A Dungeon Crawler Recipe?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 23, 2013

It’s a start:

The Dungeon Crawler Recipe

I think you need more to it than this. And “theme” – I dunno. Some of my favorite games of previous eras played fast and loose with this, and that was part of the fun. It seems modern players get much more hung up and demand a purity test for fantasy RPGs, but back in the day – no biggie. We were used to dragons laying on persian rugs and stuff back then, anyway.

One element that I tend to recall when remembering my favorite dungeon crawlers of yore is a feeling of oppressiveness, and a lack of safety. You could, at times, retreat to a safe place briefly – but you’d spend a lot of time down in a dark, dangerous place, ‘cuz that was where the action was. You’d spend a lot of the time in the dark. And by “the dark,” I don’t mean dim lighting that only allowed a few tiles’ worth of vision (though there was that, too).

I remember some dungeon levels becoming as familiar to me as the hallways of my school. My favorite bolt-holes. The exact sequence of steps to get back to a safe spot or a healing fountain. The thing about most dungeon crawlers was that I LIVED in those dungeons. And I think of depth – layers and layers of dungeon hallways built on top of each other.

And I think of pacing – I think slow, methodical pace. Thus the “crawl.” Diablo and its family tree are not really dungeon crawlers.  Those are about hacking and slashing boldly forward, not careful and meticulous progress through an extremely hostile environment that doesn’t leave much margin for error. In a true dungeon crawler, the one-two combo of puzzle-style challenges and dangerous combat makes it quite easy to end up in one of those, “Oh, CRAP!” situations with little chance for escape, let alone victory.

Filed Under: Design, Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

RPG Design: Four Guidelines for Making An (RPG) Introduction

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 22, 2013

Maybe I should blame Star Wars.

I mean, perhaps the biggest hit movie of its time, and it opens with… text. A big wall of text. Literally, a crawl text. I mean, what is this, a silent film?  Well, not exactly… but George Lucas borrowed it directly from the old film serials of his youth, like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. In those serials, there was a little ‘wall of text’ at the beginning of each episode summing up the events of the previous episodes, so that first-time viewers (or those who missed a few episodes) could get caught up to speed. Later, television serials wised up and showed ‘previously on’ summaries that using actual show footage to tell an abbreviated version of the story. But back in the old days of the film serials, you’d get stuff like this:

“A mysterious world that came hurtling from the skies, threatening to destroy the earth, forced Flash Gordon and Dale Arden into a rocket plane with Doctor Zarkov, in a mad attempt to reach the planet and divert it from its course. Hurled through boundless space, they land on the onrushing planet and fall into the clutches of the merciless Emperor Ming, who promptly imprisons Zarkov in his laboratory and then, determined to win the beautiful Dale as his bride, condemns Flash to fight huge ape-like man killers in the arena.”

And that was it. Two (large) sentences, and new viewers were brought up to speed with all the backstory they needed to know. It was minimal, but then again the stories weren’t exactly Inception. Lucas wanted Star Wars to feel like those old Saturday film serials, and even went so far as to make it feel like it was in the middle of a series. The opening crawl, which looks pretty dense on the screen, isn’t much larger than the Flash Gordon introduction:

“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy….”

It is actually pretty short. According to one report, Lucas originally had problems with editing these down to reasonable size as well. It takes a lot of skill and effort to tell a story in a concise manner.

But now we have a generation of aspiring game developers who think, perhaps because of Star Wars, that it’s perfectly awesome to start a game with a dense wall of exposition.  Maybe not all text-based (though I’ve seen that too), but narrating dense exposition isn’t an improvement. Even with pictures and 3D backgrounds.

I’m not going to mention the particular offense that inspired this blog, especially when I know the developers worked so hard on it. But let’s just say that in that critical first five minutes of gameplay, you still wouldn’t be to the ‘play’ part of things.

The Final Fantasy that might have put the “Final” in the series for me was an offender – Final Fantasy XII. I am hazy on the details by now, but it seemed like it had as many intros as Peter Jackson’s Return of the King had endings. At least one was interactive (a tutorial), but I wasn’t too impressed overall.

So here are my general guidelines – as a fan of quality indie RPGs – for handling a proper game introduction.

#1 – The player is there to play.
This is the cardinal rule. While it’s okay to take a little while out in your menu screens and introductory cut-scene or what have you to try and get the player ready and hyped to play the game, the focus must always be on playing. Thirty seconds of intro is cutting into thirty seconds of play-time. If you have only five minutes to make an impression. Is this thirty seconds worth the trade? Maybe. But if not, then the intro should be cut down. Think “Opportunity Cost” here. You are cutting into their game time, so be very sure of what you are doing.

My favorite “bad example” in recent years is Dragon Age: Origins. The intro video is well-done, but it’s basically a 3.5 minute info-dump. It’s not fun to re-watch. The entire background could have been summarized in three sentences, and even then most of the information could have been more interesting if discovered by the player through, you know, playing. Seeing the Gray Wardens mocked behind their back, learning that there are very few left and that the evil they were meant to fight is long gone, and then discovering first-hand that the evil is back with a vengeance.

#2 – Address the the Four W’s soon, but not necessarily before gameplay starts.
The “Four Ws” are questions in the players mind about the story. These should be answered soon, but not necessarily in the intro cutscene. The four W’s are:
Who am I? (Or “Who is the main character?)
Where am I?
What am I supposed to be doing?
Why should I care?

In the Flash Gordon example: It’s pretty obvious by the name of the show that the focus is on Flash. Where? A mysterious planet, in the clutches of Merciless Emperor Ming. What to do? Well, obviously, he’s in trouble and his friends are in trouble, so he’s got to help them all escape. Why should I care? Well, friends in danger is important, and the Earth is in danger, and typically friendships and our home is important to the viewer. It’s not much, but it’s enough to go on until they become more invested in the characters.

In Star Wars: Who is still a little up in the air, but it’s clear that Rebels are the good guys, and Princess Leia is mentioned by name. Where? Somewhere in space, with the whole galaxy as the setting, where an evil Galactic Empire rules. What’s the goal? To restore freedom to the galaxy, of course, probably having something to do with the secret plans to the DEATH STAR.  Why should we care? Once again, a planet-killing space station sounds like Bad News, as we’re kinda fond of our own planet, and freedom tends to be pretty high on folks’ list of Good Things to Restore. It’s not much, but it’s enough to get started until we’ve gotten more emotionally invested in the story and characters.

These aren’t detailed responses to the questions, nor should they be. We don’t know (or care) who Princess Leia’s parents are (and at this point, it would be meaningless to try and explain it to us). We’re not even introduced to Darth Vader, the main bad guy of the show. Likewise, we have very little information about Emperor Ming’s planet hurtling towards the earth, or his plans (beyond marrying Dale and offing Flash). They aren’t critical to our understanding of what’s about to happen. If it’s important, it’ll be explained later.

#3 – The intro is a promise and a tease
The introduction is a chance to get the player excited about what they are about to play, to tease them a little bit about what’s going to be in store, and to give them enough hints about the plot to pique their curiosity.  The player has an entire game to play in which to obtain background information.  The introductory cutscene needs do little else than point them in the direction of the gameplay and sell them on the prospect of playing.

Again, drawing on Star Wars – what happens immediately after the crawl? Space. A planet. Two ships battling it out, one desperately trying to escape a clearly GIANT starship. Lots of lasers and explosions. This is as much a part of the introduction as the opening crawl. This is the promise, the tease. We’re going to be in for an action-packed adventure on a scale clearly larger than life. Booyah!

Compare this to some games (I won’t mention names) where the opening sequence – a promise of what is supposed to come next – sounds like somebody reciting from the Book of Chronicles in the Old Testament. All that promises is boredom and unpronounceable names that the player won’t remember five seconds after they are uttered.

As a final bit – something many mainstream games miss – the intro should be directly related to the game. Having a cool CGI movie at the beginning of the game is fine, but not if it looks like it could be used as the intro to a dozen other games just as easily. It doesn’t have to be about the main character, but it should focus on the actual story – maybe introducing the bad guy, or the setting (an ‘establishing shot’), or a mystery. Final Fantasy VII provides a pretty good example here.  Also, the original Diablo.

#4 – Don’t be vague!
Vagueness kills interest. Again – look at the sample crawls from the movies. While they introduce more questions than they answer (deliberately!), they name specifics. Names. Ape-like “man killers.”  The Arena. The Death Star is mentioned by name, as well as its key features (armored, capable of destroying an entire planet).  The hidden rebel base is left a little vague, but it’s revealed by the end of the movie.

Compare this to some intros for (particularly indie) RPGs that speak vaguely of prophesies, evil, great heroes, struggle against a dark force, blah blah blah. Measured in power of putting the player to sleep, this is second only to describing the lineage of the main character back four generations. The player should receive concrete details, but without elaboration. Flash Gordon was fighting killer ape creatures in an arena? Holy crap, that sounds awesome! This is much better than “Flash had to fight monsters.” But I don’t need to know how the ape-like creatures were genetically engineered by Ming’s great-great-great grandfather to create a slave race that proved too dangerous, and they rebelled, and when the rebellion was quelled in the year 182 of Ming reckoning (calculated by… etc. etc. etc.). It has enough details to give it flavor, and that’s all.

So, indies: Avoid the temptation to tell the player all about your world before he’s or she has even gotten a chance to do more than click “Start.” Good story-telling starts with the introductory sequence, and it’s arguably the most important part. So make it TIGHT.

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Lady Has Bustle!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 21, 2013

The world is happier with more steampunk stuff.  Just my opinion.

So with that in mind… a parody of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s notorious classic, “Baby Got Back”, “Lady Has Bustle!”

Some words that can apply to RPGs as well (I should take this advice myself):

Steampunk is most sublime
A lot of punks won’t like this rhyme
For they’re too busy trying to define it
While the rest of us want to play

You know what the world also needs?

More Steampunk RPGs. Just sayin’. I mean, we have Arcanum. And the Torchlight series is kinda demi-Steampunk. While airships – a staple of Steampunk – are pretty popular in a lot of JRPGs, it ain’t enough. Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness qualifies. Am I missing any other significant entries?

Actually, more “warped history” RPGs in general would be a cool thing, going outside the standard medieval or dark-age eras. I had this weird dream for a fantasy western the other night …

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

What Game Designers Can Learn From Fortune Tellers

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 18, 2013

Line Hollis has a post that has probably been around a while, but was recently re-posted to her blog, comparing storytelling to fortune-telling. She contrasts the differences between the Persona games and Fallout: New Vegas, and how for her, Persona wins in the narrative category (I’d probably agree with her):

Game Stories and Fortunetelling

I really like this line of thought. I’ve used The Sims as an example in similar discussions – the deliberate vagueness of the behaviors (including the use of gibberish for dialog) allows the player free to frame the events with his or her own context and interpretation. Reading the book “Understanding Comics” really helped crystallize this for me. I was in a lecture by Chris Crawford where he touched on this a little himself, years before The Sims proved his point, as he talked about storytelling ‘atoms’ that can change based on context.

I think this is a ripe area to explore in gaming narrative, and really can lead to richer stories – partly because the player is actively involved in the storytelling process. The designer provides the narrative threads, but the player provides the context and puts them together. I don’t think it need be mutually exclusive from a more traditional branching storyline, either. As we talk about providing better, more meaningful stories in games, designers should consider that sometimes less really is more.

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

If It Weren’t For Bad Luck, I’d Have No Luck At All…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 17, 2013

A few weeks ago, I joined my family for the board game Talisman. It’s the new version, released a couple of years ago, based on the classic 80’s board game that just so happens to be one of my wife’s favorites. My memories of the game were a bit less favorable. I remembered it being long and… really random. By random, I mean frustrating for me to play when the dice work against me.

So I played. We’d limited the time to play the game so it wasn’t quite so long. Everybody made some decent progress in the game, with some family members getting to the second tier of the game board pretty early on.

Me? I got turned into a toad three times in a row. The chance was pretty small, but apparently the dice were conspiring against me. I spent a half hour unable to do much but hop a single square. I went back to… was it the enchantress…? Already toadified, and thought, “Hey, I’m already a toad, so what have I got to lose? No way I’ll roll this a third time!” Right.

I left the game saying, “Yep, this is exactly how I remember this game.”

Strangely, I’ve never really felt compelled to play the lottery, either…

You’d think that with a few stories like this one (and I have a lot of ’em), I’d be in Craig Stern’s camp, and be all “randomness in RPGs, BOO!” But no, I’m actually a fan, seeing it much more like Daniel Cook in his article, “Understanding Randomness in Terms of Mastery.” Particularly with modern RPGs, I really tend to go with systems that allow enough strategy to either minimize the role of luck of I’m at an advantage (which in normal RPGs tends to be the norm), or to actually maximize its role when I’m at a disadvantage.  I try to see what I can do to get the numbers on my side (my side often meaning, “my team’s side” when I’m playing with others.) That skill – and being able to discern see through the random ‘noise’ as Daniel Cook explains it – are key items that make me feel like I’m in control of the game.

So if I’m so focused (usually) on marginalizing randomness, why do I not favor getting rid of it altogether?

In three words: Because it’s fun.

Sometimes a little too fun.

 

Likewise, the chance of failure makes even otherwise trivial actions more interesting. There may be a 92% chance of connecting, but that little 8% fail chance makes the eventual hit all that much sweeter.

But what about those days when the dice are cold, bad luck reigns, and things just turn against you even when you have every advantage in your corner?

Sometimes that can be kinda fun, too.

 

In a good gaming system, IMO, you still have options. The option may be “run away to live and fight another day.” It’s why I’m not a fan of “critical failures” all that much – or older editions of D&D which had frequent “save or die” rolls (although many editions of the game made that merely an expensive, not necessarily game-ending, problem). This is one reason I’m still okay with the “hit point” mechanic, in spite of its lack of realism: It allows non-critical attrition to occur so you have a reasonable chance of executing a “plan B.” Or “C” or “D.”

In human-moderated RPGs, even a poor system can be compensated for by a good game master. Even without fudging the rules, they can do things like deliberately forcing mistakes on the part of the bad guys to allow the players an opening to turn things around or escape. Unfortunately, computer games generally don’t do that.   But unless the games do the “permadeath” thing, there’s always the handy reloading the saved game option to compensate. But that’s a poor substitute for a good game system or a well-moderated one. Having to reload a saved game because of some randomly bad things happening is not fun. It feels arbitrary.

It just comes down to making sure that a little bit of bad luck doesn’t ruin the game. Major failure (the kind that requires a reload) shouldn’t feel arbitrary. This can be resolved by at least three ways:

#1 – The game system is forgiving enough with random chance that deviations are limited and have limited impact on the game. Most JRPGs (at least that I’ve played lately) are like this – misses and crits are rare, and damage is in an extremely predictable range. But the occasional misses and crits that give it some “spice.”

#2 – The game system grants the player the ability to ‘equalize’ bad luck (or setbacks) – like Frayed Knights‘ drama stars, or the ‘overdrive’ meter in (non-random!) fighting games which can fill up from (among other things) taking hits.

#3 – The game AI pulls the sort of dramatic intervention a human might in a dice-and-paper game, and tweaks AI skill or decision making to give an unlucky player an opening to recover from setbacks.

Chance can be a very fun element in games, but it can also suck the fun right out of a game if handled poorly, as I felt during the Talisman game. It really comes down to whether or not the players can feel like they are either the masters of the odds, or masters in spite of the odds. But they should not feel like they are at the mercy of the random number generator.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Shhhh! Don’t Give Them Any Hints!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 16, 2013

Steve Peterson (designer of the original Champions RPG, among other things) explains how the old models for game development (and game design) are now all but obsolete, and must change with the times:

Trimming the Fat: How and Why Game Design Must Change

 

This is pretty much ancient history for most of the folks reading this blog, I imagine. I was starting to get a heads-up about how unsustainable it was back in 1999, for crying out loud, but I grossly underestimated just how much inertia (and room for growth) remained in the system.  It seems that the AAA industry, while flirting with the possibilities for several years, is finally cluing in to the fact that the old way, which has led to $50+ million budget games brawling it out in the marketplace with a winner-takes-all mentality – is just not going to fly anymore. At least not at its previous scale.

One key point: “It all comes down to design, in the end. Designers have become used to designing to the form dictated by retail sales, and they have to break out of that mold when the realities of the marketplace change.”

This is something I’m wrestling with, as well. The kind of games I want to make are heavily influenced by a particular model that I most enjoy — very ‘productized’ single-player games. Fire & Forget, a complete game from start to finish, heavy on the strong narrative.  These days, it seems like a popular path to success is to sell your game piecemeal, leaving it open-ended and replayable enough so that more pieces can be added (or finished) as you go. The kind of games I want to make don’t fit well with that model. I don’t think that model is “dead,” but it does make me wonder what else I could be doing to modernize it or improve upon it.  One of the wonderful things about being indie is that the world of game development has been constantly changing and expanding. There are countless possibilities out there now that didn’t exist when I got my start.

The thing is, the games need to be designed around their distribution / monetization approach from the get-go.  This was true in the arcade days – games were designed specifically around the coin-op model. Where we fail is where we adhere dogmatically to the form games took under a previous model – because it is something that we loved – without addressing the needs of the current marketplace. That’s where we end up with guys trying to be “nice” on the iPhone market and losing money because of it. I think the indie / digital distribution world has plenty of room for a ‘nice guy’ approach to succeed (look at Dwarf Fortress, for example).  But you can’t just force a square-peg game designed for one model to fit in a different distribution model and assume all will be well.  But I do think that things are open enough and ripe enough for innovation now that there are dozens of different approaches – some new, some old – that COULD work.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Games And Guns

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 15, 2013

A friend of mine emailed me with the subject “Has the world has gone crazy?” It linked to an article about a good ol’ fashioned book-burning that included video games, and how violent arcade games were getting removed from public rest stops.  The latter one I could kind of understand (I have never seen an arcade machine at a rest stop, but I approve of the idea!), but the former one boggled my mind.

I was a professional game developer when the Columbine High School shooting happened. And for several weeks, the media repeated the message that violent video games were to blame. People believed them. ‘Cuz, I guess, if it’s on the news, it must be correct, right?  It was a rough time to be a game developer. In fact, our publisher and licensor responded with demands that we completely redesign the game we were making for them, a design which had been fine the day before the tragedy. And we had to tone down the violence in general, nevermind that the books we were basing the games on had plenty of violence (and, occasionally, guns). I half-jokingly remark that at the time, I would feel more comfortable introducing myself as a drug dealer than a game developer.

Yet if Doom had not ever been created, would the tragedy have been averted? I really doubt it. Violent video games were a convenient scapegoat at the time.  They are a little less convenient today – time has made them far more ‘mainstream.’ And while some horrible things have happened in that time, violent crime of all kinds has been decreasing steadily in the U.S. since the release of that first big “realistically violent” video game two decades ago. In addition, here in the U.S., video games are now protected under the First Amendment, courtesy of last year’s Supreme Court decision. But obviously they aren’t immune from attack by people desperate to find blame.

When I was about four years old, I went Trick-Or-Treating on a rainy Halloween night with my mom. I was dressed as a character played by Charles Nelson Reilly, which in retrospect pleases me. 🙂 Anyway, at one point, I slipped in the mud and fell, my candy spilling out into the mud. To me at that age, it was a disaster beyond imagination. I screamed and cried. And I pounded at the candy in the mud with my hands. My mother was simultaneously trying to rescue what she could of my Halloween candy, and stop me from driving them deeper into the mud with my panicked reaction. I couldn’t understand. I was frantic. I had to DO SOMETHING.

When a tragedy occurs, people feel powerless. Finding someone or something tangible to blame that they can touch, seize, or even destroy helps restore a feeling of control to a disempowering event. Even if it is unlikely to have prevented the previous event (see the “security theater” at airports we’ve been subjected to for the last decade), or may actually make a bad situation worse, it’s a magical totem to ward off evil. When I hear demands to “DO SOMETHING” immediately after a disaster, I mentally translate it as a call for “mob justice,” to act based on the emotion of the moment before rationality and thought has had a chance to be return.

And yeah, it’s tempting. I’m not immune to the reaction, either.  It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t in charge of things on the evening of September 11th, 2001. A few months ago, my daughter’s school went into lockdown over an anonymous tip, and while I wasn’t informed until the incident was almost over and all children were accounted for, it’s a very rough thing to hear as a parent. I’d have thrown myself headlong into danger if I imagined (even erroneously) it could help. Perhaps pounding candy into the mud, again.

So I’ve refrained from making too many comments about a recent act of shocking violence, because my own emotions can tempt me to make an ass out of myself pretty easily. It’s far, far easier to talk about imagined, fictional evils in magical worlds of computer games than the horrifyingly ordinary face it wears in reality.  But now that a month has passed, I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

A causal relationship between violent video games and violent behavior has never been determined, in spite of numerous studies that have attempted to do so. Blaming entertainment media for horrendous acts is ridiculous. On a personal level, I do enjoy watching action movies and playing first-person shooters. I think, to a point, there’s nothing wrong with them, and they should be made. And more importantly, I don’t think the government should intrude upon their creation or distribution.

I think the most popular  games tend to appeal to human beings on a primitive level. They speak to our ‘hardcoded” mental programming that allowed us to survive as a race. The games that stimulate parts of our “lizard brains,” which result in pleasure when exercised. Hunting (most FPS games). Fight or Flight reflexes (almost all action games). Pattern-matching and gathering (Match-3 games). Mating (The Sims, dating games). Finding / creating shelter (Minecraft, tower defense games), acts of creation (Sim City), and power over the environment (any game allowing lots of destruction).  These kinds of activities are still simulated in sports, have been parts of games since the dawn of time, and will be with us forever.

I do feel that media informs and can shape the culture. People imitate modeled behavior. I don’t feel excessive violence (or other negative behaviors) on movie screens or game screens is healthy for us as a culture. I am concerned as game-makers, filmmakers, TV studios, music labels, and everyone else seems to be competing as to who can “push the envelope” the most at the edges of public tolerance. This isn’t a healthy trend, and I hope that indies can help lead the way on this on the game front. No, there’s not a direct link between this and violence, but I do believe that in the long term, it can color (or desensitize) perceptions and behaviors. I can’t believe that games can be a great training tool on the one hand, yet have absolutely zero influence on the other. I do believe we need to behave responsibly as creators… and as consumers.

Because of the above, I also feel it is the height of hypocrisy for the people who promote (and make huge profits from) the “gun culture” to turn around and try and attack and lay blame on the very culture they work so very hard to build up. (And seriously, while I can’t speak for the criminal culture(s) in the United States, I can tell you that the ‘gun culture’ – at least the subset I’ve been associated with – is nothing like it is portrayed in Hollywood. And… speaking of hypocrisy…  how sick do you have to be to make [or enjoy] a game about assassinating the NRA president with a sniper rifle?  No, I’m not providing a link…)

The biggest school massacre in the United States was in 1927, committed with explosives. This was long before video games, TV, and even before film really caught on as an entertainment medium (or showed anything close today’s graphic level of violence).  However – as a weird point of fact – it was committed by a politician, bitter over his defeat. My wife collects ghost stories, many based on real events of very horrible people who did horrible things to destroy many innocent lives, either all at once or one at a time, generations or even centuries ago. Evil is evil, sickness is sickness, and both have been with us since the beginning, and there is no magical cure no matter what we ban or burn or regulate.

What matters is that we make sure that Good has the tools to prevail over Evil.

In the area of video games, I believe that games have a power for good, as well.  Games can and do educate, make people think, and share what is good and wonderful about the world. They can comfort. They can distract and provide a temporary escape (and well-needed break) from the pressures of reality. They can provide a safe, fun, and even constructive outlet for aggression. They can allow us to feel like larger-than-life heroes – and, perhaps, learn to imitate those virtues a little bit. I hope game developers will bear that in mind, make continue to make games that are a counterpoint to darkness, and that we gamers – as consumers – can support that.

Based on the wild, imaginative, sometimes goofy and often experimental indie games that have been successful in the marketplace over the last few years,  it looks like this is exactly what’s happening.  Developers are pushing boundaries that have nothing to do with shocking sensibilities, but instead on expanding horizons. No, not all are successful. But I like the trend.

 

Filed Under: Geek Life, Politics - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

The Cost of Development

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 14, 2013

When I hear gamers complain about the cost of video games – and arguing that indie games shouldn’t cost more than $X (X being an arbitrary number, almost always under 10, often less than 5), I wonder if they really understand the cost of making these games. I dream of one day turning “Rampant Games” into a full-time venture with actual employees and a real (small) office and stuff. I’m talking small – maybe 7 people, tops.  But I’m still deep in stage 3 of Jeff Tunnell’s Five Realistic Steps to building a game development company. The costs of running even a tiny full-time studio are pretty daunting.

According to Game Developer Magazine’s annual survey for 2012, the average salary of a lead programmer with LESS than 6 years of experience (so he’s not a very experienced lead at all) is about $90k. A junior programmer with <3 years experience, about $65k.  A lead artist with equivalent experience to your programming lead can command an average of $72k, and a junior artist / animator takes home $46k.  Let’s combine the roles of designer and project lead, assume some decent experience (you really, really want someone with experience under their belt for handling these tasks) with a salary of about $70k. They can double as the sound guy. And the lead tester. And the biz guy. Okay, everybody else in the studio is helping out here. So we have a studio of five guys, working their tails off and wearing multiple hats. These guys need to eat, and there’s only so far the thrill of working for a tiny game studio will take them before they get pulled away to another game studio or some other industry, so we’ll assume they have to earn an average salary.

So right now, we have a burn rate of $343,000 per year for five guys / gals. Now, in the U.S., salaries for full-time staff represent only about 75% of the cost of having an employee. Believe it or not, your employer pays a lot of additional taxes that are never deducted from the employee’s salary. Especially with benefits like insurance and so forth. Even being conservative with those numbers, we’re probably talking about an extra $100,000 on top of that. So…. $443,000 in salaries.

Office space? Let’s assume we can find an office space with utilities (and the all-important high speed Internet) for about $2k a month. So that’s $24,000 / year.

Add in additional costs for furniture, computers, licenses (which can be amortized across multiple years… you hopefully don’t have to buy new chairs or computers every year), outsourcing some content or tasks to third parties, and so forth, you’re talking about a burn rate that could easily tip a half-million dollars a year.

So however a game is priced, whatever monetization scheme you choose, and however many games the studio is able to crank out per year (hopefully more than one!), you’ll need to be able to sustain an average of $42,000 revenue per month to keep the studio alive. Even if you could could get your developers to accept starvation wages, make everybody works from home on their own Internet connection, and somehow manage to cut that burn rate in half, you’d have to sustain over $20,000 a month in revenue – and at that rate, you may have people looking to either see the next title knock it out of the park, or they’ll be looking for greener pastures soon thereafter.  People gotta eat and pay the rent.

Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief, most indie games don’t sell millions of copies. Minecraft is not a small aberration. Most indie games do not sell six digits. In fact, most indie games do not sell five digits. Even with indies, it’s a hit-driven industry. Oftentimes a game will either pay for itself several times over, or it will actually lose money, with not a whole lot of middle ground.

Naturally, there are lots of other ways to play with the numbers to make them work… but as a guy who’s former game-dev boss is currently serving jail time for playing with the numbers a little too much when the revenue stream got weird, I get the impression that ultimately the math must make sense and isn’t overwhelmingly tractable. Eventually, game pricing is going to have to find some kind of equilibrium with cost of development.

Filed Under: Biz, Game Development - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

That Cyberpunk 2077 Teaser…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 11, 2013

I was pretty amazed when I saw this teaser for the Cyberpunk 2077 game. But when I still think about it hours later, I figure it’s made an impression. Warning – if you haven’t seen it, it’s… dark. Disturbing. CD Projekt Red offers the commentary, “The teaser shows how the Psycho Squad might acquire a new member.”

Okay, now in this case, the teaser trailer is more of a statement of vision and direction. And if you freeze in high-resolution to read the single frame of hidden text at the end, you can see it’s also a recruiting video. It’s not gameplay footage, and it could be meaningless in terms of the actual game. But I believe it does reveal what kind of game the developers think they are making.

As I’ve said before, I was a big fan of the original game back in the early 90s.  And the whole genre. I forget how many times I’ve read Neuromancer or seen Blade Runner, but if you fuse those together with a dose of hard science and modern trends, you got a pretty good taste of both the genre and the RPG. Mike Pondsmith had a pretty compelling vision, borrowing heavily from some of the popular fiction but injecting what I thought was a lot of his own creativity to the tropes of the genre. When he wasn’t trying too hard to compete with Shadowrun, he did a pretty good job.

I really like the CD Projekt Red guys, and so when they announced they were working on a CRPG based on this license, I was thrilled. I expected they’d do a good job. You don’t license something like Cyberpunk… which really isn’t a “hot product” today… unless you REALLY love the license. You aren’t going to “cash in” on it… this game (if done right) will probably make far more money all by itself than the entire game system over the course of multiple editions and sourcebooks ever made.

This teaser shows – I think – the style and flavor of the game they are intent on creating.

In my opinion – they nailed it. It’s shocking in its slow-mo reveal of what’s going on, but it incorporates so many elements of the original game that made it compelling:

#1 – The look of the world. This is Night City, the west-coast ‘sprawl’. Lacking horizontal space, they’ve built upwards. The city has a Blade Runner feel to it, which is exactly what most Cyberpunk fans envisioned when they played the pen-and-paper game.

#2 – Artificial beauty. This is one of the central themes of the Cyberpunk game, actually – a dystopian vision of modern stratification of society.  You had the corporate arcologies that were built with gleaming modern splendor – and ruled with totalitarian effectiveness, constructed Metropolis-like on a foundation of impoverished masses of humanity, kept partly in check by bread and circuses. Those with enough money could take that on a personal level, too, replacing imperfect flesh with artificial parts. Often proudly displaying their brand names.

#3 – The ads in the background were taken right out of the original manuals. Awesome! So much of the flavor of the original games – for me – came from the art, some of which was Patrick Nagel-inspired with an infusion of sci-fi technology.

#4 – Cyberpsychosis. This was the powerful limiting factor of the game, a precursor to how the White Wolf games did a similar thing with supernatural powers. People were… upgradable. But the more of your body you replaced with soulless machinery, the more of an impact it had on your humanity – or soul, if you will. While much of the time these changes were pretty subtle, having merely a cumulative negative modifier to your empathy score – a major theme of the game was how dehumanizing technology could be if allowed to run rampant, and how this would lead to sociopathy – or psychopathy.  As a character’s humanity / empathy dropped, the chance of them suddenly going on a psychopathic killing spree increased… especially when accompanied (or catalyzed) by drug use. In our campaigns, this was never a serious concern for player characters – you had to really build a “tank” character (or start with Empathy as a dump stat, and then ‘borg up) for that to be a big risk, and our group never played that way.  But it was a popular McGuffin for plotlines. And it was a key theme of the game – trading your humanity for cool toys.

#5 – Heavily militarized police forces. One other dystopian key element of the Cyberpunk setting. After all, only the biggest and most powerful governments of the world exceeded the power and reach of the most powerful mega-corporations. There’s some very serious detail going into those guns, too.  And then there’s the “Psycho Squad,” specialists often on the verge of psychosis themselves who are anti-borg SWAT teams.

#6 – Flying cars. Hey, it’s Blade Runner-inspired, you HAVE to have flying cars!

#7 – Brand names. Corporate logos.

#8 – Mature content – this is interesting to me a LOT. I’ve often cried out for a desire for games with mature themes, and railed against developers who conflate mature content with puerile, gratuitous application of sex, violence, and vulgarity. It’s interesting to me that in this case, there are no close-ups on the carnage that just took place. And the cyborg responds to deadly force with mechanical dispassion – until the very end (of the flashback?). In some ways, it’s made more disturbing – and poignant – by what is not seen. The impression is almost like a person just waking in the middle of an emergency – only to discover that they – while sleeping / not in control – ARE the emergency.

Now, maybe it is because this is a character (an NPC?) in the game with a dark history that the audience is supposed to – at some point – have some sympathy towards, and it’s hard to do that if you see too graphically what she has done. I mean, I quit watching the TV show Heroes when they tried to make Sylar a good guy – after a certain point, after seeing so much, there’s just no way you can emotionally accept a character’s redemption.

But my hope is that this does set the standard for the rest of the game – the dripping blood, the discarded shoe, the crumpled figures in the background and in fuzzy long-distance, the dripping blood on blades and clothing – communicates all that is necessary without wallowing in gore. And then there’s bullets shattering metal and plastic… with imagination supplying what WOULD have happened against flesh. This is the kind of “adult storytelling” I’m interested in.  We’ll see how the real game comes out. The Witcher series would be my model, which wasn’t too shy (in the expanded editions) about the sex and gore (pushing my own tolerance). So… we’ll see.  But sometimes things really are better left to the imagination.

So anyway – there’s a list of things that impressed me about the video. Again, there’s not a whole lot that a non-gameplay teaser like this can show, other than, “This is the the direction we are currently trying to go.”  But in my mind, they nailed the look and feel that I would personally expect from the game. If their aim remains true, they will do justice to the setting and it will be dripping with the dark-future flavor I’d want.  It’s enough to make me MORE excited about this game, which is actually a big deal.

Here’s hoping.

UPDATE: And for more information, here’s a post-teaser-release interview with project lead Mateusz Kanik at GameTrailers

Filed Under: Game Announcements, Mainstream Games - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights 2: Building a World

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 10, 2013

Someone told me last week that J. K. Rowling said that her secret to success in writing the Harry Potter series was to make up a bunch of details in the early books and then try and figure out what they were about when incorporating them into the later ones. I can’t verify that quote, but sometimes I think that was also what J. Michael Staczyynski did when writing for Babylon 5 as well. I’m relatively certain that when Obi Wan tossed around comments about Luke’s father and the clone wars in the original Star Wars, George Lucas did not have anything but the vaguest concept of what would eventually become the second trilogy. I’m actually relatively certain that Darth Vader was not even Luke’s dad at that point in his mind.

Nevertheless, these extended stories worked really, really well. Why? Because even if the details might have been a little vague and fuzzy and even subject to a little creative retconning, the creators had a very solid understanding of their fictional worlds. They knew ’em, knew how they worked, knew the major players well enough that on a subconscious level the worlds and people took on a life of their own.  This gives the stories a powerful authenticity – in part, I think, because this artificial reality (ooh, I’m co-opting an overused 90’s term and giving it new meaning!) that transfers to the mind of the audience, allowing them to build their own expectations and “fill in the gaps” in the narrative or setting with their own imagination.

This is extremely powerful.

In gaming, this approach was adopted by Origin Systems in their motto – “We Create Worlds.” (Which I heard at one point as part of a more complete statement, “others write software, we create worlds.”).

That should be something all RPG designers aspire to. While this should be RPG design 101 (or really, game design 101, if you are creating any game heavy on narrative), I feel it bears reiteration.  While it’s hardly limited to indies, it IS something I find lacking in too many indie titles. While perhaps this can simply be chalked up to me simply not playing the games far enough, or the inexperience of the developer, it does sometimes feel like the worlds are cobbled together from borrowed bits & pieces with only a little original thought to pull the pieces together. That, or there’s simply too little narrative structure to explain what’s really going on.

On the flip-side, there’s a similar problem where developers go too far and throw in far too much exposition – particularly during those crucial first few minutes of gameplay.  When a world really is well thought-out, well understood by the creators, it doesn’t take that much to let it shine through.  Walls of text or other forms of long exposition  should be kept to a minimum. “Show, don’t tell” is an important mantra in media that applies equally to games. The creator should have an intimate knowledge and ‘feel’ for his world, but if they do (and are skilled at their medium), it can be revealed and explained organically 90% of the time.

Okay, spoiler alert here – if you haven’t completed Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon yet but wish to remain unsullied by anything resembling spoilers, stop reading here.  It’s hard to talk about the story (even in vague, backstory terms) of the sequel without using the original as context. But I’ll try and avoid specifics.

While I worry about holding my own game as an example – because I’m well aware that I handled this clumsily in some places – for the entire Frayed Knights series, the back-story of the Wizard War and Nepharides (the token Ancient Evil) are quite important, though perhaps not for the traditional reasons. What I didn’t want to do was to start the game with a scroll of text explaining what the wizard war was, how long ago it took place, what happened, how bad it was, how it ended, and all that other stuff. Besides being boring as hell AND meaningless to you when you first start the game, there are parts of that story that really are supposed to be a mystery that becomes revealed later in the series. But as you play through the game, there are references to the war and its devastation throughout, hopefully not to the point where the player feels like I clubbed them over the head with it.

But while I’ve got a whole mess o’ details, names of heroes, secrets, locations, current political structure, factions doing their thing, and a conspiracy only barely revealed at the end of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, the player is only forced to know the parts of that back-story that affect him or her: There was a massive war a few hundred years ago that nearly wiped out all of civilization, plunged the world into a dark age that they are still recovering from. That is the source of many of these ruins adventurers love to plunder. The bad guy leading the forces of destruction was an arch-lich named Nepharides who had a ‘herald’ named Moonshadow. The name of Nepharides is still invoked as a boogeyman in a way that the name “Adolph Hitler” is used today.

And yeah, because of the devastation of the Wizard War and lack of accurate records, people today aren’t really sure exactly what happened. Or how Nepharides was defeated. Or if he was destroyed. Or if there’s a chance he – as an arch-lich – might be able to return.

Now, if that was where I left it, as a designer, it would ring pretty hollow in the actual gameplay. There’s not much meat on those bones. Plus, as backstory goes, it’s fairly generic. That was intentional. The fun is in the details, and in how this applies to the audience – the player. At least, that’s what I hope, and I hope I’m doing a good enough job of it, or I’m really screwing up.

In The Skull of S’makh-Daon, the player learns that the “mort rate” for adventurers have gone way up recently, and that it’s no accident: adventurers are being set up. In fact, the Frayed Knights themselves were targeted. And that this may have something to do with someone running around calling themselves “Moonshadow” – the herald of Nepharides – again. The conclusion is that adventurers may be the only ones capable / likely to stop… whatever plans are in motion.

In Frayed Knights 2, the game begins (except for a flashback sequence I am playing with) only a few weeks after the end of Skull. The Frayed Knights find themselves stuck in the middle of nowhere – effectively “put out to pasture” where they can be safe. Of course, this doesn’t sit very well with them, and they don’t stay out of trouble very long.

In the intervening weeks – backstory again (for those who care)  with deliberate vagueness to avoid spoilers for the new game – things have not been idle. Bad things are happening, and the revelation of a conspiracy has only caused timetables to accelerate. This gets revealed slowly at first, as the party is (deliberately) stuck way on the periphery and – like the player – will only be marginally interested in things that don’t appear to affect them.  So, again, mounds of exposition – pages and pages of “while you were away” storyline – are uncalled for.  And would bore the crap out of me, as a player.

My choice to stick the player out in the middle of nowhere where this stuff can be revealed later in the game, and organically, as he or she becomes embroiled in the plot – was a deliberate narrative choice as well. Kinda for the same reasons that each Harry Potter book started with Harry back at the Dursley house, out of contact with friends and news of what’s been going on in the world of magic. It gives me a way to ease the player into the main story arc (possibly for the first time, if they never played the original) by revealing it directly via in-game events rather than having to provide long summaries of what they may have missed or forgotten from the first game.

One of the cool things about diving into the sequel is that the world is a lot more familiar to me this time around. While it is often comical (that’s sort of the foundation of the game), and plays around with traditional fantasy tropes a lot, it’s got a serious side too. With the sequel (and indeed, the latter half of the original), the serious side gets explored quite a bit more. Not that there won’t still be plenty of goofing around and situation / character-based comedy. And Rats of Nom. I find that comedy is funnier in contrast with a serious story than when everything is just over-the-top silly. But now that the world has been established in the first game, I’m glad to take the opportunity to do more with it.

It’s fun being able to tromp around in an area that is both new and familiar.  The world, main characters, and backstory are all old hat for me now (though I find some parts still need some ‘fleshing out’), but there’s a whole new location to explore and new characters to meet, and new – weird – situations to stick the player in. That’s a lot of fun for me, as a designer.  I hope you’ll have even more fun playing in it.

 

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

BREAKING: A New Torment, Sans Planescape

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 9, 2013

Holy crap. RPG fans, this could be big.

Post-Planescape: Fargo Reveals the Future of Torment

InXile is working with Monte Cook, one of the key people involved in creating the original D&D “Planescape” setting, to set the new game in Cook’s own custom pen-and-paper RPG universe. Thus, no need work out licensing with Hasbro. But it will be a spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment, involving many of the original developers.

Wow.

To be completely honest, I was never that thrilled with the Planescape setting, especially coming as it did in the middle of the 2nd edition D&D era when TSR was desperately trying to hide the actual mythological and theological foundation of their multiverse. They changed and renamed devils and demons so that they were outwardly not so much more than evil aliens from alternate dimensions.  It never meshed well with my more traditional gaming universe. But ripped completely from that context to stand on its own (which is how many people played and enjoyed it), it was probably fine. As I hope this new one will be.

And beyond the refreshing alien-ness of the setting (which I’m sure will be just as alien in the new setting) and the existential/metaphysical quandaries it posed, it was really the quality of the characters and plot that made Planescape: Torment special.  They had fun throwing certain tropes on their respective ears, layered on mysteries, and just built a quality RPG experience. I have heard that in many ways, the secret to Torment‘s success was the same as Fallout‘s: The project was of such low profile that it was left alone so the designers could really have fun with it.

With InXile’s demi-indie approach to developing these games, there’s hope that similar alchemy could be fostered with this spiritual sequel. We’ll see. Fargo sounds like he has a good handle on this, from the interview: “We know it hasn’t been done often in the game industry, but we’re envisioning Torment as a thematic franchise with certain themes that can expand over different settings and stories. We will focus on the same things that made people appreciate PST so much: overturning RPG tropes; a fantastic, unconventional setting; memorable companions; deep thematic exploration of the human condition; heavy reactivity (i.e., choice and consequences); an intensely personal (rather than epic) story.”

But dang it, I’m excited. I keep talking about how modern RPGs have maneuvered themselves into an ‘evolutionary dead-end’ where the only way out is to either merge with other genres, or to do what mainstream studios are loathe to attempt and actually use the greats of the past as launchpads to go off in new directions.  Between the indies and stuff like this, it’s happening.  It’s a fun time to be an RPG fan.

I look forward to hearing more about this one!  I can’t believe I’m actually looking forward to another Kickstarter…

 

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

Yet More New / Upcoming Gaming “Consoles”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 8, 2013

Wow. Winter CES is happening now, and more gaming devices are being unveiled.  Gamers, we live in interesting times. I haven’t seen this level of competition since the days of Atari 2600s / 5200s / Colecovisions / Intellivisions / Odyssey 2 / Vectrex / Astrocade and a swarm of “home computers.” And I was too young back to really get a good grasp of what was going on. And Sony and Microsoft haven’t weighed in… YET.

So in addition to the new low-end game consoles running off of Android, and the Wii U, we’ve got a couple more very interesting developments:

#1 – The NVidia Shield.

This one is… weird. Running on a new Tegra 4 processor, it is a handheld / TV / PC hybrid that allows you to play games streaming from your PC on a WIFI network. Yeah, I’m kinda thinking, “WTF” as I type that, but that’s how it is. There’ll be a little bit of latency, but it’s … well, that’s what it is. So basically you can play PC games from the comfort of your living room on a little 5″ display, or plug it into your TV.  And it only works if your PC has a GeForce GTX 650 or better.  So in that mode, it’s really just a gaming peripheral to allow PC games to become semi-portable… within the bounds of your WIFI or something.

However, it will also play Android games on its own – and again, can plug into the TV.  So in that respect, it’s right there in the same territory as the Ouya, Green Throttle, and Game Stick. The streaming games off your PC thing can be considered a bonus. I imagine that with a 5″ HD screen and a high-end processor included, it’s not going to be in the same price category as these other systems.

You can grab more info here.

#2 – Xi3’s “Piston” – The Steam Box????

And coming out yesterday – the “Piston” – perhaps the “Steam Box” that Valve has wanted to take us into the “Post-PC Era?”   Basically it’s a PC optimized for running Steam in “Big Picture Mode” on a high-definition TV.  As rumors abound that the “Steam Box” was supposed to be Linux-based, will it run Linux? How much will it cost? Guesstimates are in the $1000 range, which is pricey for a console – or a computer dedicated to console gaming. You can read more about it here, but details are still sketchy at this time.

#3 – The Unu

Then we have another point of congvergance – the UNU, which is attempting to do it all: Be a tablet, a TV game console  AND video player.  Details are even sketchier on this one, but you can read a little about it here.

#4 – The Ouya – Again

In order to get some solid Ouya support so that it might emerge at the top of the growing and cluttered heap, Ouya is sponsoring a game jam specific for its console: The “Create” game jam starts January 14th and is going on for ten days to create a playable prototype. The winners will get $45,000 (total). And the Ouya gets a lot of press, pulling judges from the likes of Phil “Fez” Fish, Ed Fries, and Felicia Day.

More info here.

Have fun!

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

Cowboys & Zombies

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 7, 2013

So maybe THIS is what you get when you go to bed right after a Mountain Dew – fueled night filled with playing Baldur’s Gate (enhanced edition!) and  working on inventory UI for Frayed Knights 2. (And no, I haven’t played Minecraft or The Real Texas in weeks, so those are at least not an immediate influence).

I had a Dungeons & Dragons dream. Surprisingly, I don’t have these very often, but they are generally pretty fun. Part of the dream was literally a D&D game – the group was discussing tactics around the table.  It wasn’t medieval fantasy, however… we we armed with sixguns, shotguns, and lever-action revolvers and fighting a bad guy who was likewise armed, but also had at his command a posse of zombies.

After a discussion of defensive positions (we were defending some kind of dinner party or something) and who would be taking what sniper position where, the dream shifted perspective to the in-game action. With all of us wearing cowboy hats. It was nighttime, but the dinner party was lit by artificial light (I guess it was electricity). The bad guy and his zombie thugs were approaching behind a rock outcropping, keeping behind cover until they were relatively close, foiling good long-range sniper shots. Then the bad guy cast a spell, which shut off all the lights, and the zombies charged. Well, as much as zombies charge, which was (from what I could catch a glimpse of before the lights went out) more of a determined, shuffling march.

Well, no problem for ME, I thought: I have infravision. I think it was through magic spectacles or something.  Now, in old-school D&D, infravision was basically thermal vision – you could see heat sources.

Here’s the part that gets interesting: In my dream, I was surprised (at first) that the zombies were still invisible in the darkness – I could see the heat given off by the main bad guy as he’d be briefly, partially exposed behind cover. I could see the people at the dinner party. But not the zombies. And then I realized – zombies don’t give off heat! They are ambient temperature!

About that point I woke up – as it was Saturday morning – and thought, “Wow, cool!”

It was apparently much cooler than my wife’s dream, which she shared with me as well, which involved her giving birth to a monkey. Or a kid that highly resembled a monkey. Considering how our now very beautiful firstborn girl resembled a cross between a lizard and E.T. when she was born, I figure it wasn’t all that bizarre.

Now here’s the thing: I don’t know which I’m more surprised about – the fact that my subconscious came up with what sounds to me like a pretty clever plan that I’d never consciously thought of before, or the fact that I was “playing against myself” – in the dream, I was surprised by that logical twist as well.  But that IS the kind of tricky, clever encounters I do like putting in my games.

No, it won’t be in Frayed Knights 2. There’s no infravision in Frayed Knights, and I’m not about to implement it just for that. There are no rifles, either, at least to my knowledge… though there are cannons (and bombs), established via the explosive powder found early in the first game.

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

The “Cheap Console” Market Heats Up!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 4, 2013

First there was the Ouya. It’s not vaporware – some local friends got their dev boxes last week, and have happily shared unboxing videos. One friend tells me that with a little bit of effort he’s gotten his game (written in Unity) working on it as well as on any other platform. So… it’s there. It works.  It had a fantastic Kickstarter campaign, and they apparently struck a nerve.  Technology has finally gotten to the point where it’s more a problem of the cost required to exploit its capabilities than the tech itself. And between the Wii and the rise of indie gaming, the “polygon wars” of the 1990s are pretty much over… the race no longer goes exclusively to the game with the most photorealistic graphics.

I get mine in March. I’m looking forward to it. But it won’t be the only game in town in 2013…

Then there’s Green Throttle Games. The idea here is even more scaled-down… turning your smartphone into a game console, with an adapter to let it receive input from console-style controllers, and output to televisions. As with the Ouya, they’ve got some experienced industry vets who can make it work. I confess I’m a tad more skeptical of this plan than the Ouya, if only because, to me, wiring something up to the TV feels like something more for a dedicated piece of hardware. Gaming on your phone is something you do in brief sessions, pausing if you get a phone call or something like that. You aren’t going to be dragging your controllers and the adapter with you when you go to a friends house most of the time. Yeah, it would be more portable than, say, an XBox, at least.

For me – and I confess I’m not much of a console gamer – the big advantage of the console is that it’s right there, already in your living room, already set up. I just push a button on the remote to turn on the TV, push a button on the controller to start up the system (these days I don’t even have to insert a disc half the time), and I’m there, gaming. It’s convenient. The Green Throttle system might not be THAT much more cumbersome than inserting a new disc into my console, but it could be issue.  There’s also the question of compatibility / performance differences between different phones, but that’s hardly a new problem for developers.  But in today’s world, when smartphones are used for just about everything – even more of a “magic wand” than the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver – I don’t see why a lot of people wouldn’t feel comfortable making it their TV-based game console, too.

Next up – the Game Stick. This seems to be occupying a little bit of a middle road between the Ouya and Green Throttle (in fact, it’s compatible with the Green Throttle controllers, and even has Green Throttle founder Charles Huang in their promotional video).  The console itself makes the Ouya look like a giant. And it’s cheaper.  It looks a little like an oversized USB memory stock that just plugs straight into an HDMI slot on an HD TV. They do have a controller of their own – in fact, it’s designed so that the console itself can fit INSIDE the controller for transport.  So it’s slightly less cumbersome than the Green Throttle idea, but I would worry that the form factor might make it a little tricky to plug into some TVs based on how they are mounted or positioned. The Game Stick kinda… sticks out. Still, it’s a cool idea.

As a developer, my best response would be — support ’em all! They are all Android based, so it shouldn’t be hard to do.

I will say this – when the PS3 and XBox 360  kicked off the last “next generation” of consoles, I had no freaking clue what would come next.  Maybe it’s just that it’s been an extra-long console cycle, but between the Wii, Kinect, mobile gaming taking off, console gaming slowing down, direct game downloads rising in acceptability (at least THAT part I predicted!), indie games finally hitting the big time (I’d HOPED for that, but didn’t plan on it), and technology finally exceeding the “sweet spot” for visual capability (where the law of diminishing returns takes hold)… but things are looking pretty interesting. Rumor has it that 2013 will start bringing in the new consoles for the big players, too, which means the window of opportunity for these ‘indie consoles” might be closing soon.  I wouldn’t want to be heading up any of these companies right now. But I can say that things look mighty fun as a gamer.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

RPG Design: Hard or Soft Progression?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 3, 2013

RPGs have an inherent bias towards linearity, if only for their story and the fact that characters make (generally) move along a major axis of weak to strong. Even with a threadbare story, the dreaded Foozle or end-goal amulet is always behind some extreme challenges that you can’t just waltz in immediately and take to win the game. You have to progress through the content- be it storyline or dungeon levels – in something resembling a particular order to take a crack at the big finale.

There are four common mechanisms – plus variants – to enforce this orderly progression (or “unlocking of content”, to use more boring modern terminology):

#1 – Discovery-based: You can’t go to a place in the game until you either stumble across it manually via exploration, or perhaps learn about it from an in-game source in the process of a conversation or found map. The only real obstacle in this case is geography (or geography plus events). The advantage of discovery-based progression is that it rewards exploration (in all its forms), and makes the world feel much more open-ended. The disadvantage is that it can be frustrating to try and hunt for an entrance or exit, and that – depending upon how it is set up – it may allow parts of the game to be bypassed.

Examples: The dungeons in the Elder Scrolls games are perhaps the best examples of this. My favorite were the dungeons in Daggerfall – there were zillions of ’em, though very few were discovered by stumbling across them (for me, at least). Instead I was always finding them in treasure maps and by quest. But the later games seemed more of an equal mix of discovering locations via direct exploration as by other means.

#2 – Challenge-based: Theoretically the final battle or end goal is achievable fairly early in the game, but the difficulty is such that it is effectively impossible until the player’s character or party has grown enough to overcome the challenges. The biggest advantage of this technique is that it puts the pace of the game – and its difficulty level – in the hands of the player. It also removes what may feel like ‘artificial’ barriers to the endgame. However, it can be very frustrating if the player unknowingly goes to an overly difficult area (perhaps missing easier areas by accident). It can also encourage ‘grinding,’ pretty low-quality entertainment.

Examples: Most roguelikes. Though finding the stairway to the next level is discovery-based, there’s really nothing stopping you from just rushing down to the bottom of the dungeon and obtaining the final goal except the the fact that you’ll be slaughtered in all kinds of horrible ways long before you get there.  Many of the Might & Magic games were very much the same way – the entire world was out there, ready for you to visit from a fairly early stage, but you WILL get clobbered visiting the wrong areas at too low level.

#3 – Obstacle-based:  A part of the game is blocked by a barrier that cannot be removed by brute force, but rather by a not (strictly) story-driven mechanism, such as finding a magical key, learning a mantra / password, or obtaining a means of travel that allows passage. It does allow the player to progress at their own pace, while forcing them to explore other areas to obtain whatever is needed to clear the obstacle. These can also serve as a reward in and of themselves, as it’s kinda fun when a formerly impassible barrier suddenly ceases to be an obstacle. However, frustration can rise when it is unclear how to overcome the obstacle, or when the obstacle fails to make sense in the logic of the game – for example, when characters can destroy dragons with ease, but a simple wooden door acts as an impenetrable barrier.

Examples: The Silver Serpent in Ultima III blocked passage to the island of Exodus unless you used the magic word, “Evocare.” And about half of any Dungeon Master-style game, including the recent indie release Legend of Grimrock, where puzzles and locks make up much of the gameplay.

#4 – Plot-based: The player is moved around in the world – or parts of the world become available – based more directly by plot progression.  This makes it very easy for the developer to control content – for example, not allowing players to go back to a previous area and converse with people after a major event has occurred (thus not requiring tons of additional voiced scripts of dialog that have no direct bearing on the game). It is also easy for players – particularly inexperienced players – as there’s no need to hunt for the “next” place to be. However, it can also feel very constrained and contrived as a player.

Examples: Alpha Protocol‘s mission structure.  Pretty much every RPG by Bioware in the last six years.

I listed these in order of “hardness” – how strictly the game enforces the linearity of progression.  In a discovery-based system, if you know where to look for these places, you can go there almost immediately. Challenge-based progression will let you go there if you are very good or very lucky. Obstacle-based progression requires you to do a little hunting around to find what you need to overcome or bypass the obstacle (although in older games like the Ultimas with text-based passwords, you could cheat and obtain the words with out-of-game information).  And finally, plot-based progression is the ultimate in heavy-handedness: you just can’t go there until the game gets to a particular stage.

Most games use a mix of systems. Personally, I find games more interesting if they provide a mix of different ways to “open up” the game, and I feel it’s important for players to feel like there are many different ways of opening up new avenues to explore.  Exploring, talking to people, finding keys, solving puzzles, discovering maps, progressing the quest-lines, all of the above. I can bring up several Final Fantasy titles as examples – though FF7 is the best-remembered (because I played through it twice, and the first part maybe four times).  You start in a constrained area where you cannot really leave until the story reaches a certain point (plot-based). Then the world-map opens up, but you are constrained by the restrictions of overland travel – mountains and water provide impenetrable barriers. There’s a bit more freedom at this point, but the progression is often still relatively linear by the nature of geography, requiring you to pass through one to get access to the next (usually challenge or plot-based). But again, the further you go, the more the world tends to “open-up” for discovery-based exploration. Later in the game, you get access to new vehicles, like airships and submarines, which make formerly inaccessible areas fully accessible (obstacle-based). Then, now freed from the limitations of geography, there are optional areas of the game that you can find to take on side-quests or “secret” boss monsters – purely ‘discovery’ based areas.

Another interesting variant is Persona 3 and Persona 4, where dungeon areas and many opportunities unlock on a purely plot-based schedule. But then you have what might arguably be considered the ‘meat’ of the game which are based on discovery (being in the right place at the right time), main plot progression, and progression along multiple simultaneous sub-plots in terms of your relationships with characters, or your own personal progression. The fascinating part (for me) is how all of these little mini-progressions and choices interact and interrelate. The progression is forced – particularly with Persona 4 – so that the clock is always running and you have to balance your activities out with making progress on the main quest. But as with the Elder Scrolls games, it’s often more interesting to focus on the multitude of (somewhat) open-ended side quests.

Interestingly, older RPGs tended towards the softer progression systems, whereas more modern RPGs (with the Elder Scrolls & newer Fallout games being stand-out counter-examples) favor harder, more linear progression.

I don’t think this modern tendency is based on player demand so much as player tolerance and the laws of economics. Modern, AAA games depend more heavily on expensive, custom content. Every action must be animated, every word must be voiced by an actor (or actually several actors for fully localized titles).  Publishers simply cannot afford any ‘wasted space,’ or to have players easily bypass large swaths of expensively content. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles bypass this problem with a heavy reliance upon reusable, procedural content. This isn’t too far off from how older RPGs handled things, with tile-based game worlds.

My advice to indies is generally to avoid what the big guys (AAA, mainstream) are doing. If the tendency is for massive custom content and heavy-handed linear progression, indies can make themselves different by making a game that’s more open-ended and more dependent upon the softer progression designs. Thankfully (for gamers), that area is not completely devoid of mainstream involvement, but there’s a lot more room to comfortably differentiate your game.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

New Year Plans: How To Become a Better Indie

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 2, 2013

I have been making games for a while, now – both as a full-time mainstream professional and as a part-time indie. Some day, I hope I’ll be pretty good at it.  But in the spirit of New Years’ Resolutions, I figured I’d set some goals and some concrete plans to meet those goals this year to get better at making games.  I’m sharing for three reasons:

#1 – Hopefully some other struggling game devs might be inspired by some ideas here,

#2 – So that newbie / aspiring indies will recognize that years of experience doesn’t convey any kind of automatic superiority.

#3 – It gives me something to write about on the blog. 🙂

I feel relatively comfortable with my programming skills, though I am painfully aware of how quickly much of the specifics grow out-of-date and some huge regions of knowledge that I could do well to improve in. In 2012, by necessity I came to learn Unity, and improved my C# skills.

In 2013, I want to focus on other weaknesses as an indie game developer. Being indie means you must wear many hats, even if you aren’t a “lone wolf.” There are simply too many jobs to be done. I don’t harbor any illusions about turning those into strengths, but I want these to be less of a drag on my performance. I feel I can improve my overall abilities, which should reflect in the games I make for you – in terms of quality and speed of development.

So here are my “personal progress” plans for becoming a better indie in 2013:

#1 – Development “Quality Time”

Work on Frayed Knights 1 tended to be in fits and starts. This was directly correlated much of the time to the Day Job (working from 9 AM until 2 AM – or later – at Sensory Sweep really slowed development pretty bad). During bad weeks (of which I’ve had way too many in 2012), I’d be lucky to get 5 hours of game development work done in a week. But then as I was pushing towards the finish line, it wasn’t uncommon for me to fit nearly 40 hours of dev time in a week – another full-time job. A lot of that time wasn’t “quality” development time, either; it was frequently riddled with distractions.  This year, with a few exceptions, my goal is to make sure I get in at least one hour per day of serious, quality, distraction-free game development each day – even if it means waking up at a more ungodly hour, unplugging the Internet. As I said on Monday, getting into “the zone” doesn’t magically come when it’s convenient – it comes as a matter of habit, effort, and focus. So I need to foster that kind of behavior.

#2 – Sketch or Model Every Day

My art skills have always been lacking – but have vastly improved since I started making indie games. I’m still going to be very dependent upon contracting artists and using off-the-shelf models / art / textures / etc., but I’m going to make a concrete effort to improve upon that. Inspired by what Gareth Fouche did last year making a sketch each day, I’m going to attempt the same – except I can also substitute Blender modeling for traditional sketches.  If nothing else, they can provide a source of blog-fodder as I put some of ’em up for critique. If the key to proficiency is practice (and feedback), that should help.

#3 – Public Progress Reports

One thing which (often) worked pretty well with Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon was blogging progress. The sequel has reached a point in development now where I think I can feel pretty comfortable doing that again. My goal is to report via the blog at least twice a month.  Sort of a bi-weekly report, though it might be more frequent than that. This is actually a pretty fun stage of development where a lot is happening quickly. Towards the end, it gets more challenging, as it’s all polishing, refining, and fixing bugs — not a lot new to report on. But now there’s a lot of fun stuff to share, and there’s a lot I can use feedback on.

I’ve actually been planning this one for a while. I’m – by my guesses – about two months behind where I’d expected to be at the start of the new year, but I can blame 60+ hour work-weeks through far too much of 2012 for that one.

#4 – Game a Month – Well, Sometimes.

I went ahead and signed up as a participant in One Game a Month.  I don’t expect to get a game released every month. If I get one out every quarter, I’ll be pleased with that. But considering how the last “0 hour game jam” recharged my batteries as a developer, I’m beginning to think taking a weekend once every couple of months to do something different is a good thing. While it has the potential to reduce productivity on my main project, I think the benefits can outweigh the dangers. And since I have about a dozen game ideas I want to explore which have been put on hold because of Frayed Knights, this might be a great opportunity to fiddle around with those ideas a little bit rather than letting them collect dust.

There’s one more area I really need to improve in, and that is in outsourcing game content. I suck at it.  I’ve been lucky enough to have a few friends help me out for far below market rate (sometimes for free), which I really appreciate. And I am still running on a shoestring budget — Frayed Knights 1 hasn’t sold enough that it has made financing challenges for the sequel go away.  It just gives me a few extra shoestrings of slightly higher quality.  This is simply something I may need to dive into a little more, be willing to risk losing money on, and get more experience the hard way.

Filed Under: Production - Comments: Read the First Comment



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