Good to be back home

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 10, 2013

I’ve been home from my trip for a few days. I’m really, really glad to be back home. How glad? Well, let’s talk about where I was last week.

One week ago today, I found myself sitting in a 4-wheeled vehicle on the opposite side of the Earth flanked by an armed police escort, racing through the streets during a decidedly violent protest, where protestors were attacking any automobile or motorcycle they found on the road – passengers included. People were going to the hospital with injuries and burns, and even dying. And sometimes being a police officer – at least in capital city – wasn’t enough to protect you from angry mobs. I’d seen a picture in the paper of people armed with bricks chasing a fleeing policeman. I was watching with hyper-alertness as people crossed the street in our direction carrying packages that looked large enough to carry a brick. And I thought to myself, “They’d better let me go home on time after this, ‘cuz there’s no way I’m getting paid enough for this craziness.”

We were in the personal car of the head of the training facility, with a driver he’d managed to scrounge up, because none of the taxi services in town that we used under normal circumstances were crazy enough to go out during one of these protests.

Now, the truth is probably that I wasn’t in all that much danger, and that all sounds way more badass than it really was. Really, with three armed police officers packed in with us, we were probably as reasonably safe as our hosts could arrange. Anything more, and they’d have needed to escort us in a tank or something, and it was probably an overkill as it was. So – as safety goes – it was probably not that bad. But it was still not as safe as staying in our hotel, which was what we were supposed to do during these all-too-frequent protests two weeks before a big government changeover, just as the former head of the opposition party was getting tried, convicted, and sentenced to execution for war crimes.

I figured if I was going to go through that kind of  craziness, you’d better believe I’d turn it into at least a blog post. Or a story. Or maybe a game. It’s a weird thing to go through a situation like that and really have no idea what your personal risk level is. I’m sure my friends and readers who have served in hotspots in the military can tell even more hair-raising war stories.  Some have. But for me – well, I never had to do anything like that as a game developer.

Actually, talking to the guys in my company, nobody else has had to go through anything quite like that, either.

My joke with my co-worker just before the trip, when we were waiting for our ride with some level of apprehension, was that this was life’s way of asking, “So, how’s your side-business coming along that would allow you to quit this job, anyway?”

Sadly, mine’s not ready to replace my income any time soon. But I gotta admit, I’m feeling a bit more inspired to start cranking out top-quality games at a renewed, more brisk pace right now…

I should stress at this point that for the most part, on days where they weren’t setting fire to vans and motorcycles they caught out in the street, it wasn’t bad. The people I met or came into contact with were super-nice. I’m talking “give you the shirt off their own back” nice. They were protective of foreigners, and treated my coworker and I like celebrities sometimes. Yeah, children would stare and point at us… that was a given. We were big, strangely-colored foreigners. But folks were really nice, treated us well, and wanted us to feel safe and see the best of their country of Bangladesh. When my last day finally came, there were handshakes and hugs and heartfelt goodbyes all the way around, from these people I hadn’t known two weeks earlier. They came from a culture that was probably the most alien to me of any country I’ve ever been, but we were all people defined by a humanity that bore far more similarities than differences.

But I’m afraid the political turmoil really did throw a bit of a wet blanket on things. Just like most places in the world – including back home in the USA, I find that the majority of people – on their own – are really good people. It’s just a certain percentage of evil in the population, and their leadership (which I think attracts the darker, greedier, power-hungry percentage) that ruins everything.

On the taxiway out of the country two days later, my Thai Airways jet offered as a personal entertainment option on the seat-back display a view out of a camera on the nose of the aircraft. I turned it on, and watched our pilot deftly dodge a giant pothole on the taxiway of their biggest international airport. I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, what a metaphor for this entire visit.”

I guess you could call it all a visit filled with mixed emotions, and refer to the country as “a nation of contrasts.”

Me? As I said, I’m really, really glad to be back home.

Filed Under: General - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

The Joys of Crappy AI, and the Importance of Obviousness

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 9, 2013

Read most articles about game AI, and you’ll see a call for improvement. “Why can’t we have better AI?”

As it turns out – and this is an open secret in the game dev community – players often don’t like it. That’s why. A recent article, Artificial Intelligence?, on MMORPG.com, discusses one failed attempt to make more interesting AI in City of Heroes.

My personal feeling is that it kinda comes down to not letting the player know you are letting him or her win. You can have neither incompetent AI, nor AI that’s clearly throwing the game. Players want AI that gives them a run for their money, enough challenge to make things interesting. Most of all, I think players want AI that – for lack of a better word – emotes intelligence, even when it is stupid to do so. It’s not enough to have AI that has very sophisticated problem-solving strategies… it needs to project this decision-making so the player can see it at work, if the end-result doesn’t make it obvious. In other words, the players need feedback to recognize the AI at work – and to therefore predict and adapt to the AI.

And of course, as suggested in the article, players want familiar patterns that are easy to respond to. The power mentioned in the article was – with the attempted AI response – not really a damaging power. It was a control power – it forced AI to respond by moving to range. Which is actually pretty cool, so long as its costs are effectively balanced. But players didn’t like it, according to the article, because it broke existing patterns of gameplay. And that’s certainly true.

However…

Having played City of Heroes, I do recognize that this sort of thing can task-overload a player whose primary abilities are going toe-to-toe against bad guys.  Frankly, to effectively use that kind of control power requires a different perspective – both figuratively and literally. You cannot effectively play “crowd control” when you are in literally at the center of the fight. Plus, it’s very hard to keep track of that when you are playing the kind of game that City of Heroes gave to tankers and scrappers. It was hard to focus mentally, and hard to use from a mechanical and UI standpoint. So I don’t know if it can entirely be blamed on players preferring crappy AI or no-brainer classic MMO patterns.

Another element may simply be that the faster the action and the more players that need to coordinate with each other, the simpler the decision tree needs to be for the players. At least for most players. The more experienced they are, of course, the broader and deeper the decision tree can be. On the other hand, in a single-player, turn-based game with a top-down perspective giving you a perfect or near-perfect view of the battlefield, it’s okay to demand the players be a little more clever to keep up.

The bottom line is, of course, that simply making the AI “smarter” isn’t the answer. The AI has to fit the game, and it’s all about making the game more compelling to the players. How that is achieved really depends on the game.

 

Filed Under: Design, Programming - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

A Relatively Complete Blender Tutorial

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 8, 2013

If you are unfamiliar with Blender, I consider it one of the major “success stories” of the open-source movement. Beginning life as a commercial 3D modeling program, it was later re-purchased through a very early version of crowd-funding (we’re talking back in the 1990s, here), released to the public, and has since been steadily evolving as an open-source product.

It has proven more than adequate for making game content, commercials, and short film. It has grown legions of fans who love it. Some folks – particularly those trained on other popular 3D modeling packages like 3ds Max or Lightwave – hate it. A lot of people find it impenetrable and very difficult to get started.

At the “Game From Scratch” site is a series of tutorials claiming to take an absolute newbie from zero experience with Blender to making game-ready assets. I expect it may require some level of talent / skill to make those assets of appropriate quality (for me, texturing has always been the hard part), but we’ll see.

Complete Blender Game Art Tutorial – From Zero Experience to 2D or 3D Game-Ready Asset

I’m checking ’em out now. While I have some experience using an older version of Blender (required because export tools), I’m quite a ways out of date, and in many ways the new version feels like a totally new product. I’ve had to go through a couple of other tutorials already just to re-learn how to do things. Fortunately, game asset development takes only a tiny subset of Blender’s capabilities.

Filed Under: Art - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Deathfire – New Screenshots and Reasons for Optimism

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 7, 2013

Wow, way to go, Guido. Way to pressure me into stepping it up a notch… 🙂

Seriously, guys. Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore sounds like it’s pretty close to head-to-head competition with my game – we are going after exactly the same audience, IMO.  And you know what?

I hope he sells a million copies.

I hope we both do.

Okay, to be honest, I’d love to sell a million-and-a-half to his million, but it’s all good. Seriously. This is the kind of thing that just thrills me to no end. This is AWESOME.

Why is it so awesome? It’s only screenshots and words on paper. Well, here’s the deal: I make the kinds of games I want to play. I chose Frayed Knights when and how I did in no small part as a response to the death of this style of RPG: First-person, party-based, with turn-based combat. I LOVE that this kind of game is now making a comeback. I welcome it. I am thrilled to be a part of it.

While the games may now not be in the AAA big-name release category that they once were, I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t be just as awesome as ever – and more so. While we may not command AAA budgets, even compared to the era (adjusting for inflation), we do have access to tools and technology today – not to mention more profitable distribution systems – to allow us to run leaner & meaner than ever.

Now, nobody’s going to give us a prize for outshining a twenty-year-old game, and nobody’s expecting that. And I am certainly not about to gush too much over Deathfire on the basis of screenshots and some blog posts that say the right kind of things, even for a guy who has Henkel’s history. But after many, many years of what the RPG Codex folks like to call “decline” of the genre, I’m seeing reasons to be optimistic. This game is one of ’em.

Granted, I’m generally an optimistic guy. I am the kind of poor schmuck who sees his hopes get dashed, repeatedly, yet still keeps hoping. So take my opinion with grain of salt, or a small Siberian salt mine. Whatever. But I’m also the kind of guy who can overlook some flaws in a game and just try and enjoy it for what it is. I’m really looking forward to this one. And I really do hope it sells a million copies. That only means there’ll be sequels and more awesome games like it.

 

Filed Under: General - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Guest Post – Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Testing Snark

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 4, 2013

Today, if all goes well, I’ll be on my way back to the United States, after a somewhat eventful trip to Bangladesh on business of the day-job variety. It’s been weird being in a completely opposite time zone – 5 AM in Bangladesh has been 5 PM in Salt Lake City. Weird. Anyway, to finish up the two weeks of blogs from the road – semi-canned – I’m including a list of snarky testing comments that Daniel “DGM” McNeese sent me during testing of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. Some of these have appeared before in dribs and drabs on the blog.  But just so you can get some idea of the kind of interplay that went on during those early beta days… or maybe even late-alpha days… here they are.

Warning – mucho spoilers included.

Plus lots and lots of weirdness and inside jokes. For me, it reminds me of oh so much pain! Pain, pain pain! But hey, I hear that’s a source of humor. So here’s DGM’s compiled list of Frayed Knights testing follies… ripped right from his test reports and emails to my blog… 

 

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>> “Oh, and I also found out what is happening with the damage issues you are seeing from weapons. This is another save-game bug problem. When you reload your characters, there’s a flag that’s not getting set to tell the character attack routines to tell them to look for the currently equipped weapon in the full-fledged player inventory rather than the cheap-and-dirty NPC equipment location. So your characters have been fighting bare-handed.”

 

Okay, I know Arianna’s skills have gotten a bit rusty since her military days, but forgetting you even have a weapon is pretty bad. No wonder the Knights get no respect.

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5) On a personal and somewhat silly note, I’m going to be very sad when you get around to implementing falling damage. There were a couple of points in the tower where taking a swan dive off a high ledge made for a convenient – and amusing – shortcut. 🙂

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2) Imps seem to love blinding Dirk, and while blind Dirk seems to love attacking the wrong target. That seems reasonable enough, but he’ll even attack enemies that have already been dead for several turns. If this isn’t intentional, it’s actually funny enough that you might want to keep it and lampshade it with some dialogue.

“Hey, Sun Tzu! The enemy is over HERE!”

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8) A talking skull for a security system, the artifact skull that the main quest revolves around and now the entrance to the Chapel of Anarchy? Plus three giant skeletons in the chapel with economy-sized skulls of their own? Is there something that you’d like to talk about, Jay? 🙂

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3) One other thing about that bridge puzzle. I see you already noticed that the stairway resets on loading a save. I wanted to note that I was able to get back to the other side by swan-diving into the “cold-lava.” I just wanted to bring this up because, well… This may be the single most bizarre thing I have EVER done to get around a bug. Thank you for that once-in-a-lifetime experience, Jay. 🙂

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PX TEMPLE

1) As long as you don’t cancel out of the fountain dialogue, you can continue to throw coins into it even after running out of money. A thorough explanation of the game’s credit and loan system is called for.

2) When daring Arianna to drink from the fountain, Dirk says “Well, it’s obviously not a normal font.” Problem: this dialogue DOES use the normal font. I suggest switching to Wingdings.

3) No matter how many times I have Chloe toss a coin in the fountain and wish for a pony, it never happens. C’mon, Jay, we’re up to version FIVE here. You really should have ponies implemented by now.

ARDIN

1) Chloe suggests giving Silas some of the pimple jewels in place of the eye jewels the party missed getting. This is despite the fact that I removed the pimple stones from the game forever by dropping them before I even entered the inn. Also, I can offer Nobblehawk the drake statuette even though I’ve never heard of it before. I approve of allowing the party to give away items they don’t have – this is a fresh and original game mechanic and I can’t believe no one’s ever thought of it before. But you forgot to implement the option to give Silas the eye jewels. It would make things SO much easier for the party. Also, selling Silas the Brooklyn Bridge would be a good use of this feature.

2) Ardin is remarkably progressive. According to one of the dialogue options, the five giant rats piloting the mechanical suit are actually the town mayor. Normally I would observe that giving political power to giant, evil, intelligent rats hell-bent on the destruction of civilization may not be the healthiest course for a society to take, but we’re the country that elected Barack Obama so I don’t really have the high ground here.

3) The party has four members, two rooms at the inn and only one bed per room. Where should your customers submit their slash fanfic?

EAST WILDERNESS

1) The storm crows will periodically stop flapping their wings, but manage to remain aloft regardless. They need jetpacks to justify that. Aesthetically, those old WW2 flight helmets and goggles would go well with this.

GENERAL

1) When shopping, merchants will give their selling price for an item regardless of whether the highlighted item is in their inventory or mine. Fine, but if they’re going to charge me full price to sell me my own property they could at least ask if I want some complementary fries with that. Cheap bastards.

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12) Although Chloe wears pink again in her portrait, the title screen still has her in purple. Let me be clear: all vestiges of the Cyndi Lauper/Disney Princess abomination that is purple Chloe must be PURGED. Also, the artist must pay for bringing such a creature into the world in the first place. Where does he live, and do you know of any defenses he may have in place? 😉

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Storm CROWS, not storm bats. Not sure what the hell I was thinking there.

>> “That they are still using a bat model that needs to be replaced?”

(stares)

(facepalms)

Would you believe that until you pointed that out just now, I never consciously realized that the models weren’t crows? Jeebus Christ, for someone who roots out even the most obscure bugs and inconsistencies by the dozen, I can be remarkably dense at times. I must be blind as a – er, never mind.

>> “I was wondering when you’d eventually pick up on that one… “

The sad part is that I was paying close attention to the “crows” – when we were testing the status countdown bug – and managed to miss that anyway. I even joked about how they should have jetpacks and WW2 flight helmets so clearly I was thinking about their appearance at one point, and I STILL missed it. If you’re laughing up your sleeve right now, I can’t blame you. Even I can’t help but laugh at it – that was a pretty severe case of fail. 🙂

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Thus girded, Team Vanilla proceeded to the tower. Chloe spent most of the way whining that chocolate was actually the best flavor, until Arianna offered to let her try some hemlock and compare.

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The Holy Rollers head into the wilderness, praying fervently that they don’t get lost for forty years.

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Surprisingly, the Ferrous Golem only took 6 rounds this time. And it didn’t really do much damage to me. Having my front-liners cast Blessing on themselves probably helped, but mostly I think the dice were just with me this time (PRAISE THE LAWD!!!).

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2) If you’re already dual-wielding, the game has no idea what to do if you try to equip a two-handed weapon. Trying to put it in the primary hand results in the primary hand being empty. Trying to put it in the off hand is even worse – I had Dirk dual-wielding a dagger and a two-handed warhammer! And he didn’t even meet the might requirement!

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I’m going to go back and make Chloe a throwing specialist after all. In fact, I’m going to see if I can combine that with the dual-wielding bug and make something like this: http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/01/27/episode-1087-exalted-feat/

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Acting on Ben’s information, Don Arianna orders the party to the tower. Can Ben redeem himself and become a made hippy after all?

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7) FINALLY figured out a bug that’s been vexing me for a while. When you open the door that triggers the fight with 2 elementals and an imp, you get teleported back down 1 floor. I knew even I couldn’t be THAT bad at navigating. Even if I did end up in the wrong state once without trying to leave town.

…Shut up. 🙂

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12) An ice elemental hit the party with Frostwave after Dirk was already down. I’ll let the history scroll speak for itself:

“Dirk takes the beating like a dead Dirk, which it is.”
“Dirk is stunned”

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>> “Sorry Mario, but the item you need (#5) is in another dungeon.”

(facepalms)

Mama-mia. I swear I’m-a gonna jump on ya head one-a these days, Toad, and no jury will-a convict me. 😛

Incidentally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEVU-YLpM8A

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Team Vanilla heads towards the caverns. Along the way many alternate names for the group are proposed, such as Team Chocolate, Team Extreme and Team Can’t-We-All-Just-Get-Along. Finally Arianna proposes Team If-You-Kids-Don’t-Shut-the-Hell-Up-I’m-Turning-This-Quest-Around-Right-Now, but the others vote it down on the grounds that it’s too long for a business card.

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The Holy Rollers depart for the near caverns on a mission from God. Well, from Silas anyway. But since he’s their ticket into the Adventurer’s Guild, it feels close enough.

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Okay, let me start by warning you that my antics in this run were complete and utter BULLSHIT that will provide you with no useful feedback on balance issues whatsoever. Although they may provide you with some amusement. Or horror. Whichever.

Since you’re making enough changes that I figured further balance-related feedback would be useless under the current rules, I decided to just focus on bugs this time around. And I decided focusing on them might as well include having some fun with them. So I cheated myself a bunch of feat points and some gear and went to town. For most of the party this just meant boosting their weapon skills, but for Arianna I decided to see just how far I could push the dual-wielding. I gave her a battle axe and a shortbow, giving her 3 hands-worth of weapons to start with. Then I gave her Rank Smack, which resulted in her getting a single extra attack against the untargeted opponent in the rank. On top of the 3 attacks given for dual-wielding in the first place I figure that’s two axe strokes and two bow shots a round, or six hands-worth of weapons.

So, basically, I turned Arianna into a Marilith. I could have gone with Kali instead and let her keep the legs, but giving her a tail to go with all the extra arms just completes the crazy nicely, don’t you think?

NEAR CAVERNS

For Kasaga I used my now-standard tactic of killing off one berserker and one shaman, then bitch-slapping the chief into oblivion from afar. This went well enough, although Arianna was usually unable to attack him in the third rank. Occasionally (seemingly at random) the game would let her take a shot at him, but most of the time neither the hotkey nor the amulet would work.

I like to think he took one look at the THING Arianna had become and spent the entire battle trying to run away from her. It’s too bad I don’t have any artistic skills – I would love a picture of Arianna as a Marilith with two axes and two bows. All while looking out at the viewer with the same “I SO don’t have time for you” expression she wears in her default portrait. Oh, well.

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RAT DUNGEON

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3) Why is their secret weapon in a box they can’t open? Did the Nom Postal Service mail it to them that way? If so, there’s some definite humor potential you need to be cashing in on (barely sapient, but they’ve already discovered the wonders of bureaucracy).

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1) The augmented ceiling drop trap on the first basement floor didn’t cause any injury. Instead, it put half the party to sleep. I GUESS you could argue that being hit on the head by falling masonry would knock them out, but you’d think it would also take off some HP in the process. 🙂

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BTW, I’ve got a rather amusing bug for you. Remember how leaving the near caverns immediately after your first arrival can cause the “skull is missing” dialogue to play in other zones? This time, Ben didn’t just complain about it being a long hike back to Ardin – he did it while walking right past the STATUE of Ardin smack dab in the MIDDLE of Ardin. So apparently our little hippie’s been hitting his stash while on the clock.

For shame, Ben.

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1) The description for the Linebacker feat says “offers some protection to those IN THE BEHIND him or her.” I know the entire party is sharing a single bed at the inn now, but come on – is this REALLY that type of game?

 

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

Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles, Part 6

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 3, 2013

With this installment, we now come to the end of my “general guidelines” for designing adventure areas for Frayed Knights. After this, we move onto specifics, like “dungeons should have at least X of Y” and stuff like that. For those who may not recall, this series is expanded excerpts from the design document for Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath. I drew upon my experience as a gamer, a dice-and-paper GM, and from my experience making Frayed Knights 1: The Skull of S’makh-Daon and put some of these guidelines and thoughts on (virtual) paper for my own benefit (in the stress of development, it’s easy to forget things), and for those who are assisting me in level design. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here,  part 3 here, part 4 here, and part 5 here.

#14 – Post-Choice Chatter

For meaningful decisions (#13) or alternative approaches to challenges (#3), there’s nothing cooler than having party and NPC dialog later reflecting the choice the player made. If the player defeated the boss by dropping a boat on his head instead of fighting him (when both were legitimate options), it’s awesome when an NPC later asks, “Hey, is it true you dropped a BOAT ON HIS HEAD?!?!?!”  This can also be done in little text descriptions – like the boss’s bedroom having a description pop-up when the players enter saying, “Unless suffering from a permanent waterborne-vessel-induced headache, the boss likes to come here and relax post-battle.”

Yes, these can be time-consuming, as they require branched triggers. And maybe some players will never notice. But it’s part of the whole “making meaningful decisions” thing – your choice has to have an impact. Recognition (through dialog or whatnot) is part of that impact.

#15 – Jargon

I made a big deal about “Adventurer Jargon” in the last game, but still didn’t use it as much as I’d like. Remember to use adventurer jargon where appropriate in dialogs. It’s part of the world design, to give it a unique flavor.

One thing to bear in mind is that while the jargon is normally applied to adventuring-related activities, these professional treasure hunters will tend to use the same words for more mundane situations (like calling any death a “mort”, even when that is more particularly used to describe someone who was killed on an adventure by enemies or traps).

 

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

D&D and Computer RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 2, 2013

Tom’s Hardware has a nice little retrospective about the influence of Dungeons & Dragons on computer RPGs throughout the short little history of video gaming, including some comments from two guys who were involved in brief renaissance of D&D-inspired RPGs, Chris Avellone and Feargus Urquhart. I’ll letcha read it now, and, as usual, apply my lame commentary at the end.

How Dungeons & Dragons Inspired Classic PC Games

The title is a bit of a misnomer – it’s more of a story about, “How the Bioware / Obsidian D&D-based RPGs came to be.” Which is just as interesting to a fan, but perhaps doesn’t have much broad appeal.

While not offering new truly new information, I was interested in their take on what caused the ‘death’ of the style of game represented by the Infinity & Aurora Engine games. According to Urquhart, it was the trend towards making cinematic, console-style games. This made the kind of breadth of choice offered in their CRPGs prohibitively expensive. Publishers were no longer interested, instead focused on more linear, lusciously realized game worlds. Or, in my view – the dominance of the third-person action game!

Then there’s the little hint of a promise at the end that these guys would be interested in taking on a D&D licensed product again, and plugs for Project Eternity and the South Park RPG.

As far as the D&D system is concerned – while I’m personally a fan of 3.5 (and an even bigger fan of its spiritual successor, Pathfinder), the last edition of Dungeons & Dragons left me pretty cold. I’ve never been a huge Forgotten Realms fan, either.

The appeal to me in the past was mainly in the form of rules familiarity.  I didn’t have to wonder too badly about the relative value of a 16 Strength versus a 17 strength, or a +1 longsword versus a +2 short sword. And I was already prepared to experiment with character and party ideas. If we have a druid and a paladin, can we skip having a cleric in the party? Plus, I could leverage off of that experience to apply known tactics in something like a dragon battle.

Today, however, I’m no longer one of the D&D faithful. While I’ve perused the 4th edition player’s guide when it came out, I only recognize the gist, not the details. And I’ve really not been paying attention to the “D&D Next” development (as Paizo’s already won my group over in spades with Pathfinder, capitalizing quite well on WotC’s missteps).

And it is not as if those rules were in any way sacred or particularly well-suited to computer games. In fact, they were arguably the opposite. While the nasty learning curve of a new rules system is a pain in the butt for developers and players, I’d just as soon see more broad, turn-based, choice-heavy RPGs in the style of the 1996-2003 classics with custom rules systems.

 

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

What happens when everybody loses the race to the bottom…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 1, 2013

So the gold rush that was once mobile game development is hitting its inevitable bust cycle. Not that it’s “tapped out” or anything – there’s still plenty of money to be made there – but the competition is fierce, and the results are usually disappointing.

Kinda like the PC has always been. It’s been the model for a mature marketplace since day one. The sales graphs of every game console, when it nears the end of its lifecycle, begins to resemble that of the PC.

But I don’t think the PC game marketplace has ever been quite as saturated as iOS.

Apparently, a lot of indies are getting fed up with the mobile marketplace, and are fleeing back to console and PC. I don’t think their chances of making money with a quick-and-dirty slapped-together product are any better on the PC. Again, it really comes down to being an early mover on a platform. The iPhone and Androids were huge successes in that regard, but those days are over. MAYBE there’s a chance that you can pull that off again on one of the new consoles coming out, but… only maybe.

In the end, everyone wants a filter (or lack thereof) in place that favors them. Or, if you make crap, you want no filter at all. If you have managed to put together a broad fan base, you want it linked to popularity. If you have cash, you want money to be the barrier to entry. If you make a niche game, you want filters that allow niches to be represented, maybe based on critical acclaim (ooh, that’d be me!). Etc. Etc. Etc.

What I personally keep seeing is that the fundamentals of success don’t really seem to ever change. What’s “hot” or trendy or allows shortcuts is a constantly moving target, but ultimately they all fade or drift leaving the same fundamentals in place that were always there. And yeah, the fundamentals are HARD. You need to make a great game. You need to appeal to a large enough audience at your price point to be beyond successful. You need to NAIL your marketing and sales. And you need a little bit of luck. And, ultimately, you need to keep doing it over and over again, consistently.

Sometimes there are magical little shortcuts that allow a gold rush. In indie games, we’ve seen it with casual, and we’ve seen it with iOS / Android. But those never last, because it doesn’t take long because it’s crowded out to the point where they are no longer superior. It’s the marketplace at work. The fundamentals remain.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Bundle-In-A-Box RPGs – Last Chance

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 30, 2013

If you’ve waited, this is your last chance to grab the big indie RPG Bundle-In-A-Box. It’s over tomorrow.

Seriously. 13 Indie RPGs if you exceed the average price. Plus bonus content. And you help charity. And you help a bunch of struggling indies. It’s got win-win written all over it.

As I’ve seen people talk about this bundle, I’ve been reminded how much I SUCK at marketing. I’ve at least seen some comments like, “the only game I’ve ever heard of is Frayed Knights,” which means I’ve at least done my job a little. And I have seen a lot of “never heard of any of these games.” D’oh. To be perfectly honest, that’s exactly why I am participating now. I realized that – long term – I need to get my name and my game out there, in front of a lot more players. Plain and simple. 5000 new players isn’t a TON, but it’s a start.

Filed Under: Deals, Frayed Knights - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Dreams Surpassed

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 26, 2013

When I was a kid, I used to dream about video games. I guess I still sometimes do, but not as often or as vividly. But back when I was a kid, and arcades were king, and Ultima III was in the process of blowing my mind… yeah. I’d play games in my sleep. There were a couple of really good ones.

One was a tile-based RPG, a lot like Ultima III or so. In the dream, I unknowingly traveled to one of the harder areas of the game at low level. I spent the whole time fleeing. Yes, fleeing. In my dream you could run away from tough encounters. Pity you can’t do that too often in modern games. Anyway, the dream culminated with something out of much more recent Doctor Who episodes (they must have stolen my idea!) – I was trapped in a room with a vampire who could only move when I wasn’t looking at him. He could talk, so we actually conversed, but whenever my attention wavered, he’d sneak a few inches closer – closer to my eventual demise. I had to talk with him all night long, keeping my attention focused on him, until dawn, when I made a break through the window and fled back to the lands of lower-level challenges.

Just before waking up, I thought that was the coolest freaking RPG of all time. It would totally kick Ultima’s butt in the marketplace.

The other dream was a recurring one. In several dreams, I was hitting arcade after arcade, searching for this one totally awesome machine that I’d played once before, which had really amazed me. But I couldn’t remember what the game was about, or what it was called. All I knew is that I’d probably recognize it when I saw it, and it was completely amazing. Heads and tails above everything else in the arcades. Yet older – in an apparent contradiction (don’t blame me, blame my subconscious!), it was a few years older, yet still had better graphics and amazing gameplay.

I don’t think I found the machine in every dream. And when I did, I don’t think it was the same game. There was one that I remember – I think the game was supposed to be Atari’s Space Duel. At least, that’s the game I was expecting to play (which was one of those games that really *did* amaze and thrill me as a kid. See the video if you are wondering what it was…)

Space Duel!

However, this game was not Space Duel. It was something closer to a modern flight sim. More something like this (but with space ships):

Looked almost this pretty!

 

In the dream, of course, I was ecstatic. It was clearly the greatest game that had ever existed, and the most baffling thing was how it could be so rare and relatively unheard of. How couldn’t everyone know about this amazing machine? I mean, sure, Dragon’s Lair was pretty, too, but this was something else!

And of course, I woke up before I played much of the game. Quest complete, right?

There are two funny points about these old dreams of mine.

The first is, of course, that the boundaries of awesomeness in my dreams have been surpassed today.  By a decent margin. Technologically, games today are extremely impressive, even the lower-budget indie titles.

The other went a lot deeper, and maybe explains a little bit of my deep indie & retrogaming obsession. I guess there’s still a part of me that is convinced that there are obscure, overlooked gems of the past that will would totally blow me away. While they aren’t quite that extreme, the truth is… there are. I still stumble across them. You need only look back at my series on Wizardry 8 to see what that looks like. I keep searching, just like that dream, even though the dreams have been surpassed by reality.

It allows me to live in an interesting world…

 

 

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

Guest Post: Things I’m Pretty Sure I Learned Making Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 25, 2013

Today’s guest post is by Cuthalion (Why do I do I keep wanting to pronounce it Cthulian?), AKA Yo’el, AKA Joel Moore. Joel offers some insight into the twisty little world of game development, some lessons learned – as most are – the hard way, by actually making games and making mistakes. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did! — Jay 

For the last year or three, I’ve been involved in a little project we’ve taken to calling Records of Ur: The King. It’s going to be a tactical RPG. Exciting! But there are a lot of challenges. Here are, in no particular order, some of the things I’ve learned on this project so far. Take these with a hefty grain of salt — I’m still new at this!

1. Teamwork. If you’re working with other people, who you work with on what is critically important. I’m very extroverted and tend to naturally take over groups (for better or worse), so the idea itself of working as part of a team wasn’t too scary. But I was surprised how much of a difference the individuals involved made. For example, for a long time, I stubbornly resisted the idea of adding a second coder to the project. (I’m the “technical director”, which in this case means I do the programming, give input on game mechanics, and say “no” to the producer and creative director a lot.) I had done a pretty poor job of working with the one team member that was interested in adding coding to their responsibilities, and I’d gotten paranoid about letting other people with Other Ideas into the code while I was still figuring out how it all worked myself. I was insecure about the choices I’d made and didn’t want anyone to see it until I could say, “Look, I know you took all those computer science classes that told you this was bad, but it already works!” As it turns out, this was a little silly. The other two leaders eventually twisted my arm into adding an acquaintance of theirs, and we’ve worked together swimmingly since.

2. Temper. I mentioned I’d done a poor job of working with one other team member. As it turns out, being professional means keeping your temper in check, even when you are so sure that the other person is Wrong. If you don’t, it gets awkward.

3. Training. I’ve started a ‘t’ theme here, so let’s stick to it and talk about training. This is not something you need a computer science degree for. Nor an art, English (or Arabic, or Japanese, or Polish, etc.), or any other degree. This is something you can just do, and learn how while trying. College classes can certainly streamline that process — they did for me — but game developers can come from anywhere. The tools are out there, and Google can lead you down a lot of dead ends, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my brief life so far, it’s that once you accept the fact that you can learn pretty much anything that anyone else has already learned, you can learn pretty much anything anyone else has already learned. My degree was in “Broadcasting and Digital Media”, with audio and miscellany focuses. It was great for learning those things, but only taking a handful of programming classes hasn’t prevented me from learning how to cobble together a game on my own.

4. Time. Some games take a long time to make. Learning takes a long time to do. When you’re making a game before you know how to make it, it takes longer than you’d expect. Yes, even longer than that doubled estimate you came up with to compensate for how unexpectedly long it would take. So, do yourself a favor and don’t do what I did: don’t push for a big, complex game with lots of content and features. The Rampant Coyote has a lot of experience behind him, and even he has written many times about the scheduling troubles he’s encountered making something as big as Frayed Knights, along with all of its creeping features. My time log tells me that since I started keeping track a few months ago, I’ve spent an average of three hours a week on this. I’ve probably spent about 200 hours, grand total, maybe half of that actually programming. I tell myself that, if I just keep swimming, I’ll be done eventually.

5. Tools. There are a lot of tools out there designed to make game development easy. Unity, LWJGL… I didn’t use many of them. Don’t do that.

6. Learn. I couldn’t think of a ‘t’ for this (but I will as soon as I’ve already submitted this), but one of the most rewarding aspects, for me, has been all the things I’ve learned. When I started this project, I had done a bit of coding in a handful of classes and on my own, and even helped a friend in his intro C++ class (which is a point unto itself — I knew very little C++, but much of what I’d learned about Java and programming in general let me help him out!). But I had never really made a full game before. I had never dealt with, from scratch, putting a picture on the screen before. In fact, this is one of the reasons I was so stubborn about getting help — I wanted to learn it all myself! It’s been a frustrating, infuriating slog. But oh, it feels so good. You’ll learn a lot about things you didn’t know you needed to know. Enjoy it!

7. Pragmatism. Cold, hard pragmatism. I read an article once by John Carmack (of id Software fame) that made me feel a whole lot better about my programming. I can’t remember the name of the website I found it at, but the gist of the article was that the perfect is the enemy of the good. There is a point at which you can stop worrying about whether you’re doing it capital-R Right and just do what you can figure out. Maybe my collision detection isn’t very efficient. Maybe things aren’t encapsulated as neatly as they should be. But, you know what? If I take the time to make everything perfect, I’ll never finish. I have limitations. The joy is in getting something to work and play anyway. So, I try to do my best to use good programming practices for whatever context I’m working with, without worrying about getting it perfect, knowing that next year I’ll realize a better way to do things no matter how meticulously I do them now. As I said, I still try to program as well as I know how — that closes the door on so many potential problems down the line — but I try not to let myself get stuck on it. My future self will scoff at whatever I do now anyway, so I might as well get to Future Me sooner.

8. Enjoy! I haven’t always had fun making this thing. I’m nowhere near finished. Right now, I’m still trying to make sure I’ve ironed out all the glitches in jumping from tile to tile and figuring out what needs to be drawn in front of who in front of who in front of what. But, it’s very satisfying. I’ve learned so much. In the end, the game may or may not be good, but I’ll have, on the whole, enjoyed making it. And I hope you will, too. ^_^

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

SteamOS?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 24, 2013

Just after me worrying about the juggernaut of Valve becoming too dominant, here comes this… 🙂

Linux-Based SteamOS is Valve’s big play for the living room

IMO, anybody who didn’t see this coming wasn’t paying attention (and if you aren’t in the industry, you are forgiven for not needing to pay attention…). Given Newell’s sudden interest in Linux, his criticism of Windows 8 and the apparent move towards closing the OS, and of course the rumored “Steam Box.”

I guess one surprise for me was the emphasis on the living-room experience instead of an actual end-run around Windows 8, targeting the desktop gaming experience. But I’m not sure how the latter would work, anyway.

One obvious issue is that of the many games that will already work for the system, presumably almost all of them have been built for the desktop experience. These things don’t port all as automatically as we’d suppose. The PC gaming experience has traditionally been fundamentally different from console gaming. In all likelihood the “already compatible” games might not be the best living-room games…

… except many are indie games which – in many cases – were really console or console wannabe titles that weren’t well-optimized for the PC anyway. Or games that had one foot in both camps.

I think the word to the wise game developer here remains “multiplatform!” In the extreme. The landscape is fragmenting on a level not seen since the early days of the industry, in the early 80s, when you had Atari, Apple, Coleco, Intellivision, Etc.

These are dang exciting times. Crazy, fun, exciting times. I wish I had more hours in a day to participate.

 

Filed Under: Biz, News - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Guest post: Tides and Trends in Video Game Crowd-Funding

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 23, 2013

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for – someone other than ME! While I’m off on business in Asia, some brave folks have offered a few thoughts to share here on Tales of the Rampant Coyote. Today, it’s an offering by Lee, aka Leewelo. This is more of a list of several observations and metaphors related to crowd-funding. Stuff to ponder and argue about… Enjoy! – Jay

 

Tides and trends in videogame crowdfunding
or how poor marine metaphors can be use to waste your time

High Tide

• Crowdfunding has became so ‘popular’ and is draining so much money from gamers that what I will now call ‘historical’ game publishers are (or soon will be) again in need of rethinking the way they do that business if they want to keep their sales & profits
•  ‘Mobile’ gaming publishers seems far less impacted. I think that the crowdfunding wave is an extension of the mobile gaming (& apps) market that can be characterized by being fast paced, low price, low volume (for most individual games) and multitarget.
• The mobile gaming & app market has been made possible by the spread of smartphones and non-niche mobile terminals. Or rather both are indivisibles. Else we would all have blackberryapplepods. You don’t need much power for that. But semi-open platforms for apps and games do.
• The clouds are fun, take many shapes, have many uses, but the world remains divided: cloudy days are not fun and keep you in the house – which you may not want for your freedom and control over your data, unblemished skies can get too sunny, with no shade to connect to and no way to get that sunscreen you forgot at home.

 

Low Tide

The floating Itsukushima Shrine torii at low tide, Takuu. Photo Sputnikcccp, CC by-sa

• As with the music industry, all the immobilism in the ‘historical’ game publishers will take years to disappear. So DRM will cling to games like tabernacles to their rocks.
• crowdfunding can leave you dry as a fish trapped in a tide pool. Managing your budget will become critical, or you will be driven away, unwilling to spend the time to sift through the different projects, to find that beautiful seashell you dream of.
• As on the beach, year after years, you build-up your acumen regarding beach vendors… or did you? Managing a budget means looking beyond your first reaction to a project, looking at is viability, its benefits, its costs. How much is an ice cone worth? How much for five hours of core gameplay? Five? If like me you are more drawn to RPGs, this may well be a choice you will have to make. Projects may seem overpriced, but if a project full audience is that of the crowdfunding, it will barely break even if at all. The risk for you is get ripped-off by an overpriced ice cone or two you will drop in the sand. The vendor may lose its stall and shirt there…. and credibility, which may become paramount in the years to come with the increase ‘public’ exposure of the game developers of all kinds. However, you usually don’t spend the whole year at the beach…
• You never knew there were so many game developers around the globe? Look closer. More are coming. Summer is ending but the beaches will get crowded. Is it a new gold rush in the electronic seas? By the way, they all have great ideas. At least the ones you bother to check up on.

Trends

• ‘Indie’ is becoming a whirlpool term, sucking in everything that comes near it. But from experienced developers going indie (pendant) with their own studio and AAA crowdfunded game to the noob indie looking for 500k$ to buy some hardware and licenses, not mentioning the ‘indie’ studios of large publishers/developers, there is a world. Thankfully it also encompasses ambitious small teams and one-man teams with nicely scoped projects like our host. I do not yet see any vocables rising that would help us distinguish between scallops and clams.
• Similarly, ‘oldschool’ can now be used for games like ‘ancient’ and ‘old’ can be used for personal computers. If it is older than 6 months, it’s now oldschool. Double that and it can even become cool and trendy. Double that and it warrants an ultra super hd remake or two, a slingshot port, a full range of commercial clones and a GOG edition. Disclaimer: Shellfish abuse may distort your perception of time. Nota: I need to apologize to GOG there, a game can now be a Good Old Game (but not yet oldschool) 6 months before its initial release (and “almost” DRM free…).
• Crowdfunding platforms really need to improve their software and get real search engines, visible keywords (and somehow wikified to the funders) with rss feeds based on those, status flags, multi-leveled tree structures, better baker-kit, better/more diverse currency & payment options, international delivery agreements (that one’s taking it a bit too far perhaps). Alas I see no trend yet.
• Single-player is making a comeback (great!), with non-massive on-line multiplayer and other hybrids in the mixed. This is good. The social interaction level often required in MMO is just not possible for the different gamer social & age slices. Moreover, for many it seems to just add stress, which is unhealthy in high doses I’ve been told. So now we will get to build a sand castle and be helped or bothered by a handful of people, with the possibility of looking at other sand sculptures, but without the crowd spoiling the view.
• Artsy games are now a full genre of their own. They deserve it. But just like art, everything you don’t like is not art and does not fit in the genre.
• Transparency in crowdfunded gaming development funds allocation is just as in politics and before the IRS/fiscal administrations. Full disclosure if you don’t have much dough or a nice trip to some amenable islands.
• You can now give your input to how a game should be designed. Except the ten thousands other funders also can. Do you trust their vision enough to respect and build on their opinions? Do you trust the initial project to make their own decisions and ignore the ignominies proffered by the trolling funders? Do you in turn troll to get your way, because, after all you paid to get there? Like most utopias, the first days are full of hope and glory, spent in brotherhood bliss…

If we are shaping that industry, how will it shape us in return? How will the distribution channels (traditional & mass market (e.g. Amazon), large online platforms, apps markets, crowdfunded, non-crowdfunded independent, bundles, ‘promo’ channels) affect the whole?

We can see a stronger division between retroified games and purely innovative ones. This one was already there, but the industry had been mostly dominated by a mass of game-alike [insert year number] with a sprinkle of small novelties. Will this fade in time?

The digital distribution has gained so much support it is now the norm and majority of sales. That also means there is more direct exposure of the gamers (buy one get our free newsletter, new adds every time you log-in, and so on…) and also more involvement in the communities. Will we be able to give as much attention to a game as five, ten or twenty years ago? Not only your social context changes, but if you are passionate about games, there’s just so much material to read, watch or even play.

A game a day, in your browser, on your mobile device, or both. Some weeks I am already doing that, through the excellent selection IndieGames. Will this gain traction? Is the ad monetization enough to sustain it while more and more people block ads? Will a new kind of subscription scheme arise?

From the 1980s we can say that we have now 2 to 3 generations of videogamers. The last one is dematerialized, becoming hyper connected and maturing. They will seek more subtle enjoyment from their games, just like the first generation. Will there be a maturing of the market/offer like the one of the SciFi literature thirty years ago (or so), the Fantasy literature fifteen years ago or so? (movies in those fields are taking their sweet time)? Will the fourth generation erect itself in opposition and reject part or all of what makes video gaming today?

Will internet become our L-space and like some modern libraries include games in the manifest?

Will the copyright wars kill us all before we run out of oil to make the chemicals to make the electronics we are using daily?

Will we run out of drinkable water before we run out of fresh game ideas?

You have read this far (or perhaps just scrolled fast), so I will share the two relevant truths I’m sure of :
We are living in interesting times (no, it is not a Chinese curse).
If you prevent mankind from gaming, you will need another name for it.

– Lee – 2013.09.04. CC by-nc-sa

Filed Under: General - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Fighting the Good Fight Without the Juggernaut

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 20, 2013

Is releasing a game on PC without being guaranteed on Steam a losing proposition?

Maybe. The Racing the Sun team probably thinks so.

Seriously, this scares me. There’s a whole lot about this that scares me. I don’t want to have an entire industry completely beholden to a single company (oh, wait, there’s Microsoft… we’re already doomed…)

I’ll tell you – the numbers, the responses, much of what they talk about here – they all look extremely familiar. Very, very familiar. They could have been talking about an RPG very near and dear to my heart.

(Except the RPG took significantly longer to make…)

This will probably shock and surprise nobody. But for games that are sold as products (instead of as services, like an MMO), Steam’s pretty much the 800 lb gorilla. If submitting and selling games via Steam was as simple as selling a game via Google Play or the App Store, that’d be one thing.  You just do it. So long as your title adheres to some minimal standards, no problem. But instead, there’s the massive high-school student council election popularity contest where your game has to compete with vaporware marvels that promise the world.

But hey, after spending all that time and money generating support to get the Greenlight votes, who has anything left to actually finish a game?

As it currently exists… Steam is simultaneously enabling PC gaming on one hand, and choking the life out of it on the other. If I want to make a PC game, but I can’t guarantee a spot on Steam, it’s getting to the point where I would be very reluctant (as an actual business trying to survive making games) to do anything without some kind of prior blessing from the gods of Steam. This puts us in EXACTLY the same place we were in the bad ol’ days of the publishers dominating the landscape. This is exactly what the indie movement was trying to avoid. We didn’t intend to sacrifice a consortium of overlords for one big (if usually benevolent) overlord.

I’m going to be eternally grateful to Notch for not putting Minecraft on Steam. So at least there’s one giant title that reminds people that Steam is not the source of all indie games.

Now this is usually the point where people launch into angry tirades about how much they love Steam, justify their decisions to stick with Steam-and-almost-exclusively Steam. I know, I know. I’ve got about three metric buttloads of games on Steam, too. Amazon is my go-to place for books and my Christmas / birthday shopping, too. I even shop at Wal*Mart. But that doesn’t mean that these juggernauts don’t concern me. Honestly – I don’t want a world without Steam. Or Amazon. Or Wal*Mart, for that matter. They are convenient as hell. And they offer such service that everybody else who even wants to compete in this space has to up their game. That’s a good thing. Even when it means I have to do the same.

What I’d like to see is that these guys are always running scared of their competition, and that they and their competitors keep each other on their toes correspondingly. I’d like to see consumers that are fully educated in their decisions, and know what alternatives are out there. I think we’ll get there, but I think we need to find better ways of fighting the good fight without the juggernauts. We need to find ways to be Pepsi in a world dominated by Coca Cola. It shouldn’t be an either-or proposition for consumers or developers.

(Note – As of today I’m out of the country, and I have a bunch of blog posts – some guest posts – set to auto-post while I’m gone. I’ll try and go “live” when I can, but I don’t know the quality of the connection from where I’ll be. Bangladesh, for those who might be curious… with a pit-stop on the way back in Thailand. Day-job stuff. Anyway, I may be a little slow responding to comments as a result. Sorry.)

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Ouya Implements the Wil Wheaton Rule

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 19, 2013

Ouya’s “Free the Games” fund was pretty much waiting to get abused. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. After lots of complaining, some very public displays of frustration, and a few (very few) defenders, Ouya has changed its policy. Effectively, they’ve invoked with Wil Wheaton “Don’t be a d**k” rule, stating that if they or the community of developers judge that a project is attempting to game the system, it will now be disqualified.

How do you game a system? Effectively, it’s a promise to double your money, and it’s guaranteed until the fund runs out. So, basically, if you take out a loan from friends and family members, and can come out with something by way of a game for Ouya in a short period of time, you can pay everyone back and make a decent profit. The Free the Games Fund was intended to encourage games with a high level of community support and interest to go Ouya-exclusive. When a game hits over $50k with less than 200 backers, something’s not right.

Besides the new disqualification rule, Ouya has also extended the qualifications so that games that make less than $50k via Kickstarter. Those games will be held to a smaller window of exclusivity – because $20k isn’t a whole lot of motivation to be exclusive to a platform that still doesn’t have a wide distribution base (yet). They also got rid of the “winner take all” $100k bonus, and are paying out the fund with more traditional milestone-like payments, rather than at game launch.

I’ve been holding off weighing in on the argument, and I’m glad I did. The cacophony of voices was quite enough while this was going on, and many of them seemed rather gleeful to see the Ouya’s “epic fail” with their fund.

As for me – I hate being a naysayer when somebody wants to try an out-of-the-box idea. I’ll play devil’s advocate, sure, as its important to identify possible risks with any venture. But in the end – succeed or fail – the community at large learns from the experiment. Playing it safe is what caused the games industry to get into the deep rut that only the indies could get it out of in the first place.

I feel doubly bad because in this case, one of the main issues is that Ouya put too much faith in the integrity of game developers.  Yeah, they shoulda figured. And while there are always scoundrels out there who think nothing of gaming the system to get an advantage over others, I also have very strong anecdotal evidence that many of the members of the indie game dev community possess exceptional integrity and charity. Really, it’s an awesome, awesome community to be a part of, most of the time. I feel bad that Ouya got their shorts pulled up over their head by the less scrupulous exceptions.

Nevertheless, even as optimistic and thrilled with the community as I am, I was not at all surprised. I was a programmer for a “Network Marketing” company for a couple of years. I learned just how obsessively people will game a system, no matter how carefully thought out your rules, when money is on the line. To be fair – at least the dubious practices that tried to exploit the system seemed to be earnest, honest-to-goodness game projects and not pure scams. But I imagine that there was far too much work necessary to take advantage of this for a non-repeatable scam.

I also thought that $50k was a bit high, but I kinda left that alone, too, assuming that the Ouya folks knew what they were doing. Maybe that’s a big assumption – it seems they are kinda feeling their way around in the dark a lot, too. They have been the first to do a lot of things. They are going to make a few missteps. They are certainly facing an uphill battle.

Part of what I do what I do, and write what I write, is because I love cheering for the pioneers and the underdogs. I like Ouya and what they are trying to accomplish. I’m an indie. I’m all about people taking the long shots. I still think this “Free the Games Fund” is a little on the weird side, and not at all confident that it will give it the success Ouya needs, but I certainly wish them well.

Filed Under: Biz, News - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Game Biz: Serving Two (Or More) Masters

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 18, 2013

Blizzard officially announced the shut-down of their auction house for Diablo III. There are several more months of operation before it gets phased out, but Blizzard has thrown in the towel on this controversial in-game feature.

I don’t play Diablo III, myself. Oh, I was going to. I very nearly pre-ordered it. But then I heard about the always-on DRM, which caused me to pause with concern. And one of the reasons cited for the “always online” aspect of the game was – surprise! – the auction house. And of course, there were big launch issues, which naturally follows from the “always on” crapola. Once that all settled down, hilarity began to ensue about the auction house. Exploits, player bans, and of course balance / loot issues. Because it was so integral to the game for many players (directly or indirectly), all other aspects of game design kinda ended up passing through the rather perverse filter of the auction house. It skewed the design.

The project lead John Hight admits exactly that, noting that “it ultimately undermines Diablo’s core game play.”

I can’t pretend to be an expert on it. I’ll defer to the experts on the details and on whether or not it really was a bad thing. One thing I DO know from professional experience is that that when real-world money has changed hands on your watch and with your apparent blessing, it’s REALLY hard to simply do a database rollback when you discover shenanigans. It sounds like Blizzard – in intent, anyway – decided to go back to what they are famous for, and focus on making a good game with a great loot system, rather than forcing their auction house to work. They seem to be taking the high road. Maybe I’ll end up playing Diablo III after all.

Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about Diablo III. It’s just kind of a big-profile example of a problem facing all game developers. The point was brought up in a panel with the Romeros at Salt Lake Comic Con, reiterating a position Brenda Romero has stated on numerous occasions. While it was mostly applicable to “free to play” games, as I recall they mentioned the Diablo III auction house as another example. The problem with these games is that the designers are forced to serve two masters – game design versus maximized revenue stream. Guess which one wins out when the suits run the show?

This is hardly unique to anybody. Any kind of game that is intended to extract money from players as they play – instead of acting as a product that you pay for up front – is going to face exactly this problem. With a product, it’s straightforward – you make the absolute best game possible that players will absolutely love, and they just can’t help themselves but want to buy and tell their friends about.

But when a game is more of a service, a recurring revenue generator, things get… weird. To make the game successful, you have to keep asking the player for money. You have to keep providing them motivation to part with their money. To borrow an analogy from the Comic Con panel, to pay for the free meals at your restaurant, you may have to charge for the plates and utensils – not to mention exorbitant charges to use the restroom! While many of the goals to make the “best game possible” run parallel to making “the most profitable game possible” (after all, if the game sucks, nobody will spend any money on it…),  there are points where the two may diverge. Lots.

That’s not to say it’s impossible to take the high road and try to make a great game that has premium add-ons, services, DLC, or whatnot.  But there are going to be difficult trade-offs, regardless. This isn’t new, or unique to a particular class of games. There are always trade-offs, and we’re always serving several demands / masters, compromising our design to meet the needs of reality. That, or we never release our games.

In the modern era, these problems may be more acute. The awesome indie revolution has made things more competitive than ever. All game designers have to deal with the realities of time, budget, the market, and the need to serve the player as best as possible while still profiting enough to afford to stay in business so you can keep doing so.  There’s never a perfect compromise. Ultimately, game developers have to decide individually to what extent they will allow these economic realities to undermine their gameplay and game quality. “Not at all” sounds like great PR copy, but it’s an ideal, not reality.I just worry about a new generation of game developers that seem to be happy to take the path of the dark side when those paths diverge. They don’t even compromise, but instead treat players as credit cards with legs. Will their influence spread? Will they poison the gaming well, as customers eventually get sick of “being had” by these diversions?

Filed Under: Biz, Design, Production - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



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