Frayed Knights 2 Update: Taking Initiative… AWAY!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 15, 2012

I guess I really am a game designer. I can’t resist the urge to tinker with game mechanics.

While I’m quite proud of the old-school feel and the depth and playability of the combat system for  Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, I am still not satisfied.  In spite of the more abstract tactics, I still want the combat in the Frayed Knights series to feel more like a game of chess. Or, better yet, Magic: The Gathering. This has bugged me for a while, and I think I may have come up with a solution for the sequel.

The old system reflected an old-school approach that was designed for multiple players… everybody (usually) played one character, and you got “your turn” as a player, took your action, and then waited for everyone else to take their turn (including the enemies) until it was your turn again.

In our dice & paper games, with a very large group (at one point we had 11 players – plus a Game Master – which was insane), we had a problem with this system. In an average combat, with people often taking a minute or more on their turn (it sometimes involved looking up the rules), plus bad guys doing their thing, it meant that players were only “playing” once every fifteen or twenty minutes or so. This led to lots of distractions, lots of chatter that in turn slowed down the game, etc. It got especially complicated as players started changing their initiative order to go before or after other players – for example, letting the wizard throw the fireball BEFORE the melee characters charged in to mix things up.

One thing I tried – and really liked – was a change in how the initiative system worked. To keep things simple, I usually had enemies act as a “group” – at least groups of similar opponents. So against a single opponent or a collection of uniform opponents, all that really mattered (as a player) was whether you went before or after the bad guy(s). Really, since you could change your initiative freely  *down* to coordinate your approach with other players, why not just open that up completely and call everybody who goes before the bad guys “group 1,” and everyone who goes after the bad guys “group 2.” And if there were two bad guys going at different initiatives, then the players might be divided into three groups. If more… well, frequently even a group our size would have one empty “group”, which allowed me to regroup enemies and… well, it may sound complicated, but in practice its pretty easy and intuitive.

As a further plus, this kept players more involved in what each other was doing. Suddenly the talk turned to who should go first, and people got a chance to coordinate tactics rather than simply “reacting” when their turn came around. I liked the change. Things were simpler, players were more involved in the game, and tactics were more interesting when players could coordinate their actions as a group.

No, that’s not how initiative works in FK2. I’m just explaining how all this came together. That’s one piece. Here’s another:

While pondering how to improve the combat system – and in many ways, streamlining it, as one of the more consistent criticisms of the game was rooted – if you drive down deep enough – in the sheer breadth of choices to be made each round. I LOVE that depth and breadth, and don’t want to lose that. Comparing this to Magic: The Gathering, I thought about deck-building. I haven’t played the game for many years, but back in the old days – when the game was more free-form – we’d build decks out of available cards rather than buying decks pre-built with particular strategies.  I think deck-building was my favorite part of the game. Early on, I’d play with far too many colors, and far too many cards. I had to learn to cull out everything that wasn’t key to my strategy (or at least as far as my card library would allow me to serve my strategy).  With a large enough library, I felt like I wasn’t hemmed in by lack of choice, but I had to be very careful to self-cull my selection to keep a tight, competitive deck (competitive enough for the small group of friends I played with, at least).

So I took these two ideas – from our home dice & paper game, and early Magic: The Gathering, and probably a little bit from D&D miniatures and 4th edition, but I hit upon an approach to handling combat in Frayed Knights 2 (and most likely 3) that will improve upon the experience in the original.  I thought I’d run it past you for additional feedback. So here we go…

The general play changes to this: The player takes a turn. The AI takes a turn.  This continues until the end of a ’round’ where round-by-round effects take place. For their turn, one side can play an available character in their group, and / or (in the player’s case) choose a drama star effect, attempt to flee, or even pass. In fact, near the end of a ’round,’ if one side has a lot more characters than the other, that side may get a few extra turns in a row, though at this point I’m not guaranteeing that every character will get a chance to act every turn. At the end of the round, certain effects (like durations) are updated, and the combat continues with a new round.

Okay, when you choose a character to act this turn, you get to choose from a palette of actions that you will have selected in advance. You can change these outside of combat, but once the fight has started, you get what you get.  Here’s a VERY VERY Work-In-Progress shot that’s really not much more than a mock-up. You guys know how that works, right? You pick an action, it happens, and that character is now inactive for a period of “time.” Of course, since this is a turn-based game, time is measured in number of moves / rounds until the character is re-available. Generally speaking, they’ll be unavailable for more actions until the next round under normal conditions.

Now, it goes a little bit deeper. When a character first becomes available (again, generally speaking – exhaustion and haste or high reflexes will modify this a little bit), they’ll have access to a set of abilities that are “Tier 1.” These are the lowest-cost, cheapest, most straightforward abilities. In combat, this includes “Attack,” “Defend,” and “Swap Weapon” (which doesn’t count as an action – it’s a freebie), plus six user-defined actions which include low-impact feats, and “easy” spells (generally single-target defensive spells), drinking potions, etc.

If you leave the available character idle for a move (or more, depending on … factors), then they have access to a second tier of user-defined abilities. These are your mid-level feats and spells (generally speaking , single-target offensive spells and group defensive spells), and using certain items.

Finally, if you leave that character idle ANOTHER move or two, then they have access to Tier 3 – the heavy-duty stuff that cost the most endurance – things like group-based offensive spells. Again, these are all user-defined hotkeys reflecting that character’s abilities, and there are only six. As of this point, I expect to make it possible for lower-tier actions to be placed in a higher-tier slot, but not the other way around.

This system replaces the short-term endurance mechanic, while effectively causing the same effect. In FK1, you’d have to periodically rest more frequently while using higher-cost abilities. Now there’s just a bigger delay. Now, there’s still a cost on exhaustion, which will cause your character to recover availability and move onto the next tier more slowly – which can only be recovered via “Liquid Nap” potions or actually sleeping in a safe place. But the quick “taking a breather” resting is gone.

There are undoubtedly a few wrinkles I haven’t run into yet, but that’s where things are heading. So here are a few specific points of interest for players of the original game:

Q: Will it take longer for a character to become available after using a Tier 3 ability than a Tier 1?

A: Don’t know. Right now that’d represent a “double-cost” of taking more time to use the ability, and more time to recover. I’d rather keep it simple, but I’m leaving that open for a possible balance option.

Q: If my character is on Tier 3 and I only want to use a Tier 1 ability, can I do that?

A: Absolutely. The character’s “tier” represents the maximum action category they can use, not the only one.

Q: Is this interface used outside of combat?

A: Yep. Though the basic actions change (you get “Search” and “Inventory”, for example, instead of “Attack” and “Defend”).

Q: So will pre-casting defensive spells before combat (like right before opening a door) affect my character’s action level at the beginning of combat?

A: Still subject to change, but the answer is tentatively “yes.” If you just barely buffed the moment before you opened the door, your characters may not be immediately available. Or you can wait before opening the door, but then the durations of the buffs will be that much closer to expiration…

Q: But otherwise I can basically open up with Chloe launching a Hellacious Fireball at  the start of every combat?

A: Yes, if you want. Though you effectively could do that in FK1, also, if you put enough points into giving her a good initiative.  Same deal. And the bad guys can do the same.  Expect to see spellcasters whipping out the big guns on the first or second action.

Q: How does this affect enhanced spells?

A: You now enhance a spell when you add it to the tier list. So you have to define your enhancements in advance.

Q: So a higher reflex score or initiative feats no longer affect your characters?

A: These may affect the speed at which actions become available, and also which tier is available to the character at the beginning of combat.

Q: Why is swapping out weapons “free” and take no time?

A: Because I want players to feel free to experiment with different weapons versus different monsters. Otherwise any “better” choices get invalidated with the loss of an action induced by swapping weapons.

Q: Can a character act twice in the same round? Like, could I use Dirk, Arianna, Chloe, and then Dirk again on the same round without using Benjamin at all?

A: If a character has a magical haste effect, definitely. Otherwise, I’m not sure. That’ll come out in the playtest. But certainly you could go a round without using a character (possibly because you are letting them stay idle long enough to get at their Tier 3 abilities).

Q: Will using a Drama Star ability use up a “move?” (allowing the AI to go next)? What about fleeing?

A: Drama stars do not – those are “free.” Attempting to flee will use up an action.

Q: So if I go, then the enemies go, what happens when parties of unequal numbers fight?

A: The one with more members has more actions, taken at the end of the round. Again, this is heavily subject to balancing and tweaking, so  I’m really interested in seeing how that all pans out.

Q: Will I always have a party of four characters, like in the first game?

A: Resoundingly, “nope.”

Q: If a character doesn’t act, will they still get exhaustion?

A: Nope. A character has to act to acquire exhaustion points.

Okay.  So… there’s the direction the game is progressing. It’s a whopper of a change from a user-interface perspective, but the underlying results will probably not be too different.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

The Industry Is In Chaos. What Else Is New?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 14, 2012

The party is over at Zynga.

THQ is having trouble paying its bills.

Lawsuits are brewing over the epic collapse of 38 Studio.

“Free to Play” (a triumph of marketing on par with tiny candy bars getting labeled as “Fun Size!”) is dominating the arena.

Consoles are on the decline.

Everybody and their cousin seems to be making games (mostly crappy games, but still…)

Tim Sweeney of Epic (himself a former indie from the glory days of shareware) sees a bright future for AAA, but expresses concern about rising costs and hopes that “costs at the start of the next generation to only be double the cost of the start of the previous generation.”

Windows 8: Bringing the mobile phone experience to the desktop.

Kickstarter changing the rules for mid-tier game development. Or is it just a fad?

Minecraft and Angry Birds: Sales (and particularly ROI) that major publishers would kill to have.

HTML 5: Will it or won’t it kill Flash?

Steam. And Steam pushing Linux.

The industry is in turmoil.

Same as it ever was.

Sure, it can be easy for me to get worked up over issues that will impact my business and the kinds of games I want to play.  But I think I’ve been at this long enough – as a gamer first, later as a mainstream developer, later still as an indie – that I’ve seen an awful lot of turmoil and tons of transformations happen to the video games industry. I’ve seen the arcades and my favorite platforms and genres die out (*sniff*), and I’ve often seen something new or better take their place (or a resurgence).  I’ve seen plenty of booms and declines and fads.

I’ve come to assume that the industry is always in chaos, with only about two or three years at a time where things might be remotely stable.

That doesn’t mean I’m any good at predicting what the next big thing will be. I’m just used to it not being what I expected.

 

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

Game Design: Verb Consolidation

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 13, 2012

The text adventure genre provided a wonderful deception to a generation of gamers  – or to be honest, multiple generations, as the Interactive Fiction community still manages to provide some pretty interesting games for a niche audience. The grand illusion of text adventures – and certainly one of the things that most endeared me to the genre in my youth – was the open-endedness of controls. By using a subset of one’s native language, one could do almost anything in the game world! These game worlds were full of possibilities!

Of course, you couldn’t. While we willfully suspended disbelief for as long as possible, the frustration inevitably set in as the parser prohibited apparently obvious solutions.  Why couldn’t we wield the oar as a weapon and hit the sea serpent with it?  Why couldn’t we use the axe to chop a locked door down?

Graphic adventure games started out as simply text adventures with pictures (and usually a pretty limited text parser). But as time went by, and particularly as mouse control became popular, the most popular verbs (the command words of adventure games) were moved to a menu, but the text input window remained a stubborn hold-out in some games until the early to mid-90s. The thing was, most verbs could be consolidated into a smaller list of potential inputs. Most of the time, this was pretty sufficient – most of the time, there really aren’t that many ways to use a lamp. A simplified menu meant a lot less frustration playing “Guess what the designer was thinking.”

But the exceptions were what mattered. Sometimes the most interesting puzzles might come from creative uses of a lamp.  Sadly, many graphic adventure games lacking the ability to force players to play “guess the verb”  resorted to reliance upon its cousin, “hunt the pixel.” In the meantime, some of the more interesting approaches to adventure game puzzle design were cut off due to rarity.

RPGs didn’t quite go through the same level of consolidation for the most part, but this is arguable due to the wide variety of RPG styles of the 80’s and early 90’s. Ultima is perhaps the most interesting example. Originally, the games had commands mapped to all 26 letters of the alphabet… with creative spelling, like “K” for “Klimb.” Or “J” to Jimmy a lock (instead of picking).  Both players and designers got frustrated trying to determine the difference between Looking at an tile and Searching it.  Here’s a list of Ultima IV‘s main commands (besides movement) – with a few notes on how they changed in Ultima V:

A: Attack,    B: Board,  C: Cast,   D: Descend,  E: Enter,  F: Fire,  G: Get Chest,  H: Hole Up (and Camp), I: Ignite a torch,  J: Jimmy lock, K: Klimb,  L) Locate Position (“Look” in Ultima V), M: Mix Reagents, N: New Order, O: Open Door, P: Peer at a gem (“Push” in Ultima V), Q: Quit & Save, R: Ready a weapon, S: Search, T: Talk, U: Use, V: Volume (“View” in Ultima V), W: Wear armor, X: X-it (Exit), Y: Yell,  Z: Ztats (Stats).

In Ultima VI, mouse control was added, and the verbs were consolidated. The basic commands (besides movement) were: Attack, Spell, Talk, Look, Get, Drop, Move, Use, Rest, and Switch between combat and non-combat. There were a few auxillary controls as well to let you manipulate your inventory, inspect the party, and of course quit the game.

How much was lost in the consolidation? To be honest, not much.  While tapping all over the keyboard was kinda cool, for the most part the core gameplay of the Ultima series was left unchanged. Okay, it was unchanged by the consolidation of commands, at least. Ultima VI really was perhaps the largest departure from the traditional look & feel of the series at the time.

What’s interesting is that this list is pretty close to the list of interactions by most modern (western) RPGs. We generally don’t have moving objects around in the world available as a general option, but otherwise… it’s about manipulating objects in our environment, attacking enemies, casting spells (or using other special abilities), talking to people, inspecting things (either directly or with in-game support), and manipulating inventory.

However, in some other areas – particularly combat – modern RPGs have really added quite a bit.  Combat has gained a bit more depth beyond attack, defend, or spell.  I guess that tells you where modern game designers think the “core gameplay loop” can be found in RPGs. Expand it where it’s meaningful, I guess. I was also reminded of this (once again) by the new XCom: Enemy Unknown, which has simplified many mechanics, but has offered in exchange some potent new tactical options as the squaddies level up.

Which brings it all ’round again to what’s good and bad about consolidating the “verbs” of the game. I feel like I’m debating ancient history here, but as I always say, there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from the past.

Consolidating the list of verbs wasn’t just to cut redundancy (definitely a problem in text adventures – “Take Lamp” versus “Get Lamp,” “N” verses “North” versus “Go North”). It was also to limit player confusion.  Having a lot of verbs that didn’t work with 99% of objects was confusing and frustrating.  So instead – in the case of Ultima VI for example – this became a tiny list of verbs that worked with almost everything of the appropriate class of objects. You could talk to any non-hostile NPC, attack any hostile NPC, etc.  The commands were pretty universal. But when the world becomes even less interactive, and even these generic commands feel underused… then something feels wrong.  The world of Ultima VI didn’t get less interactive when the command list was culled. Actually, quite the opposite. While I recognize that breadth of interaction is not necessarily desirable, depending upon the game (a lot of people felt that baking bread was a waste of time).

The other side is doing what (fortunately) many games have done – take advantage of the simplified main interface to add more depth where it counts. Fighting games, popular in the 90’s, were a perfect example of this. While the basic commands were so simple and generic that a cat could randomly walk on a gamepad and make it look like his avatar was putting up a reasonable fight, the depth came from choosing the best command for the situation, timing it just right, and of course putting together the combos.  Frankly, I sucked at ’em, but I enjoyed watching skilled players do their thing.

The point is – done correctly – a simpler, consistent control scheme can actually do a better job of preserving the illusion that text adventure games portrayed in the early days of the medium. If all you can do is move, poke, and prod – but the entire world responds to being moved through, poked, and prodded, with a depth of interactivity that can be predictable but fascinating (and hopefully challenging), and then the world will come alive.

Simple? Not hardly.  There are a lot of recently released games – even big-budget games – that still don’t get it right. I can’t say I’m great at it personally, either. But it’s important to keep in mind, especially as indies continue to mine the past for inspiration.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

We Need to Kill WHAT to Make Better Games…?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 12, 2012

I said on Twitter that there was so much wrong with this article I didn’t know where to begin. But now I’ll begin. First off, the article in question

Why We Need to Kill Gameplay to Make Better Games

First I’ll cover the points of agreement. The author is absolutely right when he says, “I think than when we’re focused on overcoming a challenge – we try to kill an attacker or win a race – we go into savage beast’s survival mode and shut ourselves down for any “higher class” emotions. Our vision gets extremely narrow, and we’re no longer multi-tasking. Beating the challenge becomes the only thing that matters.”

I’ve said something similar myself several times. It’s why gameplay and storytelling are fundamentally at odds, and why striking a good balance between them means neither is going to be as strong as they’d be all by themselves. Deal with it. Hopefully we’ll achieve something more than the sum of the parts when we’re done. It’s why designing games is still more art than science. But here, the author seems to be arguing that gameplay should be sacrificed on the altar of spectacle, because spectacle is more memorable.

Okay. This dude is a seasoned game design vet, so it’s not like his opinion should be dismissed out of hand. And I think that above quote captures the crux of the matter.

Similarly, I could argue that many of my favorite moments in games were purely gameplay-related. I had a series of articles many years ago entitled “Game Moments,” and only a few of them (Wolfenstein 3D, Unreal, and Ultima 7, that I can recall) had moments that were most memorable to me because of a canned event.  The rest were most memorable because of things that happened organically as a result of choices that I made. Like the first time I won a diplomatic victory in Master of Orion, because I stifled the urge for revenge and spent the game arming combatants as a “neutral” third party through the entire campaign. Or the time the demon snuck up on me in Doom.  Or several key moments in Falcon 4.0. Or that time my group was getting hammered in EverQuest due to an aggro bug, but we managed to stick with it and barely stay alive through aggressive teamwork and an unwillingness for anybody to be the first one to run away (and lemme tell you, the XP we got that night was tremendous!). Or my first co-op game of Doom. Or going head-to-head against a friend in Rainbow Six where we knew each other so well we practically mirrored each other’s moves.  Or getting teleported into a random dungeon across the world, and surviving the hours-long search for the exit in spite of debilitating disease in Daggerfall. Or that time I mistook a plant for the reappearance of Alma in F.E.A.R. More recent examples would include managing to squeak out a victory without a single death battling the final monster in Borderlands 2, though I spent half the time cowering behind rocks.  Or finally taking out that friggin’ Balor demon (and friends) in Knights of the Chalice. Or defeating an entire wave of aliens without a single injury during the alien’s turn via Overwatch and good placement (not to mention good luck)  in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Or that two-tank surprise we got one night in Left 4 Dead 2…

Also, if a game is completely awesome from start to finish, a perfect balance of moment-to-moment gameplay and exploration, but lacks significant stand-out moments, is it a failure?

So in that respect, I think I reject the article’s premise. Maybe the author is more enthralled by little non-interactive details and cutscenes and activities in games with no gameplay value… and that’s great. For me, that’s icing on the cake. A great game, one could argue, might even require these things, built on top of a solid game. But saying that this means we should “should drop regular gameplay, with all its core combat loops, gameplay mechanics and other voodoo?”

That’s about like saying that since hot dogs are so awesome at a baseball game, we should just drop the baseball games and instead just eat the hot dogs.

Now, I haven’t played The Walking Dead, the evidence he uses to illustrate his point, so maybe I’ll become a believer once I get around to playing it, but I doubt it.

Instead, I read the conclusion of the article and think, “This guy is describing non-interactive media, like movies. He’d rather be making movies.” Or maybe questionably game-like titles like Dear Esther, which I confess left me surprisingly unexcited after all the hullabaloo. I ‘played’ it and found myself uninterested in the narrative, because it quite simply had nothing to do with me, the player, or what I was doing in the game. All I felt was a vague curiosity about trying to find the context in which I found myself on this island.That was enough to keep me playing for about twenty minutes or so, but not enough to get me to play it again after one session.

Or maybe he’s going after a Chris Crawford-esque vision quest for true interactive storytelling. I can give this pursuit a little more credit. In my mind, this simply means that we’re in disagreement over the meaning of gameplay, and I may simply have a broader definition than he does.  For me, the constant vaguely goal-related tinkering of The Sims counts as gameplay. It is not the hyperactive run-and-gun of a hardcore platformer or FPS, or the frantic moment-to-moment decision-making for a real-time-strategy game. But its no less gameplay to me. Wandering around the landscape of Frayed Knights or any other RPG looking for interesting things to mess with is no less gameplay to me than a combat sequence. To me, gameplay is a combination of interesting decisions (Sid Meier’s description of a “good game”) and challenging execution – and can literally encompass any mix of these two elements, including the extremes of having all of one and none of the other. Maybe the author is thinking exclusively of the latter type?

I’ll credit the article with one more point: We still don’t understand games. This is a good thing. We’ve still got a ton of room to explore. While I’m not a fan of Dear Esther, I appreciate the fact that the creator was willing to push some boundaries and explore some of the fringes of the medium. We need plenty of that, even though the results will often be less than awesome. It’s how we discover. But while perhaps the meaning of gameplay is happily subject to debate, I think it remains the foundation without which these “memorable moments” are meaningless.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 20 Comments to Read

Randomly Speaking

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 9, 2012

Craig Stern of Sinister Design had an insightful essay on randomness (or, rather, non-determinism) in games this week.

I thought I’d talk about it a little bit.

I’m a big fan of Go (I even dropped a serious chunk of change on Many Faces of Go – which was well worth it, IMHO). Chess a little less so, but I do enjoy the game (although I suck at it). When I was a kid, one of my favorite games was Mastermind.  These are all deterministic games with no artificial randomness.  But for me, RPGs have always been joined at the hip with the idea of slinging dice. So I’m very reluctant to go full-on deterministic with them. And Craig, too, is finding some places where gameplay can be expanded with some careful addition of some random (or at least, less predictable) elements.

In somewhat random order, here are some thoughts on randomness in RPGs – particularly computer RPGs:

Asymmetric vs. Perfect Information

In my Artificial Intelligence classes in college, we tended to talk about “perfect knowledge” or “Perfect Information” games – particularly Chess and Go – with respect to AI. Perfect information means all players know the game state and all possible moves. Nobody’s got any cards they are hiding. I *believe* this also means than the results of any move are also known in advance, so all moves must be deterministic, but I may be wrong here. But an otherwise fully deterministic simulation can be made a lot more interesting through asymmetric information. The players don’t know everything. Even in a straightforward RPG, encountering an enemy without fully knowing their powers — and having to play cautiously while figuring out what they’re capable of – is an example of asymmetric information. Ideally, the AI wouldn’t automatically know what your party is capable of, either. I was always suspicious that even the dumb animals in Knights of the Chalice automatically knew who your vulnerable spellcasters were. But even a simpler possibility here – with perfect knowledge of the enemy position and composition – would be to have each player hold three special move cards that the opponent can’t see… whether these were obtained randomly or ‘purchased’ before a combat.

This is another avenue for making a deterministic game less predictable.

Reality is Random

I was stupid and not paying attention when driving a few days ago when making a left turn. I nearly got into an accident. It wasn’t a near miss or anything, but I felt really stupid about it. I have no idea how many left-hand turns I’ve made in my life, but it’s a lot. These are not difficult actions. I don’t go into an intersection expecting a 1% chance of failure when I turn on my left blinker. But even trivial acts go wrong sometimes. And sometimes we get lucky and win the lottery.  There are so many complicated factors in play with every action and plan, so many uncontrolled variables, that our human minds effectively have to boil things down to chance. And we have to make plans around chance. We buy insurance. We take risks. We play the odds. We create “Plan B.”

I’ve done a bit of simulated combat with fencing weapons, padded swords, martial arts, paintball, and the like.  Enough to know that what seems simple and automatic in practice can become devilishly hard when the heat is on. There are plenty of reports on actual gunfights (and a few eerie videos on YouTube) that illustrate how ‘shootouts’ are amazingly… well, random. Guys who can place high in shooting competitions can’t seem to hit the broadside of a barn at point blank range against a deadly opponent shooting back at them.  Real fights are fast, frantic, messy affairs, and gamers would be infuriated with probabilities that mirror reality. Actually, older wargames (and D&D) tried to simulate this by claiming that attacks were an abstraction. In older editions of D&D, your hit chance represented the sum total of a number of attacks made during the course of a round, perhaps the one “good” shot that had a real chance of doing damage.

Simulationists (and I have at least one foot in that camp) tend to enjoy the randomness of real life thrown into our games.  Though we also like having enough control over the variables to be able to pick and choose our chances.

It’s Fun to Gamble

I forget the studies involved (it’s been a long time), but it’s been demonstrated that anticipation and excitement over an unpredictable result is much higher than for a predictable one.  Putting coins in a slot machine is a lot more fun than buying something from a gumball machine – even though your average return on investment from the gumball machine is higher.  Our most memorable moments in our “dice & paper” RPGs often come from moments where we defied the odds – either with a positive or negative result. One of our favorite stories involve a “boss” vampire going down at the beginning of round 1 with a combination of a good initiative roll on the part of the rogue, an Arrow of Undead Slaying, and a bad fortitude save on the part of the vampire. Yes, it ruined my big, high-level boss encounter. Yes, it turned a big climactic fight into almost a joke. But the players LOVED it. So what’s the problem?

Another – negative – result came from a monk in a bad melee who encouraged the spellcaster to launch a fireball on his position. “Don’t worry, I can take it,” he promised. But his enemies, he was sure, could not. After all, he was 80% sure of avoiding all damage from the fireball entirely (improved evasion), and even on failure, would take only half damage, and had a few more hit points than the spell would do *on the average*. Worst case, he could be healed and prevented from dying at -10 hit points once the fireball killed all of his opponents. You can probably guess what happened.  The damage was extremely high, and the saving throw roll was extremely low. The monk was reduced to -11 hit points, killing him immediately. The player, fortunately, took it in great humor, rolling up a new character and laughing it off. We all do, now, too.  It’s still a running joke.  It was one of those great moments in gaming.

And randomized treasure? Seriously, sometimes I think that’s the only reason Diablo ever caught on. Randomness makes a game interesting.

Randomness Facilitates Friendly Competitive Gaming

It’s sort of a given in game design that randomness plays an important role in friendly competitive games. It allows players of unequal skill to play together,  and gives all players a chance to write off losses as “bad luck.” On the extremes, you have games like Candyland that are pure luck, allowing children to play with their parents and have an equal chance of winning. By contrast, beating a more skilled player at chess may lead to the suspicion that they deliberately threw the game.

Too Much Randomness (or Lack of Control Over Variables) Irritates the Hell Out of Players

One of the discoveries I made in the making of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon was that the earlier incarnation of the game system – which relied on bell curves to deliberately be “less random” than your average pen-and-paper RPG – was extremely frustrating due to its randomness. The later version was considerably less random, yet arguably still too dependent upon random numbers in the end. I have a few theories why the level of randomness acceptable in D&D feels less so in an RPG like Frayed Knights, and more plentiful combat is certainly part of many of them.

The risk of failure is fun. Actual failure, considerably less so.  Playing in “ironman” mode with permadeath turned on in a game is – for me, at least – at least twice as thrilling as a normal game.  But it’s a hundred times more upsetting when you lose.  Which way those balance may depend upon the game and you, as a gamer. For most of us, the higher the risk, the more control we want over the variables. When a split-second of poorly timed lag (a certainly undesirable form of randomness) can yield perma-death, we’re not going to be happy.

I thought the drama star system would help offset some of the frustration with “bad luck” – and I believe it did – but as I’m tweaking the system for part 2, I’m working do diminish some of the ‘spread’ a little more.

A Happy Medium

Anyway – I enjoyed Craig’s essay, and it also amused me. He’s slowly getting sucked back into putting more non-deterministic elements in his games. I’m feeling compelled to reduce some of the randomness in some areas of mine (while possibly expanding  it other, more interesting areas…) I think it all comes to there being a happy medium in there somewhere. Of course, it varies by game and play-style so it’s hardly universal. Or predictable. You might even say it’s kinda random.

 

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

A Couple of 2D Game-Making Options

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 8, 2012

As most folks reading this are well aware, 2D games have made a resurgence, and it’s not restricted to indies. Nor are indies restricted to 2D. But modern technology has really blown the doors off the potential of 2D games from the bad ol’ days where developers had to hand-roll assembly code routines for sprite rendering and pull off all kinds of crazy tricks to fake smooth scrolling. (See: Commander Keen).

One of the reasons I’m so pleased with Unity 3D is how easy it can be to make 2D gameplay with the engine. You can simply set a camera to orthographic projection, jam everything into Z=0 (or not, for sorting purposes), and viola! 2D gaming done easy. But there are many more tricks you can do to create high-quality 2D… including some tricks borrowed from the 3D world. And then there’s a whole world of 2D gameplay using 3D graphics… featured as one of the main tutorials available at Unity’s site.

For a few ideas, I’m going to refer you to this great article by Size Five Games (Ben There, Dan That) on using Unity for 2D gaming:

Using Unity 3D for Swindle’s 2D

 

At the last Utah Indie Night, the presentation was on HTML5 gaming. A lot of indies are going that direction. I confess, I really don’t know much about it.   One of these days, I’ll have to cobble together a Pong game in HTML5, and see what I can do. Will it replace Flash? A lot of indies are banking on it, although right now support for some APIs (particularly WebGL) is still spotty – which could mean having to write a game multiple times for multiple “platforms” (web browsers). But it does seem to be the direction things are going. Is it fast enough to do really cool things? Again – it looks probable. Here’s an interesting anecdote:

HTML5 Games Faster Than Native?

Now, this is not strictly true, of course, because it’s ALWAYS possible to get native code to run faster. But it was an interesting discovery, nonetheless, with possibilities ranging from an optimization in WebGL that DirectX could do well to take advantage of, or simply that the developers were more conscious of optimization working in JavaScript than in C++. But whatever the reason, they were able to not only match the performance of their native-code engine, but far surpass it.

Of course, there remains several other great options to game developers looking for 2D game development technology. I’m still kind of fond of Torque Game Builder, though I don’t expect to ever use it again. GameMaker has REALLY made some impressive strides lately, and is priced in a pretty convenient indie range (including the all-important “free” price point). And hey, an HTML5 export option is available! Monkey Coder is another option I’ve heard some professional indies embracing. There are dozens more.

As for me… I think I’ve been won over pretty solidly to the Unity camp for the time being, for 2D or 3D.  As much as I like to pride myself on being able to program on anything, for the purpose of actually getting product out the door I’m best served by sticking to one technology and mastering it.

Filed Under: Programming - Comments: 14 Comments to Read

Computer Necromancy

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 7, 2012

My desktop system died, quite suddenly early Monday morning. Bummer.

After a few repairs and a new Windows install (on a new hard drive), I’m now back in business. Fortunately, nothing was lost on the game development front (I had backups even if my data drive had died – which it hadn’t – so there wasn’t undo concern, though I did get a little bit of panic trying to remember where all my backups of the Frayed Knights 1 source data could be found…) — except time. I’m still getting back to speed, reinstalling tools – in some cases, getting back up to speed on new versions that I hadn’t upgraded in a couple of years. And then there’s trying to remember all my passwords on various sites which are no longer cached.

So it has been a nuisance of a delay, but not terribly so.

And I’ve taken the opportunity to give my old system a little bit of an upgrade. A new hard drive and a new video card. Woot! Borderlands 2 runs better than ever.  Hopefully it’ll prove less flaky – I was getting a lot of crashes before (though I don’t *think* this was related to the system dying).

One thing that amuses me is that I now have about 3 terrabytes of hard drive storage (between two drives). In the late 1980s, my mother landed a multimillion dollar contract as a salesperson delivering this kind of storage to a government agency (no, it wasn’t to the CIA – that we know of). This still boggles my mind. As a guy who started out on a one-kilobyte system where it was faster to re-type a program in by hand than to take the time trying to save it and reload it on tape, there’s still a tiny bit of the twelve-year-old in me who marvels at what we can do now. Of course, he’s still saying things like “WOW, you could have a REALLY HUGE TEXT ADVENTURE with that much memory! Why haven’t you done that yet?”

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

A New Entry in the “Elite” Genre: Elite?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 6, 2012

Dave Braben is kickstarting a new Elite game, entitled Elite: Dangerous.

The original Elite was not available on my Commodore 64 for a long time, so I never ended up playing it until it was old, old news. However, when Frontier: Elite II came out, I was a hardcore addict.  For two or three months, I didn’t play computer games so much as I played Frontier. My neighbor was also hooked, and we’d swap information and trade routes. The game was “sandbox” writ large. I did about everything I could figure out to do in that game. I tried (successfully) to make money scooping fuel from a gas giant. I had a bad hyperdrive throw me into the far-flung reaches of the galaxy, and tried (unsuccessfully) to make my way back to civilized space before my ship’s engines gave out entirely for lack of maintenance. I battled pirates (and some of the worst, most annoyingly suicidal AI ever) to achieve an “Elite” rating. I became a pirate myself at one point. I owned every ship in the game (and there were dozens).

I was super-excited about “Frontier: First Encounters,” the sequel a couple of years later, but it was a horrendous, buggy mess that I didn’t have fun playing and never played for long.

Later, I played many of its spiritual descendents – and enjoyed some of them quite a bit. Wing Commander: Privateer was a favorite, though far too short and limited by comparison (but at least the combat sucked a lot less). The “X” series was a lot of fun, and pretty dang amazing in its scope. I played Freelancer through to completion twice, plus some heavily modded games.  And I’ve played a bit of several open source space mercenary sims, and though I haven’t played much of ’em, Star Wraith’s Evochron Mercenary and other games are pretty dang impressive indie titles. The list goes on, with many games (primarily indie) that I haven’t played.

And then there’s the weird cult phenomenon that is Eve Online.

So I guess this brings me to the big question: Is there room in the “Elite” space-mercenary genre for a literal Elite sequel?

I’ve frequently considered revisiting the whole space-sim genre as a developer. But each time I do, I look at how the genre has progressed since the glory days of Wing Commander, Freespace, Tie Fighter, Frontier, and the like… and I think, “Holy crap. What could I possibly add to the genre today, as a largely lone-wolf indie?”  Guys like Star Wraith are already doing that. And EgoSoft, 3000 AD, and others are really kicking some serious butt on the whole sci-fi sandbox thing. I’m sure if I were to really dwell on it, I’d come up with something (like the recent awesome indie space-combat roguelike FTL did), but right now it feels like anything I’d do would be really be more of a “me, too” effort. And I’ve got very strong feelings about that. I had some interesting ideas I explored with Void War, but that’s done.

And that’s what I’m wondering about the proposal for Elite: Dangerous, now, too. I mean, he’s looking for about $2 million in funding (exchanging British pounds to U.S. dollars) for… what? The fact that it’s created by the guy who started it all? That’s nice, but… I’m still not seeing the vision. I’m not sure what Braben really wants to bring to the genre in 2014 that’s not already being served by these other games and developers.  I mean, a more realistic universe – as existed in the earlier games – does make an interesting variation, but based on the pitch, that’s all I’m really seeing.

Is that enough? Is there room in the “Elite” genre for another Elite? Or have we already moved way past that by now?

 

Filed Under: Flight Sims - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Driving 4 Dollars: A Game In Five Hours, But One Doesn’t Count.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 5, 2012

A half-hour before the Zero Hour Game Jam (in my time zone), I still wasn’t sure what I was going to make. Part of me wanted to see how Unity could handle something along the lines of a “Bullet Hell” shooter. Part of me wanted to do something completely traditional – a 1980-era arcade game whipped together as quickly as possible (in zero hours!).

Suddenly, and quite mysteriously, I was struck by a desire to make a game where you drive around in a car picking up things.  Actually part of it was thinking it’d be fun to have a deathrace-style game where you also have to shoot or smash other cars to get at the best prizes (yeah, a decade and a half later, my baptisms by fire with Twisted Metal and Jet Moto still come back to haunt me, I guess…)

Of course, doing anything smart with AI was pretty much out of the question. I still kinda fantasized about having turrets shooting at the player, but I decided that would be an enhancement when it turned out that my concept was WAY too simple and was going to be done in thirty minutes…

Yeah. Right.

I’ll link to it here so you don’t have to search through this wall of text for the game: DRIVING 4 DOLLARS!

BUILDING THE GAME

I got my tools fired up in advance – Blender (which I never ended up using), the Unity engine. Should have loaded Gimp and Genetica too, but ah, well. Within seconds of hitting 1:00 AM (for the first time), I created a new project in Unity. Well, I started creating a new project. I’d included too many resources, and so Unity took a couple of minutes to pull together all the assets and finish creating the project. When you only have sixty minutes to work with, two minutes spent somewhat idle is not a good thing. I finally moved on to see if I could work on something else just as Unity finished.

I started by creating the playing environment – a ground bounded by four walls.  Since I’d only come up with an idea a few minutes earlier, I hadn’t really thought through everything I’d need. My idea for the gameplay would be that you’d have to navigate the world maze-like picking up prizes while avoiding smashing into obstacles (possible deadly ones). I still have no idea how I ended up spending fifteen minutes just putting together the playfield. I found myself tweaking sizes and stuff, and then realized that it was now almost twenty past the hour. My time was two-thirds gone and I’d accomplished next to nothing! Time to get cracking on the most important part, the player’s vehicle.

I really screwed up on this one. I’d over-designed the system. Badly. I haven’t done enough work with rigid bodies before in Unity, and realized that I’d duplicated a lot of work that rigid bodies already handle. So I ended up yanking much of the code I’d already done to handle accelerating, braking, and turns, replacing them with simplified versions that would work with Unity… and found I’d spent a half-hour writing player code. I had only TEN MINUTES to finish the game, and at this point I could barely drive around the scene.

I took a couple more minutes to import NGUI for some potential UI, and set up the basics of a UI camera and a special UI-only layer, added a UI and a panel (with nothing in it), and now I had only a few minutes. Game over, man, and I didn’t really have a game. I broke something, un-broke it, and time was up. I went to bed in failure.

Being how I am, I found myself unable to leave it at that. If I’d scoped things poorly (like I always do), then how much time WOULD it have taken to make this game in my head to the level I felt acceptable?

The following afternoon, I re-opened the project and started tinkering. Since I was curious about the time, I watched the clock.

It took another hour to rip out around half of my homemade physics and replace it with stuff more friendly to the Rigidbody physics of Unity. Since I’d only used rigidbodies in a non-scripted way before, part of this time was spent looking stuff up. A lot of the tweaking was done through trial-and-error. For example, to (partially) cancel out sideways movement of the vehicle (you can skid, just not much – definitely not as much as you could in earlier builds), I have to take the velocity vector for the vehicle, transform it into local coordinates (using the handy-dandy WorldToLocal matrix of the transform), and then apply sideways forces that I kinda have to guess on to counter whatever the sideways velocities are. After a few iterations I came up with something close, and leave it at that. That applies to the local X forces. Then there’s acceleration and braking, which get applied to the local Z coordinates. Then I re-transform these back into world forces using the also-handy-dandy LocalToWorld matrix in the object’s transform, and feed it into the rigidbody.

So two hours into the project, I was driving around a square, empty arena. And I had some basic stats up on the screen via NGUI telling me speeds, angular velocities, etc. Woot.

The next hour and a half was spent adding in the gameplay. Since I was no longer working against the clock, I took some time, learned how to use the 3D Text objects in Unity (to display the dollar values), built an overall game-logic object (as well as the “collectable” logic that fires when the car collides with the prizes).  I threw in some more walls in the arena to make it an interesting area to drive in, and … there we were. Three and a half hours later, I had kinda-sorta the game that I’d had in my head twenty minutes before the 0-Hour Game Jam. Okay, the game in my head had used a 2D perspective, but it was so easy to use the 3D camera following you around, and it looked cooler and more interesting, so I’m pleased about that change.

But since I was not constrained by time so much (though I still wanted to be “done”), I took over another hour to “polish” the game. The game currently ended rather unceremoniously, with your previous inputs still valid, running you into a wall or something. So I added a clean end to the game, including a “game over” message that tallied your final score. Plus, I made the game re-entrant, so you could hit the space bar to reset the entire game.  I added the ability for money to re-spawn as you played, which I’d planned initially but realized than in 60 seconds you had little chance of gathering all the money in the arena anyway. (Every time you grab a prize, it tries to respawn two prizes in positions OTHER than the one you just obtained the prize from, at random. If those are already occupied, then nothing happens. In practice, this means the more empty the arena gets, the more likely prizes will respawn in empty positions).

I also took some time to create and add sound effects. The rumble from the vehicle is from Unity, and I vary its pitch based upon your velocity. The pickup sounds were whipped up via BFXR. I built a stand-alone executable, which is why I give the option to press the escape button to quit (sadly, only at the end of the game, bad design but ah, well). Part of that last hour-and-change was spent creating the stand-alone and the web-based builds.

PLAYING THE GAME

It is not an incredible game by any stretch. It’s a five-hour game, and a failure of a zero-hour project. But it was an interesting exercise, taught me a couple of new (or at least forgotten) tricks in Unity, and was overall good “practice.”

So here’s the context: You are in a game show called “Driving 4 Dollars!”, where you have sixty seconds to drive around an arena in your purple truck (with the way the vehicle currently handles, and it’s boxy shape it’s definitely a truck ) picking up cash prizes in $10 and $25 denominations.  The truck is controlled by the arrow keys – up arrow for gas, down arrow for brake & reverse, and left and right arrows for steering. I think it’s kinda fun, but it’s my baby so naturally I’m naturally inclined to like it.

Play Driving 4 Dollars!
A game that couldn’t quite be made in only zero hours…

Getting up to about $100 is pretty easy. My high score so far is $150. Can you beat it?

If I were to expand upon this idea, I’d improve the handling (and graphics generally), fix the steering in reverse so it better matches reality. For gameplay, I’d probably give the player two minutes, and have a special tile (or four) where the player could drive into in order to purchase more time with some of their dollars… say $40 to buy 30 more seconds or something.

LESSONS LEARNED

The key to getting good at making games is the same as getting good at pretty much everything… practice.  And evaluating how you did, and how to improve. Here are some lessons I learned (or re-learned) making this project:

#1 – Plan ahead! I did a poor job of this one, other than opening up tools a few minutes beforehand. I don’t think it’s breaking any rules to spend some time in advance identifying what assets you need to create, what libraries you might use, and spend some time looking up information on anything you are less than comfortable with.

#2 -Keep  Engine / Tool Notes: When I started working with Unity about a year ago (yes, my last zero-hour game project was one of my fledgeling efforts in Unity), I started keeping a list on my desktop that I call “Unity Tips and Tricks.” It’s based on a similar (much longer) one I created for Torque. Whenever I have to look up how to do something new and potentially tricky, I record what I’ve learned in this text file – especially if it’s something I don’t do very often and can easily forget. During this project, I referred back to these notes a few times, and added a couple of new entries.

#3 – Start Simple and Grow: I made a mistake of over-designing the car physics from the get-go, spending too much time on unnecessary code that was eventually tossed. I should have started with the rigid body system, and figured out in advance what inputs it needed to go, rather than trying to do the physics myself and then tried to force the rigidbody to behave accordingly.  However, I was correct in starting with the core gameplay – the interaction driving around an arena – rather than jumping into something like gun turrets or overall game logic. Also – I feel I was write in keeping my assets simple – mainly just colored cubes. I’d opened Blender, but colored cubes and text works just as well for early prototyping.

#4 – Create Milestones and Fallbacks – this goes along with Planning, #1. I was “in the zone” when I was building the car controls, logic, and physics, which is a good thing, though it meant I didn’t realize how much time had passed. Any other time, this would be a great thing.  I love that. But when working on ANY project, whether for a tightly time-limited game jam or for your own indie project, you need to break things down into milestones, and decide what needs to be done if you find the schedule slipping. In some cases, it might mean removing features or simplifying things going forward. For something like a 1 hour project, I’d expect to have the very basics of the game up and running (interactive but perhaps not playable) in the first 20 minutes, to have the core gameplay done within 40 minutes, and the last 20 minutes would be spent turning that playable hunk of whatever into an actual game.  For a larger time frame, I might allocate things into quarters, and the last quarter would be devoted to testing and polishing.

 

 

Filed Under: Free Games, Game Development - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Why the AAA Games Industry is Screwed

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 2, 2012

I almost titled this, “Why the AAA Games Industry is Doomed,” but “Doomed” isn’t quite the right word. Doomed implies that its demise is inevitable. I think, like mainstream Hollywood, it’s not going anywhere for a while. But it is quite possible its best days are behind it.

This article illustrates a lot of the key problems with the industry that are pretty deeply embedded in its business and its culture by now. Maybe there is a major publisher or some studios out there that have managed to figure out how overcome these obstacles, or even eliminate them.  Every once in a while, I hear about a studio that claims to have done that… and then I hear about them closing.

Bottom line – the AAA Games Industry is screwed.  This story just illustrates how it managed to claim more victims.

Death March – The Long, Tortured Journey of Homefront

Are indies immune to these kinds of problems? The ones related to being a publisher-owned studio, sure. But then we have a lot more of our own, and the hit-driven nature of the industry doesn’t suspend its rules for indies. In some ways indies have more room to maneuver, but financially may have a lot less.  There are  tons of lessons that game developers of all stripes can learn from this story.

 

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 16 Comments to Read

A Game In Zero Hours – Again!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 1, 2012

For those living in Europe, this is already past.

But in North America, in those areas where Daylight Savings Time changes come to an end this weekend, we have an opportunity once again to play Time Lord and create a game in that we begin at 1 AM and finish by 2 AM — when it magically becomes 1 AM again! A game created in 0 hours – outside of time!

You can get details here:

0 Hour Game Jam

Detailed rules are provided under the ‘rules’ tab…

Will I be participating? Assuming that I’m not too debilitated with this cold I seem to have just come down with… heck, yeah!

I’m a Unity guy now, so I’m planning on making the game in Unity, probably for the web, so you guys can play and marvel at my totally l33t game-programming skills. I’m planning on making a game like Halo, only with more guns. With better-looking graphics. It’ll be so awesome! 🙂

Anybody else gonna give it  a try?

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Some Kickstarters of Interest

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 31, 2012

Happy Halloween folks!

And completely unrelated to today’s fun holiday, but definitely related to yesterday’s post, here are some crowdfunded projects that may be of interest to you. All of yesterday’s warnings are in effect – these are all in varying stages of development, and some might not ever see the light of day even after they’ve taken your money. I cannot vouch for any of ’em. In fact, there’s one that I’ve got grave concerns about, though I’ll be one of the first people to buy it on release day if and when it does come to pass…

AAIMIE: “Tron Meets Grimrock in this vibrant new world. Exploration and puzzle solving are front and center in this new single player RPG. ” You play a maintenance robot with a sudden, unexplained change in its AI… Gotta give this one credit for being a fresh concept.

Hero U – Rogue to Redemption  – “A turn-based PC RPG with adventure game puzzles and immersive story, by the award-winning designers of Quest for Glory. ” If the lineage isn’t enough to thrill you, go check out the page.

Fields of Fresh – There’s only a few days left on this one, but it’s got a tiny little goal that is almost met. And if you don’t think an RPG about farming can be entertaining, you’re probably unfamiliar about the very successful Harvest Moon franchise.

Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar – I’ve been following this game for at least the last three of its seventeen-year development. Go to the IndieGoGo page and watch the video just for the entertainment value. And read the recent interview at RPGCodex. The developer has a reputation for … well, let’s just say he’s a character and leave it at that. He’s pissed off a lot of people, but the game does look quite good — and it is not simply “vaporware.” It’s existed in some kind of playable form for years, and people have played it.  I just don’t know if it will ever release. Also, the indiegogo campaign releases all pledged funds to the developer whether or not he actually achieves full funding. Consider yourself warned. But … like many others, I want to believe.

Saga Kingdoms – “Saga Kingdoms is a revolutionary MMORTS, focusing on questing and empire building. ” I was one of the developers for the original Saga – the MMORTS.  I spent a lot of time on coding up gazillions of special abilities and real-time database handling. There are just a few days to go on this one, so it will need a pretty nice bump in order to make funding, but at least in this case I personally know (some) of the people in charge of it, and they are a proven quantity.

Antharion – “An old-school turn-based party-based RPG set in a huge open fantasy world.” It does look cool, and draws inspiration from all the right sources. It’s a little more than halfway to its goal, and less than halfway through it’s Kickstarter campaign, so there’s a good chance it’ll get funded.

Interstellar Marines: Prologue – “Immersive AAA-quality Indie FPS with RPG elements, tactical co-op & nonlinear gameplay set in a believable future. ” This one has been in development for quite some time already.  But it looks good. And it looks like it’s pretty far along, which reduces risk on what would otherwise be a scarily ambitious project. Very cool.

MaK – Not an RPG, MaK is described by the teaser, “Build, Experiment, Explore, Compete, Cooperate, Customize. A strange new Universe is born.” It’s a sandbox – universe to play in with a “more focused game wrapped around it.” Seriously, it does look cool.

Shadowgate – “The creators of Shadowgate are developing a new, epic version of the first-person fantasy adventure smash hit. Help make it happen!” I never played the original, but this one looks like it’s got potential, and is again a veteran team. They look well on their way to getting funded.

Ars Magica: Years of Conquest – “The Ars Magica RPG comes to the PC, as a 2D simulation and generational role-playing video game…” I wish this one a lot of success, but it looks like the KS campaign could use a serious surge right about now.

Star Citizen – “Reclaim the stars in the exciting new Space Epic from legendary game designer Chris Roberts. ” Okay, I am such a Wing Commander junkie that I really don’t know how I can resist this one. The persistent world is hosted online, but it is playable single-player as well (offline, even!). It is already fully funded (and then some), so we’re in the stretch goal stage on this one.

Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages – “Ring Runner combines all the deep customization and rich storytelling of an RPG with the fast-paced action of a space-shooter. ” This “top-down” space shooter / RPG combo looks pretty interesting (though how will it stack up to Drox Operative?)

Sword of the Stars: The Pit – “Classic, dungeon-crawling, PC RPG, set in the Sword of the Stars universe. How deep can you go?” Quite a departure from their usual 4X space strategy fare, this roguelike looks pretty cool as well. Again, a veteran development team increases my confidence. This is another Indiegogo “flexible” campaign, but it is already well towards completion at this point.

Matt Barton also has a list of projects he’s backed (and why) that’s worth a read.

 

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

When Is It Too Early to Talk About an Indie Game?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 30, 2012

Many years ago, when the blog was young, I was trying to decide how I’d talk about upcoming games in the exciting, growing indie games field that hardly anybody knew about. I faced a little bit of a quandary. At the time, something like 95% (or more) of all indie game projects failed. Early on, I was kind of surprised at this… I remember getting pretty jazzed about some promising games that had some truly beautiful screenshots, exciting design ideas, and promises from the developers that the games were near-alpha, alpha, 70% or 80% complete, or whatnot. There’d be some exciting weekly news, then monthly news, then…. nothing.

So I decided that I’d try to avoid talking about upcoming games unless either (A) they were already pretty near to completion, or (B) by an established developer with a history of released games. I’ve broken this guideline many times, and about half of the time I’ve been burned. And I’ve been surprised to see some long-thought-dead projects get revived years later. Sometimes these projects have been revived and re-killed repeatedly. And then there are some that are never quite dead, but make progress at an incredibly slow pace for many, many years.

Things are weird, now. First of all, “small games” have really grabbed hold of the indie space, even among first-time developers – particularly with the revolution in handheld gaming and web-based gaming. This is actually a good thing. For YEARS it seemed that new, aspiring indie game developers were focused on making the next Halo or Final Fantasy X, only bigger. While I exaggerate, it’s sadly not by much. Unsurprisingly, most of these ambitious projects failed.  Now that more new game developers are setting realistic project goals, my guess is that the failure rate has dropped somewhat. Unfortunately, it’s also true that the less ambitious projects are often less noteworthy as well.  What’s so special about game X, which like games Y and Z was inspired by games T,U, and W? Ummm…

Then there’s crowdfunding. This turns everything on its ear, especially with the current “bubble.” Sadly, I expect a good number of even successfully funded Kickstarter / Indiegogo video game projects to fail. Hopefully far less than 95% of the bad old days, but I don’t think it would be too pessimistic to predict that 50% or more will either fail entirely or significantly under-deliver on their promises. It’ll be another year or two before that sinks in. After that happens – well, we’ll see how people react from there, when they discover what venture capitalists have already learned by hard experience. Maybe then, the crowdfunding thing will turn out to have been a fad, or maybe it’ll turn into one of those things where unknowns need not apply. Or we’ll continue with PT Barnum’s adage about how often a sucker is born. Or maybe backers know dang well what they are getting into right now, and fully anticipate that the money they toss into fund these interesting dreams will never result in anything tangible.  We’ll see.

Whichever the case, this is causing me to re-evaluate my stance. Every week, I’m getting a few people contacting me about projects-in-development, especially crowdfunded projects. A lot of these projects sound really, really cool. Cool enough, in some cases, where I’ve pledged some money in myself, in spite of “Kickstarter fatigue.” It’s also tempting because I’m almost always looking for easy topics for a blog post, and these crowdfunding projects could be a source of two or articles a week.  Actually, if I went down that road, I’d probably have an even tougher time choosing which games NOT to mention so I could have the occasional non-Kickstarter article. Just like the old days, it’d be easy to be overwhelmed by all these cool, exciting-sounding projects with beautiful screenshots and awesome ideas.

And at this point, I have no way of telling which of these projects will ever see the light of day, unless they are (A) very near completion already, or (B) being built by established teams with a history of successful releases.

I’m still sorely tempted to break my own rules, but when actual money is involved, I’m going to feel a little guilty when I was party to advertising vaporware. I mean, if it’s my own money I through down a deep, dark hole, that’s one thing. But if other people were motivated to do the same based on my enthusiasm? Ummm…. sorry, guys?

But on the other hand, these guys seeking funding need to spread the word somehow, right? And I’m one of the go-to guys within the indie RPG specialty, right?

Anyway – it remains a quandary.  I’ve talked about some of the projects I’ve found interesting in the past, and probably will in the future, but like I said – things have gotten weird. I’m not sure how to adapt.

 

 

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

Matt Chat: Interview with Lori and Corey Cole and Dave Marsh

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 29, 2012

Matt Barton interviews Lori and Corey Cole of Quest For Glory and Shannara fame, and also Dave Marsh, designer of Shadowgate. They are all doing Kickstarters right now. It’s a biggie:

 

Filed Under: Adventure Games, Interviews - Comments: Comments are off for this article

Torn on Ratings

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 26, 2012

I have two problems with ratings (of the parental guidance variety) for indie games:

#1 – The industry standard ratings system was unreasonably painful and expensive for small, indie studios. In a field where the median iPhone game makes less than $1000, spending hundreds or thousands on a rating doesn’t make much sense.

#2 – There’s a tendency for governments and lawyers to use self-policing industry ratings against them.

Here in the U.S., problem #1 has gone away. The ESRB has now added a free, self-service rating approach for games distributed through certain major online platforms.

On the one hand, yay! This was an unreasonable hardship for indie games, especially when the median iPhone game is going to make only a couple thousand dollars in revenue – and the average XBLA game makes (I think) far less than that. I applaud this initiative on the part of the ESRB to become more indie-friendly.

But this also makes it reasonable for digital distributors to require ESRB ratings for the games they sell. I’m not so keen on this part.

And finally, once most major distributors have that “voluntary” requirement, we end up with more problems from #2: It’s a lot easier for greedy lawyers and politicians with a need to pad out their sponsorship and voting records with lousy legislation with benevolent-sounding titles to give this helpful, self-policing, customer-friendly system the weight of law or civil liability. They’ve tried many, many times, and will try again – SCOTUS decision granting video games some protection under the First Amendment notwithstanding. This will have a chilling effect on the industry. I’m not so keen on that part.

So I’m a little bit torn.

Filed Under: Biz, Politics - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights 2 Update: Cranking Spells Up To Eleven

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 25, 2012

I wanted to run an idea off you. This kinda runs contrary to my talk about simplification, but not really. Technically, I’m already going down this path, but nothing is final. But now that it’s looking more and more feasible (and likely), I thought I’d solicit some input on the spell system – definitely one of the more challenging design aspects of the entire series.

Frayed Knights has a pretty frickin’ advanced spell system. So advanced and comprehensive that we barely scratched the surface of it even when we were pushing 200 base spells, not including their upgraded bretheren that the player could control.

I mean, there’s something like a couple dozen different effects, with tons of variations. I mean, even with the most basic effect – causing damage – you have several different kinds of damage, and then there’s instantaneous damage or damage over time. And then you can combine effects into combos within the same spell! I really did go overboard. In part, this was a reference to the extreme spell list from D&D and other games, but it was a little unwieldy. Players tended to stick with only a few spells for most of the time. The total spell list felt like an almost randomly assembled grab-bag assortment of spells, with only kinda vague notions of specializations within the four spellcasting categories.

So I sat down, and figured I’d have to cull things out and pare things down HARD for the new games. And do it without disrupting the legacy of the old game. Or changing the feel of it. This is a big challenge – I mean, how do I possibly parcel out the spells in a system that was designed to be so rich? Well, someone’s gotta do it. Someone has to make the hard calls – the designer. That’s why I get paid the big bucks.

Wait… no, no I do not!

Well, screw it then! Let’s let the computer do it instead, ‘k? And then the player can cull down the list to a usable subset! Hah! My work here is done!

And that’s where we’re sitting today. You know how Diablo-like games have random (procedural) generation of loot? How about procedural generation of spells?

Let’s provide a little more background here.  Here’s where we’re going with Frayed Knights 2: The _____ of _____.  Those of you who played the first one can nod sagaciously. The rest of you… well, you can just follow along, and watch me for the changes. Here goes:

#1 – Spellcasters (who can, as in the first game, be anybody, with the right feats) have two sets of spells: A spellbook, and an active spell list.  You can only cast spells from the active spell list, and it can only be changed outside of combat. The size of the active spell list is TBD, but it’s small enough to be hotkeyed for that character. We’re not sure yet if there’ll be a limit to the number of spells a player can have in their spellbook, but there probably will be a (large) limit, with the ability to delete non-core spells to make room for more.  Anyway – the upshot is this: You’ll need to be selective about spell choices, but you won’t have to wade through several layers of menus just to cast a common spell again.

#2 – The four spellcasting categories (Sorcerer, Nature, Divine, Profane) all have different specializations, strengths, and weaknesses. This was kinda-sorta present in FK1 as loose guidelines, but they are going to be more solidly coded in the sequels.  Each spellcasting category has certain effects that are its specialties, which really define the category (like straight-up healing for Divine casters, or direct damage for sorcerers). Then there are spells effects which are secondary to the class, and weaker than the specialties by level. Then there’s the tertiary spell effects which are pretty weak, but can do in a pinch. Finally, there are spell effects that are simply not available for that spellcasting category – like healing for sorcerers.

#3 – There are a few “core” spells for a spellcasting category that are automatically available. The “common” spells of FK1 would be like this. These can’t be erased from spellbooks, and technically you COULD win the game with these spells and nothing else, but you’d be making things a lot harder on yourself. Unlike FK1, these will be few and far behind. Don’t expect a new spell every level.

#4 – Then there are some “signature” spells for Frayed Knights which are custom, hand-built spells with unique effects or amusing visuals. These are generally not “core,” but aren’t hard to find. They are either plot-critical / utility spells (not sure if we’ll have these in game 2), or they’ll be deliberately overpowered but expensive to cast. Power Word: Defenestrate belongs here, but it will be slightly beefed up.  There will be others of similar amusing variations here. Some may even violate the usual specializations from point 1.

#5 – THIS IS THE BIG ONE – The game will provide lots of procedurally generated spells throughout the game. Some will be available in a shop, others can be found on scrolls throughout the game. Scrolls can be used to either scribe a spell in your spellbook, or cast directly. These will be random, so the exact spells available to you will be different with every game. Because of the fixed, custom spells from points 3 and 4, you won’t be left high-and-dry without any spells to fulfill a caster’s primary role, but you may have to make due with some interesting combinations you’ve found by chance.

So there you go: Prepare to drown in spells in Frayed Knights 2.

This isn’t a huge deviation from what I did in FK1, where I generated dozens and dozens of spells using a formula as a guide, and some rules-of-thumb for variation. Now, I just have to let the computer use the formula and rules-of-thumb to procedurally create the spells. And then there’s the naming.  Spell names should be interesting…  But anyway, the end result is that spells will act a little like weapons & armor in Diablo-style games. They’ll be more-or-less balanced, offer some occasionally weird mixes of combo-effects (a spell that does fire damage and puts you to sleep? I guess it could happen…), and may range from the broadly useful to the highly specific-use.  Hopefully it flies.

This has lots of impact on development. Items, enemy AI were all built around a fixed spell list in the past game. This not a huge change going forward, but the ripple effect is why I’ve been facing something of a chicken-and-egg problem with the new system. I’ve also been a little concern about a problem that did rear its ugly head in initial release of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, well-explained by Shamus Young yesterday about trusting the system. When there are too many moving parts, it can be really hard to find or fix problems – or, just as bad, to notice a difference when you do something interesting.  I’m trying to address this.  In some cases, it means reducing the number of moving parts. In other cases, it’s simply a matter of making those parts a little more visible.

Regardless, at least from a developer perspective – whether the procedurally generated spells thing fly or not as we get to playtesting, the moving parts that make up the spell system will be a lot cleaner and more visible to me as a developer. Re-thinking about them in this way has given me ideas for opening up the system from a developer perspective and doing automated testing.  This means cleaner code and better balance.

So, whaddaya think of this proposal? Like it? Hate it? Got suggestions for improvement?  Lemme know.

Filed Under: Design, Frayed Knights - Comments: 15 Comments to Read



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