The Value of “Exposure”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 9, 2015

Wil Wheaton’s recent blog post on the value of “exposure” has brought a matter to popular discussion which has already been making the rounds for a bit: the use of “exposure” as compensation. In this case, it’s probably one of the more egregious abuses recently: An extremely popular and highly-valued, presumably quite profitable site – trying to use an already-popular celebrity’s work with only “exposure” as the compensation.

As a friend of mine joked, exposure is something you die of when you don’t get paid for your work.

And on one hand, this is absolutely true. I heard a story recently about an indie developer trying to commission music from an experienced composer, but when it came time to discuss the fees, the indie balked and said, “Woah, waitaminute, you’ll get exposure.” As much as I sympathize with the cash-strapped indie, the composer might have had more cred than he did. Who was giving whom the exposure?

What is the value of exposure?

I want to take the boring middle-ground for a moment. (Taking the boring reasonable position is pretty much the opposite of getting exposure, BTW. People are drawn to click-baity extremes in the Internet age). I think things have gone too far on one side and need to be reeled in… this whole idea of being compensated solely by “exposure” has gone too far.

But there’s a reason that it’s there. Exposure *IS* a thing. I mean, in the modern world, visibility isn’t everything, but it’s one of the most important things out there. For entrepreneurs, there’s really not much of a concept of punching in and getting paid. It’s all about finding your audience… and getting them to find you. That’s amazingly hard.

Wheaton even suggests this in his article… it would be a different thing if *he* was initiating the contact and trying to increase his exposure. It’s important. Especially if you are in a creative or consulting field, reputation and visibility really are your bread-and-butter. You are in a highly competitive field and, when you are just starting out, you are nobody. Deal with it.

Becoming Not a Nobody

Why wouldn’t someone be willing to take a risk on a nobody who has a decent portfolio? I have a friend who was burned by an artist who disappeared halfway through a project. He’d already paid commissions for half the artwork, but now the artist was no longer responding. So now he was left with a choice:

1. Cancel the project entirely, and lose all the money he’d invested so far.
2. Put the project on a back-burner, hoping the artist would re-appear in the future
3. Find a new artist to re-do all the art in their own style, throwing away everything that was done (and paid for) by the previous artist.

That’s a dangerous situation for a cash-strapped indie. In fact, that could kill a tiny studio on a shoestring budget. So yeah, there’s something to be said for exposure, and for developing a track record. You may have to under-price yourself below your expectations for a little while to “get out there,” develop your track record, and prove yourself to be better than the competition.

A Happy Medium

There are a lot of promising but under-funded projects out there that can’t afford what would be reasonable “market rates.” They are struggling just as much as you are. Are you all destined to sink together? Not necessarily. There are some ways of compromising that can work.

A lot of artists and composers are willing to work within “indie budgets” while keeping their prices higher for bigger-budget, bigger-studio projects. That comes with an expectation, of course, that their level of effort (the number of hoops they have to jump through) will be significantly less for an indie project. Bear in mind that this expectation cuts both ways. If you’re running a tiny studio and you’ve got “champagne tastes and a beer budget,” you may find nobody with any experience willing to work with you in the future because you are more demanding than you are worth.

There’s the more entrepreneurial approach of working for a percentage of the profit or becoming a partner on the team – although this may require a level of trust not given to someone who hasn’t spent some time down in the trenches earning their reputation. And even so… most indie projects, including those by successful veterans… don’t really make a profit. If you are trying to pay your bills, this might not be much better than working for “exposure,” and yet may be far more demanding of your time.

There may be other forms of compensation as well that fall somewhere between dubious ‘exposure’ and wads of cold, hard cash. My family has enjoyed some free memberships and gift certificates for places where my wife has performed that couldn’t afford her full hourly rate. If we were depending on that for paying the bills, we’d be in trouble. But we were able to take advantage of the opportunities and derived more value from them than we would have from cash payment. So from a lifestyle perspective, we profited. We were in a position to do so. Not everybody is.

The bottom line is that yeah, we do stuff for that won’t pay in cold, hard cash. This is true of big companies (who can better afford it) who give out free samples and other marketing efforts, as well as the tiny one-person shops. It’s marketing. For many start-ups (especially in creative professions), there’s a period of time where they are paying for the privilege of working for a while until they either give up, or get enough traction to finally become worthwhile.  Hopefully it’s short, but only a few very lucky (and probably underpriced) folks ever get to a point where they aren’t actively trying to increase their “exposure.” I’ve also done work “in trade” for people which has sometimes paid off, and sometimes not.

So yeah, don’t automatically turn up your nose at ‘exposure,’ because there are some times where the marketing opportunity is worth far more. But don’t automatically accept “exposure” as a reasonable compensation for your work, either, particularly once you have a track record. Think of yourself as a business, and your creative work as your product. There’s a time for marketing, and there’s a time to get paid. The only value of the former is to provide more opportunities for the latter.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment

Twenty Years of Twisted Metal?!?!?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 6, 2015

Sony tweeted this week that it was the twentieth anniversary of the original release of Twisted Metal.

20 years later, still Twisted. Happy birthday, Sweet Tooth and co. pic.twitter.com/IVCAZ9DxZg

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) November 6, 2015

This makes no sense to me. How can it be that old? How can *I* be that old? But my oldest daughter was born while we were developing the game, and I guess she is about to turn 21. So… HOLY CRAP!

I started working at SingleTrac right out of college. I was employee #16, and SingleTrac was a tiny startup with funding from Sony for two games for Sony’s upcoming game console. The company was mostly made up of veterans from the simulator industry… a group from Evans & Sutherland. We didn’t even have computers the day I started. Some of the guys were working on computers they’d brought in from home. I spent my first couple of days reading over design documents for our two titles in development, codenamed “Firestorm” (which would become Twisted Metal) and “Red Mercury” (which would become Warhawk, subtitled “The Red Mercury Missions,” which nobody really remembers).

When we got computers in, we were still using plastic folding tables for desks, and we used the Gateway boxes the computers came in as little side-tables to hold paperwork. A very ritzy setup indeed! A few weeks later, we returned the big beige (I think) development boxes for two cards that we installed into our hot new Pentium 90 computers, which were the new dev kit for the Playstation.

And we worked on our games. For practical purposes, we had until August the following year to finish up two titles with a team that staffed up to somewhere in the 20s. We worked crazy hours. We didn’t really know what we were doing. It was the first time any of us had really worked on a consumer-level commercial video game.  1995, for me, is one big blur of work. What I do recall is that there were so few of us that there was no ‘slack’ at all. Everyone was a little involved in everything. Not as bad as today’s tiny indie teams, but still… it was was a good experience to see all aspects of the game’s development. What happened on the publisher’s side of things was still a little bit of a black box, but on our end, we could fit the entire company into a conference room, and a “team meeting” consisted of about seven people.

Our games came out just shortly after the launch of the Playstation, which was a bigger success than just about anybody expected.

And the rest is history.

Ancient history, apparently.

I mean, I remember when I was working on these games talking about the old classics from the early 80s. That seemed so retro, like such ancient history, but I was talking about games that were less than fifteen years old. And now my games are twenty.

Ah, well. It’s been fun. Still is.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Meet Up! “Local Authors & You” Event Saturday!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 5, 2015

This is mainly for local folks: I’m going to be at the Local Authors & You event at the Viridian Events Center on Saturday, November 7th, from 1:00 to 5:00 pm. Come by and say hi, I can sign books, or just chat. I expect that with 50+ local authors there this weekend, I’m not going to be swamped or anything.

At some point (I don’t know the time), I’ll be running a half-hour panel on writing Steampunk short stories. There may even be people attending my panel on writing Steampunk short stories! It could happen…

There will be a LOT of local authors to meet and talk to. And there’ll be books for sale. It will be a good chance to get your Christmas shopping done. We’ll have copies of Terra Mechanica, Mechanized Masterpieces 2, and Beyond the Wail.

If you happen to be in the neighborhood, come pay a visit!

You can find more information here:

Local Authors & You event on Facebook

 

 

Filed Under: Books, Events - Comments: Comments are off for this article

The Ten Best CRPGs?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 4, 2015

BrainyAndNerdy has an article about the ten best (Computer / Console) RPGs you must play.

Now, a part of me really wants to rail about the games that are missing from the list, the lack of “indie” titles (unless you count The Witcher and Divinity: Original Sin), or the ordering. But you know, it’s a pretty decent list. He limits it to games that aren’t so dated that they really need a remake for today’s gamers, which I could take issue with, but… yeah, whatever. I still play those old games, and yeah, they take some getting used to. I love them, but… yeah. And the article cheats… most of the games listed are actually series (which is why I suppose the Final Fantasy series gets named in spite of many offerings being very dated).

But quibbles aside, it’s a good list. There are a lot of great memories there. Some of them are more recent than the age of the game would suggest. I love today’s world where so many titles are available digitally, emulated, in remakes, etc.   While some of the older titles are clunky to play today, they are still solid, fun titles. I’ve been tackling some old favorites lately, and man… they are still fun.

Of course, my own list would include Frayed Knights, but I’m a tad biased, maybe.

Picking only ten is kind of like picking your favorite child. For me, the most recent (and not “dated”) Final Fantasy titles have left me a little cold. And Mass Effect didn’t feel much like an RPG. And I couldn’t list any “best of” roleplaying games without including the Ultima series, the Might & Magic series, the Wizardry series, or the SSI “Gold Box” D&D series. And I remain extremely fond of Persona 3 & 4.

In fact, I recently took advantage of the releases on GOG.COM (even though I already had the series on CD-ROM from a long time ago… including paper documentation and cluebooks) to revisit the Gold Box games, and HOLY CRAP the games are still fun. Yeah, the earliest titles have some clumsy and time-consuming interface issues. The need to consult paper documentation is kinda lame today, but it allowed a lot more story to be told on technology with tight memory constraints. In retrospect, I’m considering these games a bit more highly than I used to.

I feel it’s still a bit early to see how newer games stand the test of time, but in addition to Divinity: Original Sin, but there’s a new-and-improved version of Wasteland 2 out now, Pillars of Eternity is a worthy heir to the Baldur’s Gate series, and I’ve got high hopes for the recently-released Age of Decadence.

I just started playing Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, which is very JRPG and pretty conventional right now, but I’m led to understand that it and the second chapter are pretty amazing with detail, dialog, characters, story, and a metric buttload of side-quests.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking stabs at making these lists, as inherently flawed as they are. I read lists like these and think, “Oh, man, I’ve gotta get back to playing some games on my back-burner.” There’s a lot of great stuff fun experience. But no matter what, the whole “best CRPGs EVAR!” or even “recommended to play now!” list for Computer RPG fans should definitely a living document. Now’s a great time to be a fan, and there’s a whole lot of great stuff to play.

But if I were to take a stab at this, right now, it’d be (in no particular order, and cheating as much as I could):

• Frayed Knights (Okay, that’d be #1)
• Ultima series (including Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, so I can get a 2-for-1)
• Might & Magic series (including Might & Magic X: Legacy. It’s good)
• The Infinity Engine games (Baldur’s Gate series, Planescape: Torment, and the Icewind Dale series)
• Final Fantasy series (mainly 4 – 10)
• Persona 3 and 4. Because they are weird and cool
• Gold Box D&D series (Pool of Radiance, Champions of Krynn, etc.)
• Divinity: Original Sin (though I haven’t played the enhanced version yet)
• Fallout series
• Wizardry series (particularly 6, 7, and 8)

Oh, crap, are we at 10 already? I wanted to include Pillars of Eternity, Chrono Trigger, the Eye of the Beholder series, and The Elder Scrolls. And maybe Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. And.. and… and….

See? I can’t do it.

 

Filed Under: General, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Five Point Nine Billion For a Bunch of Candy Crushers

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 3, 2015

I don’t know what to say. But seeing as that rarely stops me from spewing whateverage on this blog, I’m sure I’ll find something anyway.

Activision buys Candy Crush creator King for $6 Billion

Thought 1: Incredulity. Is Activision itself even worth $6 billion? I guess so, but that’s a lot of money.  (Answer: Yes, checking Google Finance, Activision Blizzard has 739 million shares at ~ $33.50 per share, so that’d give them a value of $24.4 billion). But for comparison, Disney bought Lucasfilm for a relative bargain price of $4 billion. Mojang was bought for $2.5 billion, which … well, okay, that was still pretty mind-boggling. Mind-boggling all the way across the board.

Thought 2: Disappointment. In preparation for their IPO, King.com got especially nasty with lawyers and trademark issues. Like trademarking the word “Saga” and trying to trademark the word “Candy.” It’s astonishing and disgusting that the “saga” trademark was even granted in the first place. It’s also disappointing that they’ve proven so successful using energy mechanics and practices that are… well, maybe not unethical, but borderline and somewhat predatory, and probably not good for the long-term health of the industry. And as a reward for their bad behavior, they made bank, setting an example throughout the industry.

Yes, I’m not the biggest fan of King.com. While I don’t consider Activision Blizzard to be a sterling example of virtue or anything, I guess there’s a chance they might serve as an influence for good. Or the other way around. I don’t know.

Ah, well. How much will this impact me, personally, as a small-time indie developer? Probably in no noticeable way. Hopefully.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

NaNoWriMo No or Yes?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 2, 2015

If you aren’t already involved in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), well, you’ve missed a day or two already, but you can still jump on board.

This is not going to be the month I write a novel. No way, no how. With the work on short stories and the release of Beyond the Wail last month, I’m behind on Frayed Knights 2 and need to devote some concentrated effort to it this month. Unless I find myself with some more editing that I have to do with stories already in the pipeline. Maybe there’ll be a novel next year, but serious effort on anything of that size is going to have to wait for Frayed Knights.

There’s some criticism being leveled at NaNoWriMo, but to me, that’s like criticizing Game Jams. Are the results at the end of November, with the goals of 50k word count, going to be awesome, ready-to-publish works of art? Heck, no. It’s a good exercise, a good start, and could end up with something that – with considerably more work – could be of commercial value. That’s the process, but getting stuff down on paper in the first draft is a critical early step. And there’s something about setting a hard goal and working for it in a disciplined manner that’s of incredible value, probably more so than the end product.

Although I should add that author J. D. Spero has some legitimate but amusing gripes with NaNoWriMo that I enjoyed. Mainly… why November? December might have been the only worse choice of months, although with only 28 days February’s not great, either.

I think it’s a great tool for first-time novelists, but  I think it’s more than that. I know some published authors who also take advantage of it in order to create momentum. We can all use all the help we can. But in the end, it’s a support and encouragement mechanism, not a limit.

Maybe next year. But for the immediate future,  if anybody needs me, I’ll be down in the dungeons making things that are trying to kill me. Please send food. Possibly a rescue party.

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

Cover Reveal for Kingdom City: Revolt

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 31, 2015

Happy Halloween, folks!

While not related to Halloween at all, I’ve got a special Saturday post to preview an upcoming book. Xchyler Author Ben Ireland has the second book of his Kingdom City series due out in January –

Kingdom City: Revolt

Ben churns out his prose from his home in Southeast Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children, and works in IT. When he isn’t writing, he’s either thinking about writing, or he’s driving his wife insane talking about his novel ideas. His work has appeared in two X-anthologies: “Kissed a Snake” in A Dash of Madness: a Thriller Anthology (July 2013), and “Fairykin” in Moments in Millennia: a Fantasy Anthology(January 2014). His first novel, Kingdom City: Resurrection was published in February 2014.

In case you missed the first book, you can find it here on Amazon: Kingdom City: Resurrection

Filed Under: Books - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

The World of Darkness Steps Back Out of the Darkness

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 30, 2015

As a fan of White Wolf’s old World of Darkness RPG series, this is a significant thing for me:

Paradox Interactive Acquires White Wolf Publishing from CCP Games

The new / old White Wolf Publishing company will run as an independent subsidiary, and will primarily deal with licensing the brands.

To me, this means hope that maybe… MAYBE… we could actually see a video game version of Mage: The Ascension. Or more likely, Werewolf.  Or more Vampire titles. Honestly, all of their games were pretty fascinating. The challenge came about in that they were really geared towards human interaction and storytelling, which didn’t translate to computer games all that well. That would be my fear of basing a game on their role-playing system.

But the settings – were incredible. I’m one of those weirdos who actually really enjoyed Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption. And Bloodlines – well, its reach exceeded its development team’s grasp, sadly, but even in its broken state at release it had some amazing things going for it.

One of the cool things is that Paradox Interactive is not a “big” publisher. They publish mid-tier games by smaller, independent studios. Will this translate to some games being made by “big indies” that are willing to be a little experimental? Maybe!

Incidentally, the 20th anniversary editions of the first dice-and-paper games have been recently released by some of the same development teams that worked at White Wolf in the old days.  I’ve got the one for Mage: The Ascension, which is something like three times the size of any of the previous editions. They are being made by Onyx Path Publishing, and are available via Drive Thru RPG and other sites (as well as crowdfunding campaigns).

Filed Under: Biz, Dice & Paper - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights 2: Drama Stars and You

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 28, 2015

One of the areas of “streamlining” for Frayed Knights 2 was the drama star abilities. To explain further, I’d like to recap a little bit for those who haven’t played Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon.

Like most people, I tend to save the game frequently when things are getting dangerous. When I suffer a setback, I’m tempted to reload. This is exacerbated by the games that provide encounters that all but demand that you do this – if you don’t enter a combat with with full health and spells, it is going to be far too challenging to complete. Because, you know, they want a challenging encounter. Then you have the next level of simplification of this… games that automatically restore you between encounters, so they can max out the challenge without worrying about frustrating players.

Which in my mind has ruined one of the critical gameplay elements of RPGs – resource management. Which has been a major gameplay element in tabletop roleplaying and computer RPGs since… ummm… pedit5?

My effort with Frayed Knights has been to return to a bit more of the flavor of old-school dice & paper gaming. One of these is the immediacy of having to play through bad luck or bad decisions. Now, I didn’t want to go so far as to add permadeath or anything like that, or even to limit the player’s ability to save the game. But I did want to encourage players to play through setbacks in the game rather than replay from a saved spot over and over again. The latter is boring, anyway, even if it does pad the hours.

To this end, I borrowed an idea from some dice & paper games – the ability to manipulate the game outside of character abilities. This is what I call Drama Stars. The idea is that as you play, you accumulate points which can be spent to have a major impact on the game… basically giving you the same advantage you’d have had if you replayed a tough section a couple of times (including bringing dead – or in FK’s case, incapacitated – characters back to life). In fact, you get some major “drama points” for doing something dangerous or having a character become incapacitated. While these drama points persist if you save & exit and then later continue, if you simply re-load from a saved point, the counter resets to zero.

So, in theory, the player who “plays through” a rough patch of the game (but survives) isn’t at much of a disadvantage over another player who reloads and re-plays several times to optimize results. But the player who didn’t save and reload probably had a more fun and exciting game.

That’s the theory. In execution, it wasn’t a legendary breakthrough in game mechanics or anything like that, but it worked okay. In Frayed Knights 2, I’ve tried to streamline and simplify things a little bit more so that Drama Stars are easier to understand and use.

In the first game, you had three stars that filled in from empty to bronze, then silver, then gold. It looked and sounded cool, but it was unnecessarily complex, and made it hard to understand the relative costs of the special abilities. Now you still have drama points that slowly complete a star, but you either have a star or you don’t. To make up for that, we need more stars. You can fill in up to ten stars. At that point, you are maxed out, and any more drama points you earn will be lost. But at that point you are able to use all of the drama abilities – which includes resurrecting (well, “recapacitating”) the entire party so long as one member is still up.

That’s the other thing I cleaned up: the drama abilities menu. There are a total of ten abilities, in ascending cost of 1-10 drama points:

The effects have changed somewhat from similarly-named abilities in FK1, but the basics (and the Holy Grail references) are the same. Fool’s Luck, which costs only a single drama star, guarantees a maximum result on the character’s next roll. The idea here is that you could just save and reload constantly until you succeeded, so why not let the player guarantee success on something that really matters? Problem solved. Bigger Fool’s Luck (I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether this refers to bigger luck or a bigger fool) adds a bonus on top of this, allowing a character to succeed in something that might otherwise be a little bit beyond their ability. Second Wind removes short-term fatigue and reduces long-term exhaustion. Only a Flesh Wound eliminates all damage to a living character. I Got Better removes all negative status effects. And I Feel Happy! means that a character (or the group) is not dead yet… they are no longer incapacitated and have a portion of their health restored.

So that is how the new and improved drama star system works. As in the previous game, current drama star status is retained if you save and exit and then continue at a later time (for those of us who may only have gaming sessions measured in minutes, not hours). But if you save anywhere and then reload, you’ll have things reset back to zero. (Clever players know to spend their drama points right before saving, if need be).

I hope it will prove an even more useful tool exploring the new dungeons!

Filed Under: Design, Frayed Knights - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

It’s About Time… For A Game Made in No Time!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 27, 2015

Do you want to do a game jam, but you can never find the time? Well, courtesy of the weirdness that is Daylight Savings Time, the time has been found for you… This is a game jam that by a quirk of procedural custom takes place in zero time. You start at 2 AM and end at 2 AM, an hour later.

In the U.S., in the areas that practice DST, this happens in the wee hours of Sunday morning, November 1st, this year. Europe already had the jam a few days ago. I’ve participated a couple of times before, and it’s always been fun. And I’ve ALWAYS gone back and spent another five hours or so polishing up my game, so I’ve had the original jam entry and a more polished version. It’s interesting to note how a technically playable version that is more-or-less “done” can take five times longer to get “finished.” That ought to be a lesson…

Anyway. It’s a jam. It literally takes no time at all, at least measurable time. If you can stay up late (or get up early) and give it a shot… it’s a fun exercise.

The 0 Hour Game Jam

Maybe this week I ought to experiment with Unity’s WebGL exporting before the jam…

Filed Under: Events, Game Development - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Old-School CRPGs: Smells Like Victory

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 26, 2015

Part of the surprise here is that it’s not such a surprise.

Obsidian Games just announced that Pillars of Eternity surpassed a half-million units sold worldwide. This is a game that was originally a nostalgia project… a game like Baldur’s Gate. They created it on a fairly low budget (by their usual, more AAA-focused measurements – it was still a TON of money by indie standards).

This tracks with the success of what was in many ways a reboot of the Dungeon Master / Eye of the Beholder games, Legend of Grimrock, which also enjoyed phenomenal success for a smaller-budget (but not shoestring budget) project – nearing a million copies sold as of a year ago.

When I embarked on the Frayed Knights project originally, there was few games embracing the old-school western computer RPG styles. You had Spiderweb’s games, and a few games like Eschalon Book 1 on the horizon and some other titles that seemed to be much further in development than they really were (The Broken Hourglass – a Baldur’s Gate style game itself – which was canceled, and Age of Decadence, which released just a couple of weeks ago).

My story that I maintained back then was that these games were still fun… with some modern updates, they could prove to be popular still. Of course, before the indie revolution, what publisher would take a chance on that? Especially since the numbers wouldn’t be “AAA” numbers selling into the millions. But with a modest budget, I maintained these things could still be viable and successful. But no, we were stuck in the desert of games that were mainly jRPGs console ports, Diablo clones, or Elder Scrolls wannabes. Not that those were bad, but there wasn’t enough out there to really scratch all the RPG itches.

Now we’re living in a world with games like Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin (with a sequel forthcoming), and with sequels to Ultima Underworld and The Bard’s Tale in development, three successful turn-based Shadowrun games (based on a dice & paper RPG)… and a spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment. And more. No, it’s not all super-rosy or anything, but I think with this latest announcement, the proof is that yes, there’s still a substantial market for these kinds of games. While they may not enjoy the “mass appeal” of some games, I have a tough time saying that 500k+ sales is a “niche” interest.

Not only that, but all of these games could be labeled “old-school” yet they are all very, very different. That’s the thing: “Old school” is not some monolithic, boring formula, but rather a wide field of possibilities that were discarded in pursuit of last year’s hit game. And we’re poised to strike out in some new, interesting directions from here, with what really amounts to a larger toolbox that embraces both old and new ideas.

So yeah. As an RPG fan, this smells like… victory.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Comments are off for this article

[Archive] Dress Codes and Development

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 23, 2015

I pulled out this old article from the old, lost blog from about 9 years ago. I think it’s still pretty relevant.

I’ve noticed with some curiosity that after having a positions at a few different companies in my career, the most productive software development teams were the ones at the companies with the least stringent dress codes. In one case, the same engineers worked at two different companies, and I noted their productivity was better at the place where they wore jeans and T-shirts to work.

I’m not saying there’s necessarily a causal relationship here. Two companies with the most stringent dress codes also had some management / business issues that were hurting either the department or the business as a whole. So while the I.T. team couldn’t get their job done, they at least LOOKED GOOD while they weren’t doing anything.

My favorite “Dress Code” story comes from Singletrac (hey, over five years at a company that rose to stardom and fell almost as quickly is bound to result in a lot of stories!) Bernie Stolar was then the head of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and they had taken a big gamble on this small company of mainly engineers who had never done games before. There was a lot of skepticism about our ability to turn knowledge of building tank and aircraft simulators for the military into entertaining videogames. (Editorial note from 2015: And at the simulator company where I now work, we’ve had a number of former video game developers developing hard-core training sims…)

One day Bernie came to take a tour of our office, and to talk biz with Singletrac’s president, Mike Ryder. So Bernie pokes his head into our offices where we’re all dillegently plugging along on our games. A few of the guys on the team had problems “dressing down” for a videogame job, so they were somewhere in-between “business casual” and casual. A few had nice jeans and knit button-down shirts.

Bernie snorted and told Ryder, “They sure don’t LOOK like gamers.”

We had an all-hands meeting every Friday during lunch. During the following Friday meeting, Mike Ryder gave us his plea:

“At Singletrac, we’ve never really had anything like a dress code. But if you feel so inclined to wear jeans with holes in them to work, or to flip your baseball hat around backwards while working on the game… please feel free!”

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Halloween Flick: Odd Thomas

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 22, 2015

Yes, it’s October, I’m still posting about all things spooky, creepy, and otherwise Halloween-y.

In this case, it’s another Netflix film that was panned by many critics: Odd Thomas, starring Anton Yelchin (Chekhov in the Star Trek reboot) and Willem Defoe, directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy), based on a Dean Koontz novel of the same name (in fact, a series). You’d think that’s a pretty good pedigree, but the critics disagreed.

Me? I liked it a lot. Yeah, it was a little jumbled, and there were man moments that looked like there were significant events portended that ended up on the cutting room floor. It’s quirky — the characters are definitely quirky — and at times it acts almost as if it wants to be a comedy. Sort of like The Mummy. But it’s really not. It’s an action / mystery movie with major supernatural elements.

The titular character is Odd Thomas, a guy with clairvoyant abilities. He sees dead people. And more. That makes him extremely handy to the chief of police, as Odd is remarkably on the nose when it comes to solving murders in his small town. Besides being able to see ghosts, he sometimes has prophetic dreams, has something of a psychic ability to find people he’s looking for, and can see into the spirit world. This includes seeing bodachs, nasty spirits that feed off of pain and violence. They can also possess people. But usually, they are simply the harbingers of extreme pain and violence. But you don’t want them to ever learn that you can see them, or they’ll use their abilities to possess someone and kill you.

And suddenly, the small town has become filled with bodachs. Something really bad is about to go down.

It’s a popular Instant Play show right now, and I really enjoyed it, warts and all.  It’s unrated, but it’d probably warrant a PG-13 for violence.

 

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Forget the Hoverboards – I want Mr. Fusion

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 21, 2015

Okay, it’s kind of a dumb meme going around, but I’ll bite. After all, it’s a one-time event for those of us who are children of the 80s. Today was the day in the future that Marty McFly traveled to from 1985 in Back to the Future II (released in 1989).

The vision of 2015 from 1989 was comical and… in my view… pretty annoying. But they had the anti-grav thing going for it, which was pretty major. And Mr. Fusion. Everyone talks about the hoverboards… where are our hoverboards?

(Well, we kind of have them, but they have to be used on a special surface. We are no closer to anti-gravity now than we were in the 1980s).

Personally, I’d rather have the flying cars. And more particularly, Mr. Fusion. I want to turn my organic garbage into 1.21 gigawatts of power, dang it! You pull that off, and have that much power at your disposal, and maybe everything else becomes a solvable problem.

The films under-estimated technology’s advancement a bit, too, still using pay phones and fax machines. But they weren’t trying to accurately predict the future… they were just trying to have fun. And the most fun thing about them is the comic representation of the same phenomenon written about in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” – how seemingly insignificant actions taken by time travelers in the past could all kinds of ripples and ramifications back in their own present time. The films played with all kinds of weird causality – starting with Marty’s own disrupting of his own parent’s relationship, causing him to slowly paradox his family and himself out of existence. Wild stuff to think about, made into a fun comedy for mass consumption.

It’s also pretty funny having such a window on mid 1980s America – deliberately shown in sharp relief against other eras – to look back on now.

So, hey, we get to give an old series which is definitely out of its own time one last great send-off today.

 

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Can’t Blog – I’m a Kid Again

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 20, 2015

Yeah. It’s Monday night, and I’m supposed to be writing this blog post. Not much is occurring to me, because I’m like 10 years old again, and watching this about a dozen times:

 

 

Admit it, you did too. Well, okay, most of you.

I’m still cautious, because I remember the heartbreak of the prequel trilogy. I mean, the ads for The Phantom Menace made chills go up my spine, too. So a part of me is afraid of getting hurt again.Not that I completely hated the prequel trilogy. Yes, I completely hated some parts of them, and loved others. I guess if you were to watch the movies with the audio turned off and just cranked up John Williams soundtracks and watched them like giant music videos, they would probably be pretty cool.

But yeah, as much as I try to not get excited… holy crap. The trailer nails something that was terribly missing in the prequels… real personal, character drama. The prequel movies were big on spectacle, but glossed over character development… if anything, character actions often seemed forced and unrealistic just to move the action along to the next planned scene. This trailer suggests some pretty interesting characters… including one of the villains.

But more interestingly, if I were to describe the story that this trailer seems to imply, it would be this:

“A powerful successor to the original Galactic Empire is on the rise. A new generation of heroes, too young to remember the original conflict, try to come to grips with what they are facing. Older veterans of the original war realize that it has returned with a vengeance.”

Of course, the real meaning that it is trying to say can be obtained by a substitution:

“A powerful successor to the original Galactic Empire Star Wars films is on the rise. A new generation of heroes fans, too young to remember the original conflict films, try to come to grips with what they are facing watching. Older veterans of the original war series realize that it has returned with a vengeance.”

Man, I hope so.

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Beyond the Wail Interview with Julie Barnson

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 19, 2015

One of my gamedev friends stepped up to the plate and offered to host an interview for the Beyond the Wail anthology. With the luck of the draw, he was asked to post the interview with my wife, Julie.

So DUH… of course I’m going to link to it!

Invicticide’s Blog: Beyond the Wail Interview with Julie Barnson

I can’t say I’m unbiased, but it’s an excellent story! Ghosts and an enchanted fiddle (“the devil’s instrument”) make a great combination.

Also remember that there’s a link to a contest with free loot, so be sure to sign up.

And remember – if you are looking for some spooky stories appropriate for the Halloween season, Beyond the Wail is a great new choice!

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