How to Not Screw Up a Superhero Movie
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 19, 2013
I saw Man of Steel the other night. I was really looking forward to it, but the final product was… well, it wasn’t bad. We’ve all seen plenty of bad. This was good, but could have been great.
I wouldn’t call myself a huge comic-book fan when I was growing up. For a while I followed Spider-Man and some Chris Claremont-penned titles, but there was simply way too many series for me to keep tabs on. I’d read a few others from friends, but I couldn’t afford to keep up the wide world of superheroes. But I played a lot of the dice-and-paper RPG Champions, never really quit reading comics, and I love superhero movies.
Any of you who have read this blog for a while or played my games can recognize that I’m not a world-class writer. I’m okay with that. It’s not my forte, but I like doing it, and I like to think I can hold my own and that I’m getting better at it. I’m really not a brilliant literary critic, either, but it’s easier for me to spot flaws in other people’s writing than my own. I think that accurately describes most writers. It seems some of these movie makers can really use some more people doing a little bit of this kind of critique. I’m not particularly harping on Man of Steel (and I’m purely dealing with generalities, here, so no spoilers!), as there are some other, far bigger offenders here that I’m imagining as I write this. In fact, I think Man of Steel gets a lot of these right, or at least attempts to.
Telling a really good superhero story isn’t easy. But there are certainly some things that can be done that hard just to avoid screwing up the story. And it’s not just movie-makers… there are some comic book writers who sometimes don’t “get it” either. And game writers. This is a blog dealing primarily with video games, and caters to players and developers, I’d suggest much of this advice applies extremely well to game stories as well. They tend to draw from the same well as superhero stories. Here are some rudimentary concepts to follow to avoid screwing up a superhero movie, or any kind of epic fantasy story:
Understand the Metaphors
Most writers get that the basic metaphors of the superhero genre that appeal to younger readers. Like many video games, the stories appeal to adolescent power fantasies. The origin stories are often tied to puberty – the acquisition of their power often coincides with the onset of puberty, or the character suffers some life-changing tragedy that marks the end of their childhood.
But the successful comic books (and now, movies) took things a lot further to continue their appeal for older audiences. The stories were metaphors for all kinds of real-life themes, the most common being personal growth, overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, dealing with change (and, often, personal loss – the more modern superheroes were constantly going through various stages of grief), and personal sacrifice. Good themes, writ large in modern-era fantasy.
Writing to these metaphors make the fantastic and impossible elements resonate with truth. I should add, this is pretty important to fantasy writing as well (role-playing game developers, take note!).
It’s also probably important to note here that not every issue (or every movie) can possibly deal with all these themes and metaphors at once. I see this way too often in movies – because the filmmakers (or, more often, the guys controlling the purse strings who all want to put their mark on what might be a major franchise) don’t understand the metaphors, don’t know how to focus, and instead just spray the plot with a grab-bag of classic elements they believe shouldn’t be left out. Once again, game developers, take note!
Make Superheroes and Supervillains Believable, Human Characters
The classic golden / silver age comics, which really only appealed to young readers, focused on the powers and battles of the superheroes almost exclusively. The characters were pretty one-dimensional. Then around the 1970’s (I give credit to Spider-Man, though I’m sure comic book scholars could cite earlier examples), many titles began focusing on the actual people behind the masks. In many cases, the “secret identity” had a far more interesting story than the person in tights. But aside from being EXACTLY a four-color soap opera, it gave the magical events and legendary battles a context and a reason. Children may not care – you can simply identify a “good guy” and a “bad guy,” and they are fully invested in the drama. Older audiences need more.
Superheroes (and yes, the supervillains too!) need to be human. Even if they are completely alien (with some allowable exceptions for certain antagonists). The heroes need to have mundane weaknesses and personal demons to compliment their fantastic ones. They should have a little bit of darkness (though the anti-heroes of modern graphic novels took it to what I felt was an unpleasant extreme). They need to fail sometimes – both in their big adventures, and in their personal lives. The villains need to have understandable (if not sympathetic) goals, redeeming qualities, and an admirable trait or two.
And motivation should be clear. Why does the hero take great personal risk and sacrifice to do what’s right… especially when the alternatives should be so very tempting (in a well-written story)? Not just the “join me and we shall rule the galaxy together” kinds of alternatives, the clear “good vs. evil” choices, but also the “why should I risk my neck when someone else can handle it?” kind of choices. Or the, “can I just live a normal life?” options. (Again, there’s a metaphor here… who really has a normal life?)
A good villain, likewise, should have more depth than simply wishing to amass power and fortune, or simply be “insane.” If nothing else, they should be consistent and represent some recognizable human aspects. In The Dark Knight, the brilliantly written and acted Joker was inscrutable, yet internally consistent… he was a fallible human incarnation of a force of nature, a human embodiment of chaos. So even as alien as he appeared on-screen, he was nevertheless recognizable as perhaps an idealized version of some basic human fears.
Explore Relationships Between the Characters
Equally as important as well-defined characters is the relationships between them. In many ways, this is storytelling 101, yet it’s handled so poorly many times (not just in superhero movies) that it feels like it’s a lost art. In some ways, a character is really defined by his relationships with others around them. How they treat strangers. How they treat the other members of their team. How they treat their enemies. How they treat their mother.
Of course, you’ve got to soap opera loves and hates. And why. This is basic human experience stuff, which is why it resonates with audiences. It’s also amusing to think of these people with really strange lives and really strange powers getting together. There’s a voyeuristic element, I suppose, to imagining how these relationships are supposed to work. But we all get that weird people need love, too.
And we’re all weird.
But there’s more to it than than. Relationships get complicated in real life, and sometimes political, and once again the fantastic elements of the comics throw these things into epic scale. But while these things are extreme in the melodrama of the superhero world, they are nevertheless grounded in real-world relationships – and struggles – we all face. And relationships may often be with principles and ideas, sometimes personified. How do characters deal with authority? With power? With failure or rejection?
And then there are relationships that may only be based loosely on real-world foundations, but extrapolated to fit the comic book universe. Once again, this serves to ground the fantastic into reality, where we recognize that certain things “make sense” or would reasonably follow in the bizarre world these characters inhabit.
The most important relationship of all might be between the hero and the villain. This is where so many movie franchises go wrong – they think if a single villain is good, than a half-dozen is better. This is incorrect on so many levels. Ideally, the hero and the villain should be set on a collision course. While there should be twists and bends, and the relationship between the two may not be black and white, this collision should be inevitable and fairly obvious. When the waters get too muddy because too many other villains are getting involved, the story decays.
Contrast With the Mundane
Some of the funniest bits in Shakespeare’s plays appeared not in his comedies, but in his tragedies. The reason was simple – he knew audiences needed “comic relief.” The moments of silliness and mundanity help re-calibrate the emotions. The harder we laugh, the more we’ll cry later, or something like that. And vice versa. Good emotional drama depends upon the valleys to help us really feel and respect the peaks.
Good superhero stories need to be anchored in the mundane. Note the Spider-Man page above (written by Babylon 5 creator, J. Michael Straczynski) – Peter reveals a dark and terrible secret while hanging a picture with his wife. The point is to recognize that these guys, even when they are going through the simplest, most normal aspects of their daily lives, are forced to contemplate the most terrible of things – including how to murder friends and allies. Yikes!
But it’s more than that. Again, these characters need to be human. We need to be able to identify with them. We need to see them in “normal” life – at least as normal as it gets. We need to see these demigods struggling with the same things we everyday mortals struggle with. We see the kids grow up (if slowly). We want to see the all-powerful struggle with bad hair days, with embarrassment, with striking out on a first date, with common mistakes. That’s how we identify with them. It reinforces their humanity.
We cannot identify with Superman. He’s a god. But Clark Kent – he’s the real deal. We can see ourselves as Clark.
And we see how their extraordinary intrudes upon the ordinary. The mundane gives us grounding so the fantastic seems all the more fantastic.
Give the Heroes Tough Ethical Decisions – Sometimes With No Right Answer
Comic books are often morality plays. While many times it comes down to good ol’-fashioned beat-em-up between the black hats and the white hats, modern comics have characters facing tough ethical decisions as much as nearly invincible bad guys. They don’t always make the right choice. Sometimes they let people die. Sometimes the “greater good” is questionable (or, as in the deconstructionist series amd movie The Watchmen, downright despicable – a modified Trolley Problem).
This doesn’t mean that superheroes need to be constantly hounded by the awful side-effects of their decisions (but there’s often plenty of angst thrown around). It’s generally fairly un-messy and palatable. But choices should have real consequences, and the heroes should have to bear the burden of their decisions. And sometimes not only are their decisions questionable (or wrong), but they don’t succeed.
Again, poor stories don’t deal with such decisions. The hero unquestioningly does The Right Thing because he’s the good guy, and it’s a pretty simple, unambiguous choice. And the consequences of his or her decision are hand-waved enough to be nice and positive with a cool wrap-up at the end. They may get beat up a lot, you may wonder how they go from being flat on the floor to pulling off a win, but the end is never really in question, and it’s all gonna work out in the end.
Two bad examples in otherwise good movies would be the 1979 Superman and the 2002 Spider-Man. In both movies, the hero is given a tough choice – to save many people, or to save the person he loves. In both movies, they wimp out and allow the hero to do both. In Superman, it’s a total Deus Ex Machina moment with no repercussions, making us wonder why he doesn’t just go back in time constantly to make sure things have a pat ending. At least he does agonize over having made the “right” decision for a few minutes before pulling off a magic solution. In Spider-Man, he tries to accomplish both, and succeeds, with a tiny bit of help from bystanders. (In the latter case, the story from the comics that this was based on differed considerably, and… had a vastly different ending.)
Remember that Superhero Stories Are Still Basic Stories
While there are some characteristics that make the superhero story stand out, the laws of drama and good writing are not repealed just because the main character can defy the laws of physics.
In particular, the biggest failing a superhero movie usually has is simply being too busy, too frantic, too complicated and too overwhelmingly “epic” that the audiences simply loses their grounding and the plot thread. Oftentimes simple is best. Comics have a very long history, and the most popular characters are well past retirement age now. Movie-makers adopting their stories would do well to remember that they can’t cram all of that into 120 minutes.
And what’s the best superhero movie of all time? For me, it’s a tough call, but I think The Incredibles might win by a nose.
Filed Under: Design, Movies - Comments: 11 Comments to Read
GOG.COM holds a massive sale
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 18, 2013
I guess it’s that time of year again…
The “Definitive Dungeons & Dragons Bundle” would be extremely interesting to me… if I didn’t already own every single game in the bundle. In some cases, twice. Or, in the case of Baldur’s Gate, three times…
And Torchlight is free for a couple of days. If you don’t have it already…
There are a bunch of awesome indie games that are now 50% off, as well. Definitely worth checking out, if you are a fan of classic & indie games! So you, like me, can be the proud owner of more games than you ever expect to have time to play!
Filed Under: Deals - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
Physical Media Loses More Traction…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Gamasutra announced yesterday that it will no longer publishing the monthly NPD numbers for retail game sales. The reason? The numbers are becoming increasingly meaningless. They stress that they still respect the NPD and the job they do – but the numbers can now be more confusing than they are helpful. This is mainly because they do not take international sales or digital sales into consideration.
Back in the bad ol’ days when I was working on Playstation 1 and Dreamcast games, NPD numbers were the highly sought-after gospel. At least in the U.S., International sales were important but secondary (and could usually be estimated by being around equal to the total U.S. sales numbers), and physical sales were king. Sure, you had used game sales and a handful of games selling digital versions (hey, this was the post-Doom era), but pretty much “in the noise” as far as game data was concerned.
And now, it’s pretty clear that at least in terms of units sold (and perhaps in terms of dollars as well), online distribution has surpassed physical distribution overall. It’s been that way for a few years on PC, and of course it has always been that way for mobile devices. And international distribution is kinda the default.
What’s even more awesome? This feels like old news. We crossed from “maybe it will happen to someday” to “what cave have you been living in?” at some point, and I’m not really sure when that was. It’s definitely a sign of indie victory. Back in those bad ol’ days, again, there was only one way to do things – really – in spite of little upstarts like id Software and Epic (Mega)Games making little end runs around the establishment. But being indie was all about being a little upstart like that.
Now… we’re not such upstarts anymore.
So now that the giant has been defeated and banished from the realm – the giant that once dictated what games would come out when – what does that mean?
Craploads of games, really. We’re already there but… craploads more. Most of which are, well, crap. But… somewhere in there, a the floodgates keep opening wider, there are some new, innovative, awesome, butt-kicking games that keep serving to remind us why we play.
Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment
Why PC Gaming Rocks: PCs Are Already Emulating the Xbox One…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 17, 2013
In terms of scandals currently making the rounds in the news here in the U.S.A., this would definitely be such small potatoes as to hardly warrant a comment. But it’s funny, and game-related.
Those Xbox One games played at E3 last week? Thanks to some well-timed pictures and a crash to the desktop, we know what they were really running on…
Xbox One Games at E3 Were Played On Windows 7 PCs with NVidia GTX cards.
By itself, this is hardly unprecedented. It’s just more on the amusing side, especially when you consider that Microsoft Games couldn’t depend on either ATI or Windows 8 for meeting the target environment.
It also makes me wonder what the launch will be like if developers still don’t have their hands on “final” hardware. This thing is supposed to be out to consumers in November. If they did, unless they had *barely* received them – why would they be supporting the PC version for the E3 demos? Microsoft has launched two consoles already, so I wouldn’t want to assume that they don’t know what they are doing with this launch, but…
Now, there was a time when the dev system for a console I was working on consisted of a couple of cards installed on a PC. But in this case, the cards really were the main hardware for the console, and the output was all the console O.S. – there was no access to the computer from the cards.
Anyway, I just find it amusing that in order to get the most awesome gaming technology that will become available in a half-year, you can just upgrade your existing Windows 7 PC with a high-end NVidia GTX (not even an ATI, which is supposed to be fuelling the Xbone) to get a similar performance. That might be a better use of the $500.
No, many of the games showcased at E3 will not be available on the PC, in spite of being developed on PC originally. And PC gaming technology has regularly been equal or superior to consoles (at least for the last couple of generations). This is really just a source of private amusement that I’m sharing. And in all the new-console, mobile-gaming hubbub, PC gaming is still going strong. Maybe not a strong growth industry, but it still rocks. Booyah.
Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Nuking BlueSnap
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 14, 2013
I’m going to be officially canceling my account with BlueSnap (formerly Plimus) in the next few days. They’ve got some new policies that make them a very poor partner for low-volume indies (and courtesy of The Long Tail, since I quit using them as a primary distribution partner a long time ago, I’m permanently low-volume).
I’m not sure if I’ll be keeping my affiliate account. If I can keep it, I will. Otherwise, it’ll be time for a long-overdue house-cleaning at RampantGames.com. I’m dreading this, as I have a LOT of older games there available as an affiliate via Plimus / BlueSnap. At one point, they were the best deal for small indies, but since getting bought out… not so much. Actually, it was sucking for a long time before that.
That’s one of the other fun things about being an indie… while you’d rather spend 100% of your time making your game (or making your game and talking about your game), you have to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of jobs that aren’t that much fun. This is one.
Filed Under: Rampant Games - Comments: 10 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights Update: How’s Unity 3D Working Out?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 13, 2013
I got a great suggestion a few weeks ago for a Frayed Knights Dev Diary thingy about my experiences working with Unity 3D.
Brilliant idea! The only trick is, I’m not really sure how to answer it.
My first reaction is, “Huh? I’m using Unity? Oh, yeah, I guess I am.”
It doesn’t sound like a compliment, but it is. Here’s why:
Familiar Language
Most of the work I’ve been doing lately has either been UI stuff (which uses a UI toolkit called NGUI… built on top of Unity), game code, and data framework stuff. For the latter two cases, well: code be code, mon. I’m using C#, which is a popular high-level language that I’ve used off-and-on over the years, but it’s very similar to C++, which I’ve used like – forever. The Mono “subset” of libraries that I can use in Unity is pretty extensive – not perfect, but more than adequate for what I’m doing in game code. It’s a fairly mature language and set of libraries by this point, and it’s a familiar language. So…. I’m right at home.
One big challenge here was, of course, that I’d written a ton of code for the previous engine that now had to be completely re-written. That was a factor in going to a new engine – I knew there’d be a big hit on schedule because of this. To some degree, I was able to “port” the old code over without too much difficulty. But I’ve also taken advantage of the opportunity to completely re-write huge chunks (I’d say 85%+) of the game code. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, but then… I’m a programmer. It’s what I do.
Third-Party Support
In the case of UI stuff using NGUI – you have to have a pretty good handle on how Unity likes to do things, I guess, but it’s still it’s own framework on top of that. I’m never sure I’m doing things optimally or not, but then I’ve never been much of a UI programmer. But NGUI is easy to work with, and has a ton of features. And this says something about Unity – it’s really well-supported by the community right now. There are zillions of third-party libraries out there for it right now, and while most aren’t quite as well-made and fully-featured as NGUI, they tend to address a lot of needs where Unity is found lacking. Most of the resources are pretty reasonably priced – so if spending $10 or $20 or $50 for a utility or library or $100 for a collection of stand-in content doesn’t freak you out, there’s plenty of stuff out there to make your job easier.
Then there’s the community itself – wow. The forums are incredibly active, with lots of helpful answers from both third- and first-party sources. There’s sample code and tutorials galore. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, until you’ve been screaming silently at your monitor at two in the morning and then do a Google Search and find the answers to your dilemma in seconds.
The Development Environment
Unity has a really nice editor that works well. By default (I think) there are a number of windows that handle most functions – a hierarchy view of the current scene, a 3D graphical scene editor, a “Game Camera” view, a project file / directory structure pane (with graphical previews of objects, materials, textures, etc.), and an “inspector” that shows you (and allows you to interact with) the properties of whatever object in your scene that you have currently selected (via the hierarchy or 3D view). Then there’s the main menu and some handy widgets, including the ability to run and test your game right there in the editor in the “Game Camera” view.
The default code editor is MonoDevelop, though a lot of people use Visual Studio instead. While I’ve been a VS guy for most of my career, I’m using MonoDevelop right now. It’s already loosely integrated with the Unity editor, and generally works pretty well. I won’t sing it’s praises, but it generally does its job reasonably well and gets out of my way.
I have had some occasional problems with the editor crashing or locking up on me. This is really frustrating if I haven’t saved recently. But I’ve simply taken to making sure that I save early and often.
Another slick feature of the development environment is that it does a lot of work automatically. For example, if you drop in a Blender object into your game’s directory, Unity automatically recognizes it, imports it, and adds it to your game resource tree. If you make a change to it, Unity automatically detects the change and updates it accordingly within memory. While that sounds like a luxury in your content pipeline, it’s amazing how handy it is and how much it can speed development.
Finally – a really big deal is the ease of exporting to different platforms. I haven’t messed with this much – the only time I’ve done a full export has been to web-based and standalone Windows projects. But it’s really, really easy. As easy as it should be, at least from my limited amount of monkeying around with it. You simply choose your target and a few options, including your starting scene, and build. Unity does all the heavy lifting and assembles your project for you.
Unity Scripting
The Unity scripting system is very easy to use once you get a “feel” for it – which might take a while. There are a few libraries to get familiar with, and some critical components to be aware of (things like Time, Transform, Mathf, and Camera are pretty critical off the bat). But at it’s core, Unity deals with GameObjects – a base class for all objects – which are object-oriented containers for components – behaviors and characteristics.
In practice, it’s pretty straightforward. You have an object. Want to make it player controlled? Link in a player control component. Want to make it visible? Link in a mesh renderer using whatever player mesh you want. Want it to leave a trail behind it? Link in a trail component. For more complex objects, your game object can have a number of “children” objects, all with their own components. It’s powerful and elegant. And of course, much of your job as a programmer is creating these components.
Once I got into the swing of things, I quickly found that a lot of the way things were designed pretty consistently – which means to me that I could predict with decent accuracy how I expect Unity to handle things I needed to do. I felt like it was designed the way I would have designed it. This makes navigating the system much easier – when I’m trying to figure out how to do something, I simply think of how I, as a programmer, would have set it up, and go hunting for a function that sounds right. Four out of five times, I nail it. This is perhaps a subjective aspect of Unity, but it makes things a lot easier and more fun for me. It just makes sense and feels right.
Nobody’s Perfect
Naturally, nothing is perfect, and Unity has some blemishes. I’ve had some upgrades to newer versions that have gone far less than swimmingly with my existing projects. There have been a few things that have seemed needlessly difficult to do in Unity that were fairly trivial in other engines, which doesn’t make sense, but usually it’s the other way around.
There are some other issues I’ve heard but not experienced first-hand. The lack of access to the source code is potentially a problem, but in my own experience so far, I’ve been able to do everything I’ve needed to without digging into source – the framework has plenty of hooks into what’s going on and great plug-in architecture, so I don’t foresee it being much of a problem.
You can take a look at some of the games coming out with the Unreal Engine and compare them with Unity, and grasp some of the claims that Unity is just not as powerful as other engines. In theory, I can see this. As I understand it (and this is hearsay), getting proficient in the Unreal Engine takes a really steep learning curve, but once you break through all of that, you have more immediate access to powerful tools. But for the most part, anything that’s done in Unreal can also be done in Unity, but may require more hoop-jumping to get there. But on the flip side, it’s a lot easier to get at the more common tools. However, this could also lead to Unity games tending to “look alike,” as developers tend to maximize their use of what comes easy.
There are a few more elements of Unity development that I haven’t messed with – like profiling and some debugging tools – where Unity may end up sucking. I personally still only feel like I’ve tapped maybe 30% of Unity’s potential, so there’s plenty to discover (and possibly be disappointed in).
Still Learning
While the learning curve in Unity (especially with the tutorials) was relatively gentle, there are a few things that I’ve done thus far that I’ve considered going back and changing. I set things up a particular way that made things a little more complicated for me than they really needed to be, but I’m not sure now if it’d be worth the time to change it. As I said, there’s still plenty I haven’t touched yet, or worked with only a little, so I don’t consider myself an ‘expert’.
With many game engines (at least ones I’ve used or experimented with), putting together a simple world to walk around in isn’t hard, but taking interactions beyond the basics can be quite cumbersome. So far, Unity’s learning curve has been pretty gentle throughout. Maybe it’s just that I’m, er, “seasoned” at this point, but taking things to the next level has not involved a giant wall of learning. There have been a few “gotchas” and some document-scouring involved from time to time, but the way forward hasn’t seemed to require a PhD in Unity before taking the next step.
An Engine that Works With Me
I’ve worked with my own, home-brewed 3D engine before (with Void War), with a number of in-house engines, and put serious effort into only a couple other off-the-shelf third-party engines (notable Torque). While it’s unfair to compare Unity with a much older game engine that was really someone else’s in-house engine re-purposed for third-party use, I did feel when using TGE that I spent half my time fighting the game engine, even when I was trying to do things “it’s way.” That sort of thing really blows productivity. And compared to in-house engines, Unity is far more fully-featured (because it has to be). Overall, with Unity, I feel much more like the engine is working with me, rather than fighting me, on what I’m trying to do.
This all goes back to my comment at the beginning – I often forget that I’m working with Unity. I feel this is a compliment.
The purpose of a game engine and development tool is to do all the heavy lifting and “scut-work” on the mechanical aspects of game development so that you, the game creator, can concentrate on making the game, and making it cool. It is supposed to ease the transition between the minds of the creators and the player’s screen. So if it is doing its job well, you really shouldn’t notice it – it’s like driving along a smooth, well-marked interstate with little traffic. By comparison, you might say, “Oh, wow, this is a really easy trip,” but for the most part it doesn’t draw attention to itself – you get to concentrate on the journey. That’s really how Unity has been for me. I’m sometimes impressed by how it makes parts of my job easier, but for the most part it simply facilitates the journey. I think, “I’m working on my game,” not, “I’m working with Unity.” And that, I think, is the mark of an excellent game engine.
UPDATE:
Free bonus (and worth every penny…)! Since I’m doing a lot of work with dungeon geometry generated in run-time, I can get some weird effects that hit the entire dungeon. This was 100% a “me” bug, not a Unity problem, but I just thought I’d share. The problem is when I flagged certain areas as being water. It worked well – except for sections of the dungeon (which I deem “blocks” – a 20 meter x 20 meter square area) with no water. There, the water didn’t get initialized, and decided to turn all the floors of the “default” material into running water instead.
So it looks like I left the water running in my dungeon.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Game Development - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
Making Short and Sweet Games
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 12, 2013
This was supposed to be what the one-game-per-month idea was supposed to be about (which I’ve not really done much to participate in). But the other day I saw this ad:
There’s a part of me – the kid who spent way too much time and money in the arcades in his youth – who would just love to make games like this forever. Once I had the engine “down” and a bunch of tools and pipelines ironed out (and some reliable content partners), I could maybe crank something like this out in six months… three months to make the game, and three months to just test, debug, polish, and get ready for release, and just make it as fun as can be. I mean, from the looks of it, it’s really just an expansion on Defender, right? Mixed together with some obvious LOLCat cuteness and some late-8-bit / early 16-bit sensibilities and gameplay, a bit of modern snarkiness (note the Xbone snark), and… boom! Sounds like win.
Working on a game that’s short, fun, and out the door in just a few months? As much as I love making RPGs, there’s something pretty awesome about that. And yes, I realize better than most that games always take longer than one expects. But hey, it’s my fantasy, I’m-a gonna let it play out the way I wanna. The guys making these games put every bit as much blood and sweat into making these “smaller” indie games, but just turn their efforts into multiple smaller titles. That’s very cool. And some days, that sounds like a lot of fun.
I’m constantly torn because, as a part-time game dev, I feel I should devote every productive work moment to my primary focus – which is, right now, Frayed Knights. Anything else is just a distraction. But by the same token, it can get easy to get burned out on a project that takes such a long time to reach fruition. And I’ve got more games I want to make than I could get done if I live to be 100.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment
The PS4 Promises to be Indie-Friendly. Also, They Clobber the Xbox One.
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 11, 2013
The Xbone pre-E3 presentation yesterday was, based on most media reports, something of a dud. Maybe it just got reported that way because that’s what many people were expecting, but… based upon what I saw / read, the response was likewarm at best. Many of the Xbone’s “features” were, IMO, not consumer-friendly. They have restrictive built-in DRM capabilities where they touted convoluted exceptions – and admitting no plan yet in place for handling things like game rentals. For indies, they had some token celebrity developers, but simply putting the mega-hit Minecraft on the machine doesn’t make it “indie” any more than putting Doom on the Nintendo 64 made it “indie.” And social media connectivity? I personally have too many ways to connect to Facebook that I just don’t want to use as it is. Most of what I heard was stuff that might appeal to big-name developers looking to enforce policy or push player behavior in a particular direction, but not very much that is of value to a consumer.
(Incidentally, when I hear “cloud-based” these days, I think, “DRM.” While it can mean a little bit more than that – a DRM with benefits – I think it’s another one of those things that’s almost exclusively in the interest of content providers, not their customers).
What made the presentation all the worse was Sony’s presentation. Delving through reports, I didn’t see anything that REALLY excited me about the upcoming PS4, except the significantly better attitude towards indies, with a confirmation that indies will be able to “self-publish” on the platform. What that means remains to be seen, but that’s a far cry from what Microsoft was offering – which seemed at odds against it’s previous approach with the Xbox 360.
Really, it sounds to me that all Sony did was not screw up. In response to convoluted schemes for used game handling for the Xbone, Sony offered this helpful instruction video:
What it came down to was summarized by John Teti in an excellent article called, “Who Do You Think You Are Talking To?” – Microsoft seemed to be addressing “a demographic caricature who was born in a marketeer’s binder,” whereas Sony (guilty of the same thing many times in the past), “changed the playbook. Its executives went ahead and talked about used games, assuring players that buying, trading, and lending software on the PS4 would be as simple as ever. They showcased a wide variety of games, refusing to pigeonhole their concept of the modern-day player (or the modern-day developer, for that matter). They promised not to make your console “phone home” to a nanny server. And they priced their new machine $100 lower than Microsoft’s.”
But in the end, I’m not hearing much that’s “revolutionary.” Which is probably just as well. All Sony did, from what I can tell, was not make any bad mistakes. Which I guess was all it took.
Until I know more (much more), I’m not planning on making games for the PS4. Although having started my career doing Playstation games, it’d be kinda fun to go back there… 🙂 Maybe Microsoft will be vindicated in the end. Either way, both console makers have a few months to tweak their message and change direction in a few ways, and it’s still too early to count Nintendo out. Ultimately, it’ll be an interesting year for gamers.
Like most indies, I’ll be keeping my head down, stay out of the way while the titans are duking it out, and then try and do the best I can to thrive no matter which way things go, before and after the dust clears.
Filed Under: Biz, Mainstream Games - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
It’s E3 Again!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 10, 2013
Okay, it’s time for E3 once again! This year I’m once again enjoying it from the comfort of my own web-browser. This week, we can expect the following:
1) More information on the next generation of consoles! How will they be more bad-ass than anything that has ever come before in the history of mankind? Why should you not believe your own eyes when you have trouble telling if a game is on the new console or an older console?
2) A whole slew of eye-popping new games – half of which have you running around killing things with a machine gun, and the other half have you running around killing things with a sword. (Yeah, I know, I’m one to talk…)
3) A lot of hand-wringing about the existence of booth-babes. Yet the same people doing the most hand-wringing are ignoring the booths without ’em….
Snarkiness aside, it is kind of a promising week for game industry news. Once upon a time I watched with much more eagerness – but then, I was in the mainstream industry then, and half of the excitement was looking for mentions of our games. Prior to that, there was CES, which was always kind of exciting to me back when the industry was a lot younger and there weren’t nearly as many games out there.
Now? Well, somebody’s gonna be covering indie hall out there, and I’m sure there are maintream games coming out this year that will be pretty cool.
Traditionally, the biggest noisemakers of E3 were the big consoles. With the PS4 and Xbone on the horizon, it’ll be an interesting year. But I’m just not sure I’m gonna be picking up a new generation console for a long time. Unless you include the new microconsoles, like the Ouya.
Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
The Penny Arcade Report Tells It Like It Is: Buy Direct From Developers!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 9, 2013
It’s howling against the hurricane, but it’s something…
The PA Report: Want to support your favorite developers? Ditch Steam and buy direct
It seems to me that the indie devs of the world could benefit from an open-source app that provides the benefits of something like Steam or Desura which any game could link into. It would provide…
A) An easy way to always download your games long after they’ve been purchased without having the delay of contacting the developer
B) An easy way to check for updates to your games … ALWAYS.
C) Discoverability
Just a thought.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
Farewell, Game Developer Magazine…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 7, 2013
1994 kicked all kinds of butt.
I was finishing up school, and starting to get serious about what I wanted to do with my life. The idea of making games for a living was just starting to appear feasible. So I supplemented my formal education by learning all I could about making video games. After all, I’d been doing it as a hobby for years, I may as well get serious about it. But with the awesomeness that was the “Shareware” scene turning guys like id Software into massive successes, where a tiny team of nobodies could shake up the industry, it was clear the future was bright. After all, only a couple of years earlier they’d announced that the video games industry had surpassed Hollywood in revenue… that is, if you only counted box office receipts.
I read lots of books on various aspects of game development. And occasionally magazines would have an article about the subject. And I could find a few things on usenet, using my university Internet connection. At school, we had a (short-lived) “game development club” where we’d get together and swap information on making modern video games. A lot of it was PC-centric (and DOS-centric), but there was a lot to know about how to read joystick input, send sounds to the Sound Blaster card, set the colors on VGA cards, etc. After all, this was the age where you had to do it all yourself, as there was no Windows 95 or Direct X to abstract out the hardware for you.
With years of formal computer science education almost behind me, and the explosion of the video games industry, it seemed like a “dream job” was possible, and if nothing else… there was nothing to stop me from making games! Why couldn’t I go head-to-head with the Doom / Wolfenstein 3D guys? The shareware revolution was at hand. Technology was getting exciting, yet was down-to-earth enough for a common programmer to dive in.
One day during the spring, while perusing a store and looking to see if the latest issue of Computer Gaming World was in, I spied a new magazine. “Game Developer,” it said on the cover, with a corner marker that announced it as the premier issue. The subtitle was, “Programming for Fun.” PERFECT! I bought it immediately, and settled down to read all about the making of Doom and of Iron Helix, using OLE, how game distribution (then) currently worked, and how some guy used Genetic Algorithms to create optimal spacecraft piloting in a simulation (something I actually used myself at one point).
I still have that magazine in my collection. The above is a scan of the cover. The pages really are starting to turn a little yellow, now. The information inside has aged even more poorly, though it’s not completely without value today.
To be fair, I didn’t know if there was enough of an audience out there for a (then) quarterly journal about game development. I was doubtful the magazine would last two years. But I dutifully went to the bookstore to get the next issue. And the next.
And now, almost twenty years later, the final issue of the magazine has been printed. It’s done.
I can’t say this is unexpected. Print magazines are going the way of the dodo and not very slowly, either. Game Developer Magazine is merely the latest to succumb to the failure of print. In this last issue, they even do one of their famous post-mortems… on their own magazine.
The weird thing is that the magazine has been a constant through my game development career. I actually landed a “dream job” at a game studio in the fall of 1994 (probably around issue 3 of the magazine’s run), and at some point they started making subscriptions free for game developers. And they had tons of free issues at GDC, and there were always issues floating around in the halls of SingleTrac.
The mag transformed from a hobbyist periodical with aspirations of addressing a professional audience to a full-on industry periodical (losing the “programming for fun” motto, as it implied development as a hobby, and an emphasis on programming that they wanted to eliminate). And it wasn’t too far behind me, as I, too, made the transformation from aspiring newbie and hobbyist to veteran of the games industry. Therefore, it’s hard for me to tell if the magazine made the shift in tone from wide-eyed newbie / hobbyist to jaded industry veteran, or if it was just me. But it did feel like it changed in those first few years.
Still, the articles were often useful, the post-mortems – although predictable – reminded us of the common mistakes and the best industry practices.
In recent years, there’d been a shift back. As indies began to dominate the scene, the magazine seemed to get a little bit of its old fire back. The games business became new and exciting again. Or again, it could have just been me.
And you know, I wouldn’t mind recapturing the spirit and feel of 1994 again. Maybe it was just me, maybe it was a cultural thing throughout the gaming community encouraged by the boom in gaming and some recent technological breakthroughs. I dunno. But I would suggest there are a lot of parallels between 2013 and 1994. The gaming world is perhaps more exciting than ever, with new technology well within the reach of any developer, and distribution – while crowded – is as wide-open as it has ever been.
More importantly, while it was nice to receive a regular update full of news and professional advice, the community of game developers that was lacking in 1994 is going like gangbusters today. Game Developer Magazine filled a critical role that was missing with the existing technology and culture of the era, when good info was sparse and hard-to-find, and developers didn’t have many convenient ways to stay in communication and build on that community. Now – that role is filled a hundred times over, and it’s more of a problem of finding the right community and the right information from an ocean of it. The need is gone.
But I think I’ll still miss it.
Filed Under: Biz, Books - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
An Old-School Dungeon Mapping Tool?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 6, 2013
In the modern era, in-game “automatic” mapping in RPGs is pretty much a given (no matter how much of a pain they might be to implement on the developer’s side… *grin*). But in older RPGs, prior to around the mid-90s, they were far more rare and of very limited utility. You were expected to play with a graph paper and a pencil next to your keyboard. (As a side benefit, years later you could be cleaning out your old desk and rediscover those old maps and enjoy a brief wave of nostalgia and fond memories…)
Now, people who play older RPGs that don’t have modern amenities are a pretty niche bunch. One of the cool things about indie-dom is that there are people out there willing to address the niches. In this case, a utility to create maps for old-school, tile-based dungeons:
I don’t envy his chances of getting more than a super-sized meal out of his profits for this, but I appreciate him trying! This really just stemmed from his own love of old-school dungeons and making a utility for his own use, and then going out and making it available for others.
This is cool. He (David Walters) has added some nifty little things like animation effects for turntable or rotating tiles, special icons so you can note where you last saved, or where your next goal might be, and several different “themes.”
Okay, you know what else might be cool? I don’t expect it will ever really happen, BUT… what if he provided an API or something into his tool such that indie games using that tile-based approach (There are a couple of ’em out there) could output tile-based data? I know, most indie titles still provide their own automaps (as they should), but I didn’t say it was a great idea, just a cool one.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Game Announcement: Battle of the Sands
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 5, 2013
As long-time readers are very familiar, I’m a big fan of Knights of the Chalice, by Heroic Fantasy Games. Often my favorite games are the ones that I dismissed and sorta ignored during development. Then when it released, I heard what people were saying about it, played the demo, and then bought the game all in the same day. And I was hooked. I consider it one of the “must play” indie RPGs out there. I’ve been anxiously awaiting a sequel, and to be fair I was somewhat disappointed to learn that the developer was making a real-time strategy game prior to the sequel.
Now, I should confess here that I am an RTS fan, too. If you go back along the list of games that I’ve put the most number of hours into, you’ll find that RTS games tend to top the list. One of my favorites of 1992 was a game called Siege, by Mindcraft (coincidentally, also a game that would later be called an “RTS” produced by a company best known for its RPGs). So I don’t have anything against RTS games. It’s just that I was hungry for more Knights of the Chalice…
Anyway, the good news is that the Heroic Fantasy Games RTS, Battle of the Sands, is now out!
The game is rooted in older, simpler titles, like Dune 2000. While I haven’t played much, it does feel like more of a “pure” RTS. In effect, it feels like Craig Stern’s approach to tactics RPGs – it’s far more deterministic and straightforward, and beating the AI feels a little like solving a puzzle, or playing a game of chess. There’s more to it than that, of course.
As in KotC, the AI seems to be pretty brutally efficient.
Anyway, again, from what I’ve played, it seems like it’s one of those games that’s pretty easy to learn (unless there’s a lot more to it than I’ve seen), but challenging to master. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right? The demo is free to check out for yourself, which you can get from the link above.
Have fun!
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
A Milestone of Sorts…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 4, 2013
Today (well, tomorrow as I write this), my eldest daughter graduates from high school.
This boggles my mind. But then, when we decided to have her, I wasn’t yet out of college. Yeah, I know, shock. These days the tendency is to wait until both parents are well-established in their careers before having kids. We had her only two months into the beginning of mine. It was a little bit of a leap of faith.
I was working on Warhawk and Twisted Metal by day (we hadn’t yet gotten into the uber-crunch mode), coming home to spend a couple of hours with my wife, and then she’d sleep and I’d be in charge of taking care of my daughter. Within a couple of months, as she was sleeping slightly more regularly, I’d play games on the computer not far from her cradle. For the next few hours, when she woke up, she was my responsibility. After that, I’d crash for four or five hours, then get up and get ready to catch the bus to work. It was rough.
In some ways, I mark the passage of time by the games I was playing. Yeah, it’s kinda weird, but everything else was kind of a blur. Without looking them up, I couldn’t really tell you what the hit songs were at the time, or what was popular on TV. But in those few waking hours I had in the evening, I gamed. And those are what I remember. Some people have soundtracks for their life. I’ve got videogames.
What I played in those late, occasionally quiet hours included the original X-Com, and Epic Pinball. At least those are what stand out in my mind. Oh, and Wing Commander III. And Wing Commander Armada (which wasn’t so great). Doom 2… which I actually didn’t play too much, because even with the sound turned way down, I felt a little weird subjecting my infant daughter to all those monstrous noises (though apparently they were fine in X-Com).
I remember with some amusement how, after being *so* excited for each installment of Wing Commander (including the spin-offs), the arrival of WC3 was much less of an event for me. At the time, I blamed it on some lackluster spin-offs that had dampened my enthusiasm. But in hindsight, I think it’s pretty clear: I’d just had my first child child, and I was in up to my neck in my “dream job” of making video games myself. What game could compare to that?
Weird what you remember, huh?
Weirder still to be on this side of it all. I can’t really say I don’t know where the time went, because it’s been a very, very eventful 18 years. But it’s still hard to believe.
As a graduation gift this week, we gave my daughter a new laptop. You know, for when she goes to college herself, in the fall. It is for taking notes, writing papers, doing research, and… yeah, entertainment.
Her eyes lit up. Her (nearly) first words were, “It will run Minecraft, can’t it?”
The cycle continues…
Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
Not So Jaded After All
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 3, 2013
Sometimes I think I’ve been wrecked for life. When I was younger – especially in my high school and college years – I would sometimes be up most or all the night playing games. Hours would go by barely noticed as I’d be absorbed in some game. Then I’d feel guilty when I finally quit and realized how much time I’d put into a game -usually because I was supposed to be doing something else. After all, I was always supposed to be doing something else… studying, cleaning up the house, whatever.
It’s been years, and in spite of being an unapologetic gamer, I still have to fight that guilt sometimes.
In recent years, I would sometimes worry that the simply joy I used to experience of being completely absorbed by a game for hours at a time – even a “dumb” arcade-style shooter – was something that wasn’t possible anymore.I’d play top console games – the kind that I believe that, as a kid, I would have played obsessively for hours on end. And they just aren’t thrilling me. Maybe it was because I was now a jaded ol’ game developer. I have a tough time playing a game without a critical, analytical eye. Sometimes I wonder if my experience makes that old joy just something I can only experience through memory and nostalgia.
Has anybody else ever felt that way? The games of today just not doing it for you anymore? And you wonder, “Is it them, or is something wrong with me?” Are those years of latent guilt poisoning the well? If anybody suggested I’d “outgrown” games I’d probably feel inclined to punch them. No way – I still loved games, I still appreciated them, I just had doubts as to whether or not I could be as completely absorbed by a game as I once was.
Fortunately, over the last couple of years, I have found I don’t really have to worry about that anymore. I keep discovering that I’m still as much a sucker for a good game as I ever was. It really was them, not me. And once again I have to fight feelings of guilt as I realize my quick twenty-minute trial turned into three whole hours. Ah, well.
I find it’s pretty evenly split between indie games and mainstream games (although some of the mainstream games are older titles I took a while to get around to). I think it’s just a combination of quality and my own changing tastes. I’m just glad to know I’m not as jaded as I once feared.
Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 12 Comments to Read
Utah Indie Night – May 2013
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 31, 2013
We had Utah Indie Night at Utah Valley University this time around. The sponsor and ever-so-awesome provider of pizza and soda was Adobe, as their “Games Evangelist” Renaun Erickson spoke to the indies in attendance who were using Adobe’s products about how the indies put them to use. He was flying his indie colors by wearing his “Indie Game: The Movie” T-Shirt, which amused me (but I heartily approve).
We had two short presentations this time. The first was by Adam Helps, former game developer who is now working for Autodesk. His presentation was an easy introduction to Bezier Curves for programmers. His contention is that there’s no excuse for games to have objects making sharp, unrealistic turns. I confess, I’ve done ’em sometimes because I couldn’t trust the curves, but he also demonstrated techniques to guarantee the bounding boxes, and determine the exact direction (and speed) of the object at every point along the curve. Gotta agree, while I’d actually used ’em before, this was a good talk to help solidify my knowledge. A friend of mine and fellow indie, Herb Flower of Mythyn Interactive (Link Realms), was sitting next to me and found the information useful as well. He finally understood why those points in his 3D modeling software worked the way they did.
Next – Helium Interactive (at least 4 members of the company, which started as 2 partners a year ago) got up and talked about their upcoming Ouya game, which is showing the potential makings of being one of the first hits for the platform. The game is called Dub Wars, and while it’s still got a little bit of polishing to go, it’s definitely looking pretty cool:
This might be an earlier level, but what we were seeing / playing last night was a bit busier / flashier / more frantic than this video. But the game is still a WIP, so that’s expected.
Basically, the dubstep music controls your weaponry. Which adds a new layer to becoming familiar with the level. They are still undergoing refinement, but what they have is pretty cool. Besides talking design, their programmer showed us some of the profiling and optimization tricks for getting Unity games to run well on the Ouya (or mobile devices).
One indie brought his Oculus Rift goggles, and so we all took turns playing around in the Unity demo. Maybe if I had adjusted the goggles more tightly so they didn’t jiggle so much, and maybe with the refinements of the consumer version, I could last more than four or five minutes before feeling the need to hurl my pizza. There’s also simply an element of developing a tolerance for ’em. But overall, it’s an impressive device. Because of my long dev cycles, I’ll probably wait for the consumer version before picking up a set. But I was immediately considering the really cool first-person RPG / Adventure Game possibilities. I think these might be less nausea-inducing with their slower pace than, say, a first-person shooter. But… who knows? Regardless, it’s a sign of how far the technology has advanced.
I missed many of the games being demonstrated, but one that I was pretty impressed with was called “Momentum.” It’s a take on those old maze games where you had to shift a maze around to maneuver a marble through it. In this case, however, the maze was a narrow 3D path that twists and bends in all 3 dimensions, with lots of areas where the rim curves around and allows the marble to fall if your movement isn’t precise. Anyway, it shows a lot of promise.
And as usual, just chatting with various indies – many of whom are old friends at this point – was a big part of the evening for me.
One thing I was noting during the evening, and something I’ve seen in the past, was how more and more games are being shown on mobile devices. Maybe it’s my old arcade bias, but I really prefer to see games up on a big screen, loud and flashy. Barring that, just having computer screens up so you can see who is demoing what can be helpful too. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if people are just huddled together swapping email addresses or playing a game on someone’s phone. I don’t think there’s a solution to this, as mobile devices are very important indie platforms today. But if you are an indie and you have the option to show your game at a meet-up like this on either a larger computer screen or on a mobile, I’d recommend the bigger screen. It lets more people see what you are up to.
One other change over the years – and a very welcome one – is that indie night is no longer quite so much “aspiring indies” with only a handful of developers who have actually released / shipped. While I’d say they are still in the minority most nights (we always welcome new blood and people still trying to ship their first game), the veterans seem much more plentiful now. The indies are a busy and talented bunch!
Filed Under: Utah Indie Game Night - Comments: Read the First Comment
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