An Eldritch Post-Mortem

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 8, 2014

I haven’t played Eldritch as much as I would like (but then, seriously, how much have I played ANY good game as much as I would like…?). My best description of the game would be equal parts Roguelike, Minecraft, Thief, and of course Call of Cthulhu. I like what I’ve played.

It’s so rare that you hear about a game project that was actually completed well in advance of the scheduled time. But in this case, it was. And it went on to be pretty successful (and still going) for a one-man project. It’s an impressive start to an indie career by former mainstream game developer David Pittman, whose previous credits include Bioshock 2 and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

The post-mortem has a lot more to do with things like burn rate, cross-platform development, and other biz-related things more than game design and amusing programming stories. But it also includes sales info, graphs, and plenty of hard numbers.

Anyway, for those who do find that kind of thing fascinating (you guys who also play Game Dev Tycoon are probably in that category), here’s the article:

Eldritch: Mountains of Madness Post-Mortem

And if you haven’t seen or played the game yet, here’s the trailer… with a very interesting musical choice….

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: Read the First Comment

Thinking in Code

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 7, 2014

While I eventually received a formal education in computer science in college, for the first six years or so of my programming experience I was self-taught. I learned lessons from typing in other people’s code from the pages of books and magazines, and seeing all the different ways people approached similar problems. And of course, I wrote my own games. Partial, rarely-completed experiments that took me to the limits of BASIC programming and eventually into the realm of machine code.

I’ve never been truly fluent in a foreign language, in spite of two years of classes each of Russian, German, and Spanish. I have been told that as you are immersed in the language, you begin to think in it, no longer mentally translating back and forth between it and your native tongue. That’s how I became with code, before receiving any formal training in it.

I first became aware of this one night during a wind storm. I was having trouble sleeping, and my brain started going into this half-conscious overload, and I found that I was half-dreaming of mathematical formulas and procedural algorithms that could be used to simulate the swaying of the trees and their branches in the high wind outside. Not that it was genius math or anything – it was nothing that would have been passable on the screen of my Commodore 64 or anything. But my brain was subconsciously interpreting the world in terms of code.

Do most programmers end up thinking in code? It seems like it’s a natural result of familiarity and fluency with programming, but it does seem to drive a couple of my project managers up the wall: I think of solutions in terms of code and abstract data relationships and have trouble sometimes translating them into English. I always had problems in school (and afterwards) applying the correct names to things and relationships, as they existed in my head as fully-formed images without name, only descriptions. Sometimes I was delighted to learn the actual official term for such things, and the name stuck. Other times, not so much.

I assume I’m far from alone in this, but I don’t know that it’s something people talk about much. I think it’s more something you see evidence of as a software developer than anything else. Like the lack of comments of documentation. When you are writing the stuff, it’s all so natural and straightforward and obvious that it’s hard to imagine anyone (let alone yourself, two months later) might not look at it and immediately understand it all.

But code by itself is mere abstract math, meaningless in the real world. I could say all it does is shift numbers around, but even numbers are an interpretation of a bunch of “on” and “off” values. If you’ve worked with the C language a lot, you are probably all too familiar with how easy it is to cast those collections of bits to a different numerical interpretation. But the numbers themselves need context to have meaning, and without an implicit binding of context it can be pretty hard to read code, no matter how much you think in it.

In English, “He kissed her” is a sentence that could carry a large number of different meanings, but there is some implicit context that is carried with it. You read that, and you can immediately draw some assumptions, and start filling in the blanks in your understanding by looking at what precedes and follows the sentence.  By contrast “x2 = j+1;” does not carry much by way of contextual clues to help a programmer figure out the meaning of a block of code. Code is implicitly efficient, not human-readable. We need to perform tricks to help explain the relationship between the code and its meaning, like using more explanatory variable names.

But that’s merely a peculiarity of how the language works (and I’m combining lots of computer languages into one lump here), and not something that makes it fundamentally different from any other language. It would be interesting to find out if there’s some way to measure it. And then here’s another question: There’s a whole body of thought that suggests that language influences behavior and thinking. Does “thinking in code” change one’s behavior? I don’t think it’s turned me into a robot yet, but has a lifetime spent communicating with machines (and indirectly, with other programmers) in code almost as much as I communicate in English changed the way I deal with the world?

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

Quick Take: Game Dev Tycoon

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 6, 2014

Game Dev Tycoon has now entered that coveted (or at least it should be) territory of games that kept me up until 4:00 in the morning. I picked up a copy during the Steam sale sometime last week, and at the end of a session of real game development, I thought I’d try the virtual version. Afterwards I entered the loop of “just one more release!” until it was … well, around 4 AM. There’s things you can get away with while on vacation, sometimes…

I haven’t yet played Game Dev Story, which was an inspiration for this game, so I can’t yet compare the two. My previous excuse was that I didn’t own the right platform, but now I have an Android tablet and phone, so that’s no longer an excuse. I’ll have to rectify that one soon.

Game Dev Tycoon made news last year by a clever prank against pirates – the “cracked” version played such that your virtual game studio eventually goes bankrupt from piracy.  Sadly, that proved to be over 90% of the players of the initial release – a number that is proving to be pretty average, along several different independent tests for different games.

It starts you out working as a solo game-maker working out of your garage in the mid 1980s, around the time of the Commodore 64’s dominance. If you are an old-school game fan, it’s probably more fun, as you remember these eras as the game takes you from the mid 1980s (around the time of the Commodore 64’s dominance) up through the not-too-distant future, growing your company and adjusting to the changes in the marketplace and technology.

The gaming platforms have all been renamed, but it’s pretty obvious what systems are being represented. Being armed with the foreknowledge of the level of success of a particular console can be really handy, so you don’t waste time and money (on licensing) on a platform that’s destined to be short-lived and have a poor market penetration.

Anyway, from my perspective – I have quibbles galore with the game. It’s a problem when you know too much about the subject matter, I guess, although it’s more of a case of what they chose to abstract and make a game element rather than “simulate” in reality. While it’s a ridiculously simplified strategy game, there are a few more realistic aspects I’d like to see. It’s possible they are already in the game, and I just haven’t stumbled across them yet (I’ve only played through one full 35-year campaign so far). While later in the game you can research multiplatform development, I couldn’t find an option to make or contract out ports of games. Porting a successful game to multiple platforms was so integral to independent game development studios and publishers that it’s hard to imagine publishing games without that option.

I got burned the first time I tried to create a sequel, because I hadn’t researched “sequels.” IMO, that should be an option to research much earlier in the game.

It would be useful to have a randomization option that changes up the success or failures of the various platforms throughout the game – and then throw in some analogs to some failed systems or less popular gaming devices like the Atari Jaguar or Lynx, the 3DO, or the Mac into the mix and see what happens. That’s a big part of the challenge of modern game development – trying to anticipate the next success story and be a part of it, but being agile enough to get out while the getting is good.

It’s amusing how the thrill of anticipating review scores once you release a game inside this game mirrors real life. There’s definitely some randomness involved, as I’ve had times when I’ve hit new records on technology & design points, zero bugs, a winning subject / genre / audience combo for the best platforms, and still gotten crappy reviews and sales. Just like real life.

I guess it’s probably a good thing in that it does not too closely mirror the real-life process, as that might threaten to rob the fun from the game.  It’s not a hard game at all – on my first play-through, still figuring out the game, I came to the “end” (the point where it scores you – although you can keep playing after that) with having been the #1 booth at the big gaming expo for many years in a row, and had almost a billion dollars in the bank. Of course, I named my company “Rampant Games” and could only WISH that I’d end up that successful. 🙂

Anyway, it’s a cute little casual game about game development. If you hate casual games, you may not enjoy it. But otherwise, especially if you are familiar with the history of the industry, it can be pretty cute and fun. And… beware the urge to just release one more game!

Filed Under: Impressions - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Game Dev Quote of the Week: Sarah Stocker on Personal Blunders

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 3, 2014

Okay, if you make games, you are going to make some mistakes. I’ve made plenty. This week, I found a quote by game producer Sarah Stocker (Pool of Radiance II, Star Trek Deep Space Nine – Harbinger, Forgotten Realms: Bloodstone, Andretti Racing, etc.) from Neal and Jana Hallford’s book, Swords & Circuitry: A Designer’s Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games. She was asked about screw-ups she learned from and wished she could change:

“One of them that is very, very obvious to me know is in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Harbinger, which was an adventure game, not a role-playing game. We had a three-dimensional maze in this alien fortress, and you had to make your way through it to get a key power source.  In theory I thought the maze was a great idea because it was in three dimensions. You had to get up, and then get down, and it was very difficult to navigate. In those days mazes were quite the rage. I remember having a conversation with one of the other game designers on the product and saying, ‘Make sure when you’re laying it out that you have to go back through it to return to the other level. And anytime the player wants to go to the power source, they have to go all the way through the maze again.’ What was I thinking? Did I have a particularly bad day? Was I just letting my sadistic impulses run wild? It was just about the most evil design decision I’ve ever made. Unfortunately, by the time I realized it, the game was already on the shelves. So yeah, if I could go back in time and change something, I would definitely make that a one-way maze. That was just way, way too difficult” – Sarah Stocker

Making comments about her involvement in Pool of Radiance 2 would just obscure the point, I think. She has gone on to work on many more games since then. But in case you ever wonder what a game designer was thinking when they made some kind of design decision… well, sometimes the designer herself wonders the same thing.

To look up other classic game designer mistakes, I recommend Earnest Adam’s annual series, “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!”

Filed Under: General - Comments: Read the First Comment

What Does “Release” Mean Anymore?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 2, 2014

I used to be able to keep up with what I thought was a sizable chunk of at least what I considered “major” indie RPG releases in a year. Major meaning … like, not something a kid wrote in a week of owning RPG Maker and “released” via link on some forum post somewhere. Now I’d estimate five times as many releases on just the PC alone as there were five years ago. I could focus all my efforts just keeping track of them all (a task which, thankfully, Craig Stern seems happy to attempt over at IndieRPGs.com).

As 2013 came to an end, I briefly attempted to reconstruct – with some searching – a partial list of games that:

1) Count as an indie release,
2) Count as a role-playing game, and
3) Were released in 2013.

In the words of Doc Emmett Brown dealing with his own comprehension of events occurring in a given timeline, “Great Scott!”

The argument over what constitutes “indie” has raged for over a decade, and it’s not going to be concluded any time soon. If anything, it has gotten more confusing, as the whole “indie / non-indie” spectrum has broadened considerably, encompassing a dizzying range of ways in which games are made and brought to market. The argument over what constitutes an RPG has raged for even longer, although it remains narrower in scope. But the features making a game an RPG have always been a little vague, and game genres have interbred so much now that it’s really impossible to draw a clear line – it’s just something that has to be done by feel. That’s difficult to do without actually sitting down and playing a game – a game that sounds like an RPG on paper might not play like one at all, and vice versa.

So 1 and 2 are hard enough, but at least #3 can help narrow the field a bit, right? We at least know when a game has been released!

Well, no. Not really.

The last couple of years has seen a substantial increase in the number of games that are commercially released while they are still in mid-development. Dubbed “Early Access” on Steam, or “pre-release” or “beta access” or “alpha funded” or whatever the developer or distributor wants to call them, these are games released to the general public early before they are… uh, released. Before they are done. You can look at it a number of ways, from customers paying for the privilege of testing for the developer, all the way to the chance to get a game at a substantial discount and a chance to influence the direction of the final product. Both are valid. As a developer, it’s always nice to get some desperately-needed funding coming in the latter stages of development.

I don’t really want to label the situation as “good” or “bad” right now. Again, this isn’t something new. Spacewar! made the rounds in the university circuit in the late 60’s and early 70’s, constantly getting updated and tweaked by many different developers. It eventually some version landed in the University of Utah computer system and inspired one fellow by the name of Nolan Bushnell to create what would eventually become this whole video game industry in the first place. And anybody who has been a PC gamer for any length of time is familiar with the release / patch cycle. Many a company has released a game to the stores that wasn’t ready to be called “version 1.0” yet, desperate for sales revenue so they could actually afford to patch their product to a reasonable level of functionality. One could argue the whole “early access” thing allows companies to do the same thing more honestly.

But it sure makes tracking release dates a pain in the butt.

It also sucks to have paid for a product that appears to have been abandoned.

So how much does it really matter when a game was “officially” released? Or whether or not a game is “officially” released right now?

For me – with the wall of unplayed games I’m facing right now courtesy of all of the special sales and bundles over the last few years – it’s unlikely that a game is going to get a second chance to make a first impression. If I play a game now that I’m not officially contributing to some kind of beta test for, it’ll either hook me so that I keep playing, or get discarded forever. It’s likely that I’ll overlook the improvements with future updates if the game didn’t excite me right off the bat. A game can go from “cool” to “more cool” in my mind with updates, but not from “lame” to “cool.” I’ll miss the move.

This is how I operate, and I know it. I’ve even avoiding playing some games that I already have “early access” to as a Kickstarter backer, unless I have been specifically asked for feedback.

It also erodes the newsworthiness of an actual, official game release. Stamping a game “1.0” is not much of an event when it’s already out and being played. But it’s most like the release of most indie games is anything most sites would consider newsworthy, anyway. And in many ways, the pre-release / constant update process is really more reflective of how games are really made, anyhow.

For me, it feels like the “cons” outweigh the “pros,” but that may be because I’m kinda stuck in the old way of doing things where things like official release dates actually matter, and labeling something as complete or “1.0” actually means something. They are handy for writing up retrospectives, game-of-the-year articles, or and comparing similar games that were released close together, but I’m not sure what else. Does anybody care when Chess was truly first invented?

Certainly, with my game-playing habits, I’m constantly playing games that range anywhere from just-released to twenty (or more) years old, and all that matters is that the game is new to me. Part of me says that this is the way things are going to keep going – getting more muddled – and I should just get on board and roll with it. After decades of being saturated with the marketing lie that newer games are somehow magically superior and more worthy than their predecessors, maybe this obscuring of the meaning of “release” is just what we need to focus back on the quality of the game, not its recency.

 

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Happy New Year

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 1, 2014

So now we’re all in 2014. Hope it is a great one.

It’s a good time to reflect and plan. Where do you want to be one year from now, and how can you make that happen? It’s that latter part that trips folks up – including me. A definite plan of action is required, something concrete that you can do.

One thing I’m going to do in 2014 – difficult as it may be – will be to renew my commitment to do One Game a Month. My emphasis will be on improving my speed. I’ve been at this long enough now that I know where some of my bottlenecks are, and I want to figure out ways to fix them.

I started a goal almost two months ago that I want to continue. I’ve been playing the guitar (almost) every day, usually in conjunction with Rocksmith 2014. Suffice to say, I’ve been impressed.

Of course, Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath dominates just about everything game-related as far as goals and plans are concerned, and I’m working with a combination of short-term and long-term goals right now. There are some really cool things I’m looking forward to sharing with you if / when they come to fruition.

As to the blog – I’d like to ask you, as the folks who actually read  this regularly… what kinds of posts would you like to see more of? What improvements would you like to see?

May 2014 be awesome. As always, have fun!

 

 

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

Rampant Coyote’s Best Posts of 2013

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 31, 2013

So here it is, the last day of 2013. Time for me to start accidentally back-date forms and checks to the previous year again.

I thought I’d visit my stats and see what posts actually resonated with people and grabbed the most visitors. Interestingly, my most popular blog post from twelve months ago was actually exactly twelve months ago – posted on New Years Eve – “Five Steps to Get Motivated to Make Your Indie Game.” That’s definitely stuff I could review. Motivation hasn’t been a huge problem the last couple of months, but with all the traveling this year, writing projects, other day job demands, and so forth, it got a little challenging at times. But it always gets challenging. Making an indie game as a part-timer is always going to be difficult, and a big game like an RPG compounds the problem.

If we strictly limit it to posts that went up in 2013, the most popular post was, “Why Are Most Indie Games 2D Instead of 3D?” It was echoed a little bit with Friday’s game dev quote by Chris Roberts. As people have pointed out, I have a little bit of a blind side here. I tend to view 2D as a conceptual subset of 3D rather than as a separate beast. You are just making simplifications based on eliminating one plane, right? Blame it on one of my earliest favorite arcade games (Exidy’s Starfire) being a “fake” 3D space shooter. I was warped for life, getting overly thrilled by 3D worlds represented on 2D monitors. I don’t know that my view is necessarily wrong, but it doesn’t jibe with that of a lot of others.

And the most popular post of my blog for visitors in 2013, regardless of when the post was originally published? That would be my very first post: “The Black Triangle“, from 2004. Evidently, I started out awesome and haven’t been able to match it ever since…

As far as game development is concerned, I definitely have my regrets for the year. I blew an internal milestone pretty badly at the beginning of September and am still trying to make up for lost time. However, we’ve had some great victories as well, and some of the stuff that was completely overhauled  has served the game well. I think Frayed Knights 2 – while holding true to its roots and the original concept – is really going to exceed its predecessor by leaps and bounds. I’m excited.

I hope you all have a very happy New Year!

Filed Under: Rampant Games - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

The Game Design Rough Sketch

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 30, 2013

I heard a joke the other day: “Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning.”

It’s pretty true, although for certain familiar tasks for veteran programmers, the planning can take a lot more time than just jumping into code. I think in code. But of course, that’s the kind of thing that gets me into trouble, too. Because I can get away with it sometimes, I start thinking I can get away with it most times.

Being a game developer, I have the desire to create far more games than I actually have time to work on. Probably until I die. These are great possibilities for game jam prototypes, if I would quit being lame and actually do another one. I don’t think I’ve participated even once this year. Shame on me. Anyway, I get more exciting ideas than I could ever hope to do, let alone keep track of in my head, so I write them down. I keep a document of all of my game ideas, every single one of which would probably make you say, “Meh,” but at one point I thought it was the Coolest Game Idea Ever.

When I’m really bored or in need of distraction, I’ll actually go so far as to start a short write-up on the design, which rarely exceeds three pages. I just throw around all these ideas about how I’d actually make it all work if I should take it to code. There’s this optimistic, egocentric part of me that looks at the game idea from 30,000 feet above it and says, “That would be easy! I’ll be you could just take a week off and whip out an awesome prototype.” Of course, I’m only thinking of coding, not the 10,000 other tasks that go with making even a prototype game.

Instead, I create the prototype on paper. More of a rough sketch. Yes, that part is faster than coding.  I take maybe an hour out. It’s a nice change of pace. This is a “brief game design document” or a “design brief.” Some folks might call it an outline, but I don’t structure it that much. I just think of it as a thumbnail sketch. I write a short explanation of what the game is about, plus some kind of “pitch” that captures my enthusiasm for the game.  I write out some of the systems that are whirring in my head that would make the game “tick.” And I write out some examples of interactions or units or characters or whatever that would end up being major content elements. I usually do all this in a page or two.

One night, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep until I did a brain dump of a game idea. That one is still up near the top of my “short list.”

The best thing about doing this is that it prevents me from getting distracted for too long with all the fun potential game projects out there. Creating that rough draft of a paper prototype allows me to feed whatever demons are demanding my attention, and record it so that the effort is not wasted.

One of three things happens.

#1 – I discover that yes, indeed, this is an Awesome Game Idea and put it on the short list for future projects. Some evenings, when I’m sick of working on my main project but want to fiddle with game development, I take a few hours to tinker with it. The cool thing is that I can go to my design brief for the game idea, remember why I was so enthusiastic about it, and get my head back into the same place where I was when I wrote the document. Maybe I add some new ideas. Whatever the case is, it’s a cool idea, and it really does become a “back-burner” project. I keep it simmering.

#2 – I discover that my super-fantastic game idea actually kinda sucks. If I go back to the document I can see later where I discovered it sucks. It may happen in mid-paragraph. The core idea might still be feasible, but at some point while I was developing a rough sketch I realize I had gone off the rails somewhere, and what I had was either no longer interesting or no longer reasonable for an indie developer to mess with.  This is just as valuable of a result as #1, because it helps me fall out of love with a distracting idea.

#3 – None of the above. The game concept just isn’t coming together, and it needs more time to gel. I may or may not get back to it another day. I might combine it with another Awesome Game Idea.

Anyway, if I was a lot better at what I do (I keep trying!), this would be an awesome place to draw from for game jam ideas and whatnot. And when the Frayed Knights series is done, I have three pretty clear candidates for what I will do next. Maybe they’ll change by the time I get there. But the nice thing is I’ve got the information recorded and filed away, I feel like I’ve done enough work on them to keep them from gnawing at me, and now I can almost forget about them to get the work done that I really need to do.

Filed Under: Design, Production - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Game Dev Quote of the Week: Chris Roberts on 3D

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 27, 2013

This week: The father of Wing Commander offers an (old, somewhat dusty) opinion on the virtues of 3D graphics:

“One thing I discovered is that 3D is more intimidating from the outside than from the inside. Once you figure out what’s going on, it’s really pretty simple. It seems harder than it is and once you build the 3D system, it’s easier to work within than top-down or side-view. From that point on you define the world, its criteria and its physics, and you can do anything in it. You can say, ‘let’s put the camera over there’ and it works. To move an object in space you just give it a velocity vector.”

— Chris Roberts, Wing Commander I & II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide, 1992

I personally take a little bit of issue with this quote, but he was talking about a different era, and a different kind of 2D. I believe that in many ways, true 3D is easier to work with than many forms of 2D games – particularly the “fake” 3D of isometric projection or other (common) projections other than strictly top-down or side-view. The real obvious reason (to me) is the difficulties of handling occlusion and attachment of graphical elements, and how much each animation must be repeated do deal with each character’s turn angle. The more you use 2D to “fake” 3D, the more complicated it gets.

To take advantage of modern graphics processing, 2D animations do make for more complicated texture atlasing, an additional technical complication not unlike the challenge of getting all the graphics to fit inside the tiny memories of older machines. Particularly now with the popularity of mobile devices, this is a complicated wrinkle. Many mobiles have a 1024 x 1024 pixel maximum on their texture sizes, but a single 128 x 64 character with twelve animations, averaging 4 frames per animation, with eight different “facings” in an isometric game, will use up half a texture all by itself. As each additional texture will slow down the game, that can be a challenge to manage.

Chris Roberts was talking about a pretty straightforward version of a 3D game – with objects in space, sphere-based collision detection, and very sparse environments. You didn’t have to worry about a character staying in touch with the floor or being constantly bounded by walls and more interesting obstacles. But the point still (mostly) stands… once you get your head around 3D – and especially once you get a good 3D engine to take the initial pain of development off your plate – it’s really not that hard to work with.

I’m a big fan of 3D graphics with 2D cameras. Or a mixture of 2D and 3D graphics. In my mind, you get the best of both worlds this way. From the perspective of animation and grouping / attaching objects to each other, it’s very simple – you do it once, and you are done for all angles and perspectives. Objects simply exist in space – you don’t have to go through all kinds of gyrations and special code making sure objects appear in front of each other when they are supposed to. Yet with the constrained camera view, you can greatly simplify the environment, you don’t have to worry about things like level-of-detail and extreme overdraw / depth complexity issues. Limiting the camera really helps. Plus, you can use some 2D “tricks” and simplifications within a scene that are a little easier to deal with than their fully 3D counterparts.

But the bottom line – why I wanted to include this quote – is that developers shouldn’t be afraid of 3D.

Filed Under: Quote of the Week - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

An Author is Me?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 26, 2013

“If you really like it you can have the rights,
It could make a million for you overnight.
If you must return it, you can send it here
But I need a break and I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.”
– The Beatles, Paperback Writer

In fourth grade, my class was assigned a creative writing project. It was supposed to be about a magical dolphin that appeared in a swimming pool that leads us to a magical land. We were given the first two sentences or something. My classmates wrote stories that were around one or two pages long, a few of them ending with the protagonist (the narrator, as the opening sentences were in first-person) waking up from the dream.

I wrote about eight pages, as I recall. Yes, even back then, I went on way too long. But I had a blast. I loved writing, but after discovering the Colossal Cave Adventure the following year, and Dungeons & Dragons the year after, storytelling and gaming became woven together in my mind. I kept up the writing through high school, but in college I dropped it as a priority. Gaming substituted for writing.

Much later – well, I had this blog, and I had writing for my games. It scratched the itch… mostly. I even managed to get other articles published – including two at The Escapist (“Going Rogue” and “Weekend Warrior“). But those weren’t fiction. During the development of Frayed Knights, I assumed that I’d still be able to draw upon my old talents in writing tons of dialog and story. It was much harder than I’d expected. I needed more practice – and feedback.

I learned about the quarterly anthologies published by Xchyler Publishing, and spoke with some of the authors at a steampunk convention over the summer. I also purchased one of their anthologies, Mechanized Masterpieces, which to me seemed like quality steampunk fan-fic for classic literature. I enjoyed it, and thought the regular competition would be a good motivation to force me to work on my skills. Besides, it sounded really fun to actually get published in an honest-to-goodness print anthology.

Unsurprisingly, my first attempt didn’t make the cut. I’m looking forward to reading the upcoming anthology, which should have fantasy stories involving time travel. It was a great learning experience, at least, which was my primary objective. I imposed on a lot of folks I know for feedback.

But earlier this week, I was informed that my short story for the spring Steampunk anthology had been a competition winner. Assuming things go as expected, I should be published just before summer, along with six other steampunk-flavored tales with a loose theme of “Around the World in 80 Days.”

While it’s a small thing, I’m pretty excited about it. It’s fun working in a different medium, and a nice change of pace once in a while from game development.

Filed Under: Books - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Merry Christmas!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 25, 2013

A very Merry Christmas to you and yours.

I hope your day – and the season – is filled with peace and happiness.

And here’s some custom programmer art to spoil it all for you:

My wife did a better job with our Christmas Card, taking advantage of a very fun family portrait session we enjoyed this year. Maybe this will make up for the programmer art:

Whatever the case, whether you observe it or not, have a wonderful day, and have fun!

Filed Under: General - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Popping the Question, Gamer-Style

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 24, 2013

With the help of a musician and programmer friend, gamer geek Robert Fink proposes to his gamer girlfriend, Angel White.

Awesome. Mr. Fink, yer doin’ it right, IMO.

Congrats to the couple!

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: Read the First Comment

The Death of Deathfire?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 23, 2013

I’m saddened. Guido Henkel and the Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore have officially pulled the plug.

The Deathfire Team: Thanks you for all your support

This crap happens all the time, really. Games get canceled, for many reasons. But in this case – with the failure of the Kickstarter and the episodic alternative – the reason is kind of depressing:

Not enough people were interested in this kind of game to commit to providing the funding in advance.

This was, sadly, the kind of game I want to play. It was based on the same kinds of games that inspired Frayed Knights. I mean, sheesh, Guido created some of the games that inspired Frayed Knights, at least indirectly.

This really disappoints and worries me. Is there just not enough  potential audience large enough to support mid-budget game development (pretty much from $100k – $1m, in my book) for this style of RPG? Is it dead, Jim? After all, we’re talking about a game style (first-person perspective, party-based, cardinal-direction movement, turn-based combat RPG)  that had largely exhausted itself by the mid-90s. The audience was getting tired of the parade of low-quality, low-tech dungeon crawlers in that era, and even the giants like SSI were having serious problems. The audience was dwindling then, and I don’t suppose 20 years has done much to improve on that.

So… where does that leave us?

By one interpretation, a little bit up the creek. If the potential audience is small, static, and declining, then it’s game over. There’s nowhere to go but down.

Another interpretation is simply that the audience needs to be regrown. Maybe not quite from scratch, but definitely beyond the bounds of the faithful elite. This might suck for the faithful elite, because that means that games with higher production values will not be able to cater quite so directly to them. The games must serve two audiences. It’ll take a lot of work, luck, and marketing… and at least one moderate hit game.

I’m thinking about the success of The Legend of Grimrock. I know they didn’t get there exclusively by catering to the old Dungeon Master / Eye of the Beholder fans. If anything, we old-school fans were a little disappointed, as it was a little bit of a rehash of what we’d played before. I suspect it was a new experience to most players, however, and while extremely limited in scope, it had decent screenshot appeal, and was a nice, polished experience. It’s a good game, and while it has its roots in late 80s / early 90s RPGs, only the old vets might notice.

The bottom line seems to be that devs cannot focus exclusively on the old-school faithful. That part shouldn’t be too surprising. So while a Kickstarter campaign can say the right things to get us old-school fans excited, these days (now that KS fatigue has set in), there needs to be more there. Matt Barton talked about this a few weeks ago, in his article, “Matt’s Guide to Kickstarter Success.” Non-genre fans need to have a reason to get excited. When you say, “Thrilling turn-based combat” to me, I get excited. I think about tactics RPGs and X-Com and some great dice-and-paper combat sessions where our group worked like a team and complimented each others actions with our own. Somebody else, however, might think, “Slow and boring.” And yeah, I’ve had those too.

This goes beyond the fundraising pitch, and should include the design and marketing. This is a pain in the butt as a developer, because not only does it require a lot more work to appeal to two different audiences, but it also requires uncomfortable compromises. It also requires a unique selling point – a reason why someone should get excited about this one game instead of the flood of high-quality games (sometimes emulating a more recent “old-school” vintage) coming in the near future.

But for right now, I mourn. I really feel for Guido and his team right now – I know they poured their hearts into this. Guido talked about the obsession he had with this game at the beginning of the year, and I know how that is. I loved the ideas they had, and was really looking forward to seeing it all come together. I’m sad for what could have and should have been.

Filed Under: Biz, Production - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: A Maze of Twisty Little Skill Trees

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 20, 2013

Making Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon was a learning experience for me, of course. It’s funny how you can think you know what you are doing after decades of playing games, and even years of experience making games, but when it comes down to actually implementing a design and making it fun… it throws you. Some things that sound like the best idea ever on paper don’t work out. And then there are some design ideas that you look at much later and wonder what the hell you were thinking of when you did that.

And sometimes you just have something that started out simple that grew way out of control.

In Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, the “Feat” system was that latter sort of beast. I’m not exactly sure where it all came from, to be honest. By what I can recall, it started out as just a supplement to increasing your main attributes (Might, Brains, Charm, Luck, and Reflexes – which sounded funnier when I first designed the stats). It was perhaps a misguided attempt to make sure the non-spellcasting characters had something to do other than just attack and defend in combat, and ways of adding a little bit of customization to their party. I opted not to do a full-fledged, detailed skill system. While that’s great if you are only controlling a single character, with a whole party of characters it gets to feel micro-manage-y. So I opted for doing a small list of one-off “feats” that could be purchased on leveling up in addition to raising your stats.

Good in theory. In practice, during the course of development, three extra-fun things happened that greatly enlarged the list of feats:

#1 – My own natural tendency to feature creep.

#2 – A desire to poke a little bit of fun at the overwhelmingly huge lists of abilities found in larger dice-and-paper RPGs (even though, by emulating that, I got sucked into the same behavior I was sending up… )

#3 – Second-guessing my design out of peer pressure.

Number three might take a little bit of explanation. I started design on the game back when there was a dearth of classic-style western RPGs. Remember that? It’s kinda awesome that’s been changing – not that they are super-common yet – but at the time, new ones of that style were in very short supply. Anyway, Frayed Knights came about out of my love for not only those old games, but dice & paper gaming. While there are some parody aspects, a big part of it was an emulation of those games, and in some ways the kind of game I wanted those older games to be – at least as far as my capabilities and resources could take it at the time.

But I still hold fast to the belief that it’s not enough to simply re-create the past (albeit with higher-res graphics and a cleaner mouse interface). The past classics are a foundation, a starting point, not a final destination. We’ve already played those games. Modern game developers need to keep exploring new ideas. In the case of Frayed Knights, my focal point was on the party – a very specific party of misfits with adventures that bordered on situation comedy.

But as its roots were still firmly in the hardcore old-school RPG camp, that was my initial audience, and I remain deeply thankful that many of them took an interest in my game early on, and provided all kinds of opinions, ideas, suggestions, and a bit of an anchor to remind me of what they had come to expect in their games. Several, however, were (and remain) resistant to the idea of not being able to create entirely custom characters for their party. Of course, that flew completely counter to the entire “hook” of the game. But especially without a game already out there to demonstrate the concept (beyond the “pilot” prototype), it was rough sailing.

Fearing that I was going to lose that crowd, I expanded on the feats a lot, reasoning that if I couldn’t provide the ability to create characters from scratch, I could at least allow players to customize the hell out of the party they had.

It turned out to be a gigantic effort – much greater than I expected. And in the end, while I know some players really loved this, the vast majority didn’t really take advantage of it. In fact, based on (too little, I admit) information I’ve gotten back from players, the real problem was that the dizzying list of feats, dependencies, and lack of full clarity as to their exact effects just confused most players. Most players stuck with the basics.

So that left me wondering. I mean, could all that time have been better spent somewhere else? Like improvement of the UI? Better spell effects? An extra few quests?

Of course, that also left me in a little bit of a quandary in the development of the sequels. Theyare using an entirely new engine and a brand-new code base. This means I’m rewriting everything from scratch, and that offers an opportunity to revise some design decisions. It’s not like Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon sold a million copies or anything, but I still don’t want to mess with the things that made it unique too much. The whole combat system and interface is so radically redesigned as it is.

For Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath, the “feat” system is getting replaced with somewhat more conventional skills, which progress linearly (which is effectively what many of the feats did, with their dependencies). Some of the more complicated abilities are going away or being changed to something easier to use and understand. And yeah, some streamlining is taking place. After years of being promised “streamlining” by mainstream game developers and only receiving what I’d call a “dumbing down,” I’m loathe to refer to what I’ve done as “streamlining.” I like my RPGs thick and chunky, full of all kinds of interesting ways of exploring not just the game world, but the game system. That’s really not changed. I think the more annoying, confusing, and hard-to-use stuff has been removed or replaced by more interesting options.

You are still going to be able to turn Arianna into a spell-slinger if you so desire. At this point, I don’t want to change that. In fact, it may be even easier to do so now without it being a major hit to her fighting ability. So – Arianna as a paladin, whipping out divine priest spells in addition to being a reasonably potent butt-kicker? You bet.

To provide examples – Sorcery is now a skill, and the four levels increase the limits on the spell level you can cast with it. Chloe (and all sorcerers) start with the skill maxed as a class feature. “Armor” is now a skill, with three levels – for light, medium, and heavy armor.  And – as of this week – all the melee weapon proficiencies are now lumped into a single “Melee Weapon” skill. No skill is necessary to equip and use bludgeoning weapons or thrown weapons. The first level of melee allows the use of all melee weapons, and the rest combine and replace weapon expertise bonuses for all melee weapons and skills like “Lunge” and “Size Doesn’t Matter”. This means that you don’t have to worry so much about being specialized in the “wrong” weapon when you see a cool one in the game.

How will this affect the ability to import your party from FK1 into the sequel? I haven’t gotten there yet. My best guess is that importing the party will require a full “respec” – which is probably going to be preferable for most players, anyway.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Game Development Quote of the Week: Derek Yu on Resources and Constraints

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 19, 2013

Today’s quote of the week comes from the absolutely outstanding article (which I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to before) “Finishing a Game” by Derek Yu. If you are an aspiring game developer who hasn’t yet gone through to release, I strongly recommend this article.

“The fact is, if we all had unlimited resources and unlimited time, we’d all make the same crappy, meandering everything game and there’d be no reason to play at all. It’s our limited resources and time that forces us to make tight games that feel like they have a purpose.”

I’ve heard this many times with different variations, and not just about games. We hate limits, but constraints can be our greatest ally, providing a foundation to build upon.  Great advice, especially for indies who generally have more power available to them than they could possibly take advantage of.

Filed Under: Game Development, Quote of the Week - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Learning from Game Jams

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 18, 2013

I haven’t been a very successful “game jam” developer. I’ve participated in a few, even completed a few, but I’m not a regular participant. I have lots of excuses. But mainly, with major projects in development, and a family / social / church life and responsibilities, it’s tough to carve out an entire weekend for a 48-hour game jam. But they can be really cool experiences that can teach you a lot about not only how to make a game, but about yourself.

My first discovery doing a game jam (which I didn’t complete) was that it really was the entire game development cycle up through release, miniaturized and done at high speed. It is not fundamentally different. Sure, the products are going to be simpler and rougher, but you encounter exactly the same pressures and issues which require exactly the same methodology to resolve.

Rocking the game jams is no guarantee of success with commercial game development (but then, what is?), but I do feel it is a great classroom for both beginners and veterans to improve not only their craft, but their processes.

By the same token, I feel that postmortems or “lessons learned” from Game Jams are at least 75% applicable to “full-scale” game development, and vice versa.

Scott Bromander has written a little about his own experiences and lessons learned from numerous game jams. His comments struck home for me, as a lot of his experiences – including blows to his ego, as a career software developer – really mirrored my own. It’s nice to know you aren’t alone, and it’s also nice to learn from someone else’s experiences rather than “the hard way.”

Sometimes the hardest lesson to learn is that first one – this game will hopefully not be the last game you’ll ever make. Sometimes you just have to save it for the next game. What you are making today will not ever be the be-all, end-all of game development. Polish up what you have and let it go.

Another thing I liked and want to do more of myself (I intended to do it myself this year with the one game a month thing, but real life combined with poor motivation) was his movement to personal “prototyping sessions.” Not only are these good training exercises, but they can be used to excise some personal demons. Working on a big RPG project like I am, I am constantly confronted with ideas for little games I’d like to make – or at least get started on. Taking a few hours to see just how far I can get is enlightening. Sometimes I spend most of the time just learning more about my tools, and all I get done is half a model.

But the key is – you don’t have to wait for a game jam, or conform to a game jam’s rules if you don’t want to. The game jams exist as a fun event for the community, a fun way to encourage this kind of practice, and nothing else.

Scott Bromander: Diary of a Developer – What I Have Learned from Game Jams

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



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