend of ours to cancer. It was a lot sooner than we expected. I still don’t know the details. We were heartsick.

Later, I found it tough to get motivated to work. I got a little done, but not much. I sought escape. So why not fire up this old classic and spend the time doing “research?” That way I could at least pretend I was accomplishing something.

It did the trick. I was lost in the world of Enroth for about a few  hours. I had a wonderful time. Although it didn’t succeed in taking my mind completely away from dwelling on the loss of a friend, it at least diverted my focus for a while. That was good. It was just what I needed. Except…

After playing for a bit, I felt uncomfortably warm. And a little queasy.   Might & Magic 6 has one of those vintage 1990’s 3D engines, with the crawling, scintillating, flashing pixels that defy proper laws of motion and perspective that my brain expects from visual input.  In the intervening decade, I’d completely forgotten about the danger of playing those games. And now, my body was none too happy.

So now, it’s the next morning. My heart and mind are still coming to grips with the loss of a respected friend, and I’m still feeling a little motion sick from the night before.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to play much more Might & Magic 6 after over-doing it last night. If not, bummer. It was a good place to go for a while when I needed it.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 24, 2010

It’s time for another post about Frayed Knights!

When I first got started in game development, I was told of the “80/20” rule. That is, 80% of the work takes 20% of the time… and the remaining 20% of the work takes 80% of the time.  I’ve also come across the expression, “The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the time.” It’s very true. Those of you nodding while wincing in pain, I see you guys are professional developers of one stripe or another.

For the rest of you, I want to invite you to ride virtual shotgun with me through a somewhat recent experience (from a month ago) in building out part of the game. I’m going to change the name of a few things to avoid too much spoilerific territory, but when you play through Act 1, you’ll undoubtedly recognize this part if you still remember this article. But all we’re going to do is script up a single room in a dungeon. Of many rooms.

Here’s the basic design of the room, in wonderful text-style prose suitable for a D&D module or one of my lame design documents:

The High Transmogrification Room:

After opening the door and fighting the room’s guards, the party finds two strange, ancient devices. One artifact hanging on the wall (we’ll call it the Wall Artifact) has three slots for Keys By Any Other Name (K-BAONs, we’ll call ’em).  Once three K-BAONs are inserted into the Wall Artifact, the second ancient device, we’ll call it the Amazing Transmogrification Pad (ATP), gets activated. The party can then use it to… [do whatever the the transmogrification pad is supposed to do].

Implementation

OKAY! I’m really excited about this room, because we’re nearly 80% done before we’ve even started. It’s mostly re-used assets, plus a little bit of scripting, a couple (surely no more than that!) of dialogs, and a couple of text descriptions. Our biggest problem will be the Wall Artifact, which doesn’t exist yet, and creating the K-BAON objects, but those should be simple.

(How, oh how, can I be so naive after so much time, huh?)

The room has already been built. Painstakingly. By someone else. Man, I love my job.

The door? Pfah! Trivial. Maybe two minutes to put it into position, set up it’s scripting. It’s mainly cut-and-paste by this point. The combat encounter? Ditto. I’m re-using monsters that have appeared several times in this level already. The ATP? I’ve already done that before, too. I just have to make some minor modifications to make it so it can be inactive. And – oh, yeah, a little pop-up description of how it seems to be nonfunctional right now, and needs to be activated somehow. So the player isn’t left in the dark. There’s a little extra wiring-up I need to do, and that part’s done. I’ve spent maybe fifteen minutes on this room, and I’m 80% complete. Awesome.

Making An Artifact

Sweet. Now just to deal with the Wall Artifact, and I’m done.  Now, I have a default stand-in object that looks like a big stone question mark that I use as an obvious placeholder.  But I’m on fire tonight, one somewhat complicated room almost done in only about fifteen minutes or so, so I’m gonna actually devote some time to making the art myself. I fire up Blender, create the model, slap a generic brassy texture over it, and export it. I bring it into the game, and hang it on the wall…

And it looks like one of those big circular life preservers. The kind you see at the poolside or on cruise ships.

Okay, a few more tweaks, and it looks much better. Less life-preservery*. Now I need to texture it, so I spend some time mucking around with the UVs, and take a first pass at a texture… which looks terrible.

And so I punt. I message my brother, Brian, and ask him how long it would take for him to create a cool texture for this thing. He’ll have it done and sent back to me before the night’s over, for sure.  And he does. About two hours later, I’m BACK to messing around with the UVs to match the differences between my UV map and his much more refined changes. That ends up taking about twenty more minutes, and the thing looks pretty decent!

Though I still have to make some additional geometry changes to further reduce the life preserver effect.

But hey, that model is done! Woot! But in the meantime, I’ve been writing. And coding…

Decisions, Decisions…

Now comes the fun part. Scripting it up!

So the party encounters the artifact! What happens?

Well, the first time it’s encountered, I have them discuss what the heck it is. That’s easy. And that moves the artifact into state 2.

There’s another state for when it’s already been activated. That’s easy too. A little descriptive text, and … done.

Uh, what happens if the party already has all three K-BAONs when they first encounter the artifact?

Do they manually have to insert the K-BAONs into the artifact through some kind of interface, or does the game just make it happen automatically?

What happens if they keep coming back to the artifact without any of the K-BAONs? Should I have their dialog give them a hint about what they are looking for?

What happens if they only have one or two K-BAONs? Do they insert them one at a time, or should it be an all-or-nothing thing? Contextually, it makes sense that they wouldn’t leave a job half-done for some monster to come by after them and undo it (and re-hide the K-BAONs) – not that I would bother making that happen in the game from a meta-gaming perspective, but in the fiction of the game, it’s a possibility. Since it’s easier for me to do it all-or-nothing, I choose that. But now I need to have a new dialog for what happens when they have an insufficient quantity of K-BAONs.

Detour #1 – Craft Time!

Oh, hey, I need to actually make the K-BOAN object. No problem. Oh, I don’t have an icon for it. I coulda sworn I had one already. Ah, well, no problem. I fire up the Gimp… la-la… a few minutes later, I have the icon. And the object. Alright, now I’m 90% done now! Maybe 95%! That was a little more effort than anticipated, but not too bad. But…

Detour #2: Code Rewrite

Oh. Problem. I have code to check if anybody in the party has an instance of a particular item in their inventory.  Nothing in there to check to see if I have at least so many of a particular item. I haven’t needed that functionality in previous quests and mechanics. Oops!

Time for a code re-write. Uh, actually, new code. I’m afraid of breaking the old code. So now I have a check-for-n items clause. I have to keep searching through the party inventory and different player’s inventory until I’ve counted an least n items of a type, because there’s no guarantee the player is going to stack them all together in one slot.

Oh. Another problem. Similar to the last one. I have to remove n items from the player inventories. My existing code only finds the first instance of an item and removes it. The new code has to search through the party and player inventories (in what order?) and keep removing all instances of the given item until it has removed so many. And then stop.

Decision Time, Again…

Okay, so now I have code that can remove a particular amount of an item. But… hey, this gives me an idea. Should I have MORE than 3 K-BAONs in the area? Like maybe four? The player never has to find the fourth?  This gives them the option of skipping one encounter…

Detour #3: Where Was I, Again?

Oh, now I have to place the K-BAONs in the dungeon. One here, one here, one… oh, wait. I am supposed to place one with the level boss. So now I make that encounter.

I consult my design notes on this boss, and note that he’s got a couple of special abilities that I haven’t implemented yet.  Well, I’ll skip those, for now. Oh, and he has a spear. With another un-implemented special ability. No problem. I’ll give him a generic spear. What? I haven’t made any spears for the game yet? Sheesh, how’d that happen? There’s a whole feat that’s been useless this whole time. So I make a spear.

That also means making another spear item icon. And 3D model. Well, we’ll skip the model, use a stand-in. Gah. Make note of this so I don’t forget.**

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the boss. I finish the boss encounter. With his attendants. Oh, there’s some special code that needs to go there, too.

Done. Okay, I have a functional (but far from complete) boss encounter, and all the placements of the K-BAONs in the game. Cool.

Where was I? Strangely, the children’s song, “There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” starts going through my head.

And Back to the Artifact.

Okay, now we’re back to the artifact. I’m testing. Finding bugs. Testing again. Repeat. I’m trying a variety of approaches, trying to do things things in a different order each time.

Finally, the room seems to be complete, matching the description above.

I thought I was about 80% complete after 15 minutes of working on this room. And now, five hours later, including a couple hours of Brian’s time to make a texture, I’m finally done!

80-20 my foot. That last 20% took forever! ***

Oh, wait, why are those stupid K-BAONs still in my inventory after I activated the Amazing Transmogrifier Pad? Crap. I thought that code was working…

* I still have the characters speculate on it’s life-preservery appearance in their dialog. Just ‘cuz. Dunno if it will still be in the final version, but it amuses me now.

** Granted, the spear wasn’t strictly necessary, either. Nor was going around the dungeon adding it to a couple of loot spots. Maybe I’m too ADD for game design…

***Okay – I’m gonna acknowledge the whole “80% complete” estimate is totally off, as the amount of time that it took for Brian to create the dungeon in the first place was significant. Or for me to write all the original code and create / script the existing objects I’m re-using. And I got a big chunk of another encounter done in the process. Estimations are a totally flawed science. That, or I just suck at it. Mostly me sucking at it, I guess.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Twisted Metal Lives

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 23, 2010

Sadly, I’m probably not going to spring for a PS3 to play this one. But I’m glad to see the tradition lives on.

Twisted Metal and Warhawk were the first two games I ever worked on (I worked on both games simultaneously; For a while, they shared the same code base, and you could fly the Peregrine – the Warhawk ship – around the Twisted Metal levels). I don’t know if it’s ever going to be possible to recapture the feeling of those days. Not sure I’d want to. But it’s fun to see the series I had a small hand in creating live on.

Filed Under: Mainstream Games - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Shareware is Dead – Long Live Shareware!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 22, 2010

Greg of Monkeytime Software sent me this announcement about the organization formerly-known-as the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP) finally striking the word “Shareware” from their name:

Shareware is Dead – Long Live Shareware!

I’m mixed about the change. Yeah, the term “shareware” is pretty much as obsolete and out-of-fashion as the floppy disk and dial-up bulletin boards. But I still think there’s a huge gulf of meaning between “shareware” and “software.”  Does this name change indicate that Microsoft project managers are now part of the intended audience for the organization?

I’m not sure what term should replace it. I’m jealous about applying “indie” to non-game software. Microsoft uses terms like “ISVs” and “Micro-ISVs,” but those are basically terms coined by Microsoft that mean, “Not Microsoft” and “Not only not Microsoft and mainly beneath our notice.”

At least one commenter made the point that “shareware won.”  That’s pretty much the case. Nowadays, most software is available directly online, and most of it has free demo versions available. Granted, some of the old shareware founders may still balk at the idea of crippled / limited demos being considered the same as shareware. But seriously – the old brick-and-mortar sales channel may be far from dead yet, but it’s still dying. The old “Computerlands” of the world are long-gone, and while perhaps OfficeMax still sells a lot of business software, most places I’ve worked have purchased their software licenses entirely online. Hey, even Microsoft offers free demo versions of some of their software now!

I guess this does feel like an acknowledgment that a fondly-remembered era has finally passed. An era I mostly recall as the days of Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit, Jill of the Jungle, Duke Nukem (2D and 3D), and Commander Keen…  and of BBS “portal” games…  sigh. Those were a godsend when I was a broke college student.

So maybe what was once pioneering and strange is now the status quo. Shareware won. It’s all good.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Game Design: All Or Nothing, and Deviants

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 21, 2010

Okay, is it just me, or did old-school RPGs really tend to hit players early with things like diseases and poisons, when they are too low level to afford proper cures?

Assuming this isn’t simply a gross mis-interpolation based on a couple of examples, my guess might be that this was simply because there was just a short time period that such conditions were a threat and not just a trivial inconvenience. So it was pretty much an all-or-nothing effect: Below Xth level, it was horrible, and above Xth level (or maybe X+2), it was trivial. What it did, however, was make those encounters with otherwise boring giant rats a lot more exciting. The random likelihood of getting diseased from a lucky shot made all giant rat encounters a little more intimidating. At least until you were capable of casting “cure disease” on yourself.

In fact, there were a lot of “all-or-nothing” effects in earlier games that aren’t nearly as present today:

* Clerics + Undead: This was generally better balanced in computer RPGs than their pen-and-paper grandfather. But undead encounters were often either party-killers or trivial depending upon whether or not you had a cleric that was on the ball.

* “Save or die” spells: These have been largely scrubbed out of the latest version of the pen-and-paper version of Dungeons & Dragons.

* Just the likelihood of missing, or having a spell fail entirely, tended to be pretty high in these older games.  When an enemy could be felled in just a couple of hits, a string of misses could make a radical difference in combat.

The end result of these effects was that encounters would get a lot more deviations from the norm. Sure, an encounter with a half-dozen goblins, on the average, would result in your party’s victory with something like 24 points of damage spread across six characters.  No big deal. However, 10% of the time it would instead result in a total party wipeout, and 5% of the time the party might get lucky on the initiative and sleep spell and suffer no damage whatsoever. And a whole spread of results in-between. The “average” meant very little.

It seems to me that modern computer and console RPGs have made an effort to decrease the deviation from the norm. Misses have become as rare as critical hits, and damage deviation has been smoothed out. And as more RPGs increase the number of encounters (as in most action-RPGs), deviations are further lost in the noise. Player success and failure becomes pretty consistent, without much being left to chance.

Is this preferable? I don’t know. A lot of players complained of the amount of randomness involved in the fights in the pilot release of Frayed Knights, and I made changes to tone that down.  But there’s a gut-feel part of me that resists the urge to smooth things out too much. Because adapting to changes and surprises – to the deviations – is part of what makes combat interesting in RPGs.

I’m still not saying I’m a fan of all-or-nothing successes or failures – but I do appreciate the wider spreads of potential results.  Too much consistency is boring.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 22 Comments to Read

235 Free Indie Games – In Ten Minutes

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 18, 2010

Two hundred thirty-five indie games – all of them available for free – shown inside of ten minutes – at about 2.5 seconds each. In alphabetical order. It’s like… like going into an arcade in the 1980s and seeing the attract mode of hundreds of games, and knowing that they are all ALL on free play…

So the next time someone asks you, “So what are indie games?” you can show them this video, and note that this is just some of the stuff they are giving away for free.

Cool huh? I totally dig the Gameboy-based music, too.

Okay – granted, it’s almost all flashy action-game stuff, not representative of the wealth of genres out there. And not everything shown here is exactly the pinnacle of originality. In fact, some of them would likely get a C&D if the creators could be found and the distribution actually halted.

But you know what? Watching this thing just makes me grin. I feel like a kid again – back in the arcades, seeing some raw, unbridled LOVE of the hobby coming alive on the screen.  This is what indie is all about. Watch the video, pick some interesting-looking titles, grab the links, and play them. They are there to be played.

And have a FUN weekend!

UPDATE: As an added bonus, 190 Free Indie Games Still In Development.

Filed Under: Free Games, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Indie Biz: Collaborative Competition

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 17, 2010

Shortly after I made the uneasy transition from being just-a-programmer to managing a project and running an actual (if not all that profitable, so far) indie business, I read a very inspiring article. I wish I could tell you who wrote it, or link to it, but I can’t recall. But the author pointed out the difference, in his mind, between “big business” people and entrepreneurs.

The “big business” folks live in a zero-sum world. They often work with a world leader for whom expanding their market share generally means taking it from someone else. Survival and growth depend upon crushing the competition. As many of these businesses are market leaders, they have a siege mentality as hundreds of small, scrappy companies come gunning for them.

Broad strokes, of course, and I don’t know how much I’m reading my own experiences into my memories of the article. I should note (and I don’t recall if the author did or not) that this mentality isn’t exclusive to the halls of the mega-corporations. It’s just that this environment is more likely to reward that kind of attitude and behavior.

By contrast, he claimed most entrepreneurs he knew would give you the shirts off their own backs to help each other and even a newcomer to their ranks. The attitude was completely different – they lived in a non-zero-sum world, where they saw so much opportunity that they knew they couldn’t come close to addressing without help. They saw other small businessmen and entrepreneurs as potential allies – even the ones who might technically be competitors.

I was grateful to see two indies I admire, Jeff Vogel and Celso Riva, recently echoed this sentiment. I believe their sincerity. I’ve seen the results first-hand. When your biggest problem is getting the word out, and your products aren’t mutually exclusive, competition can be your biggest ally. Game sales from my main site tend to flow in waves. An influx of sales from Eschalon: Book 2 is often accompanied by an increase of sales of not only the first game, but a bump in sales across the board. It’s not clear why. Maybe some folks played Eschalon: Book 2, didn’t find the style to their liking, but then decided to give Lilly and Sasha: Curse of the Immortals a try instead and preferred it?

I don’t know. And as Celso points out – you can get to the point where resources get scarce and the competition becomes a problem, as it has become with casual games and mainstream games as well. But we’re nowhere near that point yet.

But then we have something WCG said in a comment to yesterday’s post. He was trying to be frank but apologetic, but I don’t think he should have apologized. I think he hit a nail right on the head. I’ll repeat it here. He wrote:

The other thing is that there are a LOT of indies, or so it seems to me. I can’t find the time to play more than just a few of the games that sound interesting. In the past, I’ve bought games just to support the developer, and sometimes I never did get around to playing them.

I seldom buy a mainstream game until it’s been out a few years. Again, I don’t have the time to play everything I want right away. And then there are old games I want to re-install and play again. Frankly, every time I see a retrospective on a great old game, it brings back fond memories that I want to re-capture. Wouldn’t that be fun to play again?

So you’ve got a LOT of competition. Yes, you’re even competing with games ten or 15 years old, as long as they’re still playable with DOSBox. I’ve got crates of old games stored in the basement, many that I’ve forgotten all about, so I could probably never buy another game and still have plenty to play.

Compared to all that, price doesn’t matter much to me. If it’s a game I really want to play, something that really appeals to me, I won’t even look at the price. (After all, my computer is easily the major expense in playing games.) My limited amount of time is the main constraint. I’m going to be very picky on buying an indie game, just because I CAN’T PLAY EVERYTHING. If your game sounds interesting, but not exactly what I want, I’ll probably pass, just for that reason.

I wish this weren’t true, but it is.

I love GOG.COM.  It’s allowed me to catch up on some older games I missed the first time around… for cheap. Way cheaper than a new indie game, as a matter of fact.

But as an indie RPG developer, I really am going HEAD-TO-HEAD against not only the brilliant modern indie RPGs like those by Basilisk, Spiderweb, Soldak, Amaranth, and  etc. and etc. … I’m going up against Bioware’s and Bethesda’s and Atlus’s latest, and I’m also competing way more directly than I’d like against classics like the Might & Magic series and Realms of Arkania, now available for cheap and fully compatible with modern platforms.

I try not to think of this too hard, because it intimidates the hell out of me.

But honestly? I do think this is a good thing. As human beings, competition improves us. Or rather, competition and a healthy attitude towards it improves us. The entrepreneurial attitude. I hope I have enough of it. At least, what I see when I read WCG’s comments isn’t “Oh, crap, people might not play my game because there’s so much competition from games past and present.” My thought is, “Then I have to figure out a way to make my game more unique and more likely to attract the interest of people like WCG.” Maybe I won’t succeed, but hey, if he doesn’t like my game, maybe he’d like to buy something from one of my competitors? And hopefully they’ll reciprocate, and all of us – players and developers – will be happier for it.

And then our tiny little sub-section of the biz will grow, the games will improve and provide even more variety, the community will grow, the lion will lay down with the lamb and all that crap.

But mainly, we’ll be getting MOAR BETTER GAMES.

Excellent.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 10 Comments to Read



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