Ouya Secures VC Funding, Slightly Delays Launch

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 9, 2013

Looks like Ouya is moving out of the wading pool into at least the shallow end of the grown-up pool.

Ouya Raises $15m in Venture Funding and Delays Launch

My grumbling joke is this might barely give them enough time to ship all the Kickstarter preorders before public launch now…

No, I haven’t gotten a single message about my Ouya. SOMEBODY has to have their machine ship last, I guess. Le sigh. Not like I’m anywhere near ready to start porting to it, yet, so I guess I’m about as good a “last person” as anyone. I’m still pretty excited about the box. You know, for a console. Me not being much of a console gamer and all.

Anyway, it’s only a three-week delay, and since they got off to a slow start. It turns out, SURPRISE, that actually building hardware and a system is only a small part of what’s necessary to ship a product on this scale – the logistical side is something that cannot be rushed that much – at least not without huge expense.

Anyway, this is… probably… pretty good news for the Ouya.  The story of consoles has always been, “Go big or go home.” The Ouya team has been trying to subvert that in a very indie way, but having enough money to go bigger doesn’t hurt. The big question – as always is the case with VCs – is how much of their own success and control did they give away?

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Microsoft Backs Off?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 8, 2013

This article is mostly speculation, and so there’s a good deal of likelihood that there’ll be minimal changes to Windows 8 (or the roadmap for Windows 9) in the future, but it’s interesting nonetheless…

Microsoft Prepares Rethink on Windows 8 Flagship Software

What it all boils down to: Microsoft is starting to acknowledge that trying to force desktop machines to act like a tablet might not have been the Best Idea Ever. Of course, they are kinda spinning it by calling it a failure to properly educate and train consumers – basically saying, “Windows 8 is totally awesome but we failed to show people how totally awesome it is!”

Yeah, well. Whatever.

Maybe one day, when touch-screen displays are ubiquitous on the desktop and people are very used to touching their screen for stuff, some of the changes they have made might make sense. As for me, while some people are into that, I don’t see it happening.  I actually prefer to sit back from a (hopefully larger) screen, and the mouse gives you the ability to keep that distance and offers some precision you can’t get with the fingertip (without doing the whole magnification gesture with your fingers like you have to on a tablet or phone).

I am fairly new to owning a tablet, and while I certainly think it’s cool, there are a lot of things for which I feel it’s a very poor substitute for a desktop (or my beefy laptop). Even if you were to add a USB wireless mouse and keyboard to the thing, it’s strengths and weaknesses are often mirror images of the strengths and weaknesses of a computer. I really don’t think “one size fits all” trying to merge the two is really a good idea. Sometimes convergence is The Right Thing, but at other times, specialization is the key.

I still have a bigger concern that Microsoft may be trying to deprecate the desktop (although the push-back might mean they have to slow down their plans) and make their new Metro interface the standard – and of course, that’s now a locked-down, closed environment. They really, really want to be Apple, I guess, and are quite pleased with the results of XBox Live and Xbox Live Indie Games.

As far as my own plans as a game developer, this potential retreat changes nothing.  I may be a little late to the party, but I make big games that take a long development time, so I don’t get a lot of opportunity to turn on a dime and jump on short-term trends. So I’m looking at long-term “sea changes.” Windows has become a “loose cannon” as a platform for me. Windows 8 was something of an early warning for me that I cannot make my games for a single platform, or even have a single “primary” platform anymore.  Yeah, I knew that a long time ago, but this kinda turns it from a “should” to a “must” with me.

 

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: Getting Social?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 7, 2013

Frayed Knights is not what you’d commonly term a “social game.” It’s not multiplayer, you aren’t forced to recruit friends to pass critical sections of the game, anything like that. It’s a good ol’-fashioned, dungeon-crawling, monster-clobbering RPG that draws inspiration from numerous classic first-person part-based RPGs, dice-and-paper gaming, and my own demented sense of style and sitcom-inspired humor. However, as I’m cranking away on the sequel to the award-winning  game, trying to improve the experience in every way, I’ve started thinking a little bit about the social aspect of gaming. Long before “social networks,” we were talking about our games (tabletop and computer) with friends, sharing ideas, stories, and rumors face-to-face. Gamers like to talk about their games! We always have.

To be fair, I think the social aspects have improved from the day when my friends and I would swap stories about our personal experiences in the Slave Pits of the Undercity.  Today, forums provide an easy medium for people all over the world to get together and chat about a popular game.  Unfortunately, for single-player RPGs, the dicussion is usually related to hints, bugs, or strategies – mechanical aspects. Other kinds of games have a wider range of topics (especially when you are talking about big massively multiplayer online games).

In the early years of D&D, there were a few modules that many players went through. In that respect, it was a shared experience.  We all had different party compositions, different approaches, and of course a different game-master running us through the experience, so there was enough differences to be worth talking about.

Back when I was working at SingleTrac, lunch hours would often include a group game session, often a cooperative mission-based combat sim of some kind. Often our after-game discussions took longer than the game session itself. We loved sharing our different views of what was essentially the same experience. While we’d all played the same game, we all had unique angles on it, and we loved talking about it. If it was a competitive game, of course, it was fun sharing what had happened on the different sides. It was fun to discover that what we thought was an incredibly clever stratagem was actually just dumb luck, or vice-versa.

Sometimes, with a single-player CRPG (especially for a guy like me, who often doesn’t finish a game until a year or more after it’s “current”), it’s a pretty lonely experience. Not that I usually mind – I gravitate towards these kinds of games because there are times I really just want to enjoy an adventure all by myself. Unless I am stumped or stuck and looking for a solution, I tend to ignore any community of players out there.  But other times, I really like to hunt down a forum or something and see what other people are saying about the game, especially if it leads me to better understand the game or the possibilities for enjoyment. That’s something I’d like to foster, but it’s really hard to do in a little indie game. If you assume that only 1% of the players are predisposed to take that kind of initiative and contribute to the discussion, that’s not a lot of people.

It’d be nice if the game itself made it easy. And, to be honest, it’d probably help sales if the game made it easy for players to broadcast to their social networks that they are playing the game and doing exciting stuff. However, I grew pretty disgusted by all the Facebook & Twitter messages from certain games announcing the discovery of a certain flower or rock in a game I don’t give a crap about. That’s “doing it wrong,” in my opinion. Decent idea, poor implementation, maybe. Bombarding friends with stuff like that isn’t a good idea.

I especially don’t want the experience ruined by having out-of-game notifications pop up while playing, inviting you to broadcast something or to visit a website or any crap like that. Then again, these days, certain people seem to enjoy nothing more than posting status updates everywhere they go and with everything that happens to them in the real world, so maybe that’s not so bad. I really don’t know.

From my perspective, I feel like when I’m playing a CRPG, I want to be sucked into the game completely, so that the outside world disappears for a couple of hours. That includes little real-world reminders popping up or out-of-game achievement announcements or any of that crap. That’s my ideal player experience. Maybe not all players are like that. But I think that later, when a player is finished for the night, or has a minute during a lunch break at work, or is waiting to pick up your kids from dance practice, or after the game is completed but for fond memories, the game world can still there, with a network of other players to share it with.

So here are a few of ideas I’ve been mulling over.

Some games have things like being able to post characters to a website, so you can share your stats & gear with other players. That’s a neat idea, and certainly something to consider, but it’s also pretty dry. But since I’ve got quite a few more dynamic items & spells in this game, maybe that’s something people would like to show off.  I dunno.

How you’ve statted up Arianna or what cool headband you’ve acquired is not nearly as interesting as whether or not you decided to let Valeria rot in her cell. At least that’s my thought. But then, that could be a teaser or a spoiler depending upon who hears about it.But maybe, at the close of a session, the game invites you to post an after-action report on your biggest achievements of the session? Defeating a boss?

When you save off a screenshot, rather than just storing it in a directory, the game can include an option to share it on social media?

An even cooler idea (for me, anyway) might be the opportunity to share items or spells via social media. This wouldn’t be a trade, but rather just straight-up sharing, and would be restricted to “normal” level equipment and spells – no special items, unique rewards, or ‘boss’ level items / spells.  Just stuff that could appear as normal, dynamically generated stuff in a shop or in loot.  Maybe you could share a code and other people could then import the item and have it appear in one of the in-game shops.  I like this idea because it gives players a real benefit for participating in the community, yet I don’t think it risks seriously unbalancing the game, as it’s no different than if particular dynamically-generated things appeared in the game through pure chance.

Anyway, I’m not committing to any of this, but these are things I’m thinking about. What would be a “killer” community or social feature for Frayed Knights 2 & 3? If the game encouraged you to share what you were doing through social media, how would you prefer it to happen, and is there some kind of incentive that would make it interesting or cool? Lemme know what you think in the comments, folks!

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 16 Comments to Read

A Knock At The Door

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 6, 2013

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

This is the shortest complete story I know, written by Fredrick Brown, although he later elaborated upon it in his short story, “Knock,” but his point was that those two sentences formed a complete story. And he was writing for a magazine that paid by the word, so writing two-word stories probably wouldn’t pay the bills.

There’s a quote frequently attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, “There is nothing more frightening than a closed door.” This is almost an axiom in horror writing (too often ignored in modern gore-fest horror movies) that implied horror is more potent than fully revealed horror.  Whenever I think of the quote, I think of an experience I had playing the original Ultima Underworld.  As I approached a locked door, something on the other side evidently heard me and started beating on the door, trying to break it down. I heard the sounds, and electrical-sounding noise and the pounding of the door.

I fled. Really. The urge to flee was stronger than my trained response to SAVE THE GAME NOW BEFORE SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS. I did what minimal preparations I could to meet my fate, but I felt a really real fear about approaching that door. I had to prepare emotionally like I rarely do for a boss fight. There’s some deep programming from ancient ancestors who knew they were not at the top of the food chain, could not allow themselves the luxury of feeling ‘safe,’ and who knew that something that was trying THAT hard to engage you made it the predator and you the prey. It was just a video game, but that instinct was still there.

I unlocked the door. And found… a mongbat. A stupid mongbat! That was it! I think that was the first one I’d encountered in Ultima Underworld, so at least it was an exciting new encounter. But I’d gotten all worked up over a frickin’ winged monkey. The battle that followed wasn’t trivial – a mongbat was indeed a reasonably challenging foe. But it was hardly worthy of my expectations and fear. But by that point, I don’t think anything could have burst out from that door that could have been anything but a let-down.

I had no idea what to expect – the closed door was the horror.  And the knock at the door – or in this case, the pounding at the door of an unknown creature – was the story. The story I told myself in my mind, subconsciously, was more powerful than anything that could be on the screen.

I’ve recently been considering this element when it comes to narrative in games. I came across a quote I can’t find right now about rock music, where one critic noted that the song lyrics were most evocative and powerful when their meaning was incomprehensible. The poetic, stream-of-consciousness organization of the lyrics (often drug-induced, I’m sure) captures a mood and feeling that invites the listener to insert themselves into the song, to invest themselves and their own life situation to provide the meaning. Naturally, then, the songs were powerful because they were magically tailored to the listener, speaking to their situation.

In Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics,” he addresses this principle with comic artwork – the more abstract art allows the reader to “fill in the blanks” with his or her imagination, to hold the comic as a mirror to their own lives. This isn’t just a power of abstract artwork. I was rather surprised last year when I went to the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay in Paris at the power of the art and sculpture there. I’m not much of an art critic or afficianado – I’ve got enough training and experience to recognize (sometimes) when it “works” for me or not, or actually go into some technical details with artists. But I’m not often moved by artwork. I was kinda bombarded with it that day. I usually didn’t know much about many of the people, events, or stories being depicted.  But they were worth more than several thousand words to me. My own imagination and experience provided the rest.

I’ve written many times about the inherent conflict between narrative and gameplay.  We have to sacrifice the principles of (linear) narrative for the sake of good gameplay, or sacrifice gameplay (often locking out interaction completely to tell stories in cutscenes) for the sake of providing solid narrative. The two don’t work well together, and in an interactive medium – like real-life experiences – good narrative often comes from reorganizing and editing of events after the fact.

But that’s linear storytelling. As Chris Crawford once pointed out in a talk I attended many years ago, it’s quite possible to assemble a story from a series of vignettes or one-sentence events that combine to modify the context. In other words, complex stories can be formed of simple atoms (his example was the sentence, “He kissed her.”) that can be endlessly reused. At the time, Crawford’s efforts were focused more on having the computer tell the story interactively with the player.

But might we find ourselves able to construct more powerful narratives if we let the designer and the player take care of the creative heavy lifting? Let the designer imply connections, let the player form and breathe life to those connections, and let the computer just do it’s thing to provide the tools and mechanics to facilitate this?

Don’t worry – I’m not getting all artsy-fartsy and experimental for the next installment of Frayed Knights. I’m just kinda circling around a handful of concepts for how to think about non-linear storytelling. On a budget. After all, if a closed door is more frightening than anything else in the world, isn’t it a waste of time and money for indies to create what might lurk behind it? Well, yes, but for the fact that this focus makes opening the door the single most important thing a player wants to do when that unexpected knock (or pounding) is heard. We just need better ideas of letting the player’s imagination fill in what might be lacking on the screen or in the dialog.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 14 Comments to Read

A Terrible Time to Be a Game-Maker?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 3, 2013

Jeff Tunnell, who has been making games since I was a wee lad,  and has been indie for more than a decade, weighs in on the complications of being a game developer in the current marketplace:

“We Can’t Make It Here Anymore”

The guy has forgotten more about making games than I’ve ever known, so I am not one to argue with him even if I was so inclined.

This makes me glad I’m in kind of a niche, though I think Frayed Knights 1 might have been a little too niche.  Everyone is chasing the “everyone” market, it seems, and it’s really, really hard to stand out. But then, even if you stand out from the crowd, potential customers can still have a tough time finding you… even if they are looking you…

Is there a solution to this? Tunnell proposes one – one that I think Steam is currently pursuing as either an addition to or replacement for the Greenlight system.  But basically we’re talking about decentralization again, when the current cycle seems to be back to centralization again. Give it a couple of years…

It’s not like the PC is that much better. I don’t know the numbers, but it is arguably even worse. It’s incredibly hard to measure because things are definitely not so centralized, but if you include web-based game and DLC for popular games, I’d imagine the PC isn’t too far behind the mobile platforms in daily releases. And we’ve got quite the backlog of legacy games going back to the DOS era.  With emulators making it possible to play old games on new hardware, the PC was a saturated platform a decade ago, and gets more so every day. And I’ve kinda quoted the pundits calling it a “dying” platform, but I mainly mean that in jest – I think game sales on the PC – if you include all the available data (again, nothing’s centralized) – broke records again in 2012. It’s just no longer “booming.”

If the new consoles provide good opportunities for indies, then there’ll be a round of new opportunities — for a little while.

I guess it’s just gotta be about staying out there, staying loud, getting noticed, and pushing the crap out of your game. That’s tough. Maybe for some people it comes naturally, but I’m not one of them. I love talking about my game, but I’m not great about climbing onto the rooftops with a megaphone and broadcasting my presence.

If history is a reliable indicator, the boom and saturation that we’re experiencing now will be followed by a contraction and consolidation which pundits will call a “bust” and even suggest that things are “dying.” Which will really mean the rate of growth has dramatically slowed, preceded by a dip.

Yeah, it may be a tough time to be a game developer. But I think that’s pretty much the norm.

Challenges notwithstanding, you know what’s cool?

BEING a gamer. Right now. I’ve heard arguments that the term “gamer” is becoming outdated, like “movie-goer” or “TV viewer.” Maybe it’s adequate to explain what you are doing at the moment, but we’re entering an era where just about everybody in developed nations plays video games… if only rounds of Solitaire or Sodoku. If you are patient (and especially if you factor in inflation over the years), games are cheaper and more plentiful than ever before, with even greater variety and quality. As someone who was lamenting the state of the industry several years ago, this is a welcome change.

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

Techno-Culturally Faking It

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 2, 2013

I don’t know if everybody is this way, but it seems that in many ways I still expect the world to be pretty much the same as it was when I was a teenager. It’s always a little surprising to me to see how my favorite actors and rock stars have aged. I mean, especially since I haven’t aged at all… 🙂

It’s true on a cultural & technological level as well. And hey, I’m a tech guy – I should be up on these things. But I still have a “dumb phone” (as opposed to a “smart phone”), and even that was only obtained grudgingly several years ago when I’d had a couple of employers who’d decided they could economize on office phones by simply assuming all the employees had their own phones and didn’t need one.

My wife and I were discussing a phone upgrade, and balking at the price of going on a data plan. Do we really need to spend $360+ more a year now just to get a ‘modern’ phone? That’s enough to pay for my daughter’s college dorm for a month…  I mean, as a game dev, sure, I need to have access to these phones for testing if I’m gonna support ’em (and right now, for Frayed Knights 2, that may not be too likely… the screens are just too small). But as a guy who spends 80%+ of his waking hours either in front of a computer or in a place where it’s not too hard to have access to one, it’s not much of a necessity.

One thing we discussed in our “how will we afford it?” list is cutting the old umbilical – our land line.

This is weird to us both. We were raised in an era where phones called a place, not an entity. Increasingly, that’s no longer the case. In fact – and this is something I’d call a Bad Thing – our kids’ friends are actually afraid of calling the house, because they might *gasp* have to talk to someone other than the person they want to talk to. What? Talk to an ADULT for five seconds? Forget it! Nothing can be important enough to be worth that risk!

(And I can go on a giant rant on tangents to this subject for another five blog posts, but I won’t. I’ll just say, “Get offa my lawn, you kids!” and leave it at that).

So yeah – do we get rid of that old standby, the land line? We still use it a lot – but consequently, we rarely use up our allocated minutes on our cell phones. But then, unless it’s a time-pressure thing, I’m more inclined to contact people via email or IM than by phone, anyway. That way they can communicate with me at their leisure, I guess, without it being such an interruption. Which is perhaps only a couple of steps removed from being afraid to talk to a stranger at somebody’s house…

But it really is something of a holdover, I guess. It’s like the old party lines way back in my grandparents day – where several houses might be hooked up to the same telephone line, and you could tell if it was for you or not based on the ring pattern. In fact, the way I heard it, Alexander Graham Bell originally envisioned the telephone as more of a broadcast medium – you’d get a nightly call and listen in. You don’t have to squint very hard to see the trend. One phone per house? That’ll prove to be just a blip in technological history. Like the “home computer” – that was another one from my era. Funny how quickly they decided to rebrand the devices “Personal Computers.” And now, you have both, fitting in your pocket.

I don’t think it’d be hard to get used to it.

I mean, I used to laugh at the idea of “TV on demand.” Of course, part of the reason I’d laugh was because the people proposing it were the main broadcast networks, and their opinions on how it ought to work were pretty asinine, rooted deeply in the way they traditionally did things. But today? It’s a little different for the rest of my family, but I personally rarely use the TV as more than an output device for my game consoles or my Roku player. (Yes, I said “consoles”, plural). I am Mr. On-Demand Entertainment.

A little tougher thing for me to get my head around is the “decline” of the PC (and consoles!) in favor of mobile devices. But I expect that is largely a matter of how I use my computer.  The input capabilities of tablets and smart phones is limited (short of plugging in a “real” keyboard) and designed to be as simple as possible. This makes them suck for content creation – which is the bulk of what I do on a computer.  I write, I program. But they are great for content consumption. Wanna watch a video? Chuck birds at pigs? You don’t need a bulky keyboard for that! And now that “broadband” is becoming so common in developed nations, there’s really not much need for removable storage devices either – goodbye disc drives of any kind! If you really need it, plug something external into the USB port. It’s cool, and perfect for a lot of people, but it doesn’t mesh with my lifestyle.

So in spite of historically being something of a technophile, I can’t quite match step with the rhythm of the changes in culture from technology.  (Sometimes ‘cuz they are just plain stupid! And didn’t I tell ya to get offa my lawn!?!?) I’ll just go on faking it, I guess.

But yeah, the land-line umbilical? We’ve still got it. But I think its days are numbered in our household…

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

Quick Take: Bret Airborne

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 1, 2013

Mixing RPG elements with other game genres is nothing new. I mean, if you go back far enough, the genres weren’t clearly defined in the first place, and were all mixed together in weird stew that can be hard to classify. Some of the old-school RPGs of the 1980s might be called “Action-Adventure RPGs with strategy game elements” or something like that.

Today, such mixes are typically more deliberate – mainly because marketers have tried so hard to put everything in clearly defined boxes. But the results have borne fruit. I’ve put a lot of hours in the Borderlands series, a pretty reasonable blend of classic first-person shooter gameplay with fun RPG-style progression. I’d be hard pressed to really call it an “RPG”, but what it really is is a “fun game.”

Mixing RPG elements into the “match three” casual puzzle game genre is likewise not all that new (most notably done in the Puzzle Quest series).  But a recent entry comes with some really neat twists a cool Steampunk theme, and turned a planned 15-minute session into an hour-long quest (that sadly ended in failure) right off the bat. Addictive? Yeah, it’s got that. Fun? Yeah. RPG? Enough to keep my interest.

The game is called Bret Airborne, by Machine 22.

I’m gonna assume you are already pretty familiar with Match-3 games, as made famous by the Bejeweled series. Anybody not played those?  The goal is to match three (or more) objects at a time horizontally or vertically on a playing field. Basic stuff.

In Bret Airborne, there’s a lot more to it than that. Okay, so you are piloting an airship, battling other airships as you are going to save the world from  a mad scientist. You have a special ability – and can buy more special abilities (and other customized qualities) from stores as you gain rewards from downing enemy airships on your quest. So that’s the RPG aspect of the game – you gain customized powers and passive augmentations as you go. It’s not much, but it’s enough. This is not a super complex game.

The “combat” is where things get really interesting. It’s a competitive match-3 game. You and your opponent play on a single board, divided down the middle. Like most match-3 games, you make a move by swapping an object with an adjacent object.  However, you can only swap two pieces that are both on your side of the board – although you can make matches against pieces on your opponent’s side (and win “piracy” points when you do so). Normally, you and your opponent take turns making moves. If you get a match of four or more in a move, you get two bonuses – you get to take an extra turn (HUGE!), AND you push the boundary into your opponent’s territory, allowing you access to move objects formerly under his control. This lasts until your opponent finally gets his turn again, and the boundary re-centers.

Also, if you don’t have a match of any kind (or even if you do, but you are trying to prevent your opponent from getting a killer combo), you can make a move that doesn’t score any matches at all. It’s perfectly legal, but the boundary moves against you one space as it reverts to his turn, giving him access to one column of “your” objects.

In normal combat, matching cannonballs damages your opponent’s armor; matching hammers repairs damage to your ship’s armor. In thunderstorms, matching lightning bolts is something you want to avoid if you can – they cause damage to your own ship. Matching other objects has other effects, most frequently providing resources to your ship.

Instead of swapping tiles on your turn, you can spend those earned resources to use one of your special powers. These can have all kinds of effects, from straightforward damaging of your opponent or repairing your ship to things like converting some of your tiles into cannonballs, converting your opponent’s cannonballs into teapots, stealing resources from your opponent, etc. This is really the meat of the combat at higher levels – powering up your abilities while moving strategically to deny your opponent the opportunity to do the same.

‘Cuz, of course, they can do the same to you.

Anyway, I found the game delightful, and would recommend checking out the free demo –

Bret Airborne at Machine22.com

 

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

How to get pirates to complain about piracy…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 30, 2013

It seems that this story went viral yesterday – which could only help the game’s sales…

Game Dev Tycoon forces those who pirate the game to unwittingly fail from piracy (AKA Best Anti-Piracy Measure Ever!)

It’s very clever – a nice “shame on you” against the pirates.

Will it have ANY effect on piracy? I dunno. Maybe there are three or four people out there who might get inspired by the story (probably not the ones who pirated it) and say, “You know, software companies – even tiny ones – really might suffer from rampant copyright infringement. Maybe I’ll quit encouraging it from now on.” That’d be awesome.

Just because the fight is a nearly impossible one doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fought. And even any potential victory won’t be a  permanent one, and if there is any real success it won’t be won by technology – by “always on DRM” or any of that crap. It’ll be a cultural shift. And this sort of thing is probably as good a place to start as any.

My core question is whether or not the game is actually any good, having not played it yet…

For me, the game’s subject material was already interesting, but speaking for myself (though I imagine many others are in the same boat), it is made more interesting by being “the game that pulled the piracy prank, teaching pirates and others a lesson about piracy.” It makes zero impact on the legitimate purchaser, but that little bit of “meta” information does increase my interest.

While their exact “prank” is not something that could be easily duplicated (it’s unique to the kind of game they made, and now it has already been done…), I do (generally) like the idea of games having a larger “meta” story to them. It’s why I love interviewing developers (new one coming up soon, BTW!) and learning the story behind the game, and knowing about the people responsible for them. That “meta” information intrigues me. Maybe I’m weird that way, but it gives the game more meaning for me.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a game being just a game, having no relationship with anything beyond the context of its own little self-contained universe.  But games that go outside that, and either take or add meaning to the context of the greater world around them (as small of an impact as that might be) do get an added dimension.

Anyway, I hope the prank pays off for the developers. And, the eternal optimist, I really do hope that maybe somewhere out there someone will actually take the lesson to heart.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Love or Money?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 29, 2013

I was going to say that indie gaming has changed a lot in the years I’ve been involved. But after I thought about it a while, it really hasn’t. Ratios have changed, many of the players have changed, a few definitions have changed, but fundamentally it’s stayed the same.

Here’s my gripe. I don’t really like to gripe, especially not about indies. I’m an optimist that way, I guess. But here’s the thing: It seems that lately, in a lot of forums, the focus of many wannabe-pro (or pro) indies is skewed pretty heavily on thoughts of maximizing revenue generation, monetization, customer retention, payment processing, and “going viral.” Especially on the forums that cater to mobile devices, but it’s true all over.

Not that there’s anything wrong with these discussions. I wish I knew more about all of the above, and I like learning more about how to turn my love of game-making into a successful business. It just seems like this sort of talk is drowning out the discussions of things like game design, good player experiences, etc.   Just like the big boys, the discussion sometimes feel like it’s more on extracting maximum dollar value out of a player than providing maximum gaming value.

Maybe that’s why I’m still doing the part-time indie thing instead of rolling in cash like Notch.

But then, Notch ignored pretty much *all* of the principles on how to make the most money out of a game, didn’t he?  Just about everything he did – from the language / platform to develop his game (JAVA? Seriously?), to his release methodology, to his style of game, to a frustratingly opaque new user experience, to failure to plan for DLC or in-app purchases or anything like that which is supposed to be critical for creating a successful game these days. Instead, he just made a wildly entertaining little game.

But then, Minecraft is an aberration. An exception that proves the rule, or something.

Or maybe it’s just a damn good game that managed to get lucky. I think both the “good game” and “getting lucky” parts are pretty significant.  Game Excellence x Luck = Success, something like that.

The first part is what I worry might be getting lost.  All this other stuff – marketing, monetization, player retention strategies… all that is really just there to minimize the role of “luck” in the equation. At least, that’s my opinion. My concern is that it’s also being employed to replace the “game excellence” side as well. It’s like game developers aren’t out to make a better game anymore, just a more attractive and compelling slot machine than the rest of the pack so they can get more quarters out of the crowd per day…

Okay. You know what that sounds like? Yeah. Arcade machines. That’s old-school.

And it sounds like many indie game devs, eight years ago. Tools, strategies, portals, and platforms have changed, but that discussion is a very old one.  There were all kinds of arguments about how to get picked up by Big Fish Games and the like, how to better cash in on your match-three or hidden-object casual game, etc.   And many game devs (including quite successful ones) mocked those guys.

Many of the guys most focused on cashing in back then aren’t around today.  Most didn’t succeed very well in “cashing in,” possibly because they were late to the party. Others did quite good for a while, but as things matured, they couldn’t adapt to the changes. They were, after all, adhering to a different formula. Sometimes they adapted and survived after much pain; other times they simply rolled up the tent and moved on.

So, um, how’s Zynga doing these days, anyway?

So yeah. When people start sniffing Real Money, things get weird. And with success stories like Minecraft, Angry Birds, FTL, etc., there’s Real Money happening and lots of people – including people who really love games – get a little bit of gold fever. I totally understand. But when that focus is clogging up discussions, I get concerned.

There’s nothing at all wrong with trying to make a living – or even trying to make a very generous living – doing what you love and making games. I think that’s awesome.  And yeah, being indie isn’t quite the ideal I once imagined of purely making the games you personally want to make. Sure, there’s a part of that, but a lot of it is making games for others. That’s the point. The biz side is a means to an end, but the end is – as always – making games. And I’d say there’s a core group of indies for whom that is still the focus. I still don’t know many indies who are doing it purely for the cash – it remains a ridiculously tough way to make money.

The important thing, to me, is to not lose one’s soul in the more mercenary aspects of running a business. It means maintaining your love for the medium. It means focusing on providing better value to your players rather than trying to extract monetary value out of them. It means having integrity – to yourself, to the medium, and to your audience. Make games out of love, not just a desire for a paycheck. Do cool stuff just because it’s cool, cool enough to share, not just because it will get you attention and provide a new way to charge for an in-app purchase.

I know that as an indie who has not yet “made it” I am not exactly the source of expert advice.  But I’ll just express that as a philosophical principle, and a caution to the indies who continue to make awesome games: As things become more competitive, channels become more clogged, etc., do not lose sight of why you are making games in the first place.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Are You Cooler Than A 20+ Year Old Game?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 26, 2013

Long-time readers are probably well aware of my fascination with the Ultima series (and spin-offs) up until the mid-90s. And how Ultima Underworld – along with Ultima VII – hold a special place in my heart. The games are now over twenty years old, which kinda boggles my mind. I haven’t really sat down and tried to do a major re-play of these old games in well over a decade, so maybe I’m seeing things through rose-tinted goggles. But I have gone back and replayed chunks of them try and remind myself of both of what was cool about them, and their limitations.  There’s plenty in both categories.

But they provide inspiration for many RPG developers to this day, including myself.

When I was working on the level-editing tools for Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath (which I’ve been back to work on this week, as we’re shifting focus from proof-of-concept to production-level use), I had four goals:

#1 – In developing the first game, it became clear that as hard as I worked to make interesting, explorable levels, the majority of the dungeons were pretty straightforward, simple stuff. Straight halls, rooms, slopes, stairs, etc. Yet these relatively simple layouts were almost as labor-intensive as the more complex and visually / mechanically “interesting” sections. I wanted to make it far, far easier to create 80% or more of a level using just the tools. We should be able to create a pretty functional dungeon, playtest-worthy, in a single day. As a side benefit, that same data could be used to automatically generate in-game mini-maps for the player. As detailed in the above link, the point here is speed, ease-of-use, and (hopefully) an automated environment doing a lot of the error-checking / error prevention for me.

#2 – Make it flexible enough so we can add in complex, custom geometry for the other 20% of a level / dungeo, so we don’t sacrifice the potential of a modern 3D game engine for making cool environments.

#3 – Make dungeons that can be “old-school big” and still run well on desktops & tablets. Too often it seems modern RPG dungeons are tiny (see below).  As a bare minimum, it should be able to easily handle anything the size of the largest Frayed Knights 1 dungeons (the Goblin City and Tower of Almost Certain Death comes to mind).

#4 -The editor for doing the 80% should be powerful enough to replicate anything Ultima Underworld could do. But with better looking 3D, of course. In my mind, the dungeons & levels of Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 were pretty dang interesting, and I feel there’s a lot more than could be done there.  Having this flexibility as the “backbone” of any dungeon – particularly if easy to construct – would help ensure that Frayed Knights 2 would have some great environments to explore.

Now, goal #4 was based a little more on dim recollection than actually going back and playing the UU series (or System Shock 1).  I poked around a little bit, but I did not actually replay significant parts of the game or anything like that.

With the need to do some upgrades to the tools, I finally hunted down documentation for the Ultima Underworld file formats in a moment of idle curiosity, and took some time to check ’em out. The information actually came from an attempt to recreate Ultima Underworld with modern code.

I dunno – maybe there’s only a few people who find stuff like that fascinating. Like how they stored strings, back in the day when you had to work within a 640k memory “window.” Wow.

But I was mostly interested in the level data. This was amazing stuff for its time for a lot of reasons. Actually, there were some pretty amazing bits even today. You can look at this map image and see that there was a LOT to these dungeons. While I admit that in any modern RPG you are going to have some amazing detail that will blow this away, but your average modern-era dungeon “level” would fit in less than a single quadrant of an Ultima Underworld level. Seriously. With great detail comes great brevity.

But for its era, Underworld offered diagonal walls, sloped floors, underground rivers of water and lava (with currents!), moving floors, variable lighting, and something approaching realistic physics for something of a “dungeon simulator.”

So how did I do? Did I match or exceed what Underworld offered over 20 years ago? Happily, it looks like I did.  I was somewhat surprised to see some of its limitations – like slopes could only go in the four cardinal directions, and only a limited height change between them. Walls had to be the width of a full tile. The ceiling height never changed (true story! That one surprised me!).  And the levels were of the Doom-style “fake” 3D – traversable areas could not cross over each other (though I seem to recall things like bridges – special objects – that allowed special-case exceptions to this rule).

So yeah. Frayed Knights 2 happily demolishes those limitations even before I resort to custom geometry. Booyah! I managed to improve upon game technology that’s over twenty years old!

Okay, I guess that’s not exactly a super brag-worthy achievement. But I still think it’s pretty cool.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Retro - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

The Era of Flash Comes to an End?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 25, 2013

When things end with a whimper, they aren’t exactly newsworthy.  I mean, when there’s an official sunset – some kind of milestone / gravestone where people can officially recognize its passing – by that point it has been practically dead and forgotten and only barely considered news. And bold proclamations of its upcoming demise when it’s still going strong with only a hint of its coming decline is easily ignored or mocked.  Proclaiming the death of something while it’s still in it’s gradual decline is even less newsworthy.

I guess it’s a good thing I’m not a news site.

As news, Unity’s announcement of it’s dropping of support for Flash export came as something of a non-event. Originally it was intended as an interesting way to develop content for modern (and future) versions of Flash. But it never really got off the ground.

I think the big trick is that Flash just wasn’t happening on iOS, and overall mobile support is just not there. That’s where the action is now.  The lack of Flash support on mobile platforms was pretty much a concession and telegraphing of the direction things were going to go.  Adobe seems to be embracing HTML5 itself, and its efforts in Flash seem to be more along the lines of helping it get phased out gracefully.

I dunno where things are going, quite. HTML 5 hasn’t quite hit the level of maturity where it can be considered a full replacement, but at this point “it” is where the action seems to be – but “it” really covers multiple technologies. Unity’s web player is pretty awesome, but hardly ubiquitous.

It’s funny how things change.

‘Course, “dying” means not dead yet, and I’m sure there’s still plenty of room (and money to be made) for Flash game programming right now. It still has a huge install base, and anything being developed soonishly in Flash may still be quite viable. Ditto for, say, the XBox 360. Let’s not forget that a Persona 4 was a huge hit on the PS2 a couple of years after the release of the PS3.  But now would probably not be the best time to get started making games for the XBox 360, the PS2, the PS3, or Flash.

But I guess that’s one thing about being a game programmer – it’s a constantly changing field.  My l33t Playstation 1 programming skills, hard-won over five years of intense development of hit games on that platform, are really not much in demand these days. The players, the platforms, the technologies – it can be hard to keep up.

But at least it is seldom boring.

Filed Under: Biz, Programming - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Being Pathetic and Loving It

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 24, 2013

I recently re-played Baldur’s Gate via Overhaul Games’ updated “Enhanced Edition,” which I personally felt did a pretty decent job of enhancing the game (and fixing some of its flaws, especially on modern machines).

After so many years living in more modern systems, it was kinda fun taking the wayback machine to the 2nd edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. It was also a harsh reminder of how brutal those earlier rules were.

How did anyone ever make it to level 4?

Oh, right – combat was not nearly as common in the “real” dice & paper game as in the computer versions, and the computer versions allow saves. But… man. It seemed like every half-hour, combat would begin, and *SPLUTCH*. If you’ve not played Baldur’s Gate, the other members of your party are pretty optional, and can be killed (and, sometimes, brought back) as needed. But if your primary character has his or her hit points dropped to zero (or some other nasty permanent state, like getting petrified), the game is immediately ended.

For the first three levels, characters are pretty much a single critical hit or failed save away from death. Even at higher levels, there are a number of “save or die” effects in that system.  Many of these remained well into 3rd edition, too.  Insta-death really was kind of a lame factor of the rules system, but it came from an era where characters were expected to be pretty disposable. After all, in the original D&D rules, it took all of maybe ten minutes to create a new character.

But while I’m not a huge fan of insta-death, there’s something to be said for characters being so incredibly weak and pathetic in the older D&D rules. I mean, even in edition 3.5 (which lives on, in part, due to Pathfinder), someone once calculated that in a straight-up melee fight, on the average a 1st level wizard would die in a fight against a common HOUSE CAT. Yes, denied the use of his magic spells, four times out of five first-level Gandalf would be shredded and left in a bloody pulp on the floor by Mr. Whiskers.

Most modern CRPGs try to get away from that legacy, and bend over backwards to make you, as a player, feel at least somewhat badass at lower levels. And I’m okay with that.

But there’s a certain charm in the old-school style of starting your character out as a common nobody, perhaps with less-than-stellar stats, a doofus who barely knows which end of the sword is the business end, and for whom an oversized rat is a fair fight, and a lowly hobgoblin is a “boss monster.” The charm really doesn’t come from having your characters shot out from under you, of course – it comes from your character surviving long enough to no longer be pathetic, managing to escape the extreme vulnerability of the early levels and emerge powerful. Maybe it’s only out of pure luck, but you feel like that survival means something, rather than being pre-ordained.

I read once about the difference between mythological heroes and fairy-tale heroes. In most mythologies, heroes are born. Sometimes – for example, Greek / Roman myth – they are the children of gods. Or they are born with particular powers that set them apart from normal men. By contrast, fairy-tale heroes are more often ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. They are intended to teach, and thus the heroes are supposed to be easy to identify with.

Baldur’s Gate bridges that gap somewhat – you play a character whose origin is very much like the mythological hero. But you start out pretty dang pathetic and vulnerable.

Maybe there’s something to that. Maybe that’s a part of the reason (if only a small one) why Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 have become classics of the CRPG genre.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 14 Comments to Read

Guest Post: The Grinding Issue

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 23, 2013

This is a guest post by a friend, fellow indie dev, and a guy I’ve been in the trenches of “mainstream” game development with, Curtis Mirci. He is the creator of the silly, simple fun shooter-with-RPG-elements March to the Moon, an upcoming educational title with RPG elements, and the upcoming game “Siphon Spirit” which is more of an action-RPG with abstract but fascinating mechanics. His website is Califer Games. Today, he’s gonna talk about the game “mechanic” frequently referred to as Grinding. Enjoy!

After I released March to the Moon (link: http://www.califergames.com/marchtothemoon/) on XBox LIVE Indie Games and PC I got a review that made me rethink how I was doing the leveling.  My original idea was to allow people to replay levels to get more XP so they could take on tougher levels.  Indie Gamer Chick (link: http://indiegamerchick.com/2012/12/12/march-to-the-moon/) got to the second act and just played the first level over and over again for an hour.  Then she complained about the game being too easy.

I’ll admit, I like to grind when I’m playing games.  I’m playing Final Fantasy Tactics right now.  I’ve got one guy who can heal the team, one guy that can scare the enemy away, and everyone knows how to do a weak, ranged attack.  And since the XP you get is based on the level of your target, I can consistently level up by just attacking my own team.  Sure, I’m eight levels higher than everyone else, but at least I’m close to unlocking the ninja class so I can use dual weapons.

So what’s the issue?  Why should a designer care about whether the player grinds or not?  For one thing, it makes the game too easy.  A game that is too easy is a game with no more challenge.  A game with no challenge can get boring pretty darn easily.  Also, most games that allow for grinding have a story.  If the player manages to get themselves stuck grinding they could forget what the story is and what the goal is.  These both lead to a player giving up on the game since it’s no longer any fun.

There are a few ways to handle grinding depending on how your game is set up.  You could have a hard game that absolutely requires the player to grind.  I can’t think of a single reason that you would want to do this, but I have read reviews for games that complain of this very thing.  You could also make grinding simply not possible by removing enemies after they are killed or setting a low XP cap per area.  Generally, people don’t seem to like those either.

For the most part, people seem to want to have the option of grinding without ever being forced to do it.  That’s what I like.  But this has a few more layers of depth to it as well.  Players may not be grinding just to get new levels and get generally stronger.  Maybe there is something that they really want to get. Whether it’s a rare drop, money, or new abilities there are plenty of reasons that a player might want to grind.

So how can you combat grinding without taking away a player’s freedom?  I have a few ideas and I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

1. Experience requirements for level grow dramatically.

    Grinding killing rats for 2 XP made sense when it was only 15 XP to level up, but when the next level needs 100 XP you’ll want to move on to the next point of the game to something that gives more XP.

2. Give them a better chance at getting drops.

    If they’re fighting the same monster over and over again to get a rare drop, they’re going to be piling on the XP not only for that monster, but also for all the monsters they kill on the way to their target.  Increasing the odds each time that they kill the monster makes them more likely to get the drop and keep them from overpowering their character.

3. Less XP for lower level enemies.

    If the thing you’re grinding just isn’t giving you as much XP as it used to you’re more likely to move on to find something else to kill.  Giving extra XP for killing something above your level and it may pull the player to face harder challenges and perhaps get through the game sooner.

 

Filed Under: General - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

The Ratings Game of Rating Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 22, 2013

Ye olde day job has me once more on the road, although this time still in the U.S. Hopefully this time my trip to Savannah, Georgia will be a little more relaxed – 16-hour workdays last time got to be a little much, and I wasn’t QUITE as prepared with the blog posts as I should have been. While I don’t have all my posts for the week “canned,” I may not be super-responsive to the comments, depending on schedule and the quality of the hotel Internet connection.

That being out of the way…

Sometimes I get confused for being a “games journalist.” I’m really not. I don’t have the training. I really don’t do game reviews here – there’d be a serious problem with conflict-of-interest and stuff. I do like recommending games I enjoy, and I love to talk about games. It’s what gamers do. We talk about what we love. And I love video games. At least, I love many video games. I have ever since the first time I walked into an arcade and started dumping quarters into Defender, Space Invaders, and Starfire. Or saw a friend’s massive printout of his experience playing the Colossal Cave Adventure. I was enamored. I wanted to talk about it. I talked with friends. I read what few magazines there were on the subject. We compared and contrasted. We argued. We swapped stories.

This isn’t games journalism. This is being a gamer and communicating.

Flash forward thirty years, and we’ve got problems like this one with Metacritic. Sadly, there’s no two ways around it – no matter what system is put in place, when there’s money or power on the line, the system will be gamed. Hard.

I spent a couple of years working for a company that did multi-level marketing (I guess the preferred term now is “Network Marketing”) – and I was astonished. Every loophole, every idiosyncrasy would be exploited. Big time. You’d have distributors paying other distributors to *NOT* work to maximize their downline (“If I can skip you, I can make $46,000 this month, otherwise I only make $38,000 this month — do nothing and I’ll pay you one quarter of the difference.”)  That was counter-productive to everybody, except it maximized the gains of the distributor(s) at the top of the chain — and it was the tip of the iceberg. From government laws & regulations, to business agreements, to standardized test scores, to getting your game approved on XBLIG, to annual employment reviews – any system will eventually get “gamed,” and the more that is at stake, the more it will be gamed, and the spirit of the law will be violated to take advantage of the inevitable limitations of the letter.

So what really sounds like a great idea – publishers being concerned not just with being able to milk their audience for millions of sales, but also being concerned about the ultimate quality of their products – gets twisted into a system of vague pressure and politics.

I guess I also don’t understand why Metacritic doesn’t do a simpler Rotten Tomatoes type of system where the number represents the number of critics who gave a favorable review.

And  that goes back to the complex numerical scores so many review sites use. What’s the difference between an 84% and an 85%, anyway? Or an 8.0 versus an 8.1?  Some sites and magazines historically provided some kind of mathematical weighting system for calculating the score, but it seems to me like an exercise in deception – to pretend that the review score is purely objective, when no such thing is possible. I don’t know that I’d want it to be possible! I don’t think games SHOULD be something that can be entirely objectively scored.

Really – while there are certainly qualitative elements that can be pretty easily compared with each other to get something approximating empirical, non-subjective truth, games are such complex, diverse beasts that they really shouldn’t have that much in common to compare.

This is, in part, why there’s been such an emphasis in graphics quality over the decades. That’s something most games have in common – pictures. How nice are these pictures? For a while that worked okay, because it was really a combination of technology, artist skill, and programmer skill. And since technology kept improving, it was always possible to push that frontier. But nowadays, it ends up being a combination of what game has the most mind-blowing special effects and the fewest graphical anomalies. Is that really how we want to grade games?

And dinging a game on account of bugs? I totally understand when it’s a case of the bugs truly detracting from the experience. But if you recognize that bugs are simply a naturally occurring phenomenon resulting from complex software (something too few gamers seem to be able to grasp), then you’ll realize that being too quick to pick up the torches and pitchforks over *GASP* a character’s hand clipping into his hat in an animation provides a perverse reward for those games that DON’T TRY TO DO VERY MUCH. If you keep your interactions really dumbed-down and simple, easily enumerated, and easily testable, you’ll start with a lot fewer bugs, and they’ll be much easier to find and fix in development.

So even these semi-“objective” criteria really include a ton of subjective tolerances. Are you more willing to accept imperfections in exchange for greater depth and complexity? Are you willing to accept that a game taking risks with new mechanics is going to get some things wrong, compared to a game that plays it safe by honing the tried-and-true to a blinding shine?

And then we get into an area where the similarities and easily-compared elements are lost, and we’re comparing a game dealing with (for example) a theme of innocence lost and eventual redemption with another that is about… killing zombies in as graphic a manner as possible. How do you compare these two? Any commonalities will be grossly simplistic and cosmetic, and any deeper comparison might be like grading a fish on its ability to climb trees. I mean, if you ignore the superficial stuff like photorealistic graphics and quality of voice-overs, would a AAA company REALLY want its game compare to Minecraft?

I could argue that much of the lack of progress of the medium the last couple of decades could be attributable to shoddy reviews (and the influence they hold over the industry), but that might be making a bold claim that the chicken came before the egg. All I know is that it seems to have gotten us into a vicious cycle.  The problem predated Metacritic. Can you really fault a site that does its best to preserve the detail that the industry claims is an honest-to-goodness part of the source data?

So what this all boils down to is my belief that not only are game review *scores* a steaming pile of excrement, but our efforts to treat them as legitimate, objective data is what has hobbled us as an industry.

That’s not to say the reviews themselves are a problem – the text of a review can be extremely valuable not only to a prospective buyer but to anybody trying to scope out the length and breadth of the industry. It’s just the scores – which I will readily admit to being hypocritical about and checking often before reading the review itself – often present an illusion that I feel can be damaging to the medium and industry in the long run.

Really, what more do we need besides thumbs-up and thumbs-down. Maybe a thumb-sideways. Maybe an extra super-thumbs up for those games that really amaze. I don’t know that we really need an “extra bad” rating, for that matter – I know I’d not use it very often. Bad is bad.

I think that for the good of the entire industry, we really just need to wake up, embrace our subjectivity, and keep our review scores simple!

 

Filed Under: General - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Building On Your Own Rhythm

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 19, 2013

People function differently. People have different optimum rhythms and patterns. I guess this is something good managers know, but too many managers – and people trying to manage themselves – don’t get. Or forget.

One of the tricks I have to keep re-discovering is to find ways of getting stuff done that work for me.  I sometimes try to implement recommended procedures by sheer force of will and habit. I guess that works just often enough to screw me up.

The case in point: writing. I keep trying to right from the top-down, the way I was taught in school. Start with the basics, theme, setting, etc., create an outline, and fill it in.

That totally doesn’t work for me. Maybe it doesn’t work for anybody, and I was just lied to in school. I dunno.  Programming, I can do top-down pretty well. Or bottom-up. Maybe it’s a function of familiarity. I’m a better programmer than I am a writer. But writing – I have had to re-learn that I write best from the bottom – up. I dream up things best in scenes, vignettes. With a few of those, it’s really a lot easier to tie things together as a whole. Sometimes a theme emerges, sometimes it they change the fundamental nature of the story I was trying to write.

It’s the same for things like time management, or budgeting, or programming. It’s not about staying in my comfort zone (my comfort zone is probably deep in the “procrastination” territory), but finding a way to structure myself in a way that feels natural and is easy to follow. Fighting that usually ends in frustration. But working with it – and building upon that long enough to make it a habit… is what tends to work best for me.

People reading between the lines may (properly) assume that a lot of writing and story development has been happening on Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath, and that I’ve had some frustration with that.  Yeah.  And that this has changed. Actually, confronting some deadlines and needs for collaboration kinda forced the issue, made me abandon the process I’d been unsuccessfully trying to impose upon myself for months, and go back to what I was comfortable with. Hopefully with some improvements, but I no longer feel like I’m swimming upstream all the time.

Funny how deadlines can do that. Necessity, mother of invention, all that. 🙂

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Let’s Not Eliminate the Game Publishers Just Yet…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 18, 2013

You’d think, as a guy who has been a self-proclaimed “indie evangelist” for years before indie games were cool (wait, we can’t be cool!), that I’d be an enthusiastic chorus for an article entitled, “Why Publishers Stand Between Us and Better Games.”

Maybe a few years ago I would have been. And I generally don’t disagree with the the overall perspective, and I appreciate his enthusiasm, but I guess I’m a little cautious on his analysis, which suggests that publishers are the problem and that indie (esp. Kickstarter and other crowdfunding options) is the cure.

Risk Aversion

I’m all for indie and bypassing the publishers. And I agree that the big money in the games industry is choking off creativity. I disagree that it’s the desire for profit that’s killing the creativity.  Really, that’s a dumb point. I think the profit motive is the source of a ton of creativity. Sure, many game designers do what they do – and experiment – for the sake of the art more than cash. I mean, if I was in it for the money, I sure wouldn’t be making niche old-school style RPGs. I think if I “charge myself” minimum wage, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon will never be profitable. But of course, I’d like to do better than that, and this desire is the source of a lot of the improvements in the sequel.  Necessity is the mother of invention.

I don’t think the problem is the desire for gain, it’s the fear of loss. It’s a well-known phenomenon called “loss aversion.” If I give you $100, and then say there’s a 50% chance that I’ll take it away from you, you will react much more strongly than if I simply tell you there’s a 50% chance of me giving you $100.  In either case, the mathematics are exactly the same – there’s a 50% chance that you’ll be $100 richer. But emotionally, you’ll take a lot stronger measures to avoid losing the bonus $100 than to secure the gain of $100. That’s irrational behavior, but it’s how humans are wired.

So when you’ve got games with budgets in the mid-eight figures (in U.S. dollars), there’s a crapload of money on the line.  So as a publisher, you are gonna need to sell a couple million copies of a AAA game in the first week just to avoid losing money. While you certainly want to sell more than that – 8 million or more if you can pull it off – you will take every effort to avoid doing anything that could put that initial 2 million copies sold at risk. If there’s an option that is equally likely to decrease sales or increase sales by the same amount, it will probably be refused due to this psychological effect.

But this is probably not the biggest factor. It really comes down to the fact that AAA titles ride the ragged edge of budget vs. potential. Two million sales at full price just to break even is a lot. A fifty million dollar budget is a lot riding on success or failure of a project. And this probably doesn’t account for the money dumped into other projects that were cut before they saw the light of day, or the other projects that – in the end – couldn’t break even. In the AAA world, the winner (of the month) takes home all the marbles, so that level of competition keeps driving the price point up.  So the publishers desperately need a good mega-hit or two every year just to stay in business. It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s hardly unique the the games biz. You could say it’s simply a fact of life as this kind of business matures, and the publishers represent one approach that has evolved to adapt to it.

As the battle between the titans rises into ever thinning atmosphere, they leave more room at the lower tiers for alternative approaches.  Like crowdfunding, self-funding indies, etc. This is the area that excites me, and yes – it’s the area where greater experimentation can be taken, because the risk-to-reward ratio isn’t quite as high.

It’s a fallacy to believe that all the innovation is happening on the indie side, or that AAA can’t take risks (they do by their very creation!). It’s not, they do, and while the innovations on the AAA side may get a little buried in otherwise low-risk conventional gameplay, there are cool new ideas coming out of AAA all the time, too.

Publishers are Good For Indies

But I have a suspicion that part of the reason this is such fertile ground is because we’ve got these giant publishers slugging it out in the distance. We indies reap indirect rewards from this. We get to take advantage of new technologies developed specifically to support the “bigshots” in the industry. The market grows in part because of their titanic marketing campaigns. Many of us received part of our training in game development from ‘paying our dues’ in the games industry. And as much as we put a premium on innovation, none of us like reinventing the wheel, and we borrow freely from what has been extensively (and expensively) researched, developed, and promoted at the high-end.

And there are direct benefits as well. If an equitable arrangement can be reached, I’m all for publishers using their mighty marketing and distribution resources to make money off of the indies. Why not? If it’s a win-win for both sides, we’re golden! It doesn’t invalidate the “indie” label if publishers come in after-the-fact to play the traditional role of simply marketing and distributing a title. The real problem is that big publishers tend to have an enormous advantage in negotiations, and have proven quite willing to use this to roll developers in the past. While it worked to their short-term advantage, I believe it caused a hostile environment in the longer term, and I expect that’s where a lot of the schadenfreude comes from as the big publishers currently struggle.

So I’m not really into the “down with publishers!” thing. Their stranglehold over the industry that they enjoyed through most of the 1990s and the early 2000s is largely over, and I’d like to see it stay that way. Sure, most of my gaming time nowadays is spent playing either indie titles or old-school classics, but I still enjoy the occasional good ol’ straight-up AAA romp that rides the formula to perfection.

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