Indie Games: Learning From Failure
Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 1, 2013
Just a couple of links to articles today. As usual, when these articles call out the failures, I wince. I’ve done a lot of these myself.
This first one comes with a great warning:
The following list might be filled with things so stupid that you wouldn’t ever imagine doing them, and yet I did all of them at some point, often multiple times. If that’s the case you can as well just make fun of me since you’re already here.
How NOT to Market Your Indie Game
Some that I need to be reminded of from time to time…
- Don’t release the screenshots that you took 5 days into the development, they will stay in the Internet forever and haunt you. (Press posting about your game and using a year-old screenshot as a news header would be the best example)
- Don’t ask reviewers if they want a review copy of your game. Throw it at their faces. They weren’t gonna buy it anyways.
- Don’t try to make a game for both casual and hardcore players.
- Don’t insist on adding more content instead of polishing what you already have in the game.
Here’s an oldie-but-goodie that is quite painful to read. It’s about an otherwise decent, fun, competent game which probably deserved much better success than it received… and which, five years earlier, perhaps might have received reasonable success. But as of last year (when the article was written) — it couldn’t pass muster. It sold (at the time of the article) a grand total of EIGHT copies. EIGHT! In the preface to the analysis, author Tom Grochowiak (himself an experienced game designer & developer, who has made some of these same mistakes) says the following:
As human beings, we’re often victims of the survivorship bias. Starting developers focus on the success stories and look at indie game development with starry eyes and big hopes. How hard can it be if Minecraft sold millions and a simple puzzle platformer can become a major hit? Well, very hard. The truth is that most indie projects fail. We should be paying more attention to the lessons we can learn from failures rather than look up to the lucky few who made it, thinking it’s going be the same for us.
Very good points. Back when I was a newbie at this (and I still act like a newbie, so I’ve not completely learned my lessons), I had the same impressions. If such-and-such a crappy game could sell X copies, it should be easy to sell 1/10th of that! The truth is… it’s very hard.
Eight copies. That’s not as unusually bad as you might think.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, Production - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
The Ol’ Kickstarter Shuffle…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 31, 2013
Since the Red Baron Kickstarter campaign didn’t have such an auspicious start (mainly because of the lack of pre-KS marketing, IMO), Mad Otter Games has decided to cancel it… with full intentions to bring it back in the not-too-distant future, with a better, more finely-tuned campaign.
It’s the way of things these days, I guess.
In the meantime – speaking of advance marketing – Guido Henkel has announced that he’ll be launching a Kickstarter for Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore, which will be launching in about a week (November 6th). Yeah – duh – I’m going to be chucking money at that one, all the time questioning my own wisdom of helping finance other people’s games while only dipping into my own pocket to finance my own.
I’m stupid that way, maybe.
Seriously, folks – I spent some time chatting with a friend (and a far more successful game developer than me) who is growing despondent over the current situation with indie games. A vaporware project in mid-Kickstarter and a single joke going for it was greenlit on Steam, while entire libraries of quality, decently-selling (by non-Steam standards) games are still ignored. The things that will make a splash and get funded / greenlit are not the same things that make quality games. That doesn’t mean they can’t be combined into the same package. But there are no guarantees.
I guess it’s the same old story: Luck and a good story (or line of B.S.) trumps a good product. At least for a while. But neither is very reliable in the long-term. Please note that I’m not talking about specific KS projects (I’ve backed plenty, and in principle I’m a fan of crowdfunding) – just the tendency for people to be far more willing to throw time and money at a promise than reality.
Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
Multiplayer Only? Nevermind.
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 30, 2013
I did it again. I bought an indie game because of a steep discount without looking too closely at its description.
No single-player mode.
You know what this means?
It means I am never, ever going to play it. I may look at it, analyze it a little bit to see what the developers did with it. But I am never going to log in and play it. They gained a sale but lost a customer.
For me, having a game that only exists as a competitive online game us a like being unable to learn how to play chess without entering a Chess Tournament. You can figure out how to play while you are getting your butt kicked in public, but not before. Maybe, after a few days or weeks or months of being other people’s target so that THEY can have fun, you might start having fun yourself.
Now, I’ll agree that’s not always how it works, and a good game will certainly mitigate that factor to a substantial degree. And even having a solo game mode is no guarantee of anything – once again, everybody playing will have more experience than you, and quite often the skills needed to succeed in multiplayer are quite different from single-player skills. But at least you’ll have a passing familiarity with what the game is about first.
This, and the fact that I rarely have time to play a game without interruption for very long. Going more than ten minutes without needing to hit the pause button just ain’t gonna happen before 10:00 PM.
Maybe I’m just the odd weirdo, but I often prefer gaming when I don’t have the pressure of having to interact with other people. And when I’m in the mood for playing with others, it’s often just friends or a game I already love from playing single-player. Not an unfamiliar game in my giant list of games, many of which I’ve never played. One of my favorite multiplayer games over the last several years is Left 4 Dead 2. While it is exponentially better with real, live players, it’s still pretty good solo. I’d never have bothered with it otherwise. That’s why it’s my go-to game when I want to have some really fun multiplayer entertainment.
Even MMOs tend to try and provide you with something to do by yourself.
I guess I am the weirdo, because it seems that more and more indie games are coming out that have no solo gameplay. I guess doing AI or actually creating a *game* that doesn’t require the cooperation of other players to make it work is too frickin’ hard or something. Anyway, Indies, if you wanna make sure I’ll never buy your game except by accident or in a bundle with games I actually want to play, make it multiplayer-only.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
2013 Halloween Game Sales!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 29, 2013
If you want to try out some horror (hopefully not horrible) indie games, you’ve got a good opportunity starting today. Desura.com is having a 7 Days of Horror Sale, through November 5th, with different games getting discounted up to 75% per day.
Yeah. They should pay me some kind of kickback or something for this free advertising I’m doing for ’em. Hey, it’s for the indies! And Desura is the one portal that has a lot of unique titles, instead of just copying whatever Steam releases. So… I’m a fan.
Desura.com 7 Days of Horror Sale
Today’s title apparently requires a pretty beefy machine to run, so I’d check out the free demo first. I have been burned before. Just don’t take too long, because it’s steep discount will only last another half a day or so.
Not to be outdone, GOG.COM – also one of my favorite places to get games – is having a Halloween sale as well. It’s going for only three days, but there are some great classic and indie titles to be found – Amnesia and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, the Gabriel Knight series, Phantasmagoria 1 and 2, the Penumbra Collection, the Alan Wake series, the Alone in the Dark series, and more.
GOG.COM – No Trick, All Treat Sale
Check ’em out! Maybe you can treat yourself to some scary games this week!
UPDATE: And Steam has launched its big sale as well. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, buyin’ time’s here. Again.
Filed Under: Deals - Comments: Comments are off for this article
How to Bring Back the Thrill of Air Combat Simulation
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 28, 2013
I was excited to hear that Damon Slye was back into videogame development, and I even played a little bit of Ace of Aces, a game that he and his company released through the now-defunct InstantAction.com. His newest project has me even more excited, though. Once again, it is a flight sim – Red Baron, a game that was so awesome back in 1990, I got pretty excited. It feels like getting back to the roots of the flight-sim genre. His games were some of the formative experiences for me during that critical half-decade that propelled me into being a game developer.
So – as selective as I try to be with Kickstarters, this was one I not only supported, but want to share. I really want to see this fly. Pun intended.
Kickstarter – The Red Baron by Mad Otter Games
But this isn’t really about the Kickstarter. It’s about something he said about Flight Sims as a Kickstarter Update. Specifically, his comments in the update, “Why Red Baron now?”
Since I left the game and flight sim industry in 1994, the new flight simulators have not appealed to me. They have truly excelled in the obvious areas: graphics and flight model. But I think they dropped the ball in other key areas. I don’t think the campaigns are as immersive and compelling as they could be. They certainly haven’t pushed design in this area at all.
And, I think they pretty much have ignored the vast majority of people who don’t play flight sims. This is sad. The genre could be so much more popular and be filled with so many more great gamers. I myself am a hard-core flight sim player—I’m a real pilot, and I am familiar with the details of flight and weather and airplanes—but I want to bring in many more people. Right now many flight sims are really daunting to new players.
The controls are difficult and frustrating. I am not saying that we should make silly arcade flight games. I dislike those as much as anyone. The experience they offer is vapid. However, we can create a much better learning experience for new players. We can help them along each step of the way, and as they progress, discover new levels of realism for them to master. As it is now, we only get the really determined players to stick it out and become experts.
So, I believe there is a false choice being presented to gamers: a flight game must either be:
- a hard-core hyper-realistic vehicle simulation that will require tens or hundreds of hours of intense learning before you feel proficient, OR
- it is easy to learn, easy to fly, kind of fun for while, but ultimately it’s a pretty empty experience, and really it’s just an arcade game skinned as a flight sim.
I completely reject this choice. The consequence of this is that the vast majority of gamers don’t even bother to look at flight sims because they want something that is easy to learn, fun to play, yet is a deep, rich experience with layers that can be discovered over time.
Now, I don’t know if he’s gonna really pull this off with Red Baron. But his points resonated with me.
I was a pretty hard-core flight sim fan once upon a time. I’m one of the guys who played competitive & cooperative Falcon 4.0 online. And yeah, to do that, I actually had to learn how to fly the thing – and tackling Falcon 4.0 on maximum realism was no small feat. But I loved it. I was a little crazy back then, I guess. It was, at the time, among the hardest of the hardcore combat flight simulators. But even then, there were many games of nearly equal realism that I didn’t ever get into.
What was different about Falcon 4.0? The dynamic battlefield. I think I logged so many hours just learning to fly the plane in that game because of the promise – however poorly and buggily kept – of the dynamic, living battlefield. Falcon 4.0 was a world simulation on an epic scale that has – to my knowledge – never been equaled in the flight sim world. Effectively, the entire battlefield was a giant real-time-strategy game being played by the AI, where you could actually change things and directly affect the outcome of the war. In fact, at the hardest difficulty level, the game required you to disobey the recommended missions, create your own, and fly them yourself to make sure they were executed properly to have a prayer of success. As I recall (I never was successful at a max difficulty campaign – but I read strategy guides) one of the best procedures was to create some bridge-busting missions right at the beginning to slow the enemy advance long enough for your own forces (we’re talking ALL your friendly forces – not just your little fighter squadron) to regroup and resupply. As the campaign progressed, you could see the enemy reacting organically to your actions, repairing damage you did in a previous mission, etc. It was pretty incredible.
The point is that the point WASN’T to master the hardcore flight model and avionics of the simulation. That was almost secondary. That was an additional bonus of the game – if you played at a very high (configurable) difficulty, you could maintain a belief (a fairly reasonable one, judging by the number of real-life fighter pilots who heaped praise upon the game) that you were thriving using skills and circumstances that were as close to real life as possible. It’s not like the U.S. Air Force was going to come knocking on your door, a la The Last Starfighter, and say, “Holy crap, we’re desperate for new F-16 Pilots, and we’ve learned that you are an online ace! Come help us, you are our only hope!” But – when you talked about the difficulty in obtaining a lock with a maverick missile in order to fire two shots in a single pass – you were talking about very similar challenges to what real-life pilots face. And real-life tactics / solutions could be applied. That’s cool stuff.
But that wasn’t the game. The game was, according to designer Gilman Louie, to make you feel like a real fighter pilot – with one big exception. The life of a fighter pilot has been described as “hours of boredom punctuated by a few minutes of stark terror.” His goal was to get ride of as much of the “boredom” part as possible. It was all about the game. They had some really serious teething problems, and the game remained in pretty buggy shape for… well, its entire lifecycle.
So here’s the thing – I make simulators as my day job. Not flight simulators – though those would be fun to work on. I make crane simulators. Our goal is to make them as hard-core realistic as possible, within (lots of) constraints. While they can be fun to test out sometimes, the goal is to train – not to entertain. If we tried really hard (and had a mandate), I’m sure we could make a game out of the simulators. But while crane operators and students (and the developers) can have fun with the simulators, it’s not that the simulation is inherently fun.
I think that’s something that got lost during the 1990s, perhaps culminating with Falcon 4.0‘s release at the end of 1998. The games focused so much on the “hard” simulation aspects, not the game…. or they went full-bore arcade style. Origin flirted in the mid-90s with a “Wing Commander” style approach, with story and characters, but suffered from ridiculous flight models that pissed off the flight sim crowd, and serious bugs and poor performance on then-current machines that annoyed everyone else. And – let’s face it – at least as far as Strike Commander was concerned, the story and *shudder* that voice acting were not exactly anything to get anybody excited.
But they mighta sorta-kinda been on the right track. Or *a* right track. As I see it, there are a few things holding combat flight sims back from making a resurgence:
#1 – They easily get stale. Dogfights and bombing runs are really pretty awesome, but after you’ve been flying sims for a while, it’s hard to get too enthusiastic about yet another MiG-29 vs. F-16 furball, or a Spitfire vs. Messerchmitt furball. Sure, against a good player or good AI, it’s always going to be challenging. But there needs to be something more to keep it interesting.
#2 – Learning the “hardcore” simulation aspects needs to be fun. Seriously. A simple arcade shoot-em-up in flight sim clothing gets boring really fast for me. But having to spend a hundred hours learning to fly before I can actually start having fun is even worse. We make GAMES, people. We can and should make learning part of the fun, not the subject of tedious tutorials. (This applies to all games, BTW, not just flight sims).
#3 – Online play needs to be improved. Look, I used to play Falcon 3.0 over the modem, where it would take 10+ minutes to synch up with another player for a quick 2-minute dogfight. I thought it was worth it. I completely agree that there’s nothing more fun than competing (or cooperating) with real, human, vicious players online. But nowadays, going into a competitive game online is a lesson in frustration for the average player. They are likely just starting to feel competent, doing okay at shooting down some AI fighters, and then go online to get clobbered. Considering the amount of effort it takes just to feel confident to go online in the first place, just getting thrown to the wolves of online play is not a good thing. Better matchmaking, or some kind of structured arrangement where experienced players could be encouraged to mentor or protect them would be awesome. The less experienced players need to be able to contribute and have fun without simply being meat for the predators.
#4 – The game worlds need to be more compelling. Falcon 4.0 had one approach (mirrored by the similarly ambitious – and buggy – European Air War). Origin’s “Strike” series was another approach. But simply dumping us into the Coral Sea with historical notes about five summer days in 1942 isn’t going to cut it anymore. I need game worlds I can sink our teeth into. I want interactive conflicts I can actually influence. I want story. I want to know who my wingmen are. I want to play with “what if” scenarios.
#5 – The game mechanics needs to be more compelling. I’m not talking about the challenge of getting tons of aluminum, steel, wood, and / or titanium to defy gravity and shoot ordnance at other hunks of aluminum, steel, wood, and / or titanium. There are plenty of games now that are quite challenging as-is. But I’m talking about the meta-game over top of this. It could be as complex as the hugely complex meta-game of Falcon 4.0, or the simple kill scoreboards of Pacific Air War and many others – there should be more to the “game” aspect than simply hitting your objectives. Sure, in real life, that may be the long and short of it – but these are games, and games should be fun. Remember, we want to get trim away the “hours of boredom” that make up the real life of fighter pilots. Using your mad piloting skills (or even out-of-the-cockpit decisions) to move needles and events around in an interesting manner can be a lot of the fun!
#6 – Finally – and this may be a controversial option (but who knows?) – is it really so impossible to change up a hard-core flight sim so that it has some “not-so-realistic” elements? Cut loose and have more fun with the genre? As a flight-sim fan, I want to play it straight sometimes, but every once in a while it’s fun to cut loose and see how my F-15 might do against a dragon or a UFO. The final expansion for the IL-2 series, IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 (excellent sim, BTW) included planes and scenarios that assumed World War II didn’t end on time, and that some of the aircraft that were merely prototypes or only on the drawing boards actually went into production and fought in the war. Then there’s the ancient shareware game Corncob 3D, which wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of realism, but used some reasonably realistic flight physics (for the era) to pit you in a souped-up P-47 Thunderbolt vs. an alien invasion. And then there was the totally cool (but totally not realistic) Crimson Skies. While the truly hard-core flight sim fans may have a reputation for turning up their nose at anything that’s not truly ‘realistic,’ I don’t know that this sort of thing need merely be in the realm of the arcade-shooter.
While I don’t expect the indies to be able to compete head-to-head against some of the Eastern European flight sim shops that seem to have taken the “hard-core flight sim” crown, it is quite possible for indies to create good-looking sims with modern tools with relatively realistic flight and weapon systems. They are already creating arcade-style sims. I think some of these ideas are ripe for being tackled by an indie team. But it’s certainly not restricted to indies.
Like RPGs, flight sims have experienced a time when they’ve been “mostly dead.” I think that’s time to change.
Filed Under: Flight Sims - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights: Dungeon Creation Rules, Part 2
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 25, 2013
After our bit discussing general guiding principles for creating adventures in Frayed Knights, I’m now knee-deep in discussing detailed rules (well, okay, still guidelines) that I use for map-building. While not hard-and-fast, they do have explicit requirements that we’re trying to follow. While I wrote this document for the benefit of people helping me with dungeon design, it also serves as a reminder to myself of what I need to do to make sure the quality and style stays consistent in the game. While the principles are sometimes fuzzy goals, these are somewhat more specific requirements.
Why am I sharing them? Well, in part, so you’ll know where I’m going and why I’m doing what I’m doing. Obviously, part of it is to get you excited about the upcoming sequel. But I also wanted to share my thought process for others who might be interested in RPG design. I am not going to pretend that these are the perfect rules – even for the kind of game I’m trying to make this time around. But to me fellow RPG designers out there – and those that aspire to be so – I might suggest that coming up with your own lists like this, stating measurable objectives, might help you as you are designing content. What I don’t want – in my own games, or when playing other people’s games – is missions or dungeons that have the feel of having lots of filler, and not much meat. I want each little quest, each adventure, to be exciting enough to stand on its own, not to feel like just part of the treadmill. These “rules” are tools I’m using to avoid that.
You can read part 1 of the dungeon creation rules here.
You can read the general principles – part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here, and part 6 here.
#4 – Avoid more than two similar encounters in a row
Frayed Knights is not a linear game, so it’s impossible to know in advance exactly in what order the player may face encounters with enemies. And they can luck out with patrols or random encounters. So it’s going to happen. But let’s face it – while battling the same group of enemies may be a little different each time (due to different resource levels, different player party states, health & energy levels, etc.), it can get pretty old pretty fast.
But when the player is following a likely path, the fixed encounter layout should be set up so that the likelihood of encountering very similar encounters more that twice in a row are minimized. Avoid putting more than two similar encounters in a row along the optimal or likely path. Ideally, you should avoid even two highly similar encounters in a row. For example, if they’ve had two fights with melee-oriented guards, the next encounter should be a trap, or a puzzle, or a combat against wizards, or something along those lines. Here are some further suggestions:
- Try to avoid having even two encounters in a likely row if they are at all similar to random encounters or patrols.
- It’s okay to escalate a similar encounter, up until a point. For example, if you have a (likely) preceding encounter with two warrior thugs, and then two priests, then a third encounter with two thugs and a priest would be acceptable, as it forces the player to adapt to dealing with both combat styles simultaneously. Similarly, you can have a special situational event that makes things more complicated – battling in a magical snowstorm that affects certain spells and ranged attacks, for example.
- Combat can be repetitive even if it is totally different creatures with similar tactics. While battle a pair of wolves may be different from battling a bear, they are still pretty similar, physical melee oriented fights.
- Again – it’s best to take advantage of all the system has to offer, and try to avoid having even three combat encounters in a row of any kind. Use traps, puzzles, dialogs, or other “encounters” to mix things up and keep things from feeling stale.
#5 – Interactive Puzzles
Not including traps or locks, dungeons should have one or more ‘interactive puzzles.’ Medium dungeons should have at least a couple of these, and large dungeons should have at least three. It’s highly encouraged even for smaller dungeons.
If the puzzles are mandatory for progress, they should be either very easy (with lots of hints) or able to be bypassed. “Very easy” puzzles may be of the basic lock-and-key variety – not including literal keys with pickable locks! But things like learning a password, building the protective suit to bypass the death-field, pulling levers in sequence, or whatever will work to remove an obstacle.
Classic adventure-game type puzzles work well here. But harder (optional) puzzles work well, too. This is again a way to vary the gameplay, and shouldn’t be super-difficult.
Remember, puzzles can be verbal in nature, too. Convincing someone to help counts towards this requirement.
#6 – Number of Hidden Treasures
Dungeons should have at least one ‘hidden’ stash of treasure that must be found through searching (either directly or behind a secret door), or by poking around on at out-of-the-way object. (As a simple example – the broadsword sitting on the shelf in the southern guardroom in Pokmor Xang would count in FK1).
If the stash is mandatory or extremely useful for progress in the game, it should be hinted to and have several clues to its whereabouts. If it’s purely optional (most are), it could be completely hidden and only discovered by deliberate searching… but don’t rely too heavily on this. Most of the time, there should be at least a subtle hint that there’s something to be discovered should a player start poking around in a particular area and circumstances.
Most hidden treasure should be a small bonus to players to help them feel clever when they go poking around the dungeon (or dug through a strategy guide). Be sure and get creative with this, too. For example, you can have some kind of triggered event that creates the treasure based on some kind of player interaction, or something that transforms a simple item into a magical one.
Mini-dungeons should have at least one hidden item / stash. Medium dungeons should have at least three. Large dungeons should have at least five.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
Challenge: A 3D Modeling Tool for 2.5D RPGs
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 24, 2013
Yeah, I *wish* I could participate. I suck at making tools, and I’m behind schedule as it is. But I love this idea, and I hope somebody (maybe even somebody from this community) rises to the challenge…
Daniel Cook (DanC) has issued a challenge to make a 3D modeling tool for creating content for 2.5D art. He doesn’t want the blocky voxel-style art that some editors do — he wants something with far more flexibility.
The realization he made – and maybe this was more related to the kind of perspective he was going for – was this:
When making this art, it occured to me that there is a rather magical property of the traditional 2.5D view that I don’t think has been well tapped before. Once you adopt a forced 2.5D perspective, most 3D primitives are possible to be represented in a 2D plane. This makes a ton of traditional 3D operations dramatically simpler. You can think of a 3D space being reduced to a couple of 2D controls.
I dunno. When I think of 2.5D, I think isometric or other kinds of views, not necessarily the 16-bit RPG view he’s going for here. But he’s got some interesting ideas. I’ll be curious to see who takes him up on this….
Prototype Challenge: A 3D Modeling Tool for 2.5D RPG Art
Filed Under: Art - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Procedural Everything
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 23, 2013
I have a love-hate relationship with procedurally generated content.
One of the very first CRPGs I ever played was Telengard, by Daniel Lawrence. This was one of those formative experiences with procedural content. In effect, this gargantuan dungeon that would have consumed several megabytes with traditional storage was packed into a 64k computer (really 48k of usable RAM) because it was all generated procedurally. Not randomly (although the events were random) – the dungeon layout was exactly the same for every player. In effect, the X, Y, and Z coordinate of every room was passed through a filter of equations to spit out a semi-unique collection of properties. I knew this because most of the code was written in BASIC, and I spent almost as much time examining the code (and making a few modifications to it, when I felt like it…) as I did playing it.
Then there was Frontier (AKA Elite 2). Again, a giant – and I mean GIANT – procedurally created universe. Same principles. This game included some hard-coded star systems as well to augment or replace procedural data, so our own solar system matched reality, as far as the system could take it. Again – it wasn’t random, as the layout was the same for everybody. Another brilliant (and for me, addictive) non-random procedurally generated world with some hard-coded content was The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall (and I think Arena, though I haven’t played it). Likewise, events and monsters and shop contents were often generated randomly, but the basic (HUGE!) world was the same for everybody. Daggerfall and Frontier also enjoyed procedurally generated missions. After a while, the MAD LIBS style patterns of the missions became pretty boring, but they were fun up until that point.
Roguelikes – I started playing them around 1992, and here we had randomly generated procedural content, so the world was different every time you played. I was always staggered by the sheer complexity of the kind of content in one of the bigger games, like Nethack (and now, Dwarf Fortress – mind-bogglingly awesome!).
And of course, today we have indie success stories using procedural content like Spelunky and Minecraft.
On more mainstream fronts, many strategy games use some level of randomization to generate worlds. Civilization is an obvious one that comes to mind. While it isn’t deep procedural world-building on the order of Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, it still serves to keep the game relatively fresh and interesting even after dozens of playthroughs.
By contrast, I’ve often felt the dungeons of the Diablo series were pretty boring. They were just scenery that you blow through. For replayability, the randomized layout was certainly necessary, but all they really do is keep you guessing as to where the next staircase or teleporter might be. The exciting part, of course, is in the random loot generation. The loot is what matters, and games of the type have generally done an awesome job of it. Once again, they mixed in some nice, hand-crafted content with the random stuff, which keeps things even more interesting. But the level design is largely meaningless to me as a player.
That’s the problem with procedural content. Done well, it can hide its formulaic nature for a while. But eventually, even the best procedural content feels mechanically stamped-out… because it is. But when done poorly, it looks and feels utterly meaningless. It’s an infinite supply of boring filler. There’s an art and science to making good procedural content, and I think it works best when mixed with carefully hand-crafted content.
Daniel Cooke summarized a lot of the pros and cons of procedural content a few years ago in an article, “Content is Bad.” It’s an excellent read, and covers a lot of territory. I re-stumbled over this article last week, and still find it a pretty excellent overview of why the technique is awesome for indies (and where it might be not-so-awesome).
There are some really weird, interesting ways in which procedural content is getting adopted (or pressed into service) today. One area I would not have really expected it is in adventure game puzzles. Taken at face value, it just seems like it would generate a lot of nonsense that a real game designer would have to either change or generate lots of content to give it some semblance of sanity. I haven’t played the games yet that use this generator, I was just intrigued by a paper exploring the possibility –Procedural Generation of Narrative Puzzles in Adventure Games: The Puzzle-Dice System
Pondering this, it occurs to me that there are really two approaches to procedural content – runtime vs. design-time. Run-time procedural content means the computer generates the content for the end-user directly, using whatever formulas and building blocks the developers have plugged into the system. For highly replayable games, with a new randomized world every time you play, this is the way a game must go.
But then there’s design-time procedural generation. In this case, the computer generates a “rough draft” of the content during development, to be modified and enhanced by developers before the game ships. This is kind of an evolution of the approach used in Frontier and Daggerfall. In practice, the procedurally generated content really should be pretty close to the final product, or you lose most of your efficiency that you’d get from having the computer do the up-front grunt work. This is useful in any game where really big worlds are desired –
In both cases, the procedurally generated content can be augmented by hand-generated elements. Again – the unique items and special boss lair tiles of Diablo come to mind, as well as the nearest solar systems being forced to match the real universe in Frontier.
It can go the other way around, too – procedural content can augment hand-generated content pretty easily, and to some degree always has. We’ve always had games with certain random or context-triggered content that helps keep things interesting – whether it was the little UFO appearing in Space Invaders, or random loot appearing in containers in Neverwinter Nights, or enemy groups that scale to your level in … probably far too many RPGs. The AI “director” in the Left 4 Dead series is a pretty successful example.
The trick here is that procedural content is not a ‘cheap replacement’ for carefully hand-crafted content. Up until a point, it’ll actually cost significantly more to develop than the equivalent hand-crafted custom content. What procedural content gives you is ease of re-use. It scales better. It also gives the programmers something creative and fun to do…
I think games – mainstream and especially indie – are going to be more and more dependent upon procedural content as time goes by. If nothing else, it can be useful for fleshing out little details in the game to make things interesting, so that things don’t have that overwhelmingly canned, pre-scripted feel, or to fill in unimportant but interesting details. As a guy who tends to fall in love with more “simulationist” worlds, I love the idea of a world being at least partially built by the actors with whom I am interacting in-game, particularly when they interact with the world in a way that seems clever and unexpected.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
Jeff Atwood Revisits Masters of Doom
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 22, 2013
Somebody lost my original copy of Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
It’s not that it’s any kind of blueprint for how indie ought to be done. In fact, while I sometimes fantasize what it might have been like at the lake house working on Wolfenstein 3D or making the original Doom, as a whole the experience doesn’t sound like it would be that much fun. Maybe that’s because now I’m a family man and that kind of lifestyle described was only really appealing to me my first year of college. At the time, they were pioneering new horizons of shareware – which eventually became indie game development. The world and marketplace was very, very different from how it is now.
But you don’t read the book to learn how to make indie games today. But you do come away with a feel for the different – often conflicting – personalities involved, and the sheer drive that it takes to create something (or several somethings) that became a legend.
Jeff Atwood revisits the book at Coding Horror:
You Don’t Need Millions of Dollars
He finishes with a commentary on a great quote from the end of the book:
Carmack disdained talk of highfalutin things like legacies but when pressed would allow at least one thought on his own. “In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there,” he said. “The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
Atwood says that in today’s age, if anything, it’s even easier. You don’t need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success.
This is true. It’s also true that in today’s age, it’s far, far harder to create anything that will get noticed. Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake are well-remembered because they broke some pretty significant boundaries (mostly but not all technical), they showed up the bigger-budget mainstream publishers of the day, they had excellent marketing that capitalized on word-of-mouth, and they were lucky. And – let us not forget – these were not the only games these guys worked on. There were others that are far less well remembered today. Not everything they touched turned to gold, but eventually success began to beget itself.
While the shareware game market of the early 90s was sparse and ripe for a revolution (and even so, the id guys had to depend on traditional publishers for much of their revenue), today we face a problem of market inundation. Really. It’s a jungle out there. Sure, you could do something just as cool with the current tools and not much more than a lot of gumption and willingness to work your butt off. But will it have that kind of success?
Probably not. I think Atwood is being a little bit over-optimistic there. But – with enough hard work, and willingness to be flexible about things – it’s definitely possible, even likely, to achieve some reasonable degree of success. He’s absolutely right that today there’s not much of a barrier to entry for anybody to make games (thus the market saturation). The tools are very powerful, and while the learning curve may seem a bit steep, it doesn’t require a programming superhero to climb it anymore. If you aren’t trying to compete head-to-head with the AAA studios with eight-digit budgets, it’s extremely possible to do something really, really cool with a minimal investment of money, but a significant investment of time and effort. That’s really what it’s about.
Filed Under: Game Development, Indie Evangelism, Retro - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Selling Incomplete Games
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 21, 2013
Games released in what customers consider an unfinished state is nothing new. Some more picky customers are quick to declare any game with flaws (and that would be… hmmm… all of them) “unfinished” out of some view that imperfection means it wasn’t cooked long enough. However, there are many games that a more reasonable majority of gamers can agree (and, if you catch them later in a truthful mood, the devs and publishers will acknowledge) were released in a less-than-adequately–finished state. Usually, this takes the form of a game that just hadn’t reached an adequate level of bug-free polish. For some reason, the dev or publisher felt compelled to toss it out the door so that it could start making money instead of consuming money.
It’s the way of things. Again, nothing really new here.
With indie games, it’s been another matter. For one thing, they have traditionally not even attempted the level of polish of modern mainstream games, because those high production values cost a boatload of money. Indies usually don’t have access to that. However, as the world has become saturated with indie games, a lot of them are finding that the more expensive production values are what makes a game stand out – which is critical if you want a prayer of actually making money.
And with those same pressures come the same results.
On one hand, you’ve got the emergence of “alpha-funding.” People pay for a game as it is still in development, in exchange for early access, a lower price, and maybe the chance to bend the developer’s ear while it is still getting created. On the surface, I have zero problems with this. It’s a victory of the indie model. There’s no doubt it has enjoyed substantial success. Minecraft, of course, has been the poster child for this model, making millions while it was still in alpha and beta before reaching a stable release (and then continuing to have updates from that point forward). I’ve enjoyed a few games this way, and felt like I helped participate in making the games’ eventual “final” release a success. Yes, we may “pay for the privilege of beta testing” a product, but sometimes that’s actually pretty awesome.
But it’s not all successful. Just as some successfully funded Kickstarter projects never hit completion (or go back to the well for a second dip), some of these alpha-funded projects never do get completed. The devs never (as far as I’ve seen) admit that they’ve dropped the game, of course. Maybe they’re even still deluded into thinking they’ll still finish it one day. But the updates just become fewer and futher between, and then… that’s it. It’s like they hit the point of the long tail for their game, realize they’ve made most the money they’ll ever make on it, and give up. This is frustrating.
But this will exist – as will Kickstarter – as long as players prove more willing to fund the promise of a great game than to pay for a great game that already exists… warts and all (which they’ll all have in the “real world”). We pay for hope. and sometimes those hopes get dashed. ‘Cuz — really — new indies may not have too much of a reputation to trash when they discover that making games is very hard work and there’s not really a pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow.
Having been burned by this, does it make me less inclined to support alpha-funded projects? Well, yeah. To a point. I think I may be a bit more discriminating in the future, ascertaining that the developer has experience and a reputation first. So I guess that means to you first-time indies… don’t expect me to pay for your game until you deliver. Period. That good will has been squandered by indies (perhaps inadvertently) behaving badly.
Last week, we encountered yet another variation on the theme of “incomplete” games — a polished game that ends abruptly because the developer ran out of money. The reason it is unusual is because usually a game is feature-complete and relatively “content complete” long before it is final. In this case, the developers seemed to decide that, failing the Kickstarter they’d hoped to fund a full series, they’d spend their remaining time and money polishing what they could, and release the first ‘episode” at half the intended price point, skimping on anything that could be considered a satisfying conclusion.
I’ll go ahead and say it now – flames coming as they may – they made the right choice, and I don’t blame them. If they’d taken an alternative approach, skimping on the polish so there could be a more satisfying ending – the reason we wouldn’t be complaining right now wouldn’t be because it had a decent ending and more hours of gameplay. It would be because it wouldn’t have found its way to Steam, wouldn’t have been sold by GOG.COM, and nobody would have known about it other than a vague recollection that it failed its Kickstarter campaign.
Gamers – and sellers – don’t look too deep under the hood. They see the awesome, cool, inviting facade, and that’s good enough in this world where people don’t even bother with demos anymore. Maybe they’ll start if we have more repeats of this kind of thing. But really – things are what they are, and the market has proven over and over again that it rewards this behavior. Maybe they’ll have a tough time selling the sequel after this embarrassment, but I don’t think so.
And as much as I complain about people who can’t seem to see past graphics, I would prefer a game with 4-6 hours of solid, wonderful gameplay than a game that takes twice as long that feels like unpolished “filler.” So I’m not going to be too quick to pillory Dark Matter for what they did. Maybe the game is overpriced for such a slim title. Then again, I remember playing Loom for nearly full-price back in the day, and being surprised at how we won the game only about four to six hours in, too. But at least it had a satisfying ending… far too close to the beginning. And then I beat Karateka only a couple of hours after bringing it home from the store, too. The games were way too short for their price-point… but at least they actually reached an ending-point that felt like a satisfying conclusion. So maybe the Dark Matter devs’ biggest fault was making the ending abrupt.
Still, I worry that if this pays off, we’re going to return to the bad ol’ days of the game endings where you get unceremoniously dropped to the DOS prompts with a one-sentence congratulatory message. Although even then, it usually came on the heels of a major boss-conflict or another satisfying climax or expected conclusion. Simply stumbling across a game-over message is pretty bad. I really don’t want to see this repeated. But it might be.
I just wish (I can wish, can’t I?) that players AND major game-sellers out there would be smarter and more experienced than to be suckered in by a pretty face. But then, the expression “lipstick on a pig” exists for a reason, doesn’t it?
Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 11 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights: Dungeon Creation Rules, Part 1
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 18, 2013
At one point, I decided to document the things that I thought made up the “secret sauce” (not much of a secret now, is it?) that I thought gave Frayed Knights its flavor. I also wanted to make a checklist for quality and help certain other people I’ve contracted to help make content for the game. Then, because I’m lazy and I really think that some of the suggestions would be of value to other indies, I’ve modified the document somewhat and made them available as blog posts.
You can read the principles – part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here, and part 6 here.
These next four articles will switch gears into specifics – more concrete “Rules” – which are actionable items for a design checklist. You can read part 1 of the dungeon creation rules here, part 2 can be found here, part 3 here, and finally part 4 here. And, as always, you can just read the entire category of Frayed Knights posts here.
The principles were – in my fuzzy classification system – things to just bear in mind and ideals to strive for when making a dungeon. Many could be applied to other role-playing games. For the next three or four articles, we’re going to get into nitty-gritty details of actual, testable details… rules (or guidelines) that may be meant to be broken, but are still specifics that I’m trying to require where applicable in every adventuring area in the game.
As a little bit of background -In FK1, I divided dungeons into three “sizes” – mini, medium, and large. “Mini” was a dungeon of approximately 8 rooms or less, large was a dungeon with more than 20 rooms. “Room” is a really fuzzy term. But as examples:
1. The confectioner’s cottage, the rat farm, the tomb in the eastern wilderness, the ogre lair, and the mines in the eastern wilderness were all “mini” dungeons. If you played those areas, you know that while they were small, they could still represent a chunk of time and gameplay.
2. The Pit O’ Doom, Temple of Pokmor Xang, Order of Cryptus tower, etc. were medium-sized dungeons. I guess the minotaur maze was also more “medium-sized,” but the confusing geometry made it feel large.
3. Goblinville, the Hobgoblin Bunker, the main Tower of Almost Certain Death, Lizardman Lair were all “large” dungeons. Goblinville and the tower were pretty much a totally different category on their own, as they were *huge*.
Also – using the jargon of adventurers -you can read up on the different classifications of dungeons in the strategy guide, or right here.
So here we go – a few specific rules for Frayed Knights map creation!
#1 – Create “Set Piece” Areas
Most of each dungeon will be made of tiles mixed with details. This makes it very easy to build the dungeon, but can come off looking pretty repetitive pretty easily (and makes Kevin very bored). Each dungeon should have a few “set piece” areas that are unique and may need custom geometry to build. Mini-dungeons should have at least one, and larger dungeons should have several (probably about 2-3 for a medium, and 3-5 for a large dungeon). Not only do they make the dungeons more interesting, they help provide the player with a visual reference for orienting themselves when exploring.
#2 – Easy Egress
Once the dungeon has been “cleared”, the final boss dead, the final treasure room looted – there should be a rapid means of egress from the larger dungeons. The player should usually not have to spend too much time backtracking to get back to the entrance. A barred door to a shortcut, a teleporter back to the entrance, a “back door,” a cliff drop back to the main hall… something like that. Arrange your dungeon so there’s a shortcut to the exit once players have “completed” the dungeon. It’s gamey, I know, but in a dice & paper games you’d simply fade to black here and say, “You exit the dungeon and go back to town” or something.
#3 – At Least One Unusual Combat Encounter
Unless combat is exceptionally scarce in your map (it’s a “class C or D” dungeon), try to have at least one combat take place in unusual circumstances, which change the rules a little or require the player to change up their strategy a little. In FK1, we had a boss encounter with (potentially) waves of opponents; archers that shot the party if they approached from the front to engage in combat with them; an encounter where the hobgoblins made the party battle in a puddle of oil they set on fire (causing fire damage each turn to the party), a foiled ogre ambush, etc. You could have windy areas where missile attacks don’t work well, etc. Anti-magic is a possibility, but it can be frustrating.
For large dungeons, you should have two or more combat encounters with unusual circumstances. Again, they don’t have to be BIG (and in some cases, just having a unique monster variant might do the trick), but they should be interesting and require perhaps a bit of adaptation on the player’s part.
Filed Under: Design, Frayed Knights - Comments: Comments are off for this article
RPG Design: Expendable!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 17, 2013
One of the issues that I face when playing any RPG – computer, dice & paper, whatever – is my tendency to hoard expendable items. Expendable items (AKA consumables) are those things that can get “used up.” Potions, magic items with charges, scrolls, etc. Often, at the end of a game, my level 60 character will retire victorious with an inventory still containing items he acquired back at level 2.
I hold on to these items for the time that I might really need them… only to discover I still have them long after they are no longer very useful. Then I’ll say something like, “Oh, yeah, that wand of magic missiles. You know, that would have been useful in some of those early battles.”
Occasionally I’ll go on binges. I’ll remember I have a bunch of expendable items that really should get used, and I’ll just start blowing through them. This continues until I’ve used up a good selection of my inventory, and I’ll get to hoarding again. Saving up for the next binge or something.
I wonder how much that reflects my behavior in real life… hmmm….
Anyway – there’s nothing particularly wrong with this, but it does make progress through a game uneven, and likely more difficult than it should be. As a designer, you assume the player will actually use these resources to succeed against the more challenging encounters. That’s why they are there. When the “renewable” resources (like spell points – “Mana”, hit points, uses per day or per combat of abilities, etc.) are running low, you can fall back on those extra, expendable resources. Or, for the more overpowered ones, you save ’em for that nasty boss or dragon encounter.
Now, in a Diablo-style game, players will use some of them in a steady stream. I do. I actually have no problem maintaining a constant drip of potions in those games. I hate dying with healing potions still in my belt. The game has trained me to hit those hotkeys whenever I see the red or blue indicators getting low. Health and mana potions don’t seem scarce. They don’t feel like things that need to be preserved… just a resource to manage.
But in other games – things get hoarded. I know I’m not the only one.
I’ve seen this in my own game, too. Realizing that the intro dungeon – and the general threat to low-level characters in the game system – could get a little rough for new players, I compensated by providing some really potent, expendable items – in particular, potions of Liquid Sleep, and Chloe’s magic wand of fireballs. My hope was to help train players early in the game to use these resources, and get in the habit of expending them. Between those, plentiful additional potions to be discovered in that dungeon, and an all but guaranteed leveling up in the middle of the dungeon (which automatically restores health and endurance), it seemed like a good plan, and that the dungeon was really not that hard.
But people still have trouble with it, and don’t always use these resources. Maybe it’s because it’s too hard to use them, too confusing when players are still learning the basics of the game system. That’s certainly possible. Or maybe the hoarding mentality is not limited to me, and people are reluctant to use these resources, or even think about them. I don’t know.
What do you think? Do you also end up hoarding expendable magic items? If so, what can help it? If not, what do you think accounts for the difference? The “resource management” aspect is one of my favorite aspects of old-school RPGs, and it seems newer designs (particularly AAA games) have responded by simply avoiding the problem, having most powers and resources restore automatically on a timer or at the end of combat. I’d like to see the indies forge ahead on better solutions.
Filed Under: Design, Frayed Knights - Comments: 30 Comments to Read
Gal Civ III!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 16, 2013
Oh, crap.
I can see a month-long end to any and all productivity on the distant horizon.
Galactic Civilizations III has been announced.
Yeah. I still have to be very careful about loading up Gal Civ 2. I can say to myself, “Wow, I want to really sink my teeth into a turn-based strategy game for a couple of hours.” And I start a game. And then I realize it’s four o’clock in the morning, I’m not sure when my family went to bed without me, and I can’t really be sure if I ate dinner or not.
And hey, look, there’s a trailer –
Huh. Yeah, I tend to play humans. And… yes, I admit, I pretty much did that to the galaxy once or twice. But those jerk aliens had it coming!
I think they could completely improve things by hiring Bruce Boxleitner to do the voice of the human leader here, though. Seriously. Doesn’t he look like John Sheridan?
I expect this is one of the ‘canned’ campaigns, which I actually rarely play. I generally go for the free-form sandbox in GC1 and GC2, starting with the scout ship, mining ship, and colony ship, and ending with awesome planet-destroying space stations and giant armadas of ships that could individually take on any three enemy ships of a larger ship class…
Although, most of the time, I end up winning by culturally dominating the galaxy. I love doing that. One of the hallmarks of the Galactic Civilizations series – even moreso than the Master of Orion series that helped set the precedent – is that there are many paths to victory. Sure, you can be the last one standing, dominating every planet in your shadow. You can form an alliance and share the victory. You can simply have so much cultural influence that you informally dominate the galaxy. You can even evolve your entire race into beings of pure energy with no further need of the ‘crude matter’ of the physical universe. In the Twilight of the Arnor expansion, there’s also an ‘ascension victory’ where you gather enough points to ascend to a higher plane or something.
The fun part is that all of these victory conditions are in play the whole time (unless you disable them). Whoever achieves *any* of the victory conditions first, wins. So while one race might be militarily dominating the scene, another may be quietly forming alliances to not only defeat them, but to turn that into a complete victory on the other side. And then some races may be sitting on ascension crystals as a fallback plan in spite of going for a diplomatic victory…
Anyway, the website is currently short on details for Galactic Civilizations III, other than it building on the foundation of its predecessors, particularly emphasizing the strengths of the series – multiple victory conditions, massive amounts of ship building and customization (a personal favorite of mine), very powerful AI, and of course a giant sandbox to play in. Like the Twilight of the Arnor expansion for Gal Civ 2, they are giving each race a lot of custom tech tree paths, which definitely made things far more interesting. There are also “Galactic Resources” which are supposed to be new – so I assume that’s not the same as the resource nodes you could harvest with a space station in the previous games.
Also – and this is a big one – MULTIPLAYER! Woot! Although — I hope this supports play by email or something like that, ‘cuz I can’t imagine playing this one “live” with one player taking fifteen minutes for a turn when some of his opponents are just clicking “next turn” to wait for a couple of events to take place. We’ll see how this goes. Back in the day, we tried – TRIED – to play Master of Orion II multiplayer, and it didn’t work out very well. I don’t think we were ever able to finish a game due to bugs and crashes.
Anyway – I’m seriously thrilled. And terrified. But it sounds like the game’s release is still quite a ways off (in internal alpha), so I guess I can wait. Stardock is currently offering “founder’s” packages for pre-orders.
Filed Under: Strategy Games - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
Quickie Scary Movie Reviews
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 15, 2013
Every year, my wife and I watch a bunch of scary movies for October. It started as an attempt to cover as many of the creepy classics as possible. There’s a lot that we don’t like: excessive gore, the trend towards torture movies, slasher flicks, etc. Not our thing. What we like best is ghost stories – the real creepy ones – but we’ll settle for really well-made horror movies that don’t turn our stomachs.
I’ve tried to post these over the years on the blog, for those who might have similar tastes, and like a good creepy movie. Over the years we’ve already grabbed most of the low-hanging fruit – the most notable classics. So now we’re taking a lot more chances – more foreign and off-beat movies. Last year, we hardly got to see any, due to scheduling. This year we have a few more suggestions already, and the season isn’t over yet. So maybe I’ll have some more suggestions in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to share some that we’ve watched over the last year or so while the season was still relatively early.
For the purpose of simplicity, I’m going to provide a rating of “Good”,”So-So”, or “Weak.” There’s a ton of wiggle-room there, and I make no apologies for my opinions being biased, so this is far from the last word. (By comparison, I hated the movie “Hellraiser,” which apparently people consider a classic…)
#1 – The Ju-On Series – I haven’t watched all the movies in this series, but so far they’ve been really good. They are foreign, subtitled, and creepy. They were remade in the U.S. as “The Grudge,” which I didn’t think was nearly as good. The Ju-On series is a little strange, because they are actually a collection of stories merged together into one movie with occasionally overlapping storylines. But the stories don’t necessarily appear in chronological order. The common theme is – effectively – a “viral” haunting. The haunting is so horrible that anybody that it kills becomes another angry, killer ghost, and anyone THEY kill becomes another angry, killer ghost, and so on. Anyway, it is a decent movie series. Rating: Good so far.
#2 – The Hole – Directed by Joe Dante. A family moves into an old house in a small town, and discover a locked-up trap door in the basement. Unlocking it, they find that it covers a bottomless pit, with horrors inside which come out to torment them. This one started out on the creepy side, but by the end had devolved into serious cheese levels that resembled a bad Twilight Zone episode. My 15-year old liked it, so it while it’s too scary for younger kids by far, it might be appropriate for older kids. Rating: Weak, but with a solid premise and start.
#3 – Paranormal Activity Series – we haven’t seen #4 yet (this weekend?), but #1-#3 were good. The first was by far the best, and they’ve been getting progressively weaker – but still enjoyable – ever since. This is a series in the “found footage” genre – where the movie pretends to be a collection of videos or security tapes from some horrendous event, made famous by The Blair Witch Project. I like ’em. Rating for the series: Good to So-So.
#4 – Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter – I’ve never read the book, but the movie is good. Not great, but fun. This movie chronicles the secret history of Abraham Lincoln, for whom pursuing politics, becoming President of the United States, and winning the great civil war were just stepping stones to his greater purpose – to destroy all vampires! It’s just fun to see Abe Lincoln as a superheroic, badass, axe-wielding monster hunter. Rating: Good.
#5 – Carrie – The 1972-ish original classic with Sissy Spacek. I think this one might go beyond criticism, but a lot of it hasn’t aged very well. Sissy Spacek is completely awesome in the role, however. Even in her monstrous, murderous, telekinetically-empowered rage, you can’t help but feel sorry for her. Rating: So-so.
#6 – The Awakening – Taking place in post-World War I England, a boy’s boarding school is supposedly haunted by the spirit of an unknown child, which is frightening the boys. The school calls upon a woman famous for debunking supernatural hoaxes to solve the mysterious haunting so that things can get back “to normal.” However – things might not be so simple as that, and while she easily debunks some aspects of the story… there’s more. A lot more. I really enjoyed this one too. It’s a creepy ghost story with some decent surprises. Rating: Good!
#7 – Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil – This was an awesome surprise. It turns the cabin in the woods / psychopathic hillbilly horror genre on its ear. Two really nice, harmless hillbillies go to their newly acquired “summer home” – a cabin in the woods of dubious previous ownership – and get set upon by terrified and stupid college students in a case of paranoid misunderstanding. It’s dark, it’s much more gory than I usually like – but I laughed myself hoarse watching it. It was awesome. Rating: Good with a side of disturbingly gory hilarity.
#8 – The Caller – big points for originality on this one. A troubled divorcee moves into an old apartment in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with an old-fashioned, rotary phone – which is nice, ‘cuz her cell phone reception sucks. She takes a call that she originally mistakes as a prank from her ex-husband, or a crazy woman. It’s the latter – and it gets a lot weirder. The movie has a couple of truck-sized plot holes, forced character actions, and extreme predictability. Normally that would make it a total dud, but it is rescued and dragged kicking and screaming into “So-so” territority because of a really original plot (for this kind of horror movie) and villain. It’s kinda twisted and brain-bending. Rating: So-so thanks to extra credit from twisted originality.
#9 – The Woman In Black – With Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter). This is a good, creepy, scary ghost story. A junior lawyer must go to an old house of a deceased woman and perform an inventory for the upcoming estate sale. But – he gets way, way more than anticipated. Rating: Good.
#10 – Let Me In – A young, awkward boy has a mysterious new neighbor girl with a strangeness all her own. They become friends, against her own warnings, and her support and friendship gives him the courage to stand up to bullies. But… yeah. She ain’t normal. And Chloe Moretz (soon to be in a Carrie remake) can really, really do the creepy. Rating: Good.
#11 – The Eye – a girl who has been blind most of her life receives new eye implants… which allow her to see into the supernatural world. The problem is, as she is doesn’t really understand her new powers of sight, she can’t tell what is “real” and what might not be. Rating: So-So.
#12 – Skeleton Key – I don’t think I’ve written about this one before, but it was a while ago when we saw it. A twisted, creepy, voodoo-oriented movie with some wild supernatural twists. It quickly became a favorite. Good.
Filed Under: Movies - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Indie Games – Gone Mainstream?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 14, 2013
I still think of indie games as the underdog. Taken individually, any indie game not named Minecraft can probably be described as such. Collectively, however, indie games have become a force to reckon with in the industry. I don’t know that I’d yet describe them as “mainstream,” as Polygon does, but they do talk about the rise of the once-ignored stepchild of the “industry” into the force to be reckoned with it is today:
Polygon: How Indie Games Went Mainstream
It’s true that today, your average “gamer” – the “core” or “hardcore” console player – is far more likely to be aware of titles that are not produced by the big studios / publishers than they first were. I have no idea of the stats, but I’d not be surprised that the “average” gamer today owns a few indie games. It’s virtually guaranteed if they have a mobile device.
Does that make indie games “mainstream?” On the consoles, probably not. While indie games may have finally become the rule rather than the exception, it’s telling that Microsoft might even consider shutting all but the chosen few out of their new console, until apparently backpedaling, with an explanation that the new approach had been their intent all along (I’m not sure I buy that…). If nothing else, it’s clear they hadn’t really seriously considered their relationship with indies until that point. To me, that suggests that indies are only barely crossing a threshold of importance in the industry as a whole. Enough that it’s impossible to ignore them without repercussions, but the indies are still stuck eating at the kid’s table at family get-togethers.
And really – indie games still sell numbers that would be considered dismal failures in the mainstream biz, and sell for ridiculously low prices. While the big publishers might start salivating at the extreme ROIs of the more successful indie games, there’s still a problem in that their structure and overhead can’t easily accommodate the indie business. They’ve focused on creating an infrastructure to support a few big games, with overhead costs that would devour the profits of most moderately successful indie games. The scale is very different, and publishers / console makers wishing to work with small and indie teams will have to adapt with a “leaner, meaner” approach for any indie outreach.
Not that they can’t do this – or aren’t. It’s happening. I would agree that in the last year or two, it’s become obvious that the indie barbarians have not only stormed the gates and invaded, but settled. This will take adjustment on both sides. I tend to focus on how the big players – those to whom the indies are defined by not being beholden – might have to adjust for relatively peaceful coexistence. But it is a two-way street. Opportunities to cooperate with big players abound, to the point they resemble necessities, and that requires a lot of work and changes to how indies have traditionally done things. The definition of “indie” is as stretched as it ever is. The market completely changes its rules on how to compete every two or three years, requiring constant change and adaptation.
Being “indie” is a totally different experience than what it was six years ago.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Gabriel Knight Returns!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 11, 2013
Okay, this news makes me pretty happy…
Gabriel Knight 20th Anniversary Remake
Sounds like they are giving it a similar treatment to the Special Editions of the first two Monkey Island games. With Jane Jensen herself at the helm… it sounds like it has some serious potential.
So if you aren’t familiar with the series – Gabriel Knight is one of the best examples of the graphic adventure genre of the 1990s. Designed by Jane Jensen and published by Sierra in the 1990s, the games regularly pushed the envelope of storytelling and adventure game technology. They were thick with atmosphere and nicely mixed humor with horror and genuine creepiness.
For me, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers – the first of the series – endeared itself to me early in the game. As the game opens, the player is introduced to the main character, Gabriel… a struggling writer and rare book seller with a smart-ass attitude (and an assistant who is an even smarter ass and constantly one step ahead of her boss). That much is pretty traditional as it stands. It would have been a pretty decent game at this point, with the thick New Orleans atmosphere, clever puzzles, and – in the CD-ROM version – some excellent voice-over work, particularly on the part of the narrator (and hearing Tim Curry voice a New Orleans drawl was actually pretty cool).
But then, one of your early tasks involve a visit to Gabriel’s grandmother. There was something in the dialog – the sincerity of the relationship between Gabriel and his “gram” that really won me over. At that point, Gabriel ceased being a cartoon archetype and became a real character for me. Suddenly, everything else in the adventure gained greater emotional weight. It didn’t stop there. His relationship with Detective Mosely (voiced by Mark Hamill) had plenty of trappings of a stereotype, but added details and dialog gave it extra dimension, and helped “keep it real.”
Sadly, they are recasting all the voices, as the masters from the original are long gone, and the quality from 1994 isn’t up to snuff today. The original voice actors are quite a bit older, and some are out of their price range for this remake. This makes me a little sad, but I’m sure they will find some excellent talent.
And – hey – the game is being made in Unity! All the cool kids are doing it. Seriously, Unity has all but taken over the low to mid tiers of game development. It’s simply an awesome engine. The best I’ve ever worked with – and that includes (REALLY includes!) custom engines that I helped develop. The backgrounds (from what I glean from the FAQ) are pre-rendered 2D scenes, much like the original game. The character models are actual 3D, with a fixed camera angle to match the perspective of the original.
Now, I admit there’s a tiny, jealous part of me that says, “A remake? What about original indie titles?” It’s a nothingburger of a concern though, considering the deluge of original titles we’ve enjoyed over the years from the indie side of the fence. These kinds of remakes (and reboots) are still a rarity. Jensen’s company itself has been cranking out plenty of original titles. Yeah, an old classic getting redone is going to naturally get much more attention (how many of Jensen’s more recent titles have I actually mentioned in this blog, after all?).
Here’s a little bit of an anecdote to suggest that this is an amazingly good thing. My daughter had never played a graphic adventure game (I know, I’m a failure as a gamer-geek father) until the Monkey Island remakes. And she loved them. I mean, she was hyper-focused on those games until she’d beat them both – and then went back and re-played them. Now, just like her parents, she’s got that nice positive adventure gaming experience to recall when she sees a new game in the genre. It’s just kinda cool that the same games can provide the same foundation and love of the genre a generation later.
I can’t wait to see if she gets into Gabriel Knight the same way. Although, to be fair, I really need to stick some new indie adventure games on her laptop…
I’d be really excited to hear the other two games in the series get the same treatment. It’d be pretty different for Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within, as that was one of Sierra’s early forays into using real actors and sets, plus some full motion video. Personally, I was not a huge fan of the style (especially in that era… the images and video were pretty grainy and pixelated), so I wouldn’t mind seeing that redone in the same style as this remake.
Filed Under: Adventure Games - Comments: Comments are off for this article
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