Sharks… Tornado… Sharknado…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 11, 2013

It sounds like some filmmaker for SyFy has the soul (and budget) of an indie game dev. “Here’s $50 grand and the phone number to my nephew, who has a fledgling CGI studio. Make us a horror movie!”

I guess when you get into that situation you can either make the best movie possible under considerable constraints… or you just go all-in for bad, the kind of bad that you hope transcends bad into the realm of good.

This… might just be that bad.

And this…

As Brian Fargo said, I would have loved to have been in the meeting where they pitched this concept.

My wife is saying, “No! No, no no no NO!” But I think I may actually try and watch this one. Or at least record it for future watching.  You know, for those times where you just need to put your brain into neutral for a little while.

Good gravy. I really do hope that this movie is self-aware of its ludicrousness and isn’t trying to play it completely straight. With lines like, “We’re gonna need a bigger chopper,” I think I don’t need to worry about that.

Filed Under: General, Movies - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Dungeon’s Got Depth!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 10, 2013

I like big dungeons, and I cannot lie.
You adventurers can’t deny
When the party walks in through those elf-runed doors
And find out its got ten floors…

You’re no longer bored. You want to pull out your sword.
You know that dungeon is deep and mean
With lots of treasure for you to glean.
This dungeon’s packed! You attack!
You can’t say when you’ll be coming back.

The NPCs all tried to warn you,
But that’s danger that you were born to!
You hear that rumor of the dragon down on level nine
And the treasure just short of divine,
But now you keep reloading to survive
Those trolls down on level five.

The Dungeon’s Got Depth!

Okay, that’s about as far as I am gonna go, with apologies to Sir Mix-A-Lot.  And to you, for subjecting you to that.  This is what happens with too much caffeine and too little sleep. And too much time coding up visibility blocks and ladders. I think I need some fresh air.

I’ve talked about dungeon design in RPGs a few times. Like here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

When working out the “secret sauce” for dungeon design in Frayed Knights 2 for other designers (and myself, so I don’t forget anything), I thought I had less than a full page of notes, hints, and suggestions. It turned out to be seven pages long, and still didn’t include everything that I thought would be important. But the bigger the document, the less likely it was to be read, and I figured to trust the designers to comprehend the rest on their own.

It’s part of why I get so excited about all the indie RPGs coming out these days… and their impact on “mainstream.” For years it seemed that we were trying desperately in CRPGs to get out of the dungeons – because dungeons were easy (or easier)  to represent and to design, whereas the wilderness was hard (especially in 3D). Now, it seems like we are re-awakening to the joys of the in-depth dungeon crawl.

Assuming it’s done right, of course. Part of the move away from ’em in the past was due to the challenge of making these dungeons entertaining, rather than filler. But now that this is a current event rather than ancient history, it’s once again an area for serious study and improvement. I’m for more awesome dungeon crawls!

Not that this is key to any RPGs – or that I wouldn’t get sick of them if they start overwhelming the genre again. But I’m glad they are making a comeback.

Filed Under: Geek Life, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

We Are All Game Developers Now

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 9, 2013

Unity just announced that they now have over 2 million registered users.

Let that sink in just a sec. Two. MILLION.

Okay, now to be reasonable – it’s free, it’s hot stuff, and so I’m quite sure that more than half of these “developers” download the software and never get beyond ten minutes of fiddling around with it. Some never even install it. But even so… even if you assume only one in ten actually use Unity to make a game, that is an insane number of game developers.

And that’s only the people who have tried out Unity. While I’m not sure how your average game developer could avoid the temptation to “sneak a peak” at a free, popular tool even when they are content with their own development system, I’m sure there are many who haven’t yet.

And you wonder why the average indie game sells as many copies to count on your fingers and toes?

This is simultaneously a dream and a nightmare to me. WAAAAAY back when I first started getting excited about indie games, and called myself an “indie evangelist,” I dreamed of the day when technical barriers to developing games would be reduced enough that anybody with a desire to make games could do so with a moderate amount of effort. That day is here. But even then, I realized what kind of world it would be when that happened:

TONS of games. Most of ’em crap.

We’re not quite to the point of YouTube insanity (where EVERYBODY is a TV channel… and the barriers are even lower), and not even to the level of the book publishing industry yet. Or music.  Those who have released commercial-quality games to the public (whether offered completely free, or having had some form of monetization) are still a somewhat elite bunch (in my eyes, anyway). But it’s no longer much of an exclusive bunch.

In the early years of the Utah Indie Night meetings, I would have the somewhat exceptional status of being one of the few people in the room who had actually had released and sold a game as an indie (and, of course, as a “mainstream” developer prior to that). We were regular attendees, but almost everyone else was still aspiring to release their first game. Now, I’m a slowpoke. Ancient history if a year has gone by since my last release. While the “released” indie devs are still a minority there, we are no longer a novelty or an exception. I personally *love* the change, as I get the opportunity to network with and pick the brains of a lot of different people with lots of practical experience under their belt. I can listen to other peoples’ war stories.

But there are a lot of indie games out there. And a lot more coming out. It’s a glut. I think it’s part of a cyclical trend that’s healthy for the industry as a whole, it comes with its problems. I do see a correction coming, as there’s just too much content for players to keep up with.  I’m kinda looking forward to what the landscape looks like at that point, once the current “gold rush” is over. The committed will still be there, cranking out quality titles. The crap ratio will improve. And there will still be low barriers to entry for those who really want to make games.

So – overall, in spite of current problems – I’m still seeing this all a desirable thing. I’m not for artificial boundaries and limitations. I like seeing what all of you folks come up with!

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Joss Whedon’s Productivity Advice

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 8, 2013

On one of the indie gamer forums over the weekend, someone shared this excellent article:

How to Be Prolific: Guidelines for Getting It Done From Joss Whedon

The points seem to be a little bit meandering, but the key points resonate pretty well with me. While I’m hardly perfect at implementation, when I’m on a solid “roll” I find I generally follow most of these suggestions. Here’s how I apply them to game development:

1.  Be Specific About Your Next Action / Task – figure out exactly what action needs to be taken. Don’t just say, “I’ll work on X,” but rather what you intend to complete for your next task. From a game development perspective, an example might be, “Complete the special effects for spell X and Y” rather than just “Work on the spell system.”

2. Eat Dessert First – Whedon takes on the most enjoyable tasks first. This means that when he gets to the less-fun tasks, he’s already seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and is still in love with the project. This can be tough to do, especially when so much of game development depends on laying the foundation – building the “black triangles.” But getting a game to a fun, playable state as early as possible is very important.  And this usually means getting the “fun stuff” done first. The trick is balancing it and using a development methodology that doesn’t make it too difficult to rip out the prototype code & data you used to “do the fun stuff” first and replace it with your more scaleable architecture (something, I might add, which bit me in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon… I spent a lot of time and effort replacing prototype code).

3. Reward Yourself Often – he jokingly refers to this as a vice rather than advice, but it’s another trick. He uses lots of little rewards for completing small tasks (he prefers chocolate),  rather than big rewards at the big tasks. I try to use gaming as a reward for working on my game, but I keep running into self-discipline problems where 15 minutes turns into two hours.

4. “Fill the Tanks” – Seek Inspiration from Eclectic Sources – Whedon explains how Firefly was directly based on a book about the U.S. Civil War that gripped him. He combined this with (obviously) the Millenium Falcon from Star Wars for his key idea. He says, “Now, if I only watched sci-fi I would have just had the Millennium Falcon part, which has already been done, but finding that historical texture, it literally, I put the book down and started writing Firefly.” So a key to being creatively productive is to keep the inspiration coming from not only the sources relating to your focus, but from all over. I’ve noted myself how science, history, politics, music, philosophy, and provide ripe fodder for fantasy. The best game designers I know have a pretty rich & broad area of knowledge.

5. Enlist Your Friends – I’m certainly guilty of this. To be honest, some of the best ideas I’ve had were a result of bouncing ideas off of friends and my wife. Even my daughter. And I’ve certainly not been shy about working with friends to develop content. I’d say my own take-away from this, however, would be to pay attention to the local “indie” scene and know what other people are doing, what they are capable of doing … and get an idea of how you can all help each other.  Even if it’s nothing more than just bugging them for ideas or advice.

6. Don’t (Just) Talk About It… – This was something of a side-point, but an interesting one. I’ve often heard that talking about your project (especially in writing) can end up being a psychological substitute for actually working on it. And it’s certainly been true in the past… a lot of indies have proven guilty of a lot of hype and little substance. On the flip side, I’ve often found that indies who used to talk about their project a lot and then suddenly “go quiet” for an extended period of time often do so out of embarrassment – because they have no progress to talk about. Of course, it’s also true that there are times – especially deep in mid-development (that’s about where Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath is right now) – when you get pretty head-down in a project and are too busy to really talk about it, and a lot of the work that you are doing (now that the “fun stuff” from point 2 is done) is really not particularly sexy or exciting.  I’m not sure what the “best practice” might be here, other than to try a measured approach to talking about your project.

7. … Just Do It: This is the indie thing. This is not limited to games. Thanks to modern technology, the tools are cheaper than ever and the barriers are lower than ever in many fields. Put your money where your mouth is, and do it. The worst that will happen is that you’ll fail… and if you avoid bragging about it too much before the fact (point 6), then it’ll not be much more painful than never having tried.  You don’t need permission, and you can’t wait for perfection. So lose the fear and dive in.

 

Filed Under: Production - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights 2: How to Save the World (State)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 5, 2013

For today’s Frayed Knights discussion, I’m actually going to get a little general, and talk about a topic common to virtually all modern computer and console role-playing games: saving the world! Or, rather, saving the state of the world, and dealing with persistent data. It’s pretty basic stuff, and I’m not going to delve too deeply into technical issues. But it may be of use to less-experienced game developers (whether programmers or not), or just the idly curious as to what kinds of effort needs to go into making a computer RPG.  As always, be sure and check out Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh Daon on this website and give it a try. The free demo includes the first dungeon, and is a nice little self-contained adventure.

One of the aspects of the oldest of the old-school CRPGs that I don’t really miss all that much is how little of the game state was saved. Aside from your own character or party, much of the content was either random, or was reset every time you re-entered the dungeon. This meant that players couldn’t really leave their “mark” on the world, limiting interaction. And while it could be either a good thing or bad thing depending upon perspective, but it certainly encouraged grinding in “easy” spots.

Nowadays, much of the world information is persistent – carrying over between visits to areas, and between game sessions. Where it isn’t, it’s more often a design decision rather than a technological limitation. While Borderlands has many trappings of an RPG, areas are intended to be revisited, and boss monsters taken down multiple times, especially in multiplayer. The persistence is still there, in the form of quest status and a deliberate delay before monsters and treasures respawn. This is as intended, and it is a design decision borrowed from MMOs (which Borderlands also shares a few attributes with).

The first game I remember playing which had really impressive saved world states was Ultima VII. I’m pretty sure that’s one of the reasons why it remains one of my all-time favorite games. Ultima VI was the same way, but I’d kinda skipped that one and went back to it later (and to this day, still haven’t played it to completion…).  Even it had its problems at first, little bugs like having keys disappear from your inventory and ruining the game. Kind of a big deal.

While this is a feature of most modern RPGs today, few games have the level of interactivity requiring the level of world-state data as those Ultimas from 20+ years ago. I think this may be a reason why I’m so fond of the recent Fallout and Elder Scrolls games – even with respawning, they have some really impressive persistent world state information. And then there’s Minecraft…

So how do you keep track of all this information, and save it out with the saved game? While the exact nature of the system may change from game to game (Minecraft has different needs from Dragon Age), here’s the approach I’ve used for Frayed Knights. While I’ll talk a little about implementation details,  for the most part I’m going to keep this kind of general so that non-programmers can follow along.

Naturally, with the editing tools and everything, my game world has an initial state. This is part of the initial game data. By default, this is how everything in the world is supposed to be, when the game starts. All of the quest flags are set to “false” or zero, all game state variables are at zero, all the doors are closed, all the traps untriggered, all the chests unopened, all the events un-triggered, no additional bags or other objects lying around anywhere, none of the items in the world disturbed from their original resting place. This is the world in its pristine state.

This is the easiest save game state possible – this is how the world will come up if there’s no save game information whatsoever (other than character information, which is a whole ‘nother story).

Of course, almost immediately, the player starts changing the world. In Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, this is literally the first moment the actual gameplay begins – the party starts off a dialog. I don’t want the dialog to play every time the party enters the dungeon (either from outside, or by loading the game), so I have to flag this event so that it knows it can only play once, and that it has already happened, so it will never happen again. This will have to be part of the persistent data that gets saved out with every game. If the player saves the game immediately at this point, without having even moved, there’s one piece of save-game information already that has to be recorded.

At this point, the experienced game developers are probably thinking to themselves, “Duh, that’s obvious!” while some non-dev-types might thinking, “Huh. I never thought about that. That sounds like a pain in the butt.” Both apply. A persistent-world RPG (IMO, a description that should be redundant) should be built around a framework that makes this part not such a pain in in the butt from the get-go. It’s just one of many things that need to function behind the scenes to make a modern-featured RPG work.

Okay, so what I do is save out all of these changes (called “deltas”) from the pristine world-start state. Every piece of data that is part of the persistent world information has to come from (or go to) this “world state” object. Everything. It’s like the gasoline to your engine.  Every object in the world queries this world-state object to find out about itself. A chest will see if there’s an entry in there for itself and uses that state information if it exists – otherwise, it simply defaults to its starting state.

As you can naturally deduce, this object gets a lot bigger as the game progresses. It has to be relatively fast, too – when it gets queried for state information, it can’t spend a lot of time searching. So for programmers – this probably means that for a big game, a single, massive array that gets linearly traversed is probably a bad idea. For Frayed Knights 1, using TorqueScript, I ended up creating a binary search tree, and every type of state data had to be able to save and load itself.  In more modern, fully-featured languages (like I am using now), I can take advantage of serialized object data and dictionaries (a key/value collection object that has a pretty fast lookup). I know of people – especially working with MMOs – who just handle everything directly via a SQL database. That can work too. The implementation details really depend on what you are doing.

Anyway – back to the story. This sort of structure necessitates that every object with persistent state information must be uniquely identified somehow. For example, keeping track of which doors are opened and closed in a level – each door has to have a unique tag so it can query the World State object by saying, “Hey, I’m Door #15 in the Hobgoblin Bunker. What’s my state?” If the identifier is not unique, then Bad Things Happen, as two doors overwrite each other’s information. This is how you get nasty things happening like the save game ending up being in some kind of unwinnable state because of a bug. This is what is likely to happen if you depend on manually assigning the unique ID, and you often depend on copying and pasting objects to speed development.

(And yes, I speak of this from the vantage point of painful experience…)

Likewise, the unique identifier needs to be something that will survive modification. Basing the ID on the X,Y,Z location in space will give you a pretty unique identifier for the time being, but what happens if you find you need to nudge the location a quarter-meter to resolve some pathing issues after the game is released? OOOPS! Everybody’s game state from that point on – if they’ve already interacted with the object – is going to be broken, as the unique identifier will have changed when you moved it.

For Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath, I’ve hopefully learned my lesson here, and I’ve made some automated tools solve most of these problems for me. They are simple and ugly, but they do the job.

There are other optimizations to take advantage of, as well. For example, there are some global pieces of state information that need to be recognized anywhere and at any time. For example, quest states and some event information. In Frayed Knights, I also like to record how the party resolved certain situations, so I can use it against the player later. Er, I mean, have the game react believably according to the player’s previous actions.  This meant writing many variants to certain dialogs, but I thought it was more fun to have the dialogs refer to specific actions rather than be generic enough to cover all the possibilities (though at times I did that too).

But there are other kinds of state data that only apply to a particular scene when it is active. For example, if you are in the Hobgoblin Bunker, there’s no reason to care about what enemy patrols are active in the dungeons below the Tower of Almost Certain Death. That’s a possible optimization to make searching for information a little faster, but for many games that might be an overkill. Including my own. It’s just a suggestion.

Anyway – this isn’t exactly rocket science, nor is it particularly sexy. But it’s one of those things that developers have to deal with when making an RPG. It’s one reason why RPGs have a (deserved) reputation for being hard to make (compared to something like the ubiquitous indie puzzle-platform game). There are some toolkits out there which solve many of these problems for you, but it’s not a particularly challenging problem if handled correctly even if being developed at a lower level.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Indie Day!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 4, 2013

So here in the U.S., it’s Independence Day – the day we celebrate the birth of our country, and the decisions and sacrifices of those who came before us over two hundred years ago. And, in spite of quite a number of well-documented challenges, I feel we’ve done pretty well. As a result, we’re a nation that has a cultural foundation of people doing their own thing, individualism, of being citizens rather than subjects, and a predisposition to “stick it to the man.” Our nation certainly doesn’t hold a monopoly on this – if anything, we are perhaps a product of a worldwide trend – but it’s a tradition that sticks with us today. I like to imagine that indie gaming – in it’s tiny, insignificant way – is a part of that same global, cultural legacy.

Yes, these are really grandiose thoughts for what really comes down to (generally) lower-budget interactive entertainment. It’s nothing in comparison. But it is something I feel passionate about. I am very grateful that I live in a place where this is something I have the luxury of spending time and effort focusing on something like this rather than daily survival. I wish everyone could have that kind of opportunity.

What the indie game movement has always been about is freedom. We get into all kinds of arguments about the definition of “indie,” and to a point I don’t think it’s a bad thing to argue over. But what it really boils down to is a comparison to what it’s not. It’s looking more and more like indie is becoming the rule rather than the exception, which is to me how things ought to be.

But to see what it’s not, you really don’t need to go too far back. While it was never 100%, for a couple of decades the video game market was dominated by a number of middlemen with money who acted as the gatekeepers to the market. They were called “publishers,” and for the most part their dominance was dictated by the existence of limited chokepoints dictated by technology. When it costs so much to set up a duplication run (especially for things like proprietary cartridges), when limitations are imposed by physical media size at a few brick-and-mortar locations, where the limited bandwidth of print media restricted coverage of games, it’s a natural breakdown of effort. If anything, it was a natural adaptation of the market to existing conditions. So you end up with a very hit-driven environment where there’s not much room for anything that’s not going to sell huge.

Being indie back then was a lot more subversive. The ‘shareware’ guys, the mail order guys – they had to fight to get noticed, had to take advantage of emerging technologies to compete, and really had to dodge around in the shadows of the big publishers.

Aside from that, for the most part, if you wanted to make your own game, you had to beg for the opportunity to make it from the publishing overlords. There was simply no other way to finance a game’s development, market it, manufacture it, and distribute it to the stores. This often meant being a good little soldier for the industry until you had enough savings and reputation (as a studio) to create a proof of concept to shop around for approval. Or for working your way up through an internal studio to the point where you might be entrusted with some amount of creative control over a project. And that was it.

Technology has changed a lot, and it no longer favors (IMO) the big gatekeeper middlemen as it once did.  The indie “revolution” was perhaps as natural and inevitable as the rise of the publishing giants in the 1980s and 1990s. What form things will eventually take in the future, I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m much happier making and playing games in a world where creative and talented individuals no longer need to beg for approval from a committee in order to start building their dreams. Yes, this has a downside – there’s a minimum bar of quality and originality that mainstream-published titles usually (but not always) cleared, and if anything the average indie game does not. This means a lot more effort across the board to separate the wheat from the chaff. But I think that’s a reasonably small price to pay for the gems that come out of this side of the industry. Or for the impact it’s had on the mainstream developers – I think our “AAA” games are better for having to compete with their tiny indie cousins.

So, in a nutshell… life is good. I’m having fun. I hope you are, too.

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

The Airborne Chronology Hypothesis

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 3, 2013

I’m working on a new hypothesis for “fun” as it applies to gaming.

It goes something like this: Sort of like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the determination of how much fun you are having playing a game is impossible to determine while you are playing it. Or, more correctly, that elevated “fun” levels prevent accurate measurement in the observer.

Instead, it is something that can only be determined after the fact – generally speaking, measured by the amount of apparent time dilation after the activity is concluded.

In other words, if you are playing a game and think, “Huh, I guess this game is okay,” as you are playing it, it is indicative of a low level of “fun.”

But if you are playing and then happen to glance at your watch (interrupting the activity) and say, “Holy CRAP how did it get to be 2 in the morning?!?!?” this is indicative of elevated levels of fun during the activity, which suppress attention to other perceptions, such as the perception of time or the perception of actual emotional reactions. So you can’t know if a game is truly excellent or not until you take a break from playing it.

This is also applicable for game development – you cannot know you are in the “zone” and on a productive roll until you are no longer there. Ironically, this probably explains why project estimates for game development are frequently so horribly inaccurate. Due to the dilated time perception, certain development activities seemed to have taken very little time.

I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule, just as I’m sure there are people who will take this post seriously.

Just remember: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

The Same, Only Different: Where and How Much Innovation in Video Game Design?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 2, 2013

I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a long time. The newest incarnation isn’t officially “Dungeons & Dragons” (it’s Pathfinder), but it’s close enough.  I’ve played lots of tabletop adventures, and plenty of computer games based on the system. And then even more computer games that are loosely and unofficially based on  they system. I still have a lot of fun playing it.

But mechanically – the biggest change in game mechanics hit the scene around 1999, and Pathfinder is a natural extension of that. And even that revolutionary overhaul still tried to keep the basics more-or-less intact. Aside from armor class going up instead of down, and people referring to “DCs,” players of 1st edition AD&D and Pathfinder would probably be understand each other just fine. The mechanics resolve similarly. Some of the numbers have changed, and certainly a number of rules, but the fundamental mechanics aren’t too different. You still want to roll high on a D20 to hit, you roll 1d8 for longsword damage (plus bonuses), roll a save vs. a fireball on a D20 to take half damage, etc. (Incidentally, DC stands for… “Difficulty Class” – I had to look that one up because I’m so used to just hearing the initials… but it’s supposed to be analogous to “Armor Class” [AC] so I guess that fits…)

Of course, every game has a different context – a different story. We had one Pathfinder game that took place in the ruins of Washington DC a century after a magical apocalypse. We’ve had games where the entire party was nobility seeking a way to liberate their home country. We’ve had games where we hopped between the fantasy world and a variation of the mundane “real world.” We’ve played different characters, with sometimes different players, with different stories and settings and bad guys.

The point is – we’re still having fun playing the same game. There have been some rules changes, new house rules, and new sourcebooks brought to the table that might help freshen things up a little, but these are pretty minor variants.

Yet I’ve got this double standard where I rip on first-person-shooters because it’s “just another FPS.” “We’re still just running aiming, shooting, and hiding!” Where are the innovative game mechanics? I turn into some kind of game design, “gameplay is king” purist.  And yet, I still play them when one sounds interesting. And tower defense games. Sometimes a minor mechanical change and an interesting setting (but not too different!) is all it takes to part me from my money, in spite of my complaining to the contrary.

I figure a game designer trying to cater to my desires is like a frustrated TV show producer, trying to balance the demands of an audience who doesn’t want the show to change, but will get bored if it stagnates because due to lack of change. They want everything to be, “the same, only different.”

Is it really important to change up the mechanics from game to game to provide a different experience? We don’t make a major change to the rules of basketball or baseball every season, let alone from game to game. You’d think the audience would get bored after two or three games, right?

So what’s really more important? If you had a choice between two non-optimal alternatives, which would you choose?

A) A game with some really fascinating and innovative new mechanics but with the same old plot and setting (say, sci-fi-industrial) you have seen a million times?

Or

B) The same old mechanics you’ve played for years, but with an exciting new setting, intriguing characters, and a gripping, twisty plot?

Yeah, I want the best of both worlds, too. But if you only had to pick one or the other – new gameplay or new story, or “mechanics vs. context” – which would be more important to you? What might influence your decision?

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 23 Comments to Read

Computer RPGs – A New Golden Age, a Boom, or a Bust?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 1, 2013

Brian Fargo, flush with effectively free money from Kickstarter for not just one but two ‘classic-style’ RPGs, suggested last week on the (near) future of computer RPGs that, “I think you are about to see the golden age of RPGs come rushing back in the next few years.” By way of explanation, he noted his own titles, Obsidian’s games, and CD Projekt’s titles, and said, “But most certainly there was a purity to the development of RPGs in the 90’s in which we were very attuned to our players…. I honestly see that purity and being in sync with the RPG players coming back full circle — in fact it is even stronger than ever.”

While those cited examples are certainly highlights in my book, there are about a half-dozen more recent or upcoming RPGs that I’d cite as examples of a new renaissance in the genre.

Up until three years ago or so, it seemed that the emphasis on the indie side was more on re-creating the past. We borrowed the old forms now that they present very little technical challenge, using new tools and techniques to allow every team member to be four or more times as productive as their old-school counterparts, and riding the nostalgia wave. And I expressed my concern over this. Now, while there are still plenty of new titles that on the surface appear to be not much more than cheap imitations of old classics, there are definitely some talented developers out there who are pushing forward in new directions.

On the mainstream side, well, we talked about that last week. Maybe, just maybe, we could be coming to the realization simply making a straight-up console action game with a handful of stats and inventory isn’t the ultimate evolution of the genre.

This is the world I wished for. And you know what they say about being careful for the things you wish for, right?

In my mind, the “golden age” of computer role-playing games was in the late 80s to early 90s. I personally like put a stake in the ground in September, 1985, when Ultima IV was released, and call that “the beginning.” It lasted for about a decade, though some people were proclaiming the death of the genre a bit earlier. It encompasses such games as Dungeon Master, the SSI “Gold Box” and Eye of the Beholder series of D&D-licensed games, more than half of the Might & Magic series, several Ultimas, the Bradley-designed Wizardry series, Ultima Underworld, the Magic Candle series, and a host of other titles.

As an RPG fan in that era, I felt like I was drinking from the firehose.

Now, other people might set other dates. I have a number of friends who were more fans of consoles (and import Japanese RPGs). That’s entirely valid. But hey, it’s my blog, I’ll label things how I want. 🙂

Anyway, back to the drinking from the firehose thing. We had a great boom in genre in that time, but the boom was accompanied by bigger budgets, bigger scrutiny, and bigger disasters as publishers tried to find ways of economizing or broadening their audience. I actually enjoyed Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse, and I know there were people who really liked Menzoberranzan. So it wasn’t like people weren’t enjoying the perhaps less-than-stellar titles. But the golden age became a plethora, which became a glut, which became – eventually – a bust. If you define a bust as a “correction” back to norms after a boom.

So… on to today.  Desura lists five new or majorly updated games in the RPG category in the month of June. If you include Android / iOS titles, things get significantly more crowded. IndieRPGs.com has several new game announcements (not sure how many of ’em get to market) each week. Throw in the usual trickle of big-budget (or, apparently, some upcoming not-so-big-budget) mainstream publisher titles for PC and consoles, and things are getting pretty busy out there. There are far more games than I have time to play, that’s for certain.

As a parallel from the tabletop “dice & paper” side, I was thrilled with the “Open Gaming License” of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition in 1999-2000. And, to my delight, the marketplace was suddenly overflowing with third-party expansions. Yeah, a lot of ’em were crap. But there were all kinds of gems to be found out there. There were some nice experimental products, some blasts from the past, and what seemed (for a short time) to be an incredibly healthy, booming market. But then came the steep discounts (as a consumer, also an enjoyable development), and products dried out pretty quickly. The release of the “3.5” edition of D&D was arguably rushed in order to deal with steep decline in sales that followed the boom.

And we could look at the North American video game bust in the early 1980s as well…

So now, we’ve got indie games in general, and indie RPGs specifically. Are we heading for a new glut? A new bust? In 2016, are we going to look back on 2012 – 2014 and say, “Wow, those were awesome days to be an RPG fan… so many games. Why don’t people make games like that anymore?”

I don’t know. Obviously, I hope not, and it’s a totally different world and marketplace from 1994.  Or 1982.

Is this even something you are paying attention to, as a gamer? Does it even feel like there’s much of a “surge” in games for you?

 

 

 

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

The Rise of the Microconsoles Continues…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 28, 2013

Google is apparently going to enter the fray with an Ouya-killer of their own. Possibly in response to Apple’s potential push for supporting game controllers and having gaming integral with Apple TV:

Forbes: Google Takes Aim at Gaming Market With New Android Video Game Console

WSJ: Google Building Android Game Console

The rumors of Apple TV based gaming is of course interesting. Forbes has another article this morning about the possibilities: “Google and Apple May Bring Us a Console War We Didn’t See Coming.”

And the GameStick is coming out pretty soon…

And then there’s the Mad Catz MOJO. Which is more of a different way to play vanilla Android games.

Green Throttle Gaming seems to be doing kind of the same thing – letting you play stock Android games on a TV with a controller.

And then there’s GamePop – a subscription-based microconsole that I still can’t get my head around. Yet.

And we’ve got the new consoles from the major console manufacturers hitting. Wow.

Ladies and gentlemen…. welcome to the wild, wonderful world of market fragmentation. It won’t last forever (thankfully), but it will certainly be a land of opportunity… littered with the corpses of lots and lots of earnest but ultimately unsuccessful companies. As Dave Thier comments today, ” I see a storm of new technology and evolving tastes on the horizon, and I wonder what the long tail for these consoles, and the AAA gaming industry in turn, is going to look like. All the lines are blurring right now. The distinctions between console, PC, phone, tablet and watch are approaching academic. This makes for a cloudy future for anything with a more narrow focus.”

But in the meantime, as all this develops: Your choices as a gamer this year are pretty impressive: Do you go with Intel or AMD? NVidia or ATI? Definitely a lot to think about… 🙂

(Seriously, if Microsoft tries to drag PC gaming kicking and screaming down into potentially another walled garden of a “me-too” mobile-style environment, my commitment to PC gaming may not be all it once was. It’s still where my heart is, but I’m worried about being abandoned. So… while I’m still leading on computers of various flavors, I’m definitely fascinated by the evolving console / mobile landscape).

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Are Publishers Getting Interested in Old-School PC RPGs Again?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 27, 2013

Hmmm… in answer to the title query… yes, maybe publishers big and small are getting interested in that genre they happily left for dead years ago.  After some high-profile Kickstarter successes, publishers are thinking… no, not that they were wrong, but rather, that the market has now changed. That’s the excuse I remember….

Publishers may start funding old-school RPGs because of the success of Kickstarter

Well, isn’t this interesting…

Apparently, they are looking at the success of (some) old-school RPGs like Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Project Eternity, and the sales of games like Legend of Grimrock (over 600,000 sold, last I heard), and said, “Hey, we can make real money on these!” Maybe not the kind of money they are used to making on Call of Modern Zombie Battlefield Warfare (by, like, at least an order of magnitude), but they are being forced to recognize that there’s still a reasonably large market there.

Ubisoft may have telegraphed this “sea-change” several weeks ago with their announcement of Might & Magic X: Legacy. From what I can tell, it is not a “AAA” game. It’s low-budget (by Ubisoft standards, not by indie standards), and while it is not crowd-funded, they are engaging gamers to vote for features and styles. This is a more transparent development style adopted from crowdfunded games, so… I guess they are learning and imitating.

Is this a great thing?

Well, there’s certainly a question of whether it’s really “a thing” or not. At least the publishers are expressing interest and curiosity… and, in the case of Ubisoft, actually putting their money where their mouth is. But publishers always do this. If there’s money to be made in gaming, they’ll try their best to explore it. That’s why they exist. Many times in the past publishers have made less-than-stellar forays into gaming territories outside of their comfort zone, and retreated. This could be one of those times.

But if they really do go there, and return to the fields they abandoned long ago? While I’m personally a little miffed that I’m such a slowpoke and that my “desperately underserved niche” that I was going to try and occupy with very few neighbors is suddenly looking very crowded, I’m otherwise pretty excited. In the words of Bruce Willis in Die Hard, “Welcome to the party, pal!” As a gamer, the idea makes me giddy, even though I already own far more RPGs than I have time to play. As a game developer… I think it opens up a lot of opportunities. I think the upside wins, overall.

As always, we’ll just have to wait and see where this goes. But if you are a fan of classic role-playing games (and I know most of the folks here lean at least slightly in their favor…), this is a pretty fascinating little rumor…

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

How Much Time Does Indie Development Demand?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 26, 2013

Andrew Lamb, on Gamasutra, writes about Dispelling Some Myths for the Indie Studio Newbie.

I really enjoyed the article. I’d say much the same things if I’d written it myself. So kudos to Lamb.

But I wanted to talk about one of his points – about how much time and effort it takes to develop indie games. And he’s not wrong – it takes a hell of a lot of time and effort. These days, making even a simple indie game of reasonable commercial value is crazy-hard, and takes far more time than the neophyte would ever guess.

But I think he overstated his case – or underestimated his fellow game developers – with making a blanket proposition about people with full-time jobs and families are “probably screwed.” There are many people out there who hold down multiple jobs to make ends meet – with a family – that’s how I treat my game dev “job.” Or, rather, it’s how I treat it when I’m doing it right, and not-so-coincidentally, when I’m making the most progress.  It does require building your lifestyle around it, though. And having a day job that doesn’t get too insane with the overtime.  And – if you are smarter than me – choosing a project that is relatively small in scope.

It’s really a matter of time management and priorities. A week is 168 hours – we all have the same amount of time no matter our life circumstances. Let’s assume a full-time job takes up 50 of those hours… 5 days a week, 8 hours per day plus two hours for the ol’ commute, lunch, whatever.  So that leaves you with 118 hours a week for everything else. Sleep is also a necessity. Now, some people say that would take up 8 hours a day, or 56 hours per week… I make do with six (or less), which gives me about 14 extra hours in the week. That takes some work to get your body used to it, but it’s possible (and it cured me of the frequent bouts of insomnia I used to have when I was younger). But lets go ahead and say 56 hours goes to la-la land. So now you have 118 – 56 = 62 hours per week remaining for life.

Assume 2 hours per day, and 4 on weekends, to get stuff done needed for life. Cleaning the apartment, cooking meals, paying bills, doing laundry, shopping, etc. That’s 18 more hours off the week.  So now we’re squeaking in at only 44 hours per week left for everything else – social life, family time, entertainment, and so forth.

So can you limit “everything else” to just 14 hours a week? That would leave you 30 hours for game development.  24 hours? Surely everything else can fit in 24 hours a week. That would give you 20 hours a week to devote to game development. While you can’t get everything done in that much time as a full-time indie devoting 60+ hours each week to his passion, you can still get a lot done.

With a family, you might be able to economize a little in the “getting things done” department, but especially with smaller children, it’s going to take a lot of your time. But I still think 20+ hours a week of game development effort is possible for anybody with a full-time job that isn’t too excessive. (When my full-time job has me working 60+ hours a week, I admit my own game dev efforts drop down to a trickle).

But I don’t think that’s unreasonable, and possible for almost anyone. I think there are a few things that a prospective indie will have to do to make it happen:

#1 – Keep a firm schedule. Designate development time, and treat it like a full-time job. Hopefully your family or significant other will support you in this. One trick is to pick times when nobody else will be up. Some indies wake up early to get stuff done a couple of hours before the rest of the house gets up. I try to do it later at night after everyone goes to bed, but that is a harder time to be productive (‘cuz I get tired…)

#2 – Try to stay focused – family members  aren’t the only ones. This is NOT the time for browsing the web or dinking around on Facebook. Sure, emails and research are part of the job, but you’ll want to keep that focused on getting the job done.

#3 – Set goals and milestones for yourself.  This is a big deal for me, as it’s really easy for me to get to “spinning my wheels” on a task if I haven’t pre-determined exactly what I need to get done.

#4 – Keep the scope small. And then shrink it more. You can grow to larger projects as you get experience, but on a limited time and a limited budget, it’s going to be hard enough learning to get something small done.

I think it’s pretty doable, but these are all things I have to re-commit to on a regular basis to build or maintain good habits. But I think they’ll work for most other aspiring part-time indies.

This doesn’t at all invalidate Lamb’s point – you can’t get away without finding a way to devote that kind of time and energy to an indie project. But I think that with the proper approach, it is within reach of almost anybody.

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

Happy Ouya Day

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 25, 2013

I try not to be a cheerleader for the Ouya, but dang it – it’s the first big “indie console.” It’s hard not to be rooting for it.

Today is kind of crucial, as the Ouya is finally being launched to the rest of the world. Sales today may determine whether or not the little console with big dreams turns out to actually be a significant, viable platform for developers, or just a weird Android to consider for a quick port.

All has not gone perfectly. Shipping problems have still left some backers without their systems as of today, which means they did not get their Ouya prior to launch, as promised. They are mostly international orders. I only got mine a week and a half ago, so “prior to launch” wasn’t a big window. I’ve put some additional playtime since my quick take on the Ouya last week, and I really don’t have much more to add. I’m still playing around with it.

It’s still all about the games, and they are coming. 176 are here now, which is an impressive quantity at launch. Quantity? Check. Quality? It’s mixed. But you can almost call that the definition of “indie” right there. That’s the glory and frustration of it all, with no (significant) gatekeepers.

The thing that is really cool about it – for me, as a guy who’s been playing the “indie evangelist” for years – is that these games are in many cases something that wouldn’t have been out of place on older consoles – including the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo (or even older).  Or in the arcades in the late 80s or early 90s. This isn’t a platform limitation, or even a limitation of the game developers (although it might derive from a mandate for making games cheaply). It’s a choice. But even though these games technically could have been on these consoles, in many cases there was nothing exactly like it before.

Yes, you can probably identify the games that are the spiritual ancestors of these titles – as every game out there is based in some way on predecessors. But they are still pretty original,  and plenty of fun. They try to improve upon the examples of the past without getting swamped by high technology. The Ouya will be something of a test-bed to see if we’ve finally reached a state of maturity in this industry where appreciation of a game no longer hinges upon its use of the latest special effects.  It’s been slowly getting there with a gradually growing audience… so maybe the time has come.

And this may only be the beginning. We’ve got the GameStick coming soon, and more games about to make an appearance, and… well. Exciting times. In spite of all the problems and challenges of indies in the modern world, this is the time I used to dream about when I first started trying my hand at making games as an indie. So yeah. I’m rooting for the Ouya.

Early reports claim that Target Online is already sold out of the box, and apparently Amazon is “temporarily out of stock” as well . Amazon is out of stock on controllers, too. Not bad. If you can’t find one a store in your area, you can go to the Ouya order page and either order it direct, or from one of the other sellers. I don’t know if this means its selling like hotcakes, or if – as with the backers – they just couldn’t get the systems shipped fast enough to meet expected demand.

Still, this is a very hopeful news. I don’t know if people really know what they are getting with the Ouya. If not, hopefully they are pleasantly surprised.

 

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

The Prototype Problem

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 24, 2013

There are parts of the software development cycle that may seem counter-intuitive to people new it. Thanks to crowd-funding and the increased visibility into the development process from the indies, gamers and crowd-funding “backers” may find themselves in a difficult place of witnessing what may appear as a train-wreck as they follow development. Oftentimes, it’s just business as usual in this crazy field we call game development.  And sometimes, it really is a train-wreck. It’s hard to tell the difference.

In my experience, one of the main things that causes indie game development projects to fail is the incredible gulf between prototype and product. This is actually not a problem limited to indies, or even to game development. I’ve had uncomfortably close views of this phenomenon with spectacular, expensive failures outside of gaming.

In fact, let’s talk about one incredible failure at a non-gaming company. The previous management of the software department had been sacked because, IMO, they were too willing to speak frankly to technologically illiterate executives – and often told them things they didn’t want to hear, like how long a project would really take. So new management was brought in, and they selected a “silver bullet” system (which, incidentally, the previous management had considered and rejected). The sales team and techs from this third party were able to throw together a very pretty prototype of new software using our existing data inside of two weeks. On the surface, it looked like it was halfway to completion!

If halfway there, they reasoned, the rest of the software should really only take two more weeks to complete! They generously gave us eight weeks, just to be on the safe side. We needed training on the new framework, after all. They signed papers, spent a lot of money, and patted themselves on the back for finding such a brilliant, easy solution.

It was a disaster. After a year of major effort, a “death march” and two failed rollouts (and a ton of money and customer good will exhausted in the effort), we were forced to revert back to the old system – the one that hadn’t had any updates in a year because it was due to be replaced.

Was the software team simply unmotivated, lazy, and incompetent? Not at all. Maybe demoralized, but still they put in a good effort throughout the death march.  Was it the “silver bullet” framework we used? Well, yes, partly. There were some things it could do really, really well – basically the stuff that was built in two weeks to create the prototype. Everything else, particularly the tremendous amount of functionality that must operate “under the hood” that the end-user can’t see, was a nightmare to work with. It was buggy, poorly designed, ridiculously limited, hard to customize or interface with, and really slowed development to a crawl. But even this wasn’t the main problem.

But what really doomed the project from the beginning was a lack of understanding on the part of the executives and the new management of just what all had to be handled to create a complete software system for our business. They fell prey to the prototype trap – they saw what was really a semi-functional mock-up, and failed to recognize just how much effort would be required “under the hood” to imitate (let alone improve upon) our existing system. Visually, the prototype appeared to be “halfway there.” In reality, it had tackled the “easy 10%” of the job. The savings it provided in development time for a small part of the job was far outweighed by its problems on the back-end, but even if that wasn’t the case, there real problem was that it only provided an illusion of easy development.  But even if the framework had been stellar and really had sped development across the board, there was still a lot of work to do to take it from prototype to product.

Game development can be even worse. In addition to the technical challenges of making a product, games are also art. Games must chase things like “fun factor” and other aesthetics far beyond what’s necessary in other kinds of software.

It’s not uncommon for indie game developers to put forth a herculean effort to get a prototype up and running – to get that first level humming along – and then get bogged down when it comes time to turn it into a full-fledged product. It is ten times easier to hard-code something for a demo or prototype than to create a true general purpose system that can handle all the things you want to throw at it. The systems (among others) I noted above actually do a lot of work to make that easier on the developers and provide a really awesome foundation to work from, but there are still no true silver bullets or magical shortcuts for doing robust, commercial game development.

It’s really hard to explain until you’ve been there, and had to deal with those nightmares, particularly when integrating and tracking all those different pieces that go into a fully-featured game. It’s easy to feel like progress has ground to a halt, especially for an inexperienced team. And it’s easy for morale to slide, which truly will slow down progress, compounding the problems.

Entire books have been written about dealing with these problems, so I won’t go into detail about solutions here. I think it’s enough just to remind people about it here. You need to anticipate it, and plan ahead to deal with it.

For gamers, especially those who get excited about upcoming Kickstarter-funded games, I think it’s important to bring this up as a warning. It’s partly a warning not to get overly excited by what appears to be a game that – from the videos – looks “halfway done” already. It’s also a warning that there’s a point in development, that point between prototype and product – where things really do slow down. Badly. Don’t be surprised or alarmed when this happens. If you are funding an experienced team, while it’s never easy for them (especially under backer scrutiny), it’s not a surprise to them. For a less experienced team, however, the gulf may present a greater threat.

So just be aware of it, and be prepared.

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

What Does DRM Mean to You?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 21, 2013

So when you are talking about “Digital Rights Management,” DRM, the sort of thing that used to be called “copy protection,” there are a lot of arguments out there. While there are “book answers” out there, I’m more curious as to what you guys think / feel. The whole DRM thing (which has been brought to a head recently with Microsoft backing off from their previous, nasty game-sharing restrictions on the Xbone). I’m kinda curious about what the folks ’round these parts think, so I’d like to ask you some questions:

1. When you talk about DRM, what kind of DRM are you referring to? What sort of practices? Is anything at all that prevents you from simply copying a directory to another machine and running it considered “DRM” to you?

2. Are simple license keys DRM?

3. If not, do they become DRM if the game “phones home” to make sure it’s valid?   If so, is there any point at which it ceases to be “DRM” in your mind? Like if it’s a common code or password to unlock the game? Or if you have to authorized a service (like Steam) on your machine before the games will run?

4. All that being said, do you prefer to have a big demo download that can be upgraded with a single code or password, or a smaller demo download that must be replaced by downloading a “full version” that doesn’t require any sort of DRM or unlocking mechanism?

5. How important are demo versions of games to you these days? Do you usually try a game before you buy it, or are your decisions mainly determined by watching preview videos / descriptions / reviews / screenshots?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Filed Under: General - Comments: 27 Comments to Read

Booyah – The Ouya! A Quick Take

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 20, 2013

I received my Ouya just before having to leave town. I’m doing that a lot lately, have you noticed? Anyway… I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it (as expected), but I’ve been able to put a couple of hours into it. But as usual, the console itself is not really the point. It’s about the games. While the console manufacturer can do a lot to encourage or discourage games, the bottom line is that the games make the console. So – more on this in a minute.

The System

I got a special edition console, so it’s a cool brown color, along with two brown controllers. The console itself is pretty small – a little larger than the size of a soup can. This would be a problem if it was a “wired” console, as there’s just not a lot of bulk and weight there to hold cables in place. But it’s a pretty wireless device, so this isn’t a problem. It has a gig of main memory, which is pretty decent for a $100 console, and 8 gigs of secondary storage – which isn’t so great. But it also has a USB slot which I assume can be used for more storage.  For wireless connectivity, it has 802.11 b/g/n and bluetooth. It also has an ethernet port if you really do need a wired connection. To hook up to a TV, it has up to 1080p output on an HDMI (only). Don’t bother getting it if you still aren’t running on a modern high-def TV with HDMI input.

The controllers are big and beefy, for western hands. I don’t know if the ones intended for Asia are smaller. One concern I might have is that the controllers are a little too slick and streamlined – if you get sweaty palms while playing, you might have trouble holding on to the controller. The top shoulder buttons aren’t as comfortable to reach as I’d prefer, and the touchpad on the controllers is (on my brown controllers) hard to tell that it’s there. But… these are quibbles. The controllers really are pretty cool. I heard that initially, there was some lag on the controller inputs. In theory, that’s been fixed – if it’s still there, I haven’t noticed it.

The Ouya allows up to four controllers at a time, for what could be some pretty wild four-player gaming action. I only have the two, but I plugged in a wired Xbox controller into the USB port for a three-player game of You Don’t Know Jack. The Xbox controller worked fine for that game, but I don’t know if all games would work as well. I’m not sure how hard it would take to get a wireless controller working for the box, but I was pretty pleased with this discovery.

Using the touchpad causes an arrow-shaped cursor to appear on the screen.  I’m not sure how consistent this is, or how much control games have over this functionality. I can imagine it might be useful for those games that really want to be played by the touchpad. So far I’ve only played one game (Saturday Morning RPG) that uses it at all.

Graphically – I’m really not sure about the power of the console. Most games currently available for it really don’t seem to be pushing it – or maybe they are. I’ve seen some possible slowdown in games / situations, but I’m not sure if I was imagining it, or if not, what might have caused it. Sloppy coding? Some other rendering issues? I don’t know. We may be a while before we find out.

Aside from the 1080p resolution (which is a pretty big deal, admittedly), I’d guess that the graphical powers of the box are somewhere along the lines of the generation of consoles that included the original Xbox, Playstation 2, GameCube, and Sega Dreamcast. Yeah, those boxes are over a decade old, and so that’s not exactly a major compliment. But at this point, I really am just guessing.  Still, memory in those boxes was measured in megs, not gigs, and we sure as hell weren’t talking 1080p.

So don’t expect the console to be running full-on Gears of War clones anytime soon. At least not at that quality and framerate. But for making a kick-butt 2D game with lush visuals and particles, or an RPG along the style / quality of Persona 4? Technology will not be a major barrier here for indie developers.

As far as making your own games for it – I haven’t tried. It’s got a micro USB port and a USB port, and from what I’ve heard you can just side-load your game (or anyone else’s, for that matter) like an app on any other Android.

The Front End

It ran an update as soon as I set it up, which was somewhat of an amusing experience on its own. While the progress bar filled up, little amusing messages appeared on-screen. This reflects attitude. This attitude permeates the console, and I like it. It’s indie. While it does try to be slick and polished, it doesn’t forget its roots. I like this.

The front end is subject to change, so there’s no guarantee that anything is going to stay the same beyond – well, beyond the last time I played it. But as of right now, the main menu consists of four options: “Play” – to play the games you’ve already downloaded and installed; “Discover” – to browse for new games to download; “Make” – to play and test games that you’ve uploaded to the console; and “Manage” – to configure the system, manage your account, etc.

Right off the bat, you need to hook into your wireless (or wired, I guess) network to get an Internet connection, and set up your account (or log into it, if you’ve already created an account at Ouya.tv).  I’m not sure about the difference, but it seemed harder and clunkier to use the artificial keyboard on the Ouya than on my Xbox 360.  It would be nice to get some indication of whether or not you are connected to your wireless connection before you jump into the “Discover” menu option and time out, too.  I’ve found that I’ve got a “dead spot” in my wireless in my house, right where I like to place my Ouya. I only have to move it a few inches to pick up the reception, but it’d be nice to have some kind of indicator to let me know when I’ve nailed it.

The “Discover” option takes you to a menu of different games you can download. I don’t know what it will look like when the Ouya library is home to thousands of games, and I’m sure they’ll change things around eventually. Right now, there are some categories you can pick from with scrolling lists of games. There are “featured” games – basically (I think) the “staff picks” from the Ouya team. There’s a category for the Ouya exclusives, for the currently “trending” top games, and a special menu to let you choose games by genre. There’s also one for the early backers of the box – the ones that chose the dev option for the Kickstarter, which promised them a year of assistance promoting their games on the platform. As of right now, Brian Fargo of InXile has a special category for his picks… I imagine this will be a regularly changing “celebrity pick” area.

And then there’s the Sandbox. The sandbox is, I think, an area for games that haven’t yet been promoted by upvotes to the ‘regular’ areas. All games start in the sandbox, and then may get themselves promoted to the curated area by earning a high-enough “O-Rank” – which consists of values from a proprietary metrics system by Ouya to measure player engagement. They won’t explain the specifics so they can reduce how much developers try to game the system. Anyway – it seems that in every way, the Sandbox is still part of their regular store, with completed, sellable games… but games there are in the “cheap seats” and will probably be ignored by many players until they’ve “passed muster” by stalwart gamers willing to risk playing a few bad games.

Right now, the sandbox is small. As it grows, I’d like to see some better discoverability options for the sandbox – like being able to look at just the RPGs, for example, or to sort by the games with the highest O-Rank, or the newest games, or whatever.  But for now, it’s not too unmanageable.

I would like to be able to see the price of a game before I try to buy it. Right now, the price for the full version comes up only on the final pop-up asking me to confirm my purchase. This is a little annoying, but maybe this was done to preserve flexibility in how “free to play” is implemented by the developer. After all, many games won’t have any concept of purchasing a “full version” – they may use in-app purchases, subscriptions, or donations. I don’t know how it all works, I just know I like to know how much a game is going to cost me up-front.

Overall, the “operating system” for the Ouya seems pretty clean and elegant. It’s clear that the focus here is on gaming – you don’t find a bunch of options for playing music or videos or whatnot. And I have to admit – for a console, being able to just jump on and play something totally new that I just learned about is kinda cool. Because all of the games have a “free to play” component, they’ve integrated the store with your own library so well that (to me) it feels like my gaming library is literally every game released on the system. This was probably a pretty smart approach.

Rolling Your Own

I haven’t actually tried to export anything to the Ouya, yet. However, every Ouya is a “dev kit.” It’s designed as an open platform for game makers. There’s already support for Unity out there, and you can get the SDK and anything else you need to know at the Ouya Development Page. This is really, really cool.

The Games

I’ve played a handful of games for the Ouya, including Final Fantasy III (the 3D remake for mobile devices), Dub Wars,  You Don’t Know Jack, Radiant, Flashout 3D, Deep Dungeons of Doom, Puddle, Organ Trail: The Director’s Cut, and a couple others. A couple of high-profile games I haven’t played on the Ouya yet include The Ball and The Bard’s Tale (the 2005 ‘reboot’ / comical reinvisioning).

Most of these games – in fact, I think all but Dub Wars – are ports from other systems (notably mobile devices). Because they are ports, they aren’t necessarily taking the best advantage of the controller or the hardware capabilities – they’ve been designed to work on the lowest common denominator of systems, without much enhancement as they’ve moved to the Ouya.

There are some Ouya-exclusives on the list, which is interesting. I’m not sure how I’d feel about releasing an exclusive on the platform, but under different circumstances I’d probably be able to be talked into doing a limited-time exclusive (or a “console / mobile exclusive”, where computers are also a launch platform). I think one of the things that might hurt them is that with the exception of those *very* early adopters who paid the $700+ for the “developer’s special” (all 842 of them), people haven’t been able to reliably get their hands on the box ahead of the retail launch. This is unfortunate, and the launch coming up in a week may suffer from this. But… there are still over 150 games available, and some of ’em are pretty good.

The Ouya is likely to struggle for the lack of a “killer app.” Maybe one will appear between now and the Christmas season. As I said, game consoles are generally defined by their games, and the Ouya needs some hit games that are fresh and unique.  There’s definitely something to be said for being able to play some of these games with a controller instead of tapping on the screen, but there must be more than that.

Conclusion

I really don’t know if the Ouya will succeed in the long run or not, and it’s coming out of the gate with a couple of marks against it. The fact that this is the year of major console releases probably doesn’t help much, either. But if it finds its niche, I think it could do well.

What’s the niche? What role could it play to the average consumer? I’m not sure. It’s cheap, the games are cheap, after initial setup it’s easy-to-use and easy to find & play new games. It’s small, friendly, easy on the wallet. With other consoles either ignoring indies or relegating them to a hard-to-find, hard-to-use ghetto, the Ouya stands out as the machine with the strongest support of independent games (we’ll see if the PS4 decides to change that!). It’s not as portable as mobile devices (duh!), but for $100 it’s a lot cheaper than comparable tablets, plus you can play on a wide-screen TV.

I think it has tons of potential, but I don’t know if it has an audience. I can see it becoming a popular “secondary” console, or even a primary console for non-hardcore gamers (or hardcore indie game enthusiasts, like me!).  Will it find an audience? 60,000 people decided they were its audience a year ago, and that certainly sounds like a good start. Will the indies be able to take advantage of a truly self-publishing console platform and create some new industry legends with the Ouya at the forefront?

I guess we’ll see. All I can say is that I like it, I think it has a ton of potential, and I’d really like to see it succeed.

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