Nuke the entire site from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 28, 2014
I feel like a guy who decided he had been pushing his luck for too many years without having a fire extinguisher in his kitchen, and goes out to buy one… only to have his kitchen burn down while he’s off at the store buying the fire extinguisher. Or something.
I finally got to my final straw with some of the nasty little automated attacks on this site (mainly via the blog), after numerous attempts to “clean stuff out” piecemeal. I finally decided that it would be best to take the advice of Ellen Ripley in Aliens: “…Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” Clear out everything, and re-install WordPress from scratch. Sounded like a good idea in my head. And probably something that wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. After all, all the key information is kept in the database, not the files.
WELL, a couple of funny things happened on the way to doing that.
First of all… I’m a cautious guy. Or at least I try to be. I wanted to make sure I had a complete backup of everything before I started. You know, justincase. You never know when you might need that. So… I figured I’d copy stuff out in a backup directory. Great idea.
Well, as I intended to do this, I found I already had a couple of backup directories, including one entitled “broken.” Yeah, those had been there for years, and I’d ignored them. Well, I might as well delete those ancient backups that I hadn’t looked at in years, and then create a fresh one.
It turns out, one of those backups wasn’t really a backup. It was a symbolic link back to the main directory. So now that I’d “cleared out” some space, I went back to the website directory and found it… gone. Baweted. Only a few protected files / directories were left. Oops.
No problem, I thought. Most of it can be reconstructed from my own copy on my hard drive. Except… I had a hard drive crash last year, and I had copied almost everything over to the new drive when I reinstalled Windows, apparently the website development stuff wasn’t part of it. Oops.
So… making a long story a little less long… I had completely nuked my site. Without any complete backups (at least less than five years old). I had an option, of course, of contacting my hosting service and pleading with them (and probably paying them) to restore from whatever their latest backup of the hard drive might be. Or… if I made the mess, I could just clean it up.
I opted for the latter, and began the 20+ hour ordeal of reconstructing everything from scratch. On the plus side, a completely fresh rebuild of everything might finally kill whatever had compromised the blog. And – also a plus – a lot of the critical information on my site was now stored in databases, so I really just had to see if I could dig up the art resources (some of which I grabbed via the Internet archive) and rec0nstruct some game sales pages.
So… here we are. There are a few dead links here and there that I still need to clean up, I (temporarily?) have the old Blogger blog pages removed, and some ancient articles that haven’t seen traffic in years. Perhaps the biggest loss is that I lost all the pictures from old blog articles. But… unless you want to spend days reading through the old archives, they probably won’t be missed too much.
The big trick is what to do with the “community” pages. I disabled those a long time ago because the evil spambots had completely overwhelmed the server and the tools, in spite of multiple security checks (which had served me well for a couple of years, but seemingly overnight were rendered completely useless).
So here we are. And I’m now pondering ways to really improve on this place, now that I was forced to do a massive repair / reconstruction. The problem is that anything I do takes time away from making games, which I love doing much more. Well, most of the time. I like doing things with this site and really want it to be a great resource for genre fans… but I love making games. I have to be careful with that balance.
Filed Under: Rampant Games - Comments: 11 Comments to Read
Downtime
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 26, 2014
The blog will be going down for maintenance at some point this weekend. The outage will probably only be a couple of hours. This should not affect the main Rampant Games website ( http://rampantgames.com )
Sorry I don’t have a more specific time, but – in the words of Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5, I’m in the middle of fifteen things, all of them annoying.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
Game Design, Research, and Mortality
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 25, 2014
A weird, personal note today.
Several years ago, I did a great deal of research for a game I still want to do someday. I backed off on it because I realized I didn’t have the chops yet to pull it off. So I put it on the shelf for a while.
I haven’t given up on it, and in fact… now that I’m doing some writing as well… I dusted off my research and looked through it with that dangerous question in mind… “How hard would it be…?” Could I convert some of this material to a written story? Could I prototype it one weekend as an informal game jam project?
Mostly, I was glad to find the notebook. I was afraid, over the years, that a lot of the stuff I’d done had been lost (and truthfully, some of it has…) I turned through the pages and rediscovered all this information that I’d gleaned over dozens of hours of research – including books and… an interview.
On one of the pages, there was a phone number for my aunt. My mom gave me the number, and said, “My sister really knows the history of this area really well. You should give her a call.” I was not really sure what to ask her. I was researching folklore with a bit of “real world” history thrown in for flavor, and my aunt was not known for flights of fancy. You don’t get much more down-to-earth.
When I was a kid, she lived next door – for a while, my family lived in their old home. My cousin, her son, was practically an older brother to me. But then we moved away, and I saw her maybe once a year. After I grew up and had a family of my own, I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years. Perhaps she wouldn’t be much use for my game project, but I could at least say hi. I made the call.
We spoke for about an hour. She was delighted, and very animated, in spite of having been in poor health for a couple of years. And while she had absolutely no clue what I was doing research for, she was an amateur historian and gave me a wealth of information that – in my estimation – was ripe for fictionalization and turning into an adventure of horror and dark fantasy spanning a couple hundred years. She had a perspective I hadn’t found in books or the Internet – a very personal history based on oral tradition, old photos, and having lived through bits and pieces of it. She knew how things worked day-to-day for her (and my) ancestors. She’d interviewed people, herself. She knew things like old slang and patterns of speech that she shared with me that
I ended up with a couple of pages of notes and a few additional leads that didn’t really serve for my game, but were interesting to look up. One lead was a poem entitled “Cassandra Southwick” about an attempt to sell a couple of my ancestors into slavery.
I thanked her for the information, and the delightful conversation, and decided I would not wait so long to call her again, whether it was for more research, or just catching up.
I didn’t. I can’t now. She died a couple of years later.
I hadn’t looked at these notes for a long time, and it brought back a surprisingly happy memory.
As a game designer (or a writer), I don’t know of any magical way to bottle that emotion and distribute it with anything I might create based on those notes. Anyone else would just look at the notes themselves and see boring trivia. But whether I succeed or not, I still want to put it to good use.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: Read the First Comment
Movie: Knights of Badassdom
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 24, 2014
Knights of Badassdom is a horror / comedy movie about LARPers (Live Action Role-Players), featuring Ryan Kwanten, Summer Glau, Peter Dinklage, and Steve Zahn. I’d been following it for a while, during it’s seemingly unending quest for distribution. Like most indie movies – especially those not trying to be controversial or artsy-fartsy – it experienced a good deal of trouble finding a place to go, and received a bunch of editing on the way. I really don’t know what the original was like – I can only judge the final results.
I can’t say I’m a total fan of 80’s style horror movies, especially the drug-laden cheesy gore-fests this film was reputedly inspired by. Not so much my thing, but I do enjoy a good horror / comedy, and of course, the movie is about LARPers, which is something that brings to mind many a weekend from my youth, when I’d dress up in period garb, leather, and chain mail, and wield padded sticks in the form of weapons against my similarly-garbed opponents, kicking up dust and beating the crap out of each other, getting torn up more by thorns and branches than each other’s weapons, and then get up and do it all over again.
And when we weren’t fighting, or trying too hard to be “in character,” we’d shoot the breeze, and make jokes about ourselves. This plot from this movie sounds a lot like the kinds of goofy thought experiments we’d come while hanging out, eating our lunch at “Valhalla” (a time-out zone you’d visit when you “died” in larger battles… think respawn delay), or while driving to or from the battles. It’s a big “what if.” What if a bunch of live-action role-players, skilled with simulated battle with padded weapons, actually had to deal with a true horrific monster from the netherworld?
That’s Knights of Badassdom in a nutshell. Overqualified, under-achieving car mechanic and “Dark Metal” guitarist Joe (Kwanten) experiences a break-up with his long-term girlfriend. His buddies Hung (Dinklage) and Eric (Zahn) decide the best thing for their depressed friend is to get him re-acquainted with gaming – something he enjoyed prior to his relationship with his now ex-girlfriend. But – after getting him stoned and passed out – they decide to take it to the next level, and drag him with them to a major LARPing event. After a bit of an argument – and a glimpse at expert swordswoman Gwen (Glau), Joe is persuaded to stick around and try a weekend in a fantasy battle.
The surprise is that Eric – trying hard to achieve the next level as a wizard – has obtained a real, cursed book of magic off of EBay to use as a prop in the game. He casts a spell out of the tome for show, which happens to have the very real effect of summoning a deadly succubus from Hell – in the form of Joe’s ex-girlfriend. She proceeds to kill and eat quite a few LARPers during the night, and attempts to discover and then defeat her predictably escalate – as does the body count.
So how is it? Worth a DVD purchase or rental?
It was for me. I liked it. I didn’t love it the way I loved last year’s Unicorn City (another LARP-oriented movie), or The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising. I have trouble recommending this movie to many of my friends because it is very rated “R” for language, gore, and drug use. The blood & guts are not realistic, but they are plentiful. As a horror / comedy, it doesn’t approach the lofty heights of Cabin in the Woods (but then, what would?). The CGI is cheesy, but it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to take itself seriously. It’s intended to be over-the-top into the realm of ludicrous (at least so it seems to me), and just invites you to come along for the ride.
No, it’s not a great film. I am not really amused by drug use, and I’m not normally a fan of realistic gore… but this one went to the ludicrous levels to the point where I didn’t have too much of a problem with it. As an “inside joke” with gamers, it’s pretty amusing, and there were some definite laugh-out-loud moments for my wife and me. For what it is – a gamer-centric medium-low-budget indie horror / comedy, it worked for me.
So on my highly subjective 3-point bad/good/great rating system I like to advocate, I’d put it in the “good” category. If you enjoy cheesy horror movies and you are a gamer, you will probably get a kick out of it.
You can grab it from Amazon:
Knights of Badassdom
And here’s the trailer:
Filed Under: Movies - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Evermore – An Adventure Theme Park?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 23, 2014
Anybody remember the “Dream Park” series by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes? It was basically about a massive high-tech theme park for LARPing (before that was such a thing). Since then, we’ve seen variations on that idea in real life come about in small ways. But it looks like somebody’s going for it in a big way just a few miles from where I live, though they are going much more low-tech. Called “Evermore,” and labeled an “adventure park,” it’s a heavily themed location featuring interactive adventures and events. To be honest, I don’t know how they are really going to pull this off, but I’m pleased someone is bold enough to try.
From visiting their elaborate booth at Comic Con and talking to one of the staff, it is planned to be sort of an old-world European setting more-or-less based in the Victorian era… but with things like beached pirate ships, caves, and castles. And restaurants, eventually a hotel, etc. Not exactly “Steampunk,” though the Victorian-esque setting would certainly lend itself to this. They have a number of people from theater, film, “haunted house,” and even the video game industry experience working with them, so it sure sounds like they have the people necessary to put it together.
My wife calls it “A Thanksgiving Point for geeks.” Again, I’m not sure how they are going to do on the execution, but the concept is pretty awesome:
While the trailer doesn’t have too much info, here’s an interview with some of the staff (you may recognize the heading of casting from the movie Unicorn City ).
Hopefully, about 14 or 15 months from now, I’ll provide a post with pictures about how this all turned out. At least “Phase 1.”
Anyway, for more information, you can visit their website. It’s still a little sparse, but I imagine that will start to change in a few months as they start ramping up their marketing efforts:
Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Twelve Things I Learned at the Salt Lake Comic Con FanXperience
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 22, 2014
I went to the Salt Lake City Comic Con FanXperience (or “FanX”) over the weekend. With over 100,000 people there on the final day (Saturday), it was crowded but fun. The emphasis for FanX, as I understand it, is more on the broad spectrum of pop-culture fandom, whereas the Comic Con event (to be held again in September) will be more focused on the geekier side of things.
I’m not really much one for getting pictures with celebrities. It’s cool for gee-whiz factor, I suppose. Signed books are a little different, as it’s more of a personalization (something, sadly, that’s harder to do with digital media). But I don’t put signed books on the shelf or in airtight containers to preserve some illusion of value. I read ’em.
But it was a lot of fun listening to some of the stories from James Marsters, Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Karen Gillen, the cast of BYU-TV’s “Studio C”, Ghost Hunters International, and so forth. And learning about writing (especially from a gaming perspective) from guys like Larry Correia, Dave Farland (AKA Dave Wolverton), Tracy Hickman, Michael A. Stackpole, and others was pretty awesome. I attended some good and some less-good panels. Here are some little tidbits of information I learned:
#1 – The designers / producers from the mainstream video game publishers really don’t have any more of a clue than the rest of us as to where the industry is heading. We’re all just plunging ahead in unfamiliar territory together.
#2 – Traditional book publishing is still pretty screwed up, but – just like games – it’s not like going indie or going with small press publishers are magical path to success, either. There is potential with all three paths.
#3 – This was kind of a side note, but it sounds like some professional writing organizations / guilds are getting pretty politicized these days. As in “burn the heretic!” Utah has a lot of heretics.
#4 – James Marsters never steals from a set. He’s a minister’s son and a former producer for a theater group, and always hated having to pay for / replace the stuff out of his own pocket that his actors stole from the set.
#5 – One book editor told (Michael A. Stackpole?) that he could always tell which authors had been game-masters for tabletop role-playing games before: They tended to be much better than average at world-building, but worse than average at creating characters. The reasons make sense: Game-masters have to spend a good deal of effort fleshing out their worlds, because the players will inevitably start poking around and looking behind the curtain. But the game-master’s characters are always NPCs, not primary characters, so they never have to flesh out too much detail.
#6 – Nathan Fillion’s pants split three times on the set of Firefly. Once, he says, when he was just standing.
#7 – Turning a D&D adventure into a novel is a terrible idea. Trying to make a storyline to fit a game production plan is also a terrible idea. On the other hand, developing a game world based on books or (as happened in the Mechwarrior series) based on a collaboration between writers, designers, and producers can yield awesome results.
#8 – Who would win in a fight between Jayne Cobb and Colonel John Casey? According to Adam Baldwin, “Casey’s a better shot, but Jayne is ten years’ younger, and is better at fighting dirty.”
#9 – Nathan Fillion played Dungeons & Dragons only once. It was… slow. He avoided saying the word, “boring.”
#10 – While he’s happy to do it, Adam Baldwin put voice-acting for video games as the most difficult (and less fun?) acting work – mainly because you are usually working with a producer rather than with other actors, and are running through a ton of lines that represent emotional states and circumstances in the game that are dependent upon what the player does.
#11 – Good “Space Opera” is just like good stories of any other genre – they start with good characters. (As an aside – that is something that can be challenging to do in a computer RPG that tries to avoid making assumptions about the kinds of characters the players will create).
#12 – While publishers may buy stories based on the current “trends,” it’s hard to chase trends as a writer, because it takes too long to get a story written and to market in time to take advantage of it. By the time it goes through the whole process and to market, the market will already be saturated with similar titles. I believe the same applies to game developers.
Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
Overwhelmed By Choice
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 21, 2014
This weekend wiped me out, and kept me going almost constantly. I have a couple of unfinished larger posts, but I didn’t want to leave you empty-handed on a Monday. So here are a couple of things continuing to make me think:
“An Algorithm for Discovering Hidden Gems” by Lars Doucet talks about putting in place some kind of system that can measure the engagement level of a game while filtering out – at least to a degree – the popularity level and the likelihood of being “gamed.” I can’t say I’m totally on board here, but it’s worth thinking about these things. After hearing how most of the people voting for a particular movie for the Academy Awards this year hadn’t even seen the movie but thought it was “important” and thus worthy of their vote (and realizing that – before I cast the first stone – I must admit I’m not guiltless of this kind of behavior, either), it would be good to be able to measure games on an objective basis and simply see how much people enjoyed playing it – short or long, popular or not.
On what might first seem an unrelated note, I wanted to mention a post by Brad Torgersen, an award-winning speculative fiction author I met briefly over the weekend, entitled, “Whence Fandom?” He notes how fractured fandom is now, as compared to the “old days.”
I find parallels with how video games are now. Honestly, you could probably point to most media now that the technological barriers to reproduction and distribution have crumbled. Back in the “old days” of gaming, there were a handful of points of convergence for video game fans – the small, nerdy “tribe” that we we were. It would differ by region; a gamer from Tokyo might not have much in common with a gamer from San Diego. But with a (relatively) small number of platforms and the arcades, we had a relatively small pool to draw from. Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, Tetris, Wizardry, Zork, Civilization, King’s Quest, Asteroids, Breakout, Castlevania, Monkey Island, Atari’s Adventure, Mega Man, Metroid, Street Fighter, Double Dragon, Contra, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, The Legend of Zelda, Wing Commander, Falcon, Ultima, Sonic… You wouldn’t have to list too many games before you’d find a nice subset of games two or more players would have in common. And then, boom, you have common interest, and perhaps more importantly, a common language.
The extremely wide variety of games today is something of a mixed bag. We aren’t completely lacking in what Torgersen refers to as cultural touchstones. If you’ve played Guitar Hero, The Elder Scrolls, Assassin’s Creed, Team Fortress, Minecraft, Angry Birds, Modern Warfare, or – hey, Civilization (still)! – in the last decade, you don’t have to go quite so far to find other gamers who have shared that experiences with you. But these are diluted, and maybe it’s just because I’ve become such an indie / retro game fan and have departed so much from “mainstream,” but it feels like the subsets of “games in common” has become smaller and harder to find. It’s not even about the plethora of games out there (which dwarfs their counterparts back in the 80s or early 90s), but more about the plethora of gamers of so many stripes and interests. I am reminded of this all the time when Robert Boyd of Zeboyd games and I say “Classic, old-school RPGs,” and we’re often talking about completely different games. They might have common ancestors, but we’re often talking about distant cousins of the genre.
I don’t think this is an unhealthy development: more games, more gamers, more interests, more diversity, and more styles and approaches all have far more upside than downside. But I would like to see ways of finding more points of commonality, if for no other reason than to make sure that all these little niches within the medium / hobby / industry are able to keep communicating and share. Otherwise, we’re either going to start spinning those wheels we keep reinventing, or take the safe and easy path-most-traveled following the big-budget behemoths. This is the reason I’d like to see us tackle the problem of discovering and “getting the word out” on those hidden gems. The gaming world has a lot to offer, if only we can find it.
Filed Under: Geek Life, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Comic Con FanX Thoughts: Making It Real
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 18, 2014
I’m hitting the Salt Lake City Comic Con FanXperience this weekend. I just got through the first day, and only a few hours after-work at that, but I had a pretty good time. I was pondering on the whole geek-gathering thing while sitting in the hall munching on a sandwich for dinner. I have coworkers and neighbors who just don’t get it. What’s the point? What’s this about? I thought a little bit about Wil Wheaton’s speech on being a nerd at a Comic Con last year, which was cool, but didn’t quite put a finger on things. I watched all the Star Fleet officers and Princess Leias, Jedi Knights, superheroes, supervillains, Minecraft Creepers, Doctor Whos (or is that Doctors Who?), Master Chiefs, zombies, demons, steampunks, and pirates go by. I thought, “These are people who really love geek culture things, and get together to celebrate it.” But that wasn’t it, either. And besides, “geek culture” is kind of a circular definition.
I’d just attended James Marsters’ spotlight (he played Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel), and he talked about the strangeness of fan conventions. He said that hearing someone talk about themselves is one of the most boring things ever – but at conventions people cheer when he talks about himself. Then he said he’s been there, too – he was at an early convention in the 1970s when he was dressed up in a Star Fleet uniform, with Vulcan ears and his eyebrows dotted up like Spock’s, with the most awesome balsa-wood phaser of anybody at the convention. And he had the same experience – going nuts in reaction to Spock’s “Live long and prosper” sign.
So what is it? What brings these geeks together to share their weird hobbies?
With a few exceptions, the thread of commonality is that all these “geek culture” items are works of imagination. Science Fiction, fantasy, super-heroic, supernatural, you name it… the common thread is that they don’t really exist. But when we share these experiences – these fantasies – with each other, they become real on several levels (as anybody who has been in a “raid” in an MMORPG can attest). You can argue that anything that two people can share together is “real” in some ways, if for no other reason than it is something that brings people together and gives them some kind of common bond.
A lot of other people “don’t get it.” When those of us who are into these things talk about these fictional worlds, fictional people, who are meaningful to us in one way or another, and we get weird looks from those people. Sure, okay, maybe they saw Lord of the Rings, but they don’t get what the big deal is about it. So we get together with other people who do get it, who understand and share these kinds of interests and loves. We all have stories and costumes and other bits of invented memories and artifacts to share, too. We make it real – at least real enough to make it a topic of discussion, or even arguments. When we share these experiences, we breathe yet more life into these objects of imagination, and add new aspects to these creations which are otherwise static without our participation.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think that’s a not-insubstantial part of why these cons exist and are so successful.
Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Lord British Wants *You* to Port His RPG…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 17, 2014
This looks like fun for programmers around here…
Before there was Ultima, before there was even Akalabeth: World of Doom, there was…. DnD1. On a PDP 11 mini-computer.
There’s a one-month contest going on at Richard Garriott’s Portalarium – a contest to port his first computer RPG to Unity and to the browser. This is a port, not an enhancement – it is supposed to be as faithful to the original as possible, right up to mimicking the font for the character graphics on a yellowed background like the old teletype paper.
Winners and runners-up get some bonus account stuff in Shroud of the Avatar. It sounds like the intent is to have the game actually be playable inside Shroud of the Avatar, which would be kinda cool. I’m sure they have plans for the web-version as well.
Anyway, this sounds super-cool, although I wonder if they’ll end up with a bunch of absolutely identical entries.
The contest only goes for a month. So… programmers, get coding!
Richard Garriott’s DnD#1 Contest!
Filed Under: Programming - Comments: Read the First Comment
Eschalon Trilogy On Sale Today…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 16, 2014
GOG.COM is running a sale on the entire Eschalon series, from Basilisk Games, today only.
Indie Gem Promo: Eschalon Series
If you are a fan of old-school style RPGs, or indie RPGs, this series belongs in your library. I dunno what else to say. The price they have for the entire series is less than I paid for either of the first two games (but then, I paid extra for the collector’s edition of the second one, with the physical case and everything).
There are monsters in need of pummelin’!
Filed Under: Deals - Comments: Comments are off for this article
The Best-Kept Secrets
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 15, 2014
I once heard a veteran of the arcade-game industry talk about how the arcades were a great place for business Darwinism: Rapid turn-around, and the successes quickly rose to the top while the lesser games – and it was implied these were “not great” games though not necessarily bad games – quickly disappeared. According to this veteran, this caused a rapid “evolution” towards better games, as the best features of hit games became emulated.
I was too young to really see what was going on, so I can’t comment on that. But it does make me wonder if it was the quality or style of the games themselves that were truly the cause of the rise and fall of games in the arcade, or if it was more of a case of marketing and external elements. I don’t entirely embrace the “evolution” argument. Did games truly become better, or simply more similar? Perhaps the overall quality did go up over time – but I don’t believe that the barrier to success was restricted to game quality and appeal.
A friend told me about an experiment in inequality and the “cultural” marketplace. Test audiences were exposed to new music, and invited to download and keep some songs. The songs had indicators of how much they’d already been downloaded. Some of the songs had an artificially inflated number. What they discovered is that the artificially inflated number helped the popularity of some songs within the controlled audience, but could not others. In other words – some songs had hit potential and others did not. If a song had both hit potential and an apparent wave of popularity behind it, it could take off. A song that sucked rarely did well. Hit potential could not guarantee success, but it’s lack could guarantee the lack of success – or at least a large success. In other words, the distorted perception of popularity had some effect, but was not the sole contributor to the success or failure of the song.
The brave, new world of indie games completely dwarfs the arcade era in its heyday. In terms of both audience size and quantity of games getting released to the market, the difference is staggering. We have the Darwin machine on fast-forward once again, with success rapidly emulated (how many “Flappy Bird” clones have we seen in the last three months?) and failures lost and forgotten in no time.
I suspect that the more crowded a marketplace becomes, the higher the impact of the “distortion” the experiment references. Nobody can keep up with all the releases on mobile or PC. That’s both exciting and overwhelming. But it means that the audience becomes increasingly dependent upon some kind of filter to limit their choice to only those titles they are likely to enjoy. As a gamer, I don’t care so much about giving all games a fair and equal chance – I want to know I’m not wasting my own time.
This means that an increasing number of really good games are flying underneath the collective radar. As a game developer and someone with an interest in the industry as a whole, this bugs me. It means that only a subset of games are really getting a chance – and a lot of stinkers are getting much more opportunity than some far superior titles.
I don’t know how to combat this. One of my great loves is to discover one of those unknown gems, and just have a delightful time playing a game that nobody has ever heard of. But it’s not like I have a very loud voice, or a lot of time. I guess that kind of defines the problem – the guys with the time and broad audience are by definition the filters that get used. What is a good mechanism to help people discover these “best-kept secrets,” particularly in ways that are not subject to massive “gaming of the system” by developers / publishers?
Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
Lights Turned Off in the World of Darkness
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 14, 2014
Bummer:
CCP Games Halts Development of World of Darkness MMO.
I was really looking forward to seeing how they “solved” this one. I guess they didn’t.
I think I was always more of a fan of the theory behind the RPG system than the implementation, although I really loved Mage and played a bit of Vampire as well. But a big part of the “evolution” of the RPG back in the 1990s was that it was taking dice-and-paper RPGs in a direction where computers couldn’t go very well. Dubbed the “Storyteller” system, the game rules emphasized the more human elements of gaming – shared storytelling over mechanics. In my mind, it was all about plot, mood, character, and rule of cool.
Mage, in particular – the original version of the rules, not the kinder, simpler reboot – was in the realm of mind-blowing as far as rules were concerned. Rather than a spell-list like every other game out there, it was more about how much your character could manipulate reality along various lines (or, rather, “spheres”). There were some “rotes” that represented common examples of how it was done, but it was enormously removed from your fireball-wielding magic-user of D&D fame. Successful mages in the World of Darkness were more like action-movie heroes, pulling off amazing but more-or-less plausible feats that appeared to the common onlooker as being nothing more than a combination of not-quite-superhuman skill and good luck.
But those rules were pretty hard for many players to get their heads around. It was a little bit of a paralysis of having too much choice… you can do anything (within certain constraints), which led a lot of players to not really understand how they could do anything. For some it was liberating, but for others it was frustrating.
But at least in the earlier editions, the game was really rules-light and background-heavy (often, sadly, with highly conflicting background information that didn’t always work together – but hey, it was thick on atmosphere!). There was a lot of talking and role-playing, and a lot of just making-it-up as you go and rolling with it if it felt right. These are things that don’t lend themselves well to mechanical moderation. The two Vampire CRPGs that made it to the PC reflected this. Both had heavy atmospheres and storylines, but the rules systems were constrained to the point of only barely resembling the source material. They were made “video-gamey.”
Another issue – worthy of an essay in the Storyteller’s Supplement in the first edition of the dice-and-paper game – was that while the rules were technically compatible within the different types of characters in setting, they were nowhere close to “balanced.” In part, this was a result of the games being designed as completely stand-alone systems sharing core rules and a setting, but without any intention of really integrating them together. I suspect this was deliberate – the original design team tried to make the best game about werewolves as they could, not the best game about werewolves that worked well characters from other games. The essay noted that a high-level mage could literally turn an elder vampire into lawn furniture. You could say that this made the mage overpowered — but if an elder vampire caught a mage by surprise, said mage wouldn’t last ten seconds. The best the mage could hope for is to use his powers to escape to a place where he could then have time and safety to plan his new lawn-furniture construction enterprise.
In some online, human-moderated text-based worlds that used the rule system, the end result was pretty predictable… while characters across all game systems crossed paths, interacted socially, and occasionally worked together on plots, the vampire players really did vampire-y things together, the mages did mage-y things together, and so forth. Characters from other domains were more of a guest appearance.
How would this all work in a major, mass-market MMO? I was honestly keenly interested. It looks like the final answer was… “it didn’t.” As they said in the press release, “We dreamed of a game that would transport you completely into the sweeping fantasy of World of Darkness, but had to admit that our efforts were falling regretfully short.”
Over the years, I’ve often thought about how I would design a fully computer-moderated MMO along these lines. And to be fair — it’s not easy. In fact, if I had carte blanche with the license (like that would happen), I’d keep the setting and overall character types, but completely ditch the rule system as an early design choice. Purists would scream, but it’s not like it hasn’t been done before (with GURPS, LARPing, etc). So I’d be committing the same sins as the designers of Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, but taken to a greater extreme. The rules would have to change or be simplified to allow for the software to run the game, to allow players to cooperate and not be out of balance with each other, and to allow for a gradual but consistent character progression.
But no matter what, it’s a tough world to translate to the computer.
Bloodlines might have been a buggy mess on release, with some horrendous design flaws borne of a desperate, rushed release (particularly at the end, when it devolves into a shooter), but you don’t have to squint too hard to see its potential. It was a flawed gem, but the developers “got” the game system and the world. When choosing a Malkavian or a Nosferatu entirely changes the game, there’s something special going on there. It’s a glimpse into what could have been. But scaling it up to an MMO? I really don’t know.
But really, what I’d want to do isn’t an MMO for the entire World of Darkness, but really just Mage. And not necessarily an MMO – although a persistent, multiplayer world would definitely be a key feature. Something of a scaleably multiplayer along the lines of what Richard Garriott is talking about for Shroud of the Avatar. A proper Mage game would involve close friends (and enemies?) with a gradually growing circle of acquaintances and rivals. Kinda like social media.
But my fear now is that with the death of this MMO, we may never see another game in the World of Darkness. But hey, if the crowd-funded, wild indie video game world has taught us anything, it is that no license or genre is ever really dead.
Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights – Sorry, the Princess is in Another Castle
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 11, 2014
In development of Frayed Knights 1: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, a lot of the time and effort in the latter stages of the project was devoted to dealing with scaling the game. A lot of the practices which worked okay for one or two dungeons didn’t scale well to making two dozen locations. There was a lot of “butt in chair” work which would have been made much easier with better tools – especially with the ease of making mistakes. A lot of the bugs in the testing process came down to hard-to-find mistakes that came from trying to do things like manually place and configure every door in a dungeon. One cut-and-paste error in the tedious process, and you could end up with a bug that might take hours to find and fix.
In early development of Frayed Knights 2, I spent a lot of time building some editing tools, thinking they would solve this problem. I spent months making an ugly but usable editor, with some really cool ideas (well, in my mind, anyway) to make this process faster, easier and less error-prone. I created an editor that let me draw out the dungeons in 2D, like I’d do on graph paper for dice-and-paper gaming, but with some great 3D layering with slopes, stairs, parts of levels crossing over each other with some decent visualization.
I was, and still am, pretty proud of the results. My intent was to create an “80%” solution – make it so that 80% of the level design could be massively simplified so we could devote the time to the most “interesting” 20%. It was a pretty good idea. I wrote a bunch of really cool code that would transform these designs from a 2D map into full-fledged 3D environments with features like ledges, slopes, waterways, and of course diagonal walls. I learned a lot about procedural object generation in Unity. The results were actually kinda cool looking.
But…
Yeah, there’s a big ‘but.’
I think it was in an Air Force ROTC class in college when they talked about how we have a tendency to go into a new conflict prepared to fight the previous one. In this case, while the approach was probably awesome considering the way I used the old Torque engine, it was not the best use of my efforts when making my first major Unity project. I didn’t fully understand the power of the system, or what everybody else was doing in the Unity world which could make my life easier.
The more I expanded on my home-grown editing tools, the more work I found I needed to do, and the more I looked at incorporating it into the Unity editor (I think someone on the blog even asked why I hadn’t done that already, and I didn’t have a really good answer). As I started getting serious about this, and as my editor needed some very serious development to incorporate additional functionality, I looked at some third-party tools to aid me in this transition.
What I found ended up replacing rather than supplementing my editor. Seriously – some folks were already working long and hard on these kinds of problems, and if I were willing to accept the same kind of restrictions I had already planned on with my home-grown editor (to make sure the “80% solution” was still fast, easy, and reliable), then I was ahead of the game from where I would be sticking with my old stuff. There would be downsides, of course, but it looked like a net win.
This was back in the summer of last year, so it’s no longer news. But it’s still kind of painful. When I made the switch, I effectively threw away many months of work. It wasn’t a total loss – I learned a lot about Unity in this process. But it still hurt. It’s rough parting with a sunk cost — spending so much time and effort to go one direction, only to realize that you are on the wrong track. I’d spent so much time working on tools that a lot of the actual game code still remained to be done. And I had to get up to speed on using the new tools, developing yet *more* tools, etc.
I am reminded of something Michael Abrash said on his talk at GDC several years ago about the making of the Quake Engine. He and John Carmack had tried numerous different approaches to rendering the 3D world of Quake, each one proving some kind of critical weakness in the end. After a year of development down fruitless paths, they eventually settled on an approach that was not too far removed from what Carmack had done for Doom. Carmack made a comment to Abrash at the end of the year-long process, “If we’d known what we were going to be building when we first started, we would have been finished in a couple of months.”
Or maybe like Mario, discovering that the princess is hidden away in another castle. Sometimes you just don’t know until you try. But I kick myself for not finding some way of knowing in advance…
So now my map-creator Xenovore is swearing at me over dealing with the new tools, but things are finally coming together into something that’s beginning to look like a game instead of just a tech-demo. You still have to squint very hard over the stand-in content, but it’s progress.
Incidentally, one of the major tools I’m using now is ProBuilder, a level-editing tool appendage to Unity’s main editor. It’s pretty impressive. Here’s a tutorial with the creator re-creating the E1M1 Doom level from inside Unity. The videos are sped up to 2x, but it’s still pretty impressive.
E1M1 Doom Level Recreated using ProBuilder (Tutorial)
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
Game Dev Quote of the Week – Getting it Done
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 10, 2014
Designer / Developer Chris DeLeon , speaking on the matters of … uh, how to finish your game:
“It’s common now to see developers finish game jam games more ready for public release than their long-term projects. The two main factors that seem to contribute are having a smaller scope and an unmoving deadline. The thing to keep in mind is that larger projects still need a controlled, reasonable scope and an unmoving, if initially further off, deadline. The projects that have no scope control and no target deadline just expand indefinitely, opening up more issues than the developer(s) could ever realistically expect to find time to close out nicely.”
The article is pretty straightforward overall, and speaks to very similar advice to last week’s… control scope, be serious about deadlines, and focus on what it would take to get the product to market successfully as it currently stands.
Filed Under: Production, Quote of the Week - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Fun New Devices to Game On!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 9, 2014
An omni-directional treadmill for virtual reality games is now available for pre-order at Omni Natural. They are supposed to start shipping in September, and require special shoes. I have a real tough time imagining how playable an existing FPS would be with this system — but it could be an interesting way to get exercise with a custom game.
That doesn’t include a “virtual reality” game controller. Or of course, the goggles. Oculus Rift is the most well-known choice, particularly after they are in the process of being bought out by Facebook. But Sony is entering the game for the PS4 with Project Morpheus. I don’t own a PS4 and don’t currently have plans to do so, but that could change.
Microsoft, sadly once again proving to be behind the power curve this decade, has stated that they have been working on Virtual Reality headsets as well. Hopefully whatever they come out with will not only kick some serious butt, but be usable on PCs as well as Xbox.
One concern I’d have with the Omni Natural treadmill is that I’m doubtful the 360 degree turning would be compatible with the camera-based positional tracking system for version 2 of the Oculus Rift, and the camera for the PS4 for Project Morpheus. After using original Oculus Rift last year, I was surprised at how the lack of positional data screwed me up. In the course of ten minutes, I went from thinking that positional information was optional and possibly an overkill to believing that it was absolutely essential.
Moving to big screens, the Amazon Fire TV
Google also just announced “Android TV” – hopefully a comeback after their failed “Google TV” – which includes gaming.
And then there’s the old news, like Valve’s Linux-based Steam Machines, and new PS Mobile opportunities.
None of these devices is a guaranteed hit. If I were a giant game studio, needing to sell a million or more copies of a game just to break even, I might steer clear of these new platforms. But, if I were an indie (and, hey, I am!), I’d be seriously considering all the emerging opportunities out there!
Filed Under: Tech - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Guest Post – Ultima 7: Shut Up, Iolo!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 8, 2014
Today’s guest post comes from Curtis Mirci. It’s a follow-up from my post a few days ago about Ultima 7‘s lack of modern assistance or hand-holding. Maybe he’ll come back to it later and try it again. Maybe. But I do have to agree – I do tend to mentally suppress memories of this particular complaint. Anyway, here’s Curtis:
A while back Jay shared a link with me about a game that is being heavily influenced by the Ultima series. I don’t think he was very impressed with my lack of enthusiasm and I had to explain that I’d never played any of the Ultima games. Five minutes later I had a new copy of Ultima 7 sitting in my GOG account.
I thought this was pretty funny. Jay and I are both game junkies, and we’ll often joke with each other about our humongous backlogs. I have well over 100 games on my steam account I haven’t touched yet, including Skyrim and Mass Effect. He knows this. I know the same about him. Before I can joke about getting around to Ultima 7 he tells me that I need to play it soon since he bought it for me.
Soon was a week later once I decided I wanted a break from Defender’s Quest (great tower defense/RPG hybrid, BTW). I got it running and started listening to a speech from Red Skull’s simian cousin. And he’s in charge and everyone will love him and I need to bow before him. Recurring villain? Heck if I know. And then my character walks into a portal.
For a moment I sit back and enjoy the music. It reminds me of Daggerfall, which I spent a lot of time playing as a kid. Okay, time to jump into this.
It takes me a few minutes to get used to the font, which left me calling Iolo Yolo for the first bit. Okay, there’s a murder and it’s up to me since I’m the famous Avatar. Let’s head up there and look inside the barn. Left-clicking doesn’t move me. WASD doesn’t move me. Arrow keys move me, but only one square and I have to keep pressing them over and over. Eventually I get in the barn and wow. That is one crazy murder scene. There seems to be some stuff lying around, maybe I can examine something. No clue how. It’s getting late. How do I save? I can’t figure it out. I eventually close the game through task manager and check out the two manuals for some ideas of how to control the game. Absolutely nothing about controls. Great.
The next day I talked to Jay and he told me to use the reference guide instead. I printed it out and gave it another try. Moving around, talking to people. One guy that I talked to told me that the footprints MUST be the footprints of the murderer. Then he leaves. “Aha!” I think, “Following the obvious trail! That’s something I can handle!” I head out back and it’s a small fenced-in area where the footprints fade out. And there’s the guy that told me that the footprints would lead me to the murderer. “Huh. That was easy.”
Of course, he wasn’t the murderer. At least, I don’t think so. You see, I never did manage to solve the first quest. I wandered around. I talked to everyone that I saw about every topic. I checked out the destroyed forge of the murdered man. I talked to the wounded guard who made it clear that the killers escaped by boat. I talked to the creepy cultists who seem ever so guilty, but gave me nothing to pin on them. I attended their evening meeting. I did every single thing I could think of, going through the town twice and making sure I talked to everyone. It wasn’t long before Iolo got hungry. I’m not sure how he managed to survive before Avatar showed up, but he’s clearly not capable of feeding himself anymore. After LOTS of whining on his part (not even 5 seconds apart most of the time) I went back to the inn and bought some meat. He pops up a “I’ll hold onto that” and I’m content. He’s got his food, he’ll shut up and let me try to figure things out. But I’m kind of at a dead end. Before I can even wonder about my next step he’s begging for more food.
Okay, I’ve been hearing him complain a lot. Maybe I need more food to get him out of the complain-zone. I get 8 more and he gives the same message about taking them. Finally. Maybe I can … “Iolo needs food badly!” Wrong game, Iolo. I check my inventory, but there’s no meat. He’s eaten it, right? I eventually took to Google to find out what was wrong. After I figured out that I had to enter his inventory and physically hand him the meat from his sack before he would eat.
He claims that he’s following me around so he can help, but I think he’s lying. I think he realizes that I can’t send him away and that he just needs to be vocal and he’ll be fed. He doesn’t even have to cut it himself, as he obviously is demanding that I feed him with my own hands.
Avatar: “Here’s the airplane, Iolo! Open wide! Brooooooom!”
Iolo: “Yay, daddy Avatar! Do it again!”
Avatar: “Okay, just one more time! Brooooooommm!”
Iolo: “Again!”
Avatar: “You’ve already had two muttons.”
Iolo: “AGAIN!!”
I hadn’t found a way to make any money, and five minutes later Iolo was demanding more food again. I realized that I was going to be bankrupt at this rate, so I looked up a minimalist walkthrough to get me going. Turns out I has missed a kid that I only jusy barely caught running around thanks to the walkthrough. I talked to him a lot and felt I had covered all the bases. I went to the next person I needed to talk to (tossing Iolo another mutton) and found that they wouldn’t tell me anything new that the walkthrough said they should. Turns out I hadn’t asked the boy about something and … well… that was it for me.
Beforehand I told Jay that it was the lack of hand-holding that was what got me, but after more thought, I found out that that wasn’t really the case. What killed the whole thing for me was the hunger. For me, it was no longer about finding that thing I had missed, it was that I had to do it and do it fast before Iolo ate through all my savings. None of his dialogue helped. He was just there to put a time limit on me. I couldn’t sit back and really think about things because of how often he demanded I spoon feed him.
On the bright side, I think I technically made $5.99 for writing this post. This is my best-paying writing gig EVER.
P.S. In Jay’s last post about Ultima 7 (he got tired of waiting for me to write this) the comments mentioned that the combat wasn’t very good. I wouldn’t know because I never got that far.
Filed Under: Guest Posts, Retro - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
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