Massive Indie RPG Pay-What-You-Want Bundle Available Now!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 17, 2013

Since before computer games even existed as an industry, the computer role-playing game genre has been heavily influenced by the “indies.” We didn’t know them as indies back then – we didn’t even refer to the games as “role-playing games” at that point – but there were individuals and small teams working on their own with whatever resources they could provide themselves to translate the experience of the role-playing game hobby to the computer. In many cases, these unauthorized projects on university computers were erased as soon as they were discovered by the administration. But they labored on.

The early, iconic RPGs of the 1980s were made before there was a major video game industry to be independent of. Even as the publishing titans began dominating the field in the mid-to-late 80s, there were small teams of independent developers throwing together their little Ultima-likes, roguelikes, and scaled-down adventures.

In the last few years, the field has exploded with the results of indie labor. While the mainstream productions have gotten increasingly stale and hard to distinguish from action games, indies have delved the concepts of the past, and melded them with new ideas and in some cases some truly bizarre concepts. The results aren’t always pretty. They are never as polished as their mainstream cousins. Sometimes they aren’t even all that interesting or original.

But a lot of them are pretty amazing. A lot of them are just plain fun, full of the raw personality and weird ideas of their creators. There are great experiences to be had, and great adventures to be enjoyed.

And for a few days, there’s a pretty awesome indie RPG bundle available to jump-start your collection of indie RPGs in a big hurry. There are a baker’s dozen RPGs available in total, plus some extrasn (soundtracks, etc.) to be unlocked. IMO, the bundle is worth it (and then some) for just for Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. . 🙂 But there are plenty of cool games (and a few that I have never played!) included. All-in-all, we’re talking about about a hundred bucks’ worth of indie RPGs from a pretty wide spectrum of styles and approaches. There’s the massive 3D epic Frayed Knights, to the tiny but fun Inaria with its roots in Ultima III, to the tactics-heavy Telepath RPG: Servants of God, to the boardgame like Empires & Dungeons II, to the blend of Lovecraftian Horror, classic RPGs, and tactical strategy Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, to the “Choose Your Own Adventure”-like interactive books The Siege of the Necromancer, and The Wizard from Tarnath Tor, to the fast-pased Roguelike Dungeon Fray, to the “RPG Card Game” Northmark: Hour of the Wolf,  to a 16-bit JRPG-style fable about modern youth unable to cope with today’s frustrating economy in Unemployment Quest, and several others – this is a grab-bag with a wide frickin’ variety of games.

On top of everything else, not only will your purchase help the crop of indie RPG developers (like me!) represented in this bundle, but a portion of your payments go to charity, and to an indie developer grant awarded to a developer of choice voted on by customers.

So… while I don’t think it’ll make anybody even relatively rich (unlike certain bundles…), it’s a pretty awesome opportunity to support indies and charity and REALLY beef up your indie RPG collection. Even if you already have a couple of the games from the bundle already, it’s well worth checking out.

I’ll quit talking now and just give you the link:

Bundle In a Box (Indie RPG Bundle)

Filed Under: Deals, Frayed Knights, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Reminder: Guest Posts Wanted

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 16, 2013

Hey folks –

I’m heading out of the country this weekend (Friday), and can probably use all the help I can get as far as blog posts are concerned. I’m queuing up what I can, but as my community often seems more knowledgeable and skilled as I am anyway, I will appreciate any further submissions to help keep things going.

I will be deep – DEEP – in the third-world on this trip, and while my hotel offers wifi on paper (I’m told it also offers electricity *on paper* but it’s nowhere near consistent), I’m not expecting great connectivity or time to be online. Ye Olde Day Job will probably have me hopping.

Anyway – thanks again, for those who have already submitted posts, and to those who will shortly.

Filed Under: Rampant Games - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles , Part 5

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 13, 2013

Did I mention that my design document for Frayed Knights outlining guidelines and principles for designing adventures got kinda big? No? Well, it did. . This is a multi-part series describing my level-design guidelines, taken 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, and here is the result. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here,  part 3 here, and part 4 here. We’re getting to the end of the “general” principles, with probably one more post about ’em, and then we’ll move on to some of the more specific, technical principles.

Warning – there are a few spoilers here from the first game, so if you still haven’t finished it and wish to remain completely unsullied, you should quit now.

#11 – Avoid excessive backtracking

Avoid making the player go back-and-forth over previously explored territory (or any other kind of busy-work).  One way to avoid this is to make the challenge or goal clear before discovering the tool(s) needed to solve it. For example, there’s the ring-like artifact in FK1’s lizardman lair that the party can discuss in detail, realizing they need three stones to activate it (while they should have only encountered one of the stones by this point under normal play progression – and there are more than three available).  In the Temple of Anarchy, the party can see the inner sanctum across the chasm, and the hanging bridge to cross the chasm, before they learn of the mechanisms necessary to lower the bridge.

One of the places where I kinda screwed up on this was in the basement of the Tower of Almost Certain Death. There’s a point where the “best” (?) solution for an obstacle requires a trip back to town and following a quest sequence.  Fortunately, once you are back in town, the entire quest sequence is self-contained. But it’s a bit of a hike to be forced to make. I love the quest, and I wanted to make it semi-mandatory and not just a side-quest, but encouraging the player to backtrack from down in a dungeon was not the greatest move on my part.

#12 – In-Game Suggestions for Course of Action

Frayed Knights doesn’t lead the player around by the nose to their next course of action. But it does prompt the player. A lot, if necessary. Between journal entries, NPC dialog, in-party dialog, visual cues, and so forth, the player shouldn’t ever be at a loss for what to do next. In this case, a little redundancy is fine.  If the game can detect that the party has gone too far without picking up the magic key, it’s okay to trigger a conversation where Dirk asks, “Uh, okay, what are we supposed to be doing here again?”

#13 – Meaningful and Moral Decisions

In any map of medium or larger size (although it’s okay in a smaller map!), there should be at least one “interesting” decision – certainly meaningful, hopefully a moral or ethical quandary, and definitely non-trivial. It’s best if it is something that could come back and haunt the player later (in the dungeon, or in the game).  These should not be “lawful stupid” versus “psychotic evil” decisions (and may have options that try to choose a middle-road or alternative). Some of the more interesting ones (like whether or not to rescue the potentially dangerous prisoners or kill a surrendering enemy in FK1) may be a choice between rational practicality and idealism.

The game should avoid passing judgement. In fact, as easy way to do this is to make what would seem like a no-brainer pretty complicated.  Telegraph potential consequences. And reward whatever decision the player makes with at least one drama star point.

And as far as consequences – yes, there should be consequences to these decisions. If the are telegraphed at the time the choice is made, then they do not have to be immediate. Since this is Frayed Knights, it’s a good idea to play up all the consequences (where possible) for comedic value. Sometimes the very best consequence is simply to have people refer to it later in the game – maybe much later. Word gets around, and dialogs will include references to which choice the player made (if that makes logical sense).  This means lots of dialog variations (and I mean *LOTS*, speaking from experience), but I feel it makes for a satisfying gaming experience. Consequences don’t have to be earth-shaking to be meaningful – sometimes small and personal is better.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Gets a Licensekeyectomy

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 12, 2013

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the dungeon again…

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon has been updated to version 1.06.

Incidentally, there was never a version 1.05.  If you have something labeled 1.05, it didn’t come from Rampant Games. I just completely skipped that version to avoid confusion.

So what does 1.06 do? Not a whole lot, to be honest. The demo hasn’t changed.

The biggest change is that the license key requirement has been removed. I think that will have pretty close to zero effect on most customers (since it’s a fire-and-forget thing, without any kind of ‘phoning home’), but it is one less thing you have to worry about. And yes, since most people consider it weak and unobtrusive, they also still consider it DRM, so I can now proudly claim that Frayed Knights is *DRM FREE*. So there.

Why the change?

Well, the game has been out a while now, and pirated versions have been out a while as well, so I figured if the back door is open wide, there’s no sense in leaving the front door locked.

Secondly, I’m looking at distributing Frayed Knights through a few other venues in the near future, and the lack of an “in-game key” simplifies that a bit.

The other changes are primarily minor balance issues and fixing a couple of embarrassing but subtle cut-and-paste errors. The rogue class (Dirk) is a little better at searching. Costs and effects of Brigantine and Fine Brigantine armor have been adjusted. Laminate Armor was also made cheaper, so its cost is more in-line with other types of armor. The non-magical healing feats (Bind Wounds and Battle Dressing) have been significantly beefed up so they might actually be worth spending character points on.  Quick draw provides a higher initiative bonus. The Spell Dodger feat was actually slightly nerfed, as it was a bit too potent. Note: These changes impact some monsters with these feats, too.

In other words, as a Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon veteran, the changes won’t significantly impact your experience. It’ll mainly make the new player experience a little bit smoother. However, if you want to patch your older version of the game, you can grab the patch here. The patch fixes *all* versions of the released game, from 1.00 through 1.04. That page has the details of the patch, as well.

Those of you who have gotten the game via Desura will have an update available there, as well.

For the time being, if you order the game via this site (or other BMT Micro affiliates), you will still receive a key. While you no longer need to use that key in-game to activate the full version of Frayed Knights, you can still use it as a gift code on Desura, if you have a desire to do so. Just log into Desura, go to http://www.desura.com/gifts, and enter your code, and you can activate the game on Desura as well.

This should be true of past Frayed Knights activation codes, as well. Email me if you have any problems doing this.

Enjoy!

 

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

Sturgeon’s Law and Curation

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 11, 2013

“Ninety percent of everything is crap.” – Sturgeon’s Law.

This is the commonly rephrased version of an adage by Science Fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, when he was defending science fiction – explaining that it was hardly unique in having lots and lots of bad examples out there.

The thing is, Sturgeon’s Law was coined in the 1950s, when all of these things were curated by gatekeepers, in the form of publishers. Granted, there were often quite a few more (and of varying levels of quality) than there were a couple of decades later, when things got massively consolidated.

Arguably, the gatekeepers – who I’m not a big fan of, as you know – did do an okay job of acting as filters in the games and book biz. If all you are doing is comparing the ratio of gems to crap in the marketplace, then they arguably did their job. The ratio was higher after passing through these gatekeepers than before. And in many cases, they were in a position to help polish the gems.

My problem is that I feel a lot of rough diamonds got filtered out as well. After all, about a dozen publishers rejected Harry Potter. Regardless of your opinion of the books, the success of that particular empire speaks for itself. (While I liked the Harry Potter books myself, I have to grudgingly grant a similar acknowledgement for the Twilight series).  Just imagine if Rowling had quit after the seventh or eighth rejection. The world of fantasy fiction, young adult literature, and the mainstream publishing industry would be a vastly different landscape than it is today.

But the same thing could possibly be said if the editors hadn’t been on-hand to help her polish The Philosopher’s Stone to an appropriate gleam to attract enough of an audience for the book to hit critical mass.

With the modern indie explosion across all media, there’s a distinct lack of curators, which means the gem-to-crap ratio naturally diminishes. But it also means the sheer quantity of titles goes through the roof, and while there might be ten times as much crap out there as there used to be, there’s maybe three or four times as many gems.

As a veteran gamer and indie game fan, I’m very pleased with this. I know where and how to look (well, sometimes), and I’m reasonably well-enough plugged into what is going on that I get delighted by a lot of gems that would never have seen the light of day in the old days. This thrills me to no end. Many of my favorite games of the last five years would never have been released if it hadn’t been possible for indies to succeed making an end-run around the traditional, mainstream industry.

But what about the new gamer? The audience member exploring the indie scene for the first time. According to Sturgeon’s Law, their first experience is likely to not be of very high quality.  In fact, going with the (conservative) 90% crap percentage, from a purely probabilistic random sampling, it’s not until they’ve waded through about seven crappy experiences before they encounter their first gem. How many people will stick with it that long?

This is the argument for a greater need of curation, now that the traditional gatekeepers of media have fallen on their butts. This is exactly why games that are on Steam have far, far more success than others. Steam is easy, well-known, and offers at least some minimal guarantees of quality. Places like GOG.COM do the same, but they are less well-known. By limiting the quantity of everything and increasing the quality of what remains, the curators help audience members find reasonably quality experiences, which is good for the health of the market. People who have good experiences are likely to keep it up.

There are some problems with this view. Number one – I think there is a sliding scale between pure, liquid crap and a gleaming masterpiece. The 90% (or 95%, or 98%) threshold is a bit arbitrary. There are plenty of games, books, and movies that I’ve enjoyed (and even loved) that are unlikely to be among the top-ten-percent of their field even by my own biased estimation.

Secondly… well, back to the bias thing. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. It gets especially weird in an era where rapid communication paired with the relative anonymity of reviewers (it’s another large group with few gatekeepers) encourage something of a groupthink. I know many review sites are under pressure to make sure their reviews of any game aren’t too outside the norm – within the standard deviation – lest their reviewers or process come under suspicion.  The same holds true for any sort of curation or greenlighting – there’s safety in numbers. You don’t want to be the sole cheerleader on a project that later tanked.  I’m sure there was a lot of safety in rejecting Harry Potter, just as there was plenty of safety in heralding the latest Bioshock as a masterpiece. (For the record, I liked Bioshock: Infinite, too. A lot. I just didn’t think of it as particularly groundbreaking – just well-executed).

One approach has been to embrace the power of the masses or of rapid communication (as Steam Greenlight and GameRankings have done) and simply let quantity trump quality in terms of ranking and curating titles. The problem is that this technique may make plenty of business sense, but doesn’t serve the consumer very well.  These systems get gamed and abused pretty badly. They tend to reward less-than-ideal behavior or features, but like the old gatekeepers, they do tend to result in a higher gem-to-crap ratio, so by that measure they are successful.

What I’d like to see, rather than an appeal to the wisdom of the mobs, is the kind of system where potential customers can instead be lead by recommendations by people with similar tastes. Sorta like how Goodreads (or, for all its flaws, Amazon) is going… but for games. In order to reduce the lure of consensus, I’d like to see specific reviewers highlighted. If you find a particular reviewer / journalist who you like – even if your tastes don’t match – I’d like to see that reflected.

What I do not want to see (and I sadly see us sliding that direction) is a return to the bad ol’ days where a handful of gatekeepers pretty much dictate what can be discovered by interested gamers.  I think we need guiding voices more than ever (simply because there are more titles appearing every day than there ever were before), but I want to see these as guidance, not limitation.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Sony Enters Microconsole Market; Nintendo Extends Indie Outreach

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 10, 2013

Wait, whut?

It’s a little pricier than the Ouya, at $100 without a controller, or $150 with a controller and an 8 GB card (it has only 1 GB RAM on-board).  Mysteriously, it’s entering the market at about the same time as the PS4. While on the surface it’s not a great deal compared to the Ouya, it will come with something the Ouya currently does not: a strong library of games.

And while not quite as open as the Android-based microconsoles, they have been actively wooing indies.

I dunno. I see potential flop here, but isn’t everything? It wouldn’t take much to outsell the Ouya. Right now the whole microconsole market (which is – at least as of today – the Ouya) is still questionable as far as what it is, and who plays the games.  Is Sony just being really forward-thinking here, seeing potential that makes others hesitate? Or is it may just be an alternative strategy to boost lackluster (to be generous) Vita sales? I dunno.

And now even Nintendo is looking at loosening up their process to make it easier for indies to work with them.

The world has gone topsy-turvy. Indies and mainstream console makers getting so cozy? Sony trying to compete with the Ouya? Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!

So I guess you could say that the industry is now in upheaval, turmoil,  and transition. While the core of indie gaming has stayed the same, the marketplace for indie game has radically changed at least twice in the time I have been involved. It looks like we’re entering a new phase, and mainstream gaming is transforming itself at the same time.  I don’t know how it will end up. Perhaps more stratification of game developers, with more tiers between “indie” and “mainstream” taking more solid form? The return of the mid-tier? More mixing and blurring the lines? All of the above?

Interesting times, to be sure. Maybe it’s just the optimist in me, but as a developer and a gamer, I’m hopeful.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, Mainstream Games - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Salt Lake Comic Con Post-Battle Report

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 9, 2013

As I mentioned last week, I went to my first Comic Con this weekend – the very first Salt Lake Comic Con. It ended up breaking a few records. It managed to be the most heavily-attended first-year Comic Con in history (by almost 2x). It also turned into the single largest convention ever held in the state of Utah, I think. Pretty successful numbers, at least, with over 50,000 tickets sold.

Some quick descriptions of the event:

* Crowded.

* Very Crowded

* Lots of people wearing box-shaped Minecraft heads or pixely picks, in addition to the usual superheroes, starfleet personnel, Star Wars characters, and various incarnations of The Doctor.

* Insufficient Organization

* Absolutely impossible to see / do everything. Chock full ‘o stuff.

* A hell of a lot of fun.

I’m not a usual convention-goer. I guess to be more successful at what I do, I should attend more (and buy booth space), but that’s never been a big part of my life. With the exception of a Consumer Electronics Show, I’d say this was the biggest event I’ve ever attended.

Maybe it is a holdover from the years I attended the Game Developers’ Conference, but I tend to go for the panels and lectures. Yeah. Learning is fun. Sadly, as Comic Con isn’t really an educational / professional conference, the panels tended more towards the fan-based discussions and introductory level information, but I managed to attend several in some unfamiliar territory that were quite interesting.

I attended a panel by the team doing the new Tex Murphy game, the Tesla Effect (which included Rifftrax / Mystery Science Theater 3000 member Kevin Murphy), and found out what they’ve been doing since their successful Kickstarter. It’s looking pretty good. Oh, yeah, and it’s being built in Unity. All the cool kids are doing it, apparently. One of the more interesting things about the sets is that they are using exactly the same source data for the 3D virtual sets in the videos as they are in the 3D gameplay. While it’s able to be more nicely rendered in the movies, it means transitioning between the video segments and the interactive segments should be more seamless.

Another great panel I attended was the one for the movie Unicorn City. I’ve talked about it before, and I think I love it even more now, knowing a bit more about the details of how it was made, and the challenges they faced as indie movie developers. Just as interesting was an announcement by the financial backer for the film that he is involved with making a “Unicorn City” for real (under a different name). They’ve already bought the property and are about half funded. They’ve got plans for having a couple of restaurants / taverns on the property, themed seasonal events, and so forth – including a “haunted house” concept that should rival Richard Garriott’s big Halloween events.

As far as the gaming panels I attended, there wasn’t a whole lot new being discussed, but it John & Brenda Romero were extremely entertaining (and, to their credit, they kept it mainly kid-friendly!) in the two that I attended that they were involved in. Nobody on a panel about the “next big disruption in video games” thought the new microconsoles were really going to make a big impact (they weren’t too excited about the upcoming big-name consoles, either). I loved Brenda’s answer to the question about what the biggest disruption now & upcoming would be for the industry – Minecraft. She and John said that they’ve caught wind of a large number of AAA games that were canceled because of that game. In a nutshell, the AAA studios are now competing with the indies, and they wish they could be Minecraft. While it is certainly an exception by several orders of magnitude, it was a seismic event in the industry that heralded the shift to the indies, and is causing lots and lots of re-evaluation of how things can and should be done. The old ways are dead / dying, but the new ways aren’t yet set in stone. At least this was my interpretation.

I attended several panels on writing. While I’m looking at writing as yet one more hobby of far too many that I don’t have time to pursue, I do think a little bit of an exercise in that arena could improve my game dev skills, particularly in the RPG (or other story-heavy) arena. But a major aspect of my curiosity was to look at the parallels between the game publishing and book publishing.  I wanted to learn what the publishing and writing biz has been doing to react to the same kind of disruption (albeit probably on an even larger scale) as gaming.

It’s fascinating. Really. In the literary world, traditional publishing is far more hosed than it is in the video game industry. The plight of new authors in the “mainstream” publishing world is even worse. Far worse. Ridiculously worse. The overwhelming sense I received in several panels, from every single author (including ones with long careers working with mainstream, traditional publishers) was that if you are a new author, forget the big publishers. Or, at best, send stuff their way and go indie in the meantime. Perhaps at some later point, once you’ve already got a following, you might be able to get a book contract that might be interesting, particularly if the big publishers finally see the light and change their ways in the future. But for now… forget it.

That leaves either completely doing-it-yourself as an indie, or going through a “small press” publisher. The latter may or may not be a good option, depending upon the author, and depending upon the publisher – there are plenty of horrible ones out there. However, if you “go indie,” it absolutely has the same problems as going indie as a game developer – you spend half your time on business & marketing, rather than making your next title. That can be a pain. Even if you go with a publisher (big or small), a sizable chunk of your time will be spent marketing – they all depend on you to promote your own product.

One point brought up in both game panels and writing panels was the problem of lack of curation. Now, as a hardcore indie evangelist for many years, I’ve not been a major fan of ‘curation’ in the traditional sense. I don’t really want some panel of people with PhDs (or advanced marketing credentials) designating what’s worthy and what is not. We’ve been there, we’ve done that, and the problem is that they exclude a hell of a lot of wonderful creations, and yet still let a lot of crap in the door. Now, they are often competent enough that the gem-to-crap ratio is higher coming out of the filter than going in. That’s a good thing. But I don’t know that it’s worth the cost. However, while the wild-west of uncurated, free-for-all media has plenty of appeal for adventuresome veterans, Sturgeon’s Law can turn off most audiences, forcing them to flee for the safety of some kind of guarantee of quality from a credible source.

I’m sure that’s worthy of a blog post or three in the near future.

Actually, the whole event was a goldmine for possible blog post topics.

As far as big celebrities – I didn’t really spend any time looking for them. I caught glimpses of Dean Cain (Superman of Lois and Clark), Nicholas Brendon (Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Henry “The Fonz” Winkler, Adrian Paul (Highlander), John de Lancie (Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation), Kevin Sorbo (Hercules), Sofia Milos (CSI: Miami), and lots of others.  And nope, I never saw William Shatner or Stan Lee. Was tempted, but by schedule was too full. 🙂

As a final note, there was a comment about networking with other professionals in your field using social media and whatever. One best-selling author noted that he would never have Stephen King friend him on Facebook. Instead, you’ll make friends and contacts around your own level. And in five years, some of those folks – maybe you –  will have “broken out” and had some serious success. And they will be in a position to help the people who they’ve been friends with on their way up. So you get the “rising tide” effect (a rising tide lifts all ships) via cooperation all the way through.

Another tidbit: I can’t remember if it was John or Brenda Romero (or both, echoing each other) on the problems of Kickstarter & crowd-funding: The way it has evolved, a crowdfunded game ends up being developed via a near-waterfall methodology. Which is, with a few exceptions, a failed methodology for game development.

So… bottom line: Will I go again? Yeah, I’d definitely go to the next one. I hope they learned some lessons from this one and do a better job of organizing things next year (it may very well mean that they restrict ticket sales, however, to something less than what they had this year). But I did have a great time, if an exhausting one.

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Comic Con!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 6, 2013

Salt Lake City’s inaugural Comic Con is this weekend, and I’m joining the 40,000 other people who are descending upon the Salt Palace to get their geek on. I’ve never been much of a con-goer, to be honest. Visiting the Game Developer’s Conference back in the day, and my attendance at Brigham Young University’s Fantasy & Science Fiction Symposium while I was going to school there, was about as close as it ever came for me.
It was generally a time and expense thing for me. But when something like this is happening practically in your back yard, there’s not much excuse not to go.

According to the papers, the number of tickets sold far exceeded expectations, and this is now the biggest first-year Comic Con opening ever, and also the largest convention Salt Lake has ever hosted. Thanks to late ticket sales, the number is finally tipping 40,000 tickets. That is a lot of people. I missed the first day due to work, but I hope to catch most of today and Saturday.

The visiting guest list is about as long as my arm… the special guest list alone is pretty impressive, and then there are icons like Stan Lee, William Shatner, and Henry Wrinkler. I’m also looking forward to saying hi to some new friends and old at various panels and booths. John and Brenda Romero plan to be there – at least on Saturday, and I look forward to hearing Ed Fries offering his perspective on the video game industry. Then there are authors Dan Willis and Tracy Hickman, and some folks from Salt City Steamfest I’m looking forward to meeting again.

I expect it will be scarily crowded, but otherwise, a good time. I’ll be sure and tell you folks how it went next week.

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles, Part 4

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 5, 2013

Once more, I’m cribbing from a design document for Frayed Knights. This is a multi-part series describing my level-design guidelines.  You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

What happened was this: Since I’m working with a few extra people on dungeon design this time around, I codified some of my mental guidelines that I developed during the course of building Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, although many of them were philosophies I’ve just adopted over years of gaming. And now I share them with you. Some are fairly specific to the Frayed Knights series, but most are pretty adaptable to any RPG.

At this point, we’re still on general guidelines. WARNING – There are some spoilers for the first game here.

The next two guidelines are very similar, so I’ll throw in a bonus third guideline this time.

#8 – Provide warnings for traps

Traps can be placed on interactive objects, or triggered by walking into an area. While you can feel comfortable putting a trap on a door or a chest (it’s sort of a given that they MIGHT be trapped), any other use of a trap should telegraph it’s presence in some way so alert players know to attempt a search in advance. Bloodstains on the wall or floor next to the trap are one give-away. Dire warnings from NPCs, or scrawled on the wall earlier in the dungeon are other possibilities. Just try to avoid letting the player stumble blindly into a trap if they’ve been otherwise paying attention.

If nothing else, the player should say to themselves, “OH! I guess that’s why there’s a skeleton on the floor there! I should have searched!”

#9 – Provide hints / warnings of other secrets (ALMOST always)

While it’s okay to have the occasional super-well-hidden ‘easter egg’ type of secret in the game that players either need to be obsessive or read the strategy guide or online hints to discover, for the most part secret doors, hidden treasures (found by “searching”), and other secrets need to be hinted at by some means – just like traps – so the player doesn’t feel like they have to search every few steps and click on every square foot of the dungeon. Sounds, text descriptions, dialogs, visual appearance – these are all ways of hinting that there may be some secret for the player to discover if he pokes around or searches.

Just like rooms and everything else, you should have some idea about the history of a “secret” of whatever kind… just tucking some secret treasure down an otherwise dead-end path might be a reasonable gameplay reward, but you should have some idea of who did it and why. All by itself, that may give the player a bit more feeling of believability to the situation, but ideally it should be part of whatever hints the player gets, or the reward itself. Who buried that treasure there, or created that secret room, and why? How did they use it? When did they create it? These suggest clues to the player, and the clues themselves provide a subtle storyline.

#10 – Avoid Linear Maps, and How to Handle Obstacles

Even if the most “open” map can be made linear with the (im)proper application of locks and challenges. Avoid the temptation to truly force the flow through the dungeon. It’s good to make sure the player can’t make a beeline to the final encounter and bypass everything else on the way, but try to open up the dungeon in “tiers” of otherwise open areas.  The player may have to accomplish certain tasks to gain entrance to the next tier or section of the dungeon, but their movement and the manner in which they accomplish the task is unconstrained within that tier.

As far as locked doors are concerned for blocking progress – in general, a plain ol’ ordinary locked door is not going to be an obstacle to an adventurer. Locks are made to be picked. The lock can be very hard to pick, but not impossible. Anything that bars entrance to a new area is going to have to be made of sterner stuff. In FK1, I used things like force fields, chasms that need to have a bridge lowered, teleporters that need to be activated, portcullis gates that have to be raised by an external mechanism, even a magical mountainside that had to be removed.

One approach I chose in the Temple of Pokmor Xang and the Pit O’ Doom was to make the final encounter much more difficult if the players bypassed the rest of the dungeon to make a beeline for the final encounter. There’s little preventing them from doing so… it’s just much harder. There are also other places – like the archers in the hobgoblin barracks – where a certain direction is suggested (under pain of multiple archer attacks), but it is not strictly enforced.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

An Explosion of Roguelikes

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 4, 2013

Maybe it’s just my attention bias, as I consider roguelikes to be a subgenre of role-playing games, but it sure seems to me that there’s been an explosion of roguelike indie games lately. For years, it seemed that there were just a dozen or so ASCII-based roguelike codebases making the rounds, but now that it’s proven demonstrably possible to have a commercial indie roguelike succeed in the marketplace – from PC to console to mobile – things have gotten a little bit interesting. Now – again, it could simply be that the indie explosion is a tide that lifts all ships, roguelikes included, and the category isn’t growing significantly more than every other category under the sun in indie-dom. Still, there are more roguelikes out there or in development right now than I can track.

I ain’t complaining.

One natural side effect of all this is that the definition of “roguelike” has gotten stretched quite a bit. Now some people even use the term “roguelike-like” to describe games that could belong to the family, but perhaps deviate a bit too much for the purists to accept.

What are the traditional features of a roguelike? I confess I’m not much of an authority, but the usual list runs something like this:

1. Randomly generated levels (often dungeons).

2. Permadeath

3. Turn-Based

4. Traditional RPG-style adventuring gameplay – you waste bad guys and take their stuff.

5. Solo character – although you may have a pet or other semi-controllable henchman.

6. ASCII graphics

The thing is – none of these features really need be there for a game to be considered a roguelike anymore – at least for us non-purists. After a certain point, sure, it gets a little hard to call it a roguelike. FTL is sometimes called a roguelike, but it deviates so much that most people – at best- describe it as a “roguelike-like” or “inspired by roguelikes.”

I’m actually pretty okay with this. More than okay – thrilled. As much as I do enjoy going back to good ol’ classic gameplay, I don’t want to see it stagnate. FTL showed what cool things could be derived from that foundation.

To be honest, I never really got into Nethack that much. Not as much as some other roguelikes. The one that seized my brain for much of a summer back in the 90’s was Moria – which was the progenitor of the Angbad series. And – according to that pinnacle of correctness Wikipedia, it was also the direct inspiration for Diablo. Many of you may already know this, but Diablo began life as a turn-based game. Amusingly, when I was hooked on Moria, I kept thinking, “Wow, you know, with some high-quality graphics, I don’t see why this couldn’t be a commercial game.” Apparently, I can call it, but I can’t get rich off of it.

Anyway – that can lead to a lot of arguments over what is and is not a roguelike. And maybe it’s because I’m okay with stretching the definition that I’m seeing so many more. I dunno. I don’t care. Was Telengard, one of my first RPGs (and first addictions) a roguelike? It used real (albeit crappy) graphics, and the world configuration wasn’t random. But it was so large that in one teleport trap it might as well be… and the events were incredibly random. It was something of an action / turn-based hybrid. I’ve little doubt it was – or at least the games that it imitated were – an influence on the roguelike genre from the early days – even on Rogue itself.

Dungeons of Dredmor is roguelike to its core… but it doesn’t have ASCII graphics, and *GASP* permadeath can be disabled! Does that disqualify it? Not in my book. So what about other games like Diablo, Drox Operative, and others where you can choose hardcore or not? And what about Dwarf Fortress, which is more of a civilization simulator than classic roguelike gameplay, yet otherwise shares much in common with roguelikes?

A few somewhat recent entries of late that have come to my attention (or found their way into my possession, often through indie bundles). A lot of these are in no way pure roguelikes… some really are other genres (like platform shooters) but keep one foot in the roguelike arena.

100 Rogues – action-roguelike originally for the iOS, now released on the Ouya

Rogue’s Tale – classless roguelike

Rogue Legacy – a side-scrolling roguelike-like with (kinda) genealogical progression and genetic deficiencies.

Drox Operative – Another one that’s vaguely derived from roguelikes, but takes it in a totally different direction… in space. Randomly generated space. With a hardcore option. Work with me, here.

Voyage to Farland – advertises itself as a “tough as nails” roguelike.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit – a semi-mainstream studios entry into indie-dom, with a high-quality sci-fi roguelike.

Tales of Maj’Eyal – AKA ToME, this is an Award-winning graphical roguelike with an emphasis on tactics. This one is completely new to me, and looks excellent.

Lair of the Evildoer – a low-budget action-roguelike (is that a new subgenre? Can we just call all these Diablo-likes “action-roguelikes” now?)

99 Levels to Hell – Again, an action-platformer game, borrowing the procedural generation and a few other bits from the roguelike genre.

Dark Gates – still in alpha.

The Wizard’s Lair

Deep Dungeons of Doom – now on Ouya

Heroes of Loot – a high-quality roguelike / shoot-em-up coming in about a week to Android, IOS, PC, Mac, Linux, and the Ouya.

Sword of Fargoal 2 – the sequel to an ancient classic, this kickstarter-funded title looks like it could be pretty exciting.

Cardinal Quest – a very popular indie roguelike. And its upcoming sequel, Cardinal Quest 2!

Steam Marines – this looks interesting, but I haven’t played it yet. Still in alpha, it’s a squad-based tactical roguelike.

Malevolence – Sword of Ahkranox – First-person, persistent world, turn-based, grid-based, infinite-world game. It’s not randomly generated, but it is procedurally generated. Like Telengard.

Project Zomboid – this zombie survival rpg has been in development forever, it seems, but has been playable and popular for a good while.

I’m only scraping a few chunks off the tip of the iceberg here, but you get the idea.  And then there are the classics that continue to get updated.

I can totally understand the appeal of the roguelike as a developer. If your goal is to make the game that you want to play, but you want it to surprise and challenge you as the developer, it is tempting. I can’t say I’m not tempted myself – someday. Maybe for a 7DRL competition or something. Although I have about three different ideas that would be really fun to do as a roguelike.

As always, it’s a good time to be a gamer.

 

Filed Under: Roguelikes - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Guest Posts Wanted

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 3, 2013

Looks like I am heading to Asia again on the 20th, for about 3 weeks. I don’t know what my Internet access will be like during that time, other than that the hotel is supposed to have “Wifi.” Wifi to a dial-up AFAIK.

Anyway, I plan to queue up some articles for those three weeks in advance, and wouldn’t mind some help in this respect. Got around three to five paragraphs (or more!) of game-related thoughts to get off your chest? Here’s the place to be! I’d appreciate the help. Send me what you’ve got at jayb  here at rampantgames.com, and we’ll see if it’ll work.

Thanks in advance!

Filed Under: General - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Art. Or Not.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 2, 2013

I’ve recently read a few older books and short stories. By older, I’m talking stuff from the 1800s and early 1900s. In particular, I’ve started exploring “pulp fiction” – the short stories or serials from the super-cheap fiction magazines that were popular from about 1890 to the early 1950s.

Traditionally, “Pulp Fiction” is a term applied to “lowbrow” fiction of the era. It brings to mind gumshoe detective / crime stories,  sensationalist tales, and lantern-jawed serial heroes like Doc Savage, Conan, The Shadow, and Tarzan. In reality, the fiction from the cheap “pulps” was somewhat interchangeable with the more expensive “slicks,” as authors shopped around their rejected tales. Many of the pulp stories went on to be considered classics in the modern era, and it was how many famous, critically-acclaimed authors got their start – or at least where they gained popularity and paid their bills. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, O. Henry, Agatha Christie, and many other “classic” writers of the era were pulp writers. Charles Dickens predated the pulps, but his novels first appeared serialized in the newspapers in a similar fashion.

Was it lowbrow? Arguably. Was it low quality? Sometimes, definitely. But sometimes it was really great stuff. Like the rise of the “cheap indie games” on mobile devices today, the floodgates were open for titles of wildly varying quality. There were a lot of gems and even more crap. Parallel number one to the modern video game biz.

Sadly, with the demise of pulps, the major market for short stories went away as well, one of the many, MANY obstacles modern authors face today with actually making a living. Many writers and new publishers are effectively taking matters into their own hands and “going indie” much like the game industry is doing today.  Parallel number two. But I digress…

The point is… many of the “classics” – the “masterpieces” that are held in such high regard today were simply yarns spun to pay the rent by these authors. Between a combination of good writing, good editing, a story that resonated with the audience, and possibly a healthy dose of good luck, these stories and serialized novels went on to become standards of excellence in their respective genres. The authors certainly did their best to make a great story, but I doubt they set forth with a prevailing desire to create “Art.” At least, based on some of the non-fiction and letters (especially to their peers) of the time, it certainly didn’t sound that way. That, or they were overwhelmed with false modesty. They tried to please their audience (and their editors), and the laurels came later. Sometimes much later.

Over the last couple of decades, the popularity of science fiction has declined steeply. There are a lot of likely culprits cited, and this phenomenon is frequently argued on websites, at conventions, and so forth. Author Sarah A. Hoyt offered her diagnosis a year ago, followed by something of a manifesto to fix it. (Amusingly, she refers to the aforementioned pulps as “the ghetto of crudely colored magazines.”) But she suggests that with the reluctant acceptance of science fiction as literature after a couple of generations, the SF community – authors, agents, and publishers – started making a concentrated effort to become socially relevant, and accepted as “art.” And in a nutshell, it got boring. She writes, “Between the bands of political correctness, the bands of ‘relevance’ and the bands of ‘we want to be literary’ science fiction was strangled in the crib by people who didn’t care if sales numbers kept falling …”

She somewhat sidesteps the issue, but one could argue that the reason science fiction gained the seat at the table of cultural gatekeepers was because it was popular, and had those high sales numbers back when it was disdained by the literary establishment. Ditto for rock & roll music. Ditto for jazz. Ditto for just about every art form / genre that was “new” at some point in recorded history, but then caught on. In general, it takes about as much time as it takes from when the art form “catches on” to when the generation of gatekeepers for whom it is new and alarming to die off. In my opinion, “social relevancy” doesn’t often come by conforming to societal norms and expectations, but by challenging them.

Wasn’t that what rock & roll was all about in its heyday – giving a rebellious middle finger to establishment mores and values? At its best, it wasn’t even directly calling out the establishment it defied – it was simply leading by example and doing its own thing. Ditto for science fiction – it fired up the imaginations of readers back in the day because it smashed conformity and limitations of the present world and dared imagine something new and sometimes scandalously different.

So here’s parallel number three. As video games slowly, painfully gain acceptance as art (if not capital-A Art) and prove their relevance, I’ve seen the temptation – particularly amongst some journalists and indies – to argue the case for really focusing on the artistry, messages, social relevance, and (indirectly) the artistic legitimacy of video games. I hear arguments about whether or not it’s even important for games to be “fun.” Or, at least, not just fun. This combined attitude – particularly amongst the indies – is probably mocked more often than it is actually employed, and I’m not really worried at this point about game developers stampeding towards some mirage of artsy-fartsy relevancy. I’m not against games having deeper meanings or meaningfulness.  Quite the opposite.

I would just caution indies that pleasing their true audience – on whatever level is most “awesome” – should come first, and feeding their own creative desires should either be tied with, or come in a close second to that. Appealing critics should be a distant third. Trying to be “Art,” or trying too hard to resemble a different media (like movies or TV, the biggest temptation in gaming), or to please the cultural gatekeepers who don’t even like games are false goals – and possibly self-destructive at that. Games do not have to steer themselves towards old-fashioned definitions of art and critical acceptance. Screw that pretentious crap. Those things have to catch up to gaming. I think there are enough parallels in other media that we can see where trying to conform to conventional standards set by different art forms leads, and hopefully avoid the worst pitfalls as an industry. Let games be games – however that gets defined by the creators and the audience. Theirs are the only opinions that truly matter.

Let games be games, and we’ll sort out the definitions, standards, and questions of artistic legitimacy later. Just don’t be boring.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

The Indie Flood Continues…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 30, 2013

Steam just Greenlit 100 new games – the largest ever.

It gave Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon greenlight page a nice little boost towards the top 100.

It is apparently Valve’s intent to phase out Greenlight in favor of a better system that removes most barriers to getting a game on Steam. The 100 approvals is something of a stress test on their system. While it’s likely a one-time event (for a while), the goal is to increase the throughput of games onto Steam.

While on the plus side, it means it will be easier to get games on Steam, there’s a downside to those who have long-enjoyed the exclusivity of that particular gatekeeper. Getting on Steam was never the equivalent of winning the lottery, anyway, but this will further dilute the attention from the Steam audience. Getting on Steam may one day be as big a deal as getting on the App Store. Just getting on the platform will no longer be the gigantic jump in discoverability that it has been.

As an interesting side-note, a lot of the greenlit items are games still in development. Kind of an interesting phenomenon, between that and the crowd-funding craze — people are a lot more interested in promises than reality. I guess that explains politics.

Also of note, Majesco has opened up an “indie publishing” division, entitled Midnight City. It’s focus is getting indie games into places that are difficult / impossible without a “real” publisher.

How much money can indie (or non-traditionally published) games (or games company) actually make? Minecraft seemed to really push the boundaries, to the desperate salivation of the big publishers, but apparently the new pie-in-the-sky figure is: $2.4 million PER DAY.  I don’t think that’s quite so doable with niche titles.

After watching the Unite 2013 keynote and having a few more headlines catch my eye this week, I was once more impressed with how indie games – once the exiled stepchild of the games industry – has become front-and-center. Things have changed a lot over the last decade. Who woulda thunk?

 

Filed Under: Biz, Links & Tidbits - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Unity Levels Up?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 29, 2013

The big buzz in the game dev community has been about Unity’s embrace of 2D support, announced Wednesday. It’s … big.

Unity Introduces New 2D Tools

I figured something like this was in the works when they hired the guy responsible for the best-selling NGUI toolset. I expected that it would be more limited to UI improvements, but apparently they’ve taken GameMaker’s professed desire to be the “Unity of 2D” to heart, and decided that they wanted Unity to be the Unity of 2D.

We’ll see how it goes. There’s a lot of crossover between 2D and 3D, but there are a lot of differences as well. I’m talking 2D graphics, here – with sprite-based animation and everything. Unity has always been great at providing 2D gameplay with 3D graphics. Is it possible to make an engine that does both very well? I have to say, Unity has proven absolutely amazing for 3D development… with the right add-ons. I hope they can pull it off well.

This is certainly a good thing for 3D developers as well, especially those with significant UI issues (like, say, role-playing games!). While NGUI has been way more than adequate, it’d be cool to have this all incorporated into the engine rather than being something of an exceptional path.

These weren’t all of Unity’s announced changes. They made two other announcements that kind of take them into the publisher space. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that. They announced the beta of Unity Cloud, making it easier for developers to use alternative marketing / monetization methods with built-in cloud functionality. They also announced a publishing initiative. Finally, they are rolling out a joint SDK with Facebook for easy integration of games (or apps) with that social network across multiple platforms.

These are all reasonably Big Deals, though the 2D tools are by far the most interesting to me. If nothing else, the Unity folks are not resting on their well-earned laurels.

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 28, 2013

I haven’t mentioned Guido Henkel’s new thing yet. I figured I should remedy this little problem.

First of all: Who is Guido Henkel? He’s the producer of some pretty legendary titles in the computer RPG history – the original Realms of Arkania series, and Planescape: Torment.  He was also involved in the production of Fallout 2 and Neverwinter Nights.

Pretty cool pedigree, right? He’s also a writer, programmer, and composer. Nice combo.

And as a final claim to fame, he was the face of the Nameless One on the box art for Planescape: Torment. Yeah. That guy. I have it on good authority that he doesn’t look quite like that when he walks down the street.

So after a little bit of hiatus from game development to pursue writing, he’s back to game dev. He attempted to launch a larger-scale RPG entitled “Thorvalia” via Kickstarter at the end of last year, but it didn’t generate enough interest. So he’s gone with something a little smaller scale. Now, he’s working on a party-based, real-time, first-person perspective RPG. It’s official title is Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore.

The game is “step based” – which, when combined with real-time gameplay, gives you a gameplay style somewhere along the lines of Dungeon Master / Eye of the Beholder / Legend of Grimrock fame.  From his developer diaries, it looks like they are emphasizing story and character customization content a bit more in this game than Grimrock, which will be welcome for legions of RPG fans who got a little bored with the puzzle / tactics based gameplay of Grimrock. At least that’s my interpretation, and it certainly sounds like it is Guido’s intention:

It will be as gripping as Dungeon Master – or Grimrock if you’re not old enough to have played the original Dungeon Master upon which it was based – but it will have the depth of a real role-playing game, putting it more in line with the Wizardy games, perhaps. It will be a completely amped up affair. It will be more intense and deeper than either of these games. We have completed the character system design at this point and I can tell you that there are enough character attributes and stats to rival the Realms of Arkania games. Well, not exactly, but we’re not too far away from its depth. Our intentions are to push the envelope on what has been done with stepped role-playing games in the past. I feel that there is a huge untapped potential how that gaming experience can be enhanced.

He’s certainly saying the right things to my ears.

Oh, and like many of the cool RPG developers these days, he’s using Unity. 🙂

Deathfire is still in early stages of development, and is expected to release sometime next year.

 

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

An Unusual Tale of Online Romance

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 27, 2013

Last week I read a very cute novel. I don’t normally go for little romantic comedy books, but this was an exception.

It was about a girl, Nattie, who meets a guy online. At least she thinks it’s a guy, but she’s not sure at first. The whole anonymity that comes from remote communication via text. In spite of it being something of a public forum that’s supposed to be used for business purposes only, they take to some online flirting – to the irritation of a couple of other users. Of course, they never plan to meet in real life, so they take advantage of their virtual anonymity to get a little more familiar than they would in the “real world.”

Nattie’s friends note that she’s spending more and more time at the office, doing some after-hours chatting, and that she seems to be living in “two worlds” – one “wired” and one in the real world. Her closest friend gets as fascinated by this online romance, but Nattie maintains that it’s purely virtual.

Before the end, we have a (fortunately low-grade) stalking / identity theft case, which is appropriately creepy. But halfway through, Nattie meets the guy (he is a guy) who was her online correspondent – unknowingly at first. Once they both know the truth, things get really complicated. Nattie finds that she’s far more comfortable texting him than talking face-to-face, even when in the same room, but her best friend does not have that problem. There are jealousies, love triangles (quadrangles?), silliness, and so forth. The sort of thing you’d expect from a romantic comedy.

While it all sounds quite modern, and is pretty common in western society today, it was published quite a few years ago.

It sounds like it would fit pretty good in the 90’s, doesn’t it? Sorta like the movie, “You’ve Got Mail,” with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, huh? Well, it’s earlier than that.

Maybe the 80’s? Back in the early days of Prodigy and Compuserve? That would certainly work, too. But it’s even earlier than that.

A LOT earlier. The 70’s? Try 1870s…

The book, “Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes” was published in 1879, and was apparently on the best-seller list for several years. As you can infer from the title, the texting and online technology is the telegraph.  It is not science fiction or fantasy; it is somewhat based on the author’s own experience as a telegraph operator, in an era when about 1/3rd of the telegraph operators in America were women.

The language is a little different (the book frequently uses terms like “ejaculated”, “making love,” and “gay” very differently from their popular modern definitions), and the social customs of 1870s can seem a bit confusing. But in spite of this, the story was quite readable and fun. It feels like it could easily be transplanted into the current era – with the exception of the not-so-secret code Nattie and Clem share. The issues, the confusion, the vagueness of online relationships – it’s all there, over a hundred and thirty years ago. Tech changes, but people are the same.

That was the part that really impressed me – just how people reacted and adapted with this communications technology complicating relationships very much as it does today.

Another fascinating aspect of the book was its explanation of how small, local telegraph offices worked.  That was actually what led me to discover the book in the first place.  It was also funny how telegraphy terms end up in the slang of the primary characters, and how non-technical people misunderstand how the telegraph worked. Once again, the parallels with modern technology are fascinating.

Another amusing bit is how even the non-“techie” characters in the book are at least aware of other technologies, like the telephone (one even complains that they should use a telephone instead, so that everyone else can know what they are talking about. They are also aware of facsimile transmission- what we call “fax” today (ah, how quaint!). Yes, they had early fax transmissions in the 1870s. The French, I understand, actually had an early commercial fax service than ran from 1865 to 1870.  That blew my mind when I found out about it a couple of weeks ago.

Aside from that, it’s a cute and humorous romance. That’s not the kind of book I normally read, but this one amused me. It was fun, a fairly quick read, and I felt better educated (about life & telegraph technology in that era) and enlightened when I finished.

Best of all – it’s well and truly in the public domain, and available for a free download. There’s a nice advantage of the more modern evolution of this old technology…

Filed Under: Books - Comments: 3 Comments to Read



« previous top next »