The Casual Games Gold Rush is Over

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 3, 2010

No, they aren’t dead. Not even dying. But it seems that the casual game boom has finally come to an end.

Gamezebo: Where Have All the Good Games Gone?

My thoughts:

This is so very, very predictable to the point of being boring. It is a textbook example of the industry life cycle (which closely follows a product life cycle). You have introduction – the slow burn. Growth – when things really start taking off (that was about six years ago). Maturity – the top of the curve, when growth tops out and everybody jockeys for position now that the gold rush is over. Price wars ensue. And then decline. (Some charts do show the decline reaching a point of sustainability, but many do not – apparently business-type people  don’t want to bother with those, because it’s boring. Or maybe they figure it’s just part of the “Mature” stage until it really starts dropping to zero).

So what we’re seeing here is that we’re probably getting past the center on the maturity stage. The major parties involved are coming to the realization that the growth they enjoyed 3+ years ago was unsustainable, and it’s now collapsing. Consolidation is happening, participants are dropping out, and the channel is clogged with crap. The price wars have taken their toll. This shake-out had to happen.

So I guess those who are still making RPGs, adventure games, flight simulators, and 2D platformers can say, “Welcome to the party, pals!”

I don’t forsee it ever returning to the levels of the Glory Days of a few years ago, though. Just not happening. That ship has sailed. A lot more air has to be let out of the balloon before it reaches sustainable levels. Nothing will check the decline until that happens. The whole sub-industry will morph and change and merge with others a bit, and a lot of participants will do pretty well with it for a long time to come. But the gold rush is over.

Darn, there goes my plans to introduce “Frayed Knights Hidden Object Search.”

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

What If Game Design Hasn’t Progressed In 30 Years?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 2, 2010

Matt Barton proposes an interesting thought experiment over at Armchair Arcade:

Some Thoughts Towards a Non-Linear Game History

His not-quite-so-preposterous idea: What if game design hasn’t truly progressed since 1980, merely changed fashion? If you could somehow make yourself blind to the technological / graphical improvements, has game design really advanced in thirty years?

I’d contend that it has, but maybe not as much as we’d like to imagine. In a lot of ways, modern games are getting simpler than they were 10+ years ago – closer to their old-time roots. They do have a few more trappings – layers of complexity – that usually actually add to the experience. Like being able to purchase upgrades, RPG-style.  And we can afford a lot more detail that was too expensive for 32K way back then. But again, that’s a case of something we couldn’t do, not something we didn’t know to do.

Looking at RPGs – I’m not going to argue that Ultima IV was the apex of RPG design. Or even Ultima VII.  There wasn’t anything those games did that modern games really haven’t. It’s just that they somehow managed to present it in such a way that at least my imagination was kicked into high gear and filled in the missing details much better than any technology could today. So while the underlying technology may be much more sophisticated and capable, I don’t know that that core design has really progressed. Some days, I’m certain it has regressed.

A lot of game design today is simply dealing with the problems of complexity caused by – surprise – that same technology that solved so many problems of yesteryear.  Like where and how to position the 3D camera.

So much of what we frequently call “evolution” in game design has really not been anything other than following the path of least resistance and following the current trends as best as we can figure them.  When those trends change, so will game design. And they will.

So have we advanced? Yeah, I say we have. But not that far.

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

Why Are RPGs So Hard to Create?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 1, 2010

Computer RPGs have a reputation for being among of the most difficult and time-consuming game genres to develop. This is one of the reasons so few mainstream developers shy away from them. But why is that?

Maybe I should ask this question of people like Amanda Fitch, Jeff Vogel, or Inidinera Falls. They make it look easy. However, they use well-established, familiar engines (evolved painstakingly over time), and I do know that for a while Amanda was making casual games in-between her RPGs because they were significantly easier – and more profitable – than the RPGs. The appearance of ease is deceptive.

The problems faced by RPG developers are hardly unique to the genre, but are often more severe. I’m still not an expert. But that never stopped me from throwing in my $0.2 before.  So here are some of the top challenges I’ve found:

Content Consumption – RPGs are traditionally exploration-based and very content-intensive.  The player is always pushing forward to see something new. In addition, older content – enemies, items, etc – quickly becomes obsolete. While there are still many opportunities for repetition of content as found in other genres (combat, usually the core mechanic, offering the most opportunities for repetition – but too much of that and players resent the “grinding”), it’s nothing like, say, an old-school fighting game where you are just changing the backgrounds from level to level. Players want a constant flow of upgrades to their equipment, lots of opportunities to customize their characters, and a constant opening of new areas to explore.

Variety of Player Choices – Having many different ways of resolving a challenge is a good thing in RPGs. Non-linear, open-ended progress is likewise critical, at least for western RPGs. The downside is that the designers and programmers have to jump through all kinds of hoops to provide that variety, or to resolve all kinds of weird cases caused by the open-endedness. Things like: What happens if the player resolves the quest conditions before the quest gets assigned? What happens if half the quest conditions have already been met – we have to avoid a “deadlock” situation where the rest of the triggers never fire because the other ones were handled prematurely.

The thing is, the player never sees all this. At least not in a single play-through. All they see is the path that they took — all those paths not traveled are effectively “wasted effort.” In a more linear game with more forced action, the designer could have scripted seven times as many quests / events of similar complexity in the time it took to create just one for a somewhat open-ended RPG.

Duration – Blame it on the old-school RPGs that took dozens and dozens – often over a hundred – hours to complete.  And yes, I LOVE that about ’em. But players typically expect more hours of gameplay out of an RPG than other genres. Sheesh – I’m not saying either of these are good things, but in the time it takes to complete some third-person shooters on the consoles, you are still feeling like you are in the tutorial in Final Fantasy XII. So RPG makers remain compelled to make their games “big” to meet audience expectations. On top of the average RPG designer’s insatiable desire to do that anyway.

Variety of Interconnected Game Systems and Activities – A good RPG is effectively several games in one. The player may participate in several activities – combat (usually lots of combat), conversations, puzzle-solving, trading, crafting, breeding Chocobos, whatever. This would be bad enough, as the developer creates several games in one, but the various systems interact with each other in subtle yet powerful ways. Or at least they’d better, or they are stupid make-work activities.  For example, being able to do more effective trading or crafting will impact combat, as you will soon be entering the battlefield with superior equipment.  Being able to thrive in combat may in return improve your trading, as you can take down opponents with better loot. That’s a positive feedback loop that could go out of control – which is why you often find merchants in “lower level areas” with only very limited gear to offer for sale.

Balancing these different systems – effectively different games (even if not very good ones by themselves) – so they all make a complete whole can be a daunting task, and many mainstream games do a horrible job of it. But others have done an excellent job of it, and it shows. But the bottom line is that it’s a lot of extra work, even if done poorly.

Game States – RPGs have gigantic game states, compared to most other games. In, say, a platformer, you may have to save the player’s current score, number of lives, what level he’s on, what his location is in the level, and probably the states of the other enemies, pick-ups, or triggers. Its still a lot of data, but reasonably manageable. Compare that to a more open-world RPG – with treasures that have or have not been looted (or partially looted), conversations, quests, factions, attitudes, monsters, triggers, and so forth for an entire world. Not to mention the player’s state – all his stats, equipment, location, current spell effects, etc. Now, good programming methodology can limit the difficulty of representing all of this state info (and saving / loading it properly)  – but there’s still a problem of when these things do go wrong, they can go very very wrong, and they can be a real pain in the butt to tease out.

This is a challenge not only to software architecture and organization, but also to the design process. There are quite frankly a lot of variables to consider.

Testing and Debugging – All those things above combine to make testing and debugging an RPG a pretty challenging chore. Testing out a simple quest, for example, can be pretty labor intensive:

1. Create a saved-game or other situation (cheat codes, etc.) that starts you in a “reasonable” state to begin the quest at an appropriate “fresh” state.
2. Begin the quest in a fresh state from the
3. Play through the entire quest sequence, which could take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours. Until it goes wrong. Then fix & repeat from step 2.
4. Now repeat the previous steps for all possible varieties of approaches to complete or screw up the quest.

The end result may be many man hours just to test and debug a quest which only represents fifteen minutes of player time. Of course, the tester will have tons of cheat codes to accelerate the activity, and probably tries to handle bugs in “batches” (rather than restarting and repeating each time). Still – debugging any game (or software) can be a laborious activity, but the scope and scale of most RPGs make them stand out.

Are these challenges insurmountable? Absolutely not. There have been approaches to RPG design that have bypassed or simplified all of these issues. For an extreme case, check out Desktop Dungeons – which is probably more of a puzzle game than an RPG, but I’ll count it for the purpose of illustration. But I thought it might be helpful to point out these kinds of difficulties faced by RPG designers. It may help players appreciate the kind of effort that has to go into making RPGs, and why indie RPG makers can’t crank out new titles at a very rapid pace (unless they are Aldorlea Games).

And it may help us recognize why so many mainstream studios are embracing a much simpler style of gameplay and calling them “RPGs.” They are trying to dodge these very issues.

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Rampant Coyote’s Gone Bye-Bye. What Have You Got Left, Egon?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 31, 2010

I’m dreaming about game content now. Sanity may be no more than a distant memory.

I woke up from a vivid dream about 3D models of creatures for Frayed Knights. With accompanying stat blocks that would have been appropriate in a pen-and-paper RPG. And an additional chart showing completion levels. Somehow in my dream a model could have animation at a non-zero completion level before the rigging was 100% complete.

And then I got to see them in action. They looked like half-painted miniatures. I saw some that were supposed to be based on Fallout 1, but they didn’t resemble any Fallout 1 enemies that I recall. These were cyborg-mutants that seemed to be a cross of one of those fortune-dispensing carnival machines (with legs) and a Big Daddy from Bioshock.

I have no clue what I thought I’d be doing with them in Frayed Knights. But it’s not the content of the dream, so much as dreaming about content, that has me worried…

Filed Under: Geek Life, Production - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Studio or Studios?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 30, 2010

Ever notice how many game studios – with just one “studio” – have a company name that says “Studios?” Delusions of grandeur, or planning for the future?

And then you have Iron Tower Studio – singular – which now legitimately includes multiple “studios” under their brand.

Just a random observation that amuses me…

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

The Devolution Revolution

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 28, 2010

Another week, another call for RPGs to “evolve.” So I guess it’s time for my monthly rant about the evolution of the cRPG genre.

Hat tip to RPGWatch for this link. My response was snarkier over there than this one will be here. (See? I may be growing as a person. Or something…)  Maybe because, in some ways, I think the author is right. Just maybe not in the way he thinks he is.

In a nutshell, author Michael Johnson discusses what he considers to be the key elements that make an RPG an RPG, describes how these elements are now permeating a very wide variety of games these days, and notes how western RPGs like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 seem to be taking over an area where those moribund jRPGs used to dominate.  And then he calls for jRPGs to evolve, as the western RPGs have.

I was pretty much with him through the whole Farmville-is-like-an-RPG thing, and then my teeth were set on edge.  Warning: crochety old-school cRPG fan alert!

First, a history lesson, as perceived through the eyes of an interested outsider:

In some ways, the “death of RPGs” that was called repeatedly in the mid-1990s came from a lack of innovation. Or evolution, I guess. Except it wasn’t. Yes, RPGs were stuck in a rut – or two or three ruts – but it wasn’t just a lack of innovation. It was a lack of quality. An awful lot of crap filled the marketplace at that time, and much of it attempting to imitate the “best of breed” of the previous years.

Even Origin – a company once synonymous with quality RPGs – produced a game that really received faint critical praise with Ultima VIII during this time.  Ironically, it did try to innovate, and turned off a lot of gamers without being well-received by a larger audience. (One critic referred to it as “Super Avatar Brothers.” )

It was kind of a dark time RPGs. Briefly. But it was enough to convince many of the best and brightest game journalists and marketing directors that the era of the RPG was OVER. Siyonara, suckers. It’s been a good run.

And then Diablo happened. “Ah-hah!” cried the industry, anxious to cover their collective butts and not to appear as fools when an RPG sold over a million copies after they’d declared the genre dead. “It’s a new paradigm! This is the evolution of RPGs.” See, they weren’t wrong. The old RPGs were dead. Long live the RPG!

Nevermind that Final Fantasy VII and Baldur’s Gate (which admittedly had some Diablo-esque elements) were also making insane amounts of money, too. FF7 pretty much dwarfing Diablo‘s success. But it was, you know, a console title. And even Fallout garnered some major critical appeal and financial success, and it was an old-school-style RPG writ LARGE.

So really, what we may call “evolution” is really nothing more than a story of “chasing the almighty buck” and following a narrative provided for by men in suits. So now, the whole “RPGs are dead / dying” thing really rings hollow to me. I’ve lived through it before, and I know how it works. It’s got nothing to do with changing the paradigm. Sure, a lot has to do with appealing to the market’s tastes, but a significant part of that is simply putting out a quality product (and marketing the crap out of it). Quality – and especially innovation – doesn’t always sell, but a lack of either rarely does. And that had been the real problem.

Moving on to Johnson’s other point: the jRPGs. As far as jRPG evolution / innovation – having been bored to tears playing Final Fantasy XII (but you just need to play it for another 8-10 hours and it gets good, they promise…) and not even bothering with Final Fantasy XIII yet after hearing the reviews, I can’t say I’m keen on what passes for “evolution.” But as far as innovation… dude, I’m there. I was absolutely delighted by Persona 3 and Persona 4 not too long ago.  That, to me, was innovation. But in many ways, it also stuck pretty close to standard jRPG themes. Turn-based combat. Linearity. Weird, over-the-top monsters in a modern-fantasy setting. And a storyline only this side of comprehensible (but it still made more sense than Final Fantasy VII… or X).

Now, my apologies to Michael Johnson, but holding up the modern mainstream western RPG as an example of RPG “evolution” is pretty much a sure-fire way to set my teeth on edge. It’s not his fault. I’m kinda bored with the trend these games seem to be following, though I do see some good ideas there. But I see a lot more potential in the ideas indie games like Depths of Peril and Knights of the Chalice are introducing (or re-introducing) to the genre.

So for me, the point isn’t about evolution. It’s about expansion. There’s a critical difference. Evolution – as referred to by the media – suggests movement along a single direction – towards a “better adapted” (improved) species. Expansion suggests movement along multiple paths into greater diversity and niches. And in biology, by my limited understanding, this is the key behavior that allows evolution to take place.  Otherwise, we would have had a world full of perfect dinosaurs…

Making RPGs more accessible with streamlined interfaces and hold-your-hand gameplay (AKA “dumbing down” by us crotchety old-school RPG fans) can be a great thing. It can  help newer gamers discover RPGs and learn to love them as we crotchety old-school gamers do. And it can point out areas where truly pointless tedium (ahem – not just the elements that make an RPG feel less like Halo in the eyes of some designers) can be done away with.

But I don’t want to see every game like that. Or even a majority of games! There’s a wide field of opportunity for not only new ideas, but expansion on old ideas that have been left fallow for many years while publishers rode off in pursuit of the biggest buck.  “Innovation” is a lot more than simply exploring non-linearity or getting rid of post-battle fist-pumps. There’s a lot of room to explore new territory in terms of story, character, and player interaction that goes well beyond what we’re now seeing, without necessarily re-writing the entire concept of how RPGs should be played.  In fact, the latter tends to just get in the way and send us back to square one.

As players, what we REALLY want isn’t necessarily  innovation (look at Blizzard’s success!), evolution, re-imagining, or anything like that. We simply want an experience that feels fresh and interesting but which still gives us the familiar fun that we crave. Many game developers tend to focus instead on new whistles and bells, or making a game that’s more like that-other-game-that-made-a-lot-of-money. While that’s a viable approach, many of us don’t want the entire genre dragged in that direction. We see a world of opportunities to explore, yet the mainstream industry seems blind to all but the most obvious, rudimentary possibilities.

I guess that’s why there are indies.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism, Mainstream Games - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

Spiderweb Software Announces Avadon: The Black Fortess

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

So if you were wondering what Spiderweb Software would do now that they have concluded both of their award-winning RPG series, the mystery has now been at least partly revealed in a press released yesterday:

Avadon: The Black Fortress

Man, and here I was thinking he was going to retire and make hidden object games…

As you can see from the screenshot to the right (if you expand it) or the other screenshots on the website, this isn’t exactly a quantum leap in graphical quality from his previous games – but it’s still looking pretty sharp.

The website enumerates these features of the new game:

Avadon: The Black Fortress features:

• Epic fantasy role-playing adventure in an enormous and unique world.
• Four different character classes, with dozens of unique spells and abilities.
• Uncover the fascinating history of Avadon and the land of Lynaeus.
• Many different endings. Your choices will change the world.
• Dozens of side quests, hidden dungeons, and secrets to discover.
• Hundreds of magical items to find. Use powerful crystals to make your artifacts even more powerful.
• Huge adventure with lots of replay value.

The story as described sounds fairly ordinary for fantasy fare, but I’m sure it’s got plenty of intriguing twists.

Both the Mac and Windows versions are supposed to be available in early 2011.

Filed Under: General - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Eschalon: Book II – Mac and Linux Versions Now Available

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 27, 2010

Sweet old-school RPG action – now available on Mac and Linux:

Download  Eschalon: Book II for Windows, Mac, OR Linux.

The game has been updated to version 1.03, now. As I understand, no real massive game-destroying bugs have been found, mainly small bugs, rare crashes, and typos.

I’m kinda jealous. I’ve been swamped with development duties lately, and haven’t had much time at all to play it since the first night it was released. My poor mage is languishing. We’re heading down to visit the in-laws in Cedar City for the weekend. My laptop isn’t very powerful, but it can handle the Eschalon games just fine. Maybe I should  carve out some time this weekend to remedy that situation.

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

Caster Promotion – Pay What You Want!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 26, 2010

Mike Smith, whom I miss greatly at the Utah Indie Nights, asked me to announce a new promotion for his 3D action-fantasy game, Caster.

First of all, until the end of this month, he’s inviting people to pay what they want for the game. A single penny if you are a goober. A few cents if you are really just broke.  Or more if you want to support great indie games and developers and would like a really cool, high-quality, award-winning game.

CASTER

In addition, he’s got T-shirts.  Also donation-ware. The shirt design is just as cool as the game:

More information can be found at Mike’s Blog.

Enjoy!

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

Frayed Knights: Faking It

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Time for another update on Frayed Knights, the upcoming indie computer RPG series from Rampant Games that attempts to feel old-school hardcore, play modern, and keep its tongue firmly in its cheek…

Yes, it does feel a little weird to call it a series. Even though we’ve been considering breaking it up for three months. I’ve been trying to keep the heat turned up on the other acts as well (poor Kevin has been working on very little other than the third act for many, many moons now…), but this has definitely caused us to focus a lot harder on getting Act 1 alpha-ready. We’re not quite down to the just-odds-and-ends stage. There’s a ton of data and scripting to generate, and that falls entirely on my own shoulders. And I have to keep moving ahead so that the artists can keep on rolling into Act 2 even while I may be mired in Act 1. Yes, folks, that’s what design documents are for.

Speaking of design documents: when it comes to designing the gameplay – scripting up the environments –  I typically approach things kind of “bass-ackwards” from how they are supposed to be done. I’ve found that much of the initial plan changes (yes, even in “mainstream” game studios) between design and production, and many of the best ideas happen when things are into production. And a lot of other ideas that I thought were great turn out to be… well, not so hot. So I tend to put less detail into the initial environment design – really more of an outline of major encounters, theming, and general gameflow – and I do more of the “fleshing out” of the world and encounters later in the process. This works fine as a lone-wolf developer, but can cause problems working with even a small team. We’re still evolving the process.  But for me, working with a more fully realized 3D environment really helps make ideas flow.

That can be a surprisingly big deal.  When I’m trying hard to “build a commercially viable RPG,” I find myself getting a massive case of writer’s block. I wrack my brain for ideas  for making Door Trigger #300 a little different from Door Triggers #1 – #299. It’s painful. It’s frustrating. In effect, I think I’m trying too hard, and thinking too much inside the box.

Instead, what seems to work best for me is also kind of a backwards approach to design. Instead of thinking about things in terms of their software-based game definitions, I find it is best for me to back up and draw upon my years (*cough*decadesdangIfeelold*cough*) of experience a game-master for dice-and-paper RPGs. I approach it as I would planning our Saturday night RPG sessions. I throw the door open to ideas, and try not to think about the constraints of the software we’ve developed. Approaching it from this higher level makes it easy. THEN I get down to the nuts and bolts of trying to figure out how to simulate it with the game mechanics.

Some ideas don’t survive the translation into the limitations of the game engine very well. Quite frankly, the content and coding requirements for these ideas – if I were to try and present them as literally and graphically as possible – would be STAGGERING.  As much as I’d rather show than tell, the limitations of time and budget, mean that I have to use smoke, mirrors, and text-boxes to present many aspects of the world.  An elaborate ambush, an army of undead marching through the valley, an entire mountainside changing shape at the utterance of magical words, detailed AI behaviors — those kinds of things are going to have to live primarily in text descriptions and in the player’s imaginations.

For now, I’m okay with that. This is how, IMO, computer RPGs used to be made. Still are, to some degree, but it seems that as the capabilities of technology expanded, the willingness of game designers to allow their visions to be constrained by it also increased. Back when everything had to be “faked,” it was no big deal. But now that so much could be shown on the screen, voiced by actors, pre-rendered in a cut scene, and stored on the hard drive, designers don’t want to include anything that won’t fit. We’ve read them admitting as much in interviews. No, not admitting – proudly declaring.

It’s a good thing to want the game to provide a more visceral punch through sound and graphics. Seeing your characters muscles grow would certainly be more satisfying than seeing some number go from 13 to 14. Maybe that really is the best approach. Maybe that really is what most players want.

But I don’t see other media being so willing to limit their ideas too tightly to their technological and budgetary constraints. If you listen to the commentaries of many sci-fi epics on DVD / Blu-Ray (at least the ones that weren’t made by George Lucas), you’ll often find interesting descriptions of tricks pulled to get around the fact that they just didn’t have the special effects budget to pull off exactly what the script called for. They were creative. They faked it. They implied things happening off-screen. They provided just enough of a taste of it to get the audience to buy in, but ultimately fell back on tried-and-true tricks to make the scene work.

(As a side note – with technology making virtually anything possible on-screen as far as special effects go, I’ve noticed a trend to show everything in effects-heavy pix. In many cases I think the older, more subtler methods were more effective. Cutting away to a reaction shot on the face of another human being can bring more emotional impact than seeing the knife’s destructive effects in full gory detail. I say this, because I know you read this blog and seek out my advice, George…)

So that’s kinda where I’m coming from. Yeah, it means that sometimes Frayed Knights feels a little like those old adventure games from Legend Entertainment back in the late 80s and early 90s, where the pictures were a supplement to the old-school text. I’m not taking it quite that far, but yeah – it’s going to be text heavy. There are a lot of things implied that you won’t see. Big, cool events may be hidden behind a cloud of particle effects.  The characters may talk about things they see, smell, taste, touch,  or hear that the player does not.  People will talk about other people and places that the player will never see. That’s just the way it is.

But I hope that will be more than made up for with more variety and a more interesting world, and maybe an experience that feels a little more authentic to early-era dice-and-paper gaming.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Free Vs. Purchased Demos

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 25, 2010

Steven Peeler of Soldak Entertainment on Free vs. Purchased Demos:

“… Charging for the demo just seems very wrong. First of all, it means you are now demanding payment for your marketing. What’s next, making the customer pay for your ads? Also what happens when they don’t like your demo (which is going to happen fairly often)? The company got some amount of money, but the customer paid for something they didn’t enjoy. A lose-win situation.

“Personally I really dislike lose-win situations in business. I’m not in competition with our customers. We are in a mutually beneficial relationship, a loss for them is a loss for me.”

As I said a couple of weeks ago, bring it on, mainstream publishers! As a tiny indie who properly sees demos as both marketing and a tool to help ensure customer satisfaction (they know exactly what they are buying, so they shouldn’t have any bad surprises), I could use all the business you are going to be sending my way!

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism, Mainstream Games - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Digging For Gold

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Many years ago, I bought the entire SSI Dungeons & Dragons “Gold Box” series from WizardWork as a discounted bundle. I even sprang for the hint books. It was plenty “old school” even when I grabbed them (mid-to-late 90s).

I wanted to revisit them recently, as I’ve been dissecting these old first-person dungeon crawlers. Apparently, while they were always underfoot once upon a time, they disappeared with my last move.  It’s not a big deal – it’s not like I have time to devote to them right now anyway. I have a ton of old-school RPGs and new indie RPGs demanding my “spare” minutes on my hard drive already. But it would be nice to check ’em out again. And kind of infuriating that they disappeared.  I’m sure they are merely tucked away in some drawer somewhere… if only I could figure out where.

But if GOG.COM is looking for suggestions for future additions to its line-up… might I suggest SSI’s old catalog? Assuming the licensing issues aren’t a problem…

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

It’s the Voice Acting’s Fault

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 24, 2010

I’ve complained about it before.

Shamus Young complains about it better.

Y’know, for a brief, glowing moment in the history of our hobby – pretty much the late 90’s – it seemed like we almost had it right. The text was supplemented by voice, but it was limited –  enough to help visualize characters.  But after saying the first line or two of dialog, they were silent, and you just read the text.  It worked.  Minsc, Morte, and Imoen would not have been as popular without the life and character given to them by their actors.

For me, as a gaming experience, it was far superior to what I’ve got now. When I was playing Fallout 3, I found that I was either slowing down my reading to match the rate of speaking, or forcing myself to tune out the speaking to read the text at a more comfortable rate. It was an annoying experience.

But that’s a side-complaint. The real complaint is that this inferior form of presentation is a significant reason for inferior gameplay. Is it really a factor?

Well, I remember hearing about William Shatner’s reaction to the script for the CD-ROM version of one of Interplay’s Star Trek games (I can’t recall if it was Judgment Rites or 25th Anniversary). He reportedly exclaimed, “There are three movies in here!” It makes sense. I mean, the average game is many, many times longer than a two-hour movie.  Even though much of a game might not be spent in dialog, the branching decisions means that there’s more dialog than the player will ever hear.

That is a LOT of expensive voice-acting work.  And it has to all be planned out well in advance, limiting flexibility. You’d better believe it’s a limiting factor in the kinds of dialog options available. As a producer worried about the bottom line, I’d be encouraged to see that every single spoken line of dialog that I’d paid for was heard by the player.

Is it too late to go back? Maybe, for the mainstream guys still doing RPGs. Granted, when I played the most recent Persona games, I found the lack of voice on optional parts of the story to be noticeable and just a little bit distracting. So it’s not a perfect solution, and I may be viewing the older games through lenses that are a little too rose-tinted.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Biz, Design - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

How to Sell Your Indie Game

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

I had to hunt down this resource on the old blog to find it again, and thought I’d repost it here for aspiring indie developers:

Amanda Fitch of Amaranth Games (Aveyond, Aveyond 2, Aveyond: Lord of Twilight, etc.) has put together a quick-and-dirty guide for newbie game developers on how to sell their indie games. We’re talking traditional download-and-sell type things here, not online games.

It is far from exhaustive, but it’s also a nice step-by-step set of instructions for people who are just getting started. The guide suggests how to do the following:

• Beta Testing your game
• Obtaining a Business License
• Setting up a website
• Setting up an installer for your game
• Setting up DRM for your game (we’re not talking about the draconian psychotic crap the big publishers do, just wrappers to make it easy for you and for your users to unlock the game with a registration key)
• Setting up an order processor for selling your game
• And — selling.

How to Sell Your Game, from Amaranth Games

Anyway – while the options suggested in the PDF may not be the best for you or for your game if you are a game developer or living outside the U.S., they are a good start.

One thing she left out was the marketing side of things – to which I can only suggest shelling out a few bucks for Joseph Lieberman’s excellent Indie Developer’s Guide to Selling Games. Some of its a little out-of-date now, but still full of pretty timeless, valuable knowledge.

Filed Under: Production - Comments: Read the First Comment

Played Eschalon: Book II or Din’s Curse Yet?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 22, 2010

Have you downloaded and played the free demos of Din’s Curse or Eschalon: Book II yet?

If not, why not this weekend? Unless you are on dial-up. Or really hate RPGs. In which case, you have a good excuse (and if you hate RPGs, you probably hate that half my posts are about ’em, huh?)

Seriously, when I’m talking about what cool stuff indie RPG makers are coming up with – with miniscule budgets and teams of, like, one guy (or girl) and some contractors working for peanuts… these games are exactly the kinds of games I’m talking about. (Well, alright, this whole list holds the kinds of games I’m talking about, but anyway…)

Din’s Curse

Eschalon: Book II

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Making Epic 3D Dungeons, Part 2 – Applying the Lessons

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 21, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, in Making Epic 3D Dungeons, I talked about the evolution of the classic “dungeon” paradigm from dice-and-paper gaming through the development of computer RPGs, and how its fared through the pseudo-3D and finally fully 3D presentation.

There are a couple of additional resources I want to recommend:

Brenda Brathwaite article on RPG Level Design – sort of a grab-bag of good ideas…

Raph Koster on Zone Design for Virtual Spaces – much of it is geared towards social multiplayer environments, but he makes some generally useful points overall, and can help expand one’s thinking when designing these environments

I feel a little weird talking about something I really don’t feel qualified to comment on… but since when has that stopped me before? Working on Frayed Knights, we’ve had an opportunity as indie game developers to learn more about it… the hard way. We’re still learning. We’ve violated these lessons as we’ve gone, out of ignorance, forgetfulness, or (especially on my own efforts) out of lack of skill to implement them as well as we should have.  And I also suspect that the many of the things that work for Frayed Knights wouldn’t work for another game, even another RPG.  And as we keep learning, we may find we’re totally wrong about some of these things.

But with all these caveats in place, here are the kinds of lessons we’ve learned about making 3D dungeons for this kind of RPG:

Artistic Considerations

Use the Vertical: I mentioned this in the last article. Having a uniform spacing from floor to ceiling is not only a waste of modern 3D technology, and it gets pretty boring.  And if a game is about exploration, you need the environment to be visually interesting and worth the exploration.

Don’t Be Square: Also along the same lines as using the vertical… plain rectangular rooms are also boring (while, granted, a staple of old-school dungeons).  They will always have their place, but should be used sparingly.  L-shaped rooms or similar constructs are more interesting. Replacing some of the 90-degree corners with other angles is also more interesting. Adding some vertical elements is also more interesting.

The Devil Is In the Details: My “real” level designers are not themselves seasoned AAA level design vets, but they do know more than I do about texturing levels, and constantly correct me for being such a n00b with my efforts. I’m always fighting to limit textures and download size issues, but they want levels that look awesome. Apparently, it’s not enough to just slap down generic wall and floor textures and call it good. Comparing results, I think they are right. A good level has details – both in models and textures. If you look at the walls in the later-gen pseudo-3D RPGs (the ones made for VGA, especially), the wall art was very interesting. They had trim, cracks, niches, grates, moss, pillars, icons, supports, and so forth built into the texture.  These details helped make those worlds come alive even in tiny resolutions. The same thing applies in 3D – doors need frames, walls need decor, transitions shouldn’t be abrupt without reason, and so forth.

Mix It Up and Make It Distinct:  Locations should be visually distinctive. Unless you really are making a maze, the player shouldn’t have to look to hard to get his or her bearings.  Here’s where it may be a good idea to take a page from the old text adventures: remember how (almost) every room had a unique title and text description? Try and think of every location in a 3D dungeon as if you writing a text-adventure description of the room as well (something I am considering taking somewhat more literally as I’m working on the game). Each location  should (generally) have  a purpose and something that makes it stand out.

Provide Contrast: Light to dark, narrow to wide, shallow to deep, cluttered to clean, dull to vivid – anybody who has played Oblivion or Fallout 3 knows how impressive it is to contrast different kinds of areas. Having the player navigate between contrasting areas helps make exploration exciting.

Break Up the Big: A big, open area can be cool (especially provided as a contrast) , but having nothing between you and the horizon-line (or the far wall of a Big Room) is lame. Pillars, towers, terraces, whatever – having “stuff” visually to break up the bigger spaces not only makes it interesting, but makes the bigger spaces seem even bigger.

Keep It Real:  In real life, form follows function. You get things like pillars, load-bearing walls, and arches supporting larger structures. We’re used to it. We may not notice it. But if it’s missing (in a game), it bugs us on some subconscious level.  Sometimes this is desired, especially in a fantasy game. But it shouldn’t be done in ignorance. Of course, I’m pretty ignorant myself, so I violate this guideline a lot… but I try.

Gameplay Considerations

Cue Theme Music: Dungeons should have one or more  “signature” locations that have a major, specific theme or feature  or something  stand out more than most. Something that really calls attention to it.  These locations should either be at central nodes, or significant end-nodes. These help define the dungeon (“it’s the one with the…<feature name> room”), anchor it in the player’s mind,  helps the player navigate the level, and provides strong visual rewards for exploration.  For examples in the Frayed Knights pilot, there was the meditation chamber (with the toilet-shaped fountain), the torture / prison room, and the altar room with the statue of the fat, happy version of Pokmor Xang.

Show Goals Early: It’s good design to show where you want to go before you can actually get there. Maybe it’s up high where you can’t reach it, or blocked / locked, across an uncrossable stream or chasm, or simply off in the distance. This can (and often should) be done in stages – maybe you don’t see the final goal immediately, but you soon see the sub-goal to focus on to get there — like  a raised drawbridge that needs to be lowered. Showing it engages the players brain, and gets him trying to figure out how to get there. Failure to do this makes the level seem more pointless and maze-like… and frustrating.

Twisty Little Passages: The player shouldn’t be required to move very far in one direction without encountering a twist, bend, or – better – a decision. An option to click on something. A door to open. Or, if all else fails, a monster to encounter. Long & straight areas with nothing happening are to be avoided.

Click Anywhere!: Locations should be chock full o’ interactivity. This is fun for the player, and as a content creator it means more bang for the buck out of every location. I was inspired by watching my kids play Ron Gilbert’s Humongous Entertainment adventure games – Putt-Putt, Freddie Fish, Pajama Sam, etc. Exploration isn’t confined to movement from one location to another – it can also be had by just exploring the possibilities in one location.

It’s a Secret: Having some secrets or “goodies” that are hidden and only revealed through careful exploration and experimentation is a huge win for an RPG (or most other games). For one thing, it rewards exploration, giving the player access to something she realizes most players won’t ever see. Secondly – it really does make the world seem bigger, as it may create the perception that there’s a lot more to the world than is revealed in a straightforward playthrough.  A dozen secret areas may be a hundred or more in the players’ imaginations.

You Take the High Road, and I’ll Take the Low Road: A good level has choices for travel. In other words, should provide some non-linear exploration. Now, the decision about whether you turn right or left at a T-junction is about the most boring, pointless decisions one can make in a game. But you know what? It IS a decision. It “feels good.” It helps the player feel in control.  Of course, it’s better to make the choices more interesting… like giving them some clue in advance about the consequences of going left or right.

Mix Up Encounters, Too: Fight after fight after fight even gets boring in the action-RPGs, and can be worse in a turn-based RPG emphasizing exploration. Combat encounters should be mixed liberally with other activities – traps, puzzles, conversations, discoveries, whatever else the game provides.

(Don’t) Take the Long Way Home: Getting to the end-goal may a long, hard quest, but once the goal has been accomplished, getting back out again shouldn’t be a chore.  There should be shortcuts back out again. For a bigger dungeon, this may apply across multiple paths.

So … what thoughts or criticisms do you have? What have you always liked (or disliked) in certain games? What’s worked and what’s failed for you? Let me know!

Then maybe we won’t repeat the same mistakes…

Filed Under: Art, Design, Frayed Knights - Comments: 6 Comments to Read



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