Competing Against the Past

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 21, 2012

One of the awesome things about indies is that they are capable of revisiting genres or game styles that have long been abandoned by the industry at large. Turn-based RPGs, adventure games, 2D platformers, shoot-em-ups, space combat sims, even flight sims… these game categories are nicely represented by indies nowadays after long dormant periods.

This is a great thing. I’m extremely pleased with all of this. But here’s something I feel a regular need to say:

Guys & gals… indies… I love ya. I am thrilled to see new life injected into an old genre. But I want to see “new life” there, not just a budget “best of” rehash. As a guy who has played a lot of the games that you have drawn inspiration from – and a retro-gamer who still plays some of these games, often for the first time in all their retro glory: as far as I am concerned, you are absolutely competing against the past.

We live in a world where classic console and computer games are now available as uber-cheap downloads.  If an indie game adds little or nothing to a classic game that inspired it, I’m still just playing a cheap knock-off. Even if it is separated by over a decade, and even if your game has higher-resolution graphics and runs on modern platforms, it is still a cheap knock-off of another title.  The “indie” badge doesn’t mean much to me when you are cloning a game that old, and nostalgia will only take me, the player, so far. Because the best that’s gonna happen with a weak retread is that I’ll play the game for a short time, and it will just make me wish I was playing the game that inspired it instead.

I am absolutely NOT saying you shouldn’t create a game that builds upon a foundation of a classic game that inspired you. Chances are, if that game inspired you and you can capture whatever that magic was and share it with me, I’ll feel that same level of enthusiasm.  But it must be your game. It has to be new. It cannot be just a pale imitation of a past classic.

A unique and compelling story can help. Different or new game mechanics can help, too. Don’t just ape the approach of your inspiration – question it! Find a focus! Don’t put an old classic on such a pedestal that you don’t even try to improve upon it. No game is perfect – at best they are a collection of smart compromises. There are always things that some segment of the audience would like to see handled differently, or things that couldn’t be done then that can be done now if you are willing to make cuts and sacrifices elsewhere to hone your vision. This doesn’t mean changing things just for the sake of changing them, but you absolutely must inject your own ideas and originality into your game. Make sure your game stands out as something new.

Otherwise, what’s the point of being indie? You may as well set up shop making ports of other people’s games to different platforms. (It’s good work, and probably pays better.)

In today’s world, you really are competing directly against the very games that inspired you. Make a game as if you intend to win that competition.

 

Filed Under: Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Your Friends, the Video Game Companies…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 20, 2012

Just remember:

Video game companies are your friends.

And these cartoons will help you remember just what kinds of friends they are.

I guess I could add one about indies: “The indies are a collection of casual acquaintances you see in the local clubs, and perhaps you remember a few of their names. They seem pretty cool when you are clubbing at night,  but you pretend you don’t recognize them when you see them working at the Burger King the next day.”

 

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Indie Game Development: Words of Discouragement?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 17, 2012

This is a sad story indeed.

There are a few lessons that could be drawn from this story.

One might be that nice guys finish last. These guys tried to take a different path from how they saw “predatory” in-app purchases work. And as a result, they are now broke. So one could say that those nasty “predatory” tricks that fill customers with hate are a necessary evil.

One could simply observe that the market is quite simply overwhelmed with content. It’s basic supply-and-demand economics – supply has exceeded demand, so those on the supply side of the equation are facing struggle-for-survival times. More than ever, now.  That means a lot of good developers – and good games – are going to fail.

Another possible (probable) lesson is that you cannot simply develop a game and put it out there with zero thought to the business side of things and expect it to succeed. Maybe it will – happy accidents do happen – but that’s not a foundation for a sustainable business. Even professional gamblers approach gambling with a very scientific, disciplined, business-like attitude. They don’t just jump out there on a wing and a prayer and hope that luck will be a lady tonight. They leave that to the amateurs.

I think there are elements of truth in all three lessons, particularly the third.

I’m drawing all kinds of discouraging lessons from recent developments in the gaming space. The Kickstarter revolution – as cool as it is – tells me that people are willing to pay far more for hopes and dreams than they are for reality. In spite of their waning success, the Zynga story tells me that what could be termed “predatory” practices exercised against customers really does work – at least in the short term. The number of long-term indies who have now become dependent on Steam for their continued success is worrying me a lot. The numbers that have been revealed to me in private for some indies who have done relatively poorly on Steam reminds me that getting on Steam is no guarantee to “making it.”

But what are the most important lessons to be learned, here?

1. Change is constant. The marketplace for games is constantly in turmoil. Adapt.

2. If you are adapting by “following the crowd,” you’d better be dang fast, because latecomers to “the crowd” usually get lost in it. This is closely related to #3, which is:

3. Standing out is critical – whether it’s by being niche, being awesome, being innovative, being controversial, just being weird, or a combination of these. Whatever the case, getting noticed is critical. But most importantly:

4. The game has to serve your business. Yeah, that sounds bass-ackwards, and handled improperly, it is.  But ultimately, survival takes precedence over game-making, because you can’t make games after you’ve starved to death, or if you are spending your time doing other things to survive. (Ahem, which I guess is what we part-timers do…)  If you want to make a living making games, your games have to make you a living, is what I guess what I want to say. We have hang-ups in our western culture about asking for money – and I’ve got the same problem as many about this.  Your game has to sell itself and pay for itself somehow. Don’t be stupid about it. There are so many sub-rules here that change from audience to audience and game to game, but it really comes down to “don’t be stupid about it.”

The “indie games” arena has changed dramatically since I’ve been working in it and writing about it. And I have as much of a problem learning these lessons as anyone.  There’s lots more to be learned, I’m sure.

But I guess what I’m saying here is that while the above story is certainly disappointing, and a bunch of armchair quarterbacking won’t change the fact that it’s a rough market out there for game development. But I don’t think that it is a fundamentally different story from how it was five, ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. The details and strategies change like crazy, but five years ago it was the big casual portals and casual games, and twenty years ago it was trying to get wide enough distribution for your shareware. It’s always been rough. The competition has always been fierce relative to the customer base, with those rare windows of opportunity when supply hasn’t quite caught up to demand on a new platform or genre.

Do it ‘cuz you love it.

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

Pixel Prospector’s Big Page of Indie Resources

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 16, 2012

Not sure if I have linked to this before… but if so, it’s grown quite a bit:

Indie Resources at PixelProspector

There are tons and tons of articles linked there – a couple of them from Tales of the Rampant Coyote! If you are serious about making indie games, there’s plenty to find here to aid in your education.

Now if only someone could show me where the “make my game for me” button is in Unity…

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

Why Are CRPGs So Combat-Heavy?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 15, 2012

Why don’t we have more RPGs that emphasize non-combat activities? Why wasn’t Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines able to keep up its efforts for non-combat solutions to problems, particularly in the latter part of the game? Do players tend to min-max their characters for fighting because the CRPGs emphasize it, or is it the other way around? (Note: This last one is a problem in pen & paper RPGs as well… what gives?)

So why are CRPGs so combat heavy?

1. Combat is exciting

Stories need to be about conflict, and combat is a straightforward, immediate conflict. It appeals to us on a hard-wired level, just as sports do. Our cavemen brains somehow recognize this as training or practice for survival skills, which it rewards with a dopamine trickle or something. I know for me, this true of turn-based games as well as action-RPGs. Now, some people will get just as excited at a courtroom-drama style conflict, but straight-up combat has a more universal appeal.

2. Combat is satisfying

In the real world, we have to restrain a lot of impulses and seek non-violent resolutions to problems. This is a very good thing. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t WANT to just haul off and punch that jerk right in the mouth.  Video games in general allow us to cut loose a bit, throw our weight around, and exert our dominance with a well-placed fireball or mini-nuke.

3. Combat is easy (to make)

Relatively speaking, combat is easy to do on a computer. Computers are much better at representing the physical world, spatial relationships, and visual effects. They aren’t so good at representing interpersonal conflicts, mental anguish, or many other subtleties of human drama.  These kinds of things would have to be represented in abstract, less-satisfying forms, whereas it’s easy enough to animate a monster’s head getting lopped off in full, visceral detail.

4. Combat is a repeatable mini-game

Combat represents a mini-game in RPGs that can be easily re-used, with enough variations to keep things relatively interesting through hundreds (even thousands) of iterations – at least, if it’s done right. That’s without requiring custom content, like new voice-overs! With lots of inputs and options that really come down to mixing & matching & math, it’s tough to find a worthy substitute. Plus, once a combat system is in place, it’s easy to fire that sucker up whenever the game needs some action, as combat rarely requires any sort of new content (like voice-overs). Cheap, easy, and fun is a tough-to-beat combo.

5. Combat has an inherent risk-reward structure

If combat is supposed to be lethal and potentially game-ending, there’s an inherent risk. This is why players may tend to favor  combat skills over non-combat alternatives: a botched Conversation roll may get someone mad at you, but a botched Defense roll may kill your character and end the game.  The stakes are high from the get-go.  It’s hard to repeat that with a lot of other kinds of conflicts.

In addition to risks, there may be costs associated with combat – in the form of expended resources. Even if it’s just as simple as using up hit points or healing potions, there’s a miniature economy at work with every fight that layers complexity into the game system.

Combat has a lot going for it in RPGs. It’s hard to create substitute activities that will fulfill the same criteria. This is why I don’t see it being dethroned any time soon.

But I certainly don’t intend this post to dissuade anybody from trying. Quite the contrary – I’d like to illuminate the advantages combat has as an RPG activity so indie RPG designers could start coming up with a few more ideas to broaden the genre. I gave it a shot with the trap system in Frayed Knights, which is still going to be there -but  improved! – in the sequel.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

RPG Design: Boss Battles and the Positive Feedback Problem

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 14, 2012

In my article last week about Frayed Knights‘ problem with boss battles, I neglected to mention one other factor that worked against my poor bosses which is peculiar to the RPG genre: One of my guiding principles of the overall game design is that the game should be fully playable and of reasonable difficulty for a player who chose “sub-optimal” progression for the party. In other words, a player should not be penalized for experimenting with character advancement and making some “poor” choices.

I stand by this choice, and unless something convinces me otherwise, I expect to make this approach with any and all RPGs I make in the future. The whole point of creating a rich character design / progression system is to allow players to experiment and customize characters as they would like to imagine their character, not as the game dictates.  More importantly, I would never want to create a situation where the player finds the end-game unwinnable (one way or another) because of choices made in ignorance they made earlier in the game. Should there be consequences for choices? Sure. But that’s not the same as penalization.

The problem with even a middle-of-the-road approach like this – where the game is balanced for middle-of-the-road ‘optimization’ – is a positive feedback loop. Yes, “positive” sounds like a good thing, but in games, it’s often a bad thing.  I’ve talked about this before, in fact exactly three years ago today. Must be the season or something. But I thought I’d revisit the topic with a bit more concrete examples, and relate it to boss design.

With a positive feedback loop, good players get an easier game, and poor players get a harder game. The “rich get richer, poor get poorer.” In coin-op arcade games, the positive feedback loop was  advantageous to getting players to pump in the quarters, as it led to a speedier conclusion to the game – and gave less-skilled observers some insight into the amazing things the expert players could do as long as they could “ride the wave” of their own success.

And then there are the boss battles. In general, boss battles are intended to test a player’s mastery of in-game skills. They should represent something of a break from the gameplay routine – an interesting challenge. Although, really, in an RPG as much as any other game, I don’t think you should have any uninteresting challenges. But anyway… a boss shouldn’t be just a “bigger, badder” opponent.  They should be a special, dramatic challenge for the player.

The problem – if you’d call it that – is that there is an additional layer between the player and the game, and that is his character (or characters). In a traditional game, the game can challenge the player directly – testing his precision and timing with jumping, or with jumping and shooting combined in an epic boss fight.  The potential capabilities of the player’s avatar are known entities at design time, and challenges can be designed to exactly test the player’s mastery of control necessary to get within a threshold of that potential.

But how do you do that in an RPG, when the player has invested their points into their characters ‘leet’ bread-baking skills?  Do the bosses now challenge the player to a bread-baking contest instead?

This runs into another contradiction of the purpose of a boss battle – to break up the routine. If the player has gotten to the point where he can win the game by simple, skillful application of bread-baking mastery, the player should not be able to simply bake his way out of  a boss fight! No, at the very least, he should be tested in the application of his skills in a cookie-baking contest, just to shake things up and get the player out of his comfort zone, right?

But what designer is going to create customized boss encounters for every area of character expertise – and non-expertise?

My poster-child for this problem is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, a game that’s failures were made so painful only because it tried so hard to push boundaries. So many encounters in the game could be resolved through means other than straight-up combat. They worked very hard to make the game very playable for a character that relied upon stealth or subtlety. But then – especially near the end-game – they dropped you into an arena with a straight-up combat against a powerful boss opponent, and if your stealthy or subtle character had neglected their combat skills – something remarkably easy to do to this point – then you, the player, were in for a very rough time.  There was no place to hide, and nobody to talk to. Just guns and fangs.  A conflict designed to challenge combat god builds was multiplied by three.

That’s analogous to having an entirely conversation-driven boss encounter, a la Vizzini’s “battle of wits” from The Princess Bride, and if your characters Wits and Conversation skills aren’t high enough, you’ll automatically die at the end and lose the game. What’s that really testing? Whether or not the player knew the designer’s intentions and demands in advance? Players would cry foul at this – and justifiably so – yet we let the combat bias slide all the time. We’re used to it, I guess.

There’s no easy answer to this. “Middle of the Road” bosses are certainly an easy approach – challenging an “average” player with an “average” build – but not a particularly satisfying encounter, and subject to the positive feedback problem. What are some other approaches?

1. Constrain player customization.  Class-based systems work well here, as the designer has limited the variations they must design for to a few well-defined options.

2. Force the player-characters to maintain a minimum level of combat skill. Level-based systems help here, too – regardless of how you’ve customized your character, your attack, defense, and hit points have still gone up a minimal amount. In this case, an overwhelming challenge may be made easier simply by delaying the encounter for a couple of levels.

3. Make the “optimal” tests optional. Here’s where you put the Vizzini and Master Baker and Combat God boss fights – somewhere off the main quest line of the game.

4. Provide alternative methods of winning encounters. You can fight the demon-lord head-on, sneak around him, or talk his minions into betraying him.

5. Provide alternative boss encounters: This is an expensive approach, but not unheard of.  Different “boss encounters” (or major challenges) may be chosen by the player, which test different character abilities.

6. Allow players to use custom skills to weaken the boss encounter: The “raw” encounter may be a great challenge for an optimal combat-build character, but the player can use other skills (in advance?) balance the encounter. This is really, IMO, the best approach, as it allows the player to “test” his skills at using the character’s other abilities.

7. Auto-Scaling the encounter: Yes, Oblivion handled auto-scaling poorly, giving it a bad rap. But IMO, this is potentially no different from a live “Game Master” building an encounter around his player’s abilities. It just needs to be handled much, much better, so it feels like less of a cheat.

8. Bosses should be able to counter the most-optimal strategies: This is generally good boss design anyway. I don’t think bosses should negate a player character’s abilities – this is simply the reverse of the original problem.  But a little bit of ‘negative feedback,’ not to penalize optimal character builds but to reduce their advantage – could make for more interesting encounters.

9. Fully Organic Bosses: There is no set “strategy” for defeating the bosses, but simply an interesting encounter and environment where the player is free to use any skill or strategy at their disposal to resolve it. I love this idea in theory, and lean this way in my own design, but in practice it can result in boss encounters feeling no different from any other.

 

While I didn’t always apply things perfectly in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, it tended towards the more old-school RPG approach of having the “bosses” be somewhat understated and less of an “event” anyway. My real desire is for all combat encounters to be interesting and present their own challenges, and I’m not completely abandoning that approach in the sequel, either.  But there will be a few “boss encounters” that will be “punched up” a bit more.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Thirty Years and Counting…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 13, 2012

I hit a major (internal) milestone with Frayed Knights 2 on Friday. So for the weekend, I decided to celebrate by taking a break. By… working on another little “side” game project. Mostly it was an educational experience to get more familiar with NGUI for Unity – and it did enlighten me to a few of the little quirks of the system. And it was curtailed a bit by a bout of what I can only figure was food poisoning.  But it was a lot of fun to just be cutting loose on a weekend project for the heck of it.

And I realized something.

This month marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the Commodore 64. While I learned programming (kinda) and did some tiny little projects on the Sinclair ZX80 (my first computer), it was the arrival of the Commodore 64 that really changed my life. I’d come home and… aside from playing games… I’d write them. I “finished” a few, dabbled in many more, and constantly explore the bounds of possibility and the limits of my understanding of the machine.  I had nobody to teach me, so anything I learned I had to learn from books and magazines.

But especially that first year, 1982-1983… I was a game-making maniac. As I said, I finished very little, but I had a lot of fun experimenting.  It was what I did with my spare time. Cutting loose this weekend with something new (although… ahem… not really) recaptured that feeling. The “Have computer, can make anything!” feeling, I guess.

Some things never change, huh? It’s just weird to think that after all this time, all these life-changes, I’m still basically doing the same thing I was doing as a kid. And still loving it.

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

“I”ve Been to the Ninth Circle of Monetization Hell – It’s Called the Arcades.”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 10, 2012

Gamasutra has last year’s presentation by Mark Cerny where he talks about how the face of gaming has changed since he started as a developer in Atari’s coin-op division. And how – in his view – things still need to change:

Mark Cerny – “The Long View” (Or as Gamasutra titles it, “How developers are still fighting their arcade heritage 30 years later”)

The guy’s been at it for quite a bit longer (and more consistently) than I have, so I’d not dismiss his opinions likely.  Going back and retro-gaming older console titles, the arcade heritage is painfully obvious and can be downright annoying.  Why is the game still treating me like it’s trying to drain quarters from my pocket constantly when I already own the game?

In many cases, the answer is: “Because otherwise you’ll finish the entire game in 20 minutes.”  That was, I think, the other reason to why games cost so much to make nowadays — as we move away from this old-school approach of forcing the player to start over (at the beginning of the game, or beginning of the level, or whatever), we find that not only does content take FAR more time to make for modern systems, but that we need a heck of a lot more of it to give the player something to do.

I am not sure about his conclusion about games ‘helping’ the player. This isn’t just the videogame heritage. How do you feel if you are playing any game with someone, and you suspect they are deliberately “throwing” the game to allow you to win? I mean, it’s one thing if it’s up front, and you are playing with a handicap against a better player. That’s fine. For me, victory is almost as sweet in those circumstances. But if you feel they are deliberately letting you win?  If you win, it feel hollow, and if you lose, you feel even worse.

He also mentions the glut of cheap games filling bargain bins as the harbinger of video game crash of 1982, but doesn’t see a counterpart in today’s dumping ground of $1 iPhone games and Steam mega-sales.  He opines that the diversity of games makes the difference, and I do hope he is right. And I suspect he’s dead-on about the endangerment of the “$50 million games.” I’ve long felt that was unsustainable, even back when it was only $10 million games.

I recommend this talk as fascinating look into the world of top-tier game development from the early 1980s to today.  It’s been a fascinating thirty years…

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

Frayed Knights: Taking On An Army

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 9, 2012

So here’s something with the development of Frayed Knights 2 that I haven’t come to a conclusion on yet: Changing (or tweaking)  some of the fundamentals of  combat.

When I began work on Frayed Knights, I had a lot of big ideas about designing role-playing games. A lot of these big ideas – like a complex conversation system – were excised early in the process because they really didn’t fit the game. Some were eliminated later because I wanted to, uh…  finish the game before I died of old age.  That kind of thing.

One concept that made it’s way into the final release that, in retrospect, I’m still not 100% sure about involved the fundamentals of the combat system – which in turn influenced the entire game system. This takes a little bit of explaining, but the short version is that I wanted to downplay the importance of levels, and increase the importance of numbers and teamwork. The idea here was to bring in a tiny amount of  “realism” – including some experiences I’d had with live medieval reenactment in my youth – as well as some influence from classic fantasy and science fiction stories. I can’t even remember the story (or the author), but I remember a scene from a Conan story or novel where he was cornered by several soldiers. One, two, maybe even three soldiers would not be too large of a problem for Conan. But when faced with… I think it was seven… with no way to escape he had no choice but to surrender.

In D&D, a high-level character like Conan would have no problem taking on a dozen 1st or 2nd level soldiers, even with a crappy armor class. Thanks to hit point scaling, and Conan’s high chance to hit (not to mention damage bonuses from feats / class abilities, in later editions), the soldiers couldn’t do enough damage to him fast enough before he’d taken them all out.  With some clever maneuvering, he could probably still escape with more than half of his hit points intact. This was worse in later editions of D&D than the more recent ones. Especially with the earliest editions, when “high level” was only around 6th or 8th level.  (Do you know how long it took me to realize that “mid-level” was around 10th in 3.0?)

I had a bunch of ideas for making an RPG more “realistic” (there’s that word again, gonna quit using it now) in this respect, and I still think they were great ideas for an RPG. But maybe they were not so great for a game with such deep roots in traditional RPGs (which were themselves deeply rooted in classic D&D game rules) like Frayed Knights.  I love the way they play, but it does feel a little “off” for a lot of players. Anyone who has played through Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon can tell you that many “boss battles” seem relatively trivial compared to fighting large numbers of enemies. This is also why most of the “bosses” in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon are encountered with minions. Solo, even the toughest bosses can be relative pushovers.

At one point, it was even more extreme. Mid-way through development, I’d tweaked the rules a bit in the opposite direction, to give levels a bit more of a positive bias. Once upon a time, even at the highest levels, your party would be in serious trouble from an army of pus golems.

So what sort of things did I do to “flatten out” leveling for a more … I won’t say ‘realistic’ again in this context, let’s say ‘verisimilitudinous’  instead… experience?

1) I Flattened Out the Probability Curve:  Traditionally, differences in relative skill in RPGs follow a bell-curve. Near the center, when levels or skills are pretty evenly matched, you’ll get the majority of results. When you are throwing multiple dice – like an attacker’s roll versus a defender’s role, or rolling 3D6 for results – with some kind of additive or relative comparison – you’ll end up with something kind of bell-curve like. What this means is that within a relatively close window of values, you’ll have a very interesting fight, with plenty of possibilities for an underdog to get lucky, but still strongly favoring the stronger participant over successive rounds. But as those relative strengths diverge, the stronger competitor completely overwhelms the lesser. In Frayed Knights, I greatly flattened out the bell curve. So instead of this:

You get something more like this:

(I free-handed these graphs for illustrative purposes, so don’t try and read too much into them).

So an eight-point difference between being four points weaker than your opponent and four points higher than your opponent is still quite significant – a 32% chance of success versus a 68% chance of success! But the differences quickly flatten out beyond that. That same eight-point difference between being +16 higher than your opponent and +24 higher than your opponent is minor –  around a 92% chance of success versus a 95% chance.  The end result is that being overwhelmingly more powerful than your opponent doesn’t give you a linearly overwhelming advantage over your opponent. If it was down to a single probability check, if you had a 15 level advantage over your opponent, one in twelve would still defeat you.

While multiple cumulative die rolls means you don’t have to worry about insta-kills from trivial enemies, it does mean that against a sizable force, some hits are GOING to get through, and you can’t rely on level differences to protect you.

2) I reduced hit point scaling: In old-school D&D, a 3rd level character would have about three times the hit points – and thus be three times harder to kill – than her first-level counterpart. In Frayed Knights, increasing skill levels contributes a much smaller bonus to your base hit points.  I did the same thing with endurance as well. This mainly evened out the lower-level encounters. It also made balancing the effects and costs of spells (and enhancements) a serious pain in the butt.

3) Positioning of the enemies (and party) is important. Like most of these factors, I can’t claim this one is completely original – many first-person RPGs of the classic era that inspired Frayed Knights used an abstract positioning system that provided some protection to the rear ranks of monsters, as they are harder to get at. The trick, however, is effective positioning of the bad guys, as their numbers can work against them just as easily if the rear-rank opponents cannot use their best abilities against the party.  For planned encounters, this was easy to arrange, but the randomly generated encounters and patrols might occasionally be put together in a less-than-optimal fashion.

4) Combat is front-loaded. The “endurance” factor – a resource that must be expended in combat – means that characters will be more potent in the beginning of a fight than later (in a prolonged battled). In practice, since the monsters aren’t expected to survive more than a few turns anyway, this means the bad guys are at their best early in the fight – before the party has been able to whittle away at their numbers. There are a few exceptions, especially with groups with serious “buffing” characters in the ranks – but as there’s no point in the enemies holding anything back (unlike the party), a larger force means lots of incoming fire for the first couple of turns. I also included some position-dependent passive feats – like “Linebacker” – which provide more bonuses to an entire group (or in Linebacker’s case, the group behind the character with the feat).

5) Lots of party-enhancing spells and abilities. This mechanic wasn’t a deliberate attempt to enhance the threat of greater numbers, but it worked out that way. The end result is that many spells (which the monsters can use) act as a multiplier on the group’s combat abilities.  So while it’s probably not worthwhile for one guy to sacrifice an attack to buff himself, a group buff on a large group can be devastating if used early.

6) Lots of individual-crippling spells and abilities. My choice to put the “sleep” spell as an early spell choice really influenced this one.  What this came down to was that it’s really easy to use spells or magic items to keep one or two enemies on the ropes, unable to act effectively.  This makes facing only one or two opponents really easy.

7) Offensive group-based spells cost spell gems. This wasn’t always the case, either. But perhaps because all of these other factors made groups of enemies so potent, a spell that affects groups of enemies was correspondingly powerful as well.  Too powerful, without making it cost an additional resource.

8) I refused to make the bosses cheat.  Mostly. One of the things that drives me crazy about some RPGs – especially JRPGs – is that the boss monsters are often virtually or totally immune to major debilitating spells (like the kind I mentioned in point 6). Blindness? Silence? Sleep? Fuggedaboutit. There’s no explanation – they are simply immune to most clever tricks because they are supposed to be awesome and challenging. I took the more traditional western RPG approach to the big bads, which means that concentrated fire can disable or destroy them without much more effort than any other opponent.

9) Decent teamwork AI. This one is actually pretty funny. I made the mistake of doing a lot of the enemy balancing when the AI was effectively acting at random every turn.  This caused unsurprisingly inconsistent results. An encounter might be trivial four times out of five, but devastating on the fifth try, as the enemies used their abilities in something resembling a strategy. Not wasting a turn healing an unwounded companion, for example. Once I started giving the AI something resembling brains, however, things turned nasty quickly.  The enemies became frustratingly nasty with very little logic and tactics. For a strategy or war game, they’d be great, but for an RPG, they were not much fun. They’d pull the same kind of tactics that would serve a player – focus on suppressing the spellcasters, and whittling down the party numbers by concentrating fire on one player character at a time. It was very difficult to finish a combat against some enemies without at least one party member incapacitated. And this was with the AI still doing some really stupid moves a lot of the time!

So I actually had to tone down the AI and make them more “dramatically responsible” rather trying their best to beat or cripple the player’s party. Yet even that wasn’t good enough, and I had to tone them down more. One tester completed the game on one of the intermediate builds where the AI was only somewhat toned down from its most-brutal level (and still making more stupid mistakes than they do now…) I have to give him credit – even *I* did not try to play through the whole game at that punishing level. Anyway, the AI was further gimped to use their “Brains” score to make decisions, to be “more random” (again) in their choices, and to more heavily weight actions that would challenge the player rather than just send them back to the inn to restore incapacitated party members.  So, for example, they’ll now prefer to hurt an uninjured party member than finish off a wounded one.

But while the AI is far from perfect, they do apply some tactics to enhance each other’s fighting ability, to form something resembling teamwork. Sometimes. 🙂

Results:

Although I made some later changes to tilt the balance a little more back in the traditional direction, as it stands Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon has a different flavor of combat from most other RPGs of its style.  In recognition of this, the game  even awards an experience point bonus for facing larger groups – so facing six goblin Whitelisted Mages as a group is worth more experience points than six far-easier battles against them one at a time.

I personally think it’s cool. But was it the right game for this approach? That’s the debate I’m facing in development of the sequel. Should the balance be tilted further in the traditional direction? Now would be the time to do that… On the one hand, if I were to do it all over again, I’d definitely skew a few of these factors back in the traditional direction, and make trivial enemies more trivial and boss encounters more — uh, bossy. But on the other hand, I am working on a sequel, which should be faithful to the experience of the original.

 Frayed Knights veterans, feel free to chime in here and let me know what you think!

 

(Oh, and if you aren’t a veteran, you can become one pretty easily. The first part of the adventure is even free:

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon

And you can check out more details about the game rules from the free strategy guide. You don’t even need to own the game! )

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

To Grind or Not To Grind?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 8, 2012

Rowan Kaiser talks about “grinding” – an ill-defined term that generally references facing repetitive, meaningless combat encounters.

‘Grinding’ and it’s Relationship to the RPG Genre

Grinding is generally a negative term, and I agree in that I dislike games where grinding is a significant source of gameplay. I remember all too well my frustration back when I was playing Ultima III (when it was new), and facing Yet Another Random Combat Encounter while I was trying to find a Mark in the dungeon.  Useless, senseless filler.

But I take a little more favorable view of unplanned encounters as a general rule, and of ‘optional’ grinding where the player is allowed to basically go out looking for trouble to get a little extra loot and experience. In fact, it’s a little frustrating for me in a few games which have a fixed number of encounters with no options to get a little ‘ahead’ of the game.  If I’m only a couple hundred experience points from leveling, or I’m out of money but feel I need a few extra healing / mana potions prior to moving on to a confrontation with the Big Bad’s Henchmen, I want to be able to do some quick grinding and improve my chances. Or if I only have fifteen minutes to play, a quick excursion to a respawned dungeon for some quick fights and loot can be just what I needed.

There’s actually something a little zen about some of the old-school games where you can push forward from a safe (healing) spot, kill a few bad guys in some fights, and come back, particularly if the game has an interesting combat system. I just don’t want that to be a significant & mandatory chunk of the game.

 

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

The Ouya Kickstarter – Clearing $7 Million In Its Final Hours

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 7, 2012

The Ouya Kickstarter has been extremely interesting to watch. To be honest, I’m a little surprised by the amount of support that has come through for this tiny little “indie” game console. They’ve cut a deal with OnLive, bringing some “streaming play” for mainstream games to this little platform. There will be an Ouya part of Final Fantasy III (the “real” 3, not FF6 re-branded as 3 in the U.S.), and at least one exclusive title on release. It is now on its final day (and change), and has managed to clear $7 million. Now, granted, most of this is little more than a pre-order for the console, and simply informs the company of the size of the pre-order. But at around 50,000 units pre-ordered at this point, this is a pretty solid showing.

Now, during the height of the console wars against the big-boy consoles, this number probably wouldn’t cut it. But does it have the potential for traction as an indie platform?

Probably. If we take a wild guess and say Kickstarter pre-orders will represent 10% of the install base the first year, that’s half-a-million consoles out there. For indie games, IMO, that’s not an unreasonable install base. Where it will have problems is if Android ports inform pricing for games, and the Ouya becomes a ghetto for game-in-a-month apps like the current iPhone / Android market. $2 games at 70% mean $1.40 in developer revenue per sale. Assuming a 1% turnover (which may be optimistic for the “average” indie game; we’ll have to see) times 5000 sales would be only $7,000 in revenue per game. That would kill the market for Ouya-exclusives.

However, if prices migrate higher on the average (we can dream, can’t we?) for bigger games – in at least the $5 – $10 range, and hopefully up to the $20 range, and if indies don’t rely on the Ouya as an exclusive platform, I think there are some good possibilities there. And indies can certainly aspire to a greater than 1% penetration. Anyway – the bottom line is that I think an Ouya as part of a cross-platform strategy would definitely be a viable option for indies, who really don’t need to sell millions (or even hundreds of thousands) of copies to sustain their business. And maybe, if the console really takes off, it could become a decent platform for exclusive titles.

I’m getting one. My hopes are modest, but I’m a fan of the concept. And I’d like to have my games available for it – hopefully much more likely now that I’ve switched to Unity as an engine.

Anyway, there are a few hours left if you want to get in on the Kickstarter:

Ouya Kickstarter – Less than 36 Hours Remaining!

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Curiosity

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 6, 2012

I gotta admit, as much as I tried to blow it off as “no big deal,” the Curiosity landing on Mars thrilled me. I was glued to the NASA feed through the entire entry — realizing, of course, that by the time we saw anything the limitations of light-speed meant that it had already happened several minutes earlier.

I’ve recently read The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell, which is some good ol’ military space-opera stuff where light-speed communication and sensors is the single greatest factor in all fleet engagements – all maneuvers have to be timed in advance with contingencies to make up for the fact that your view of the battlefield – a star system – and even your own fleet is based on progressively stale data.  So seeing it happen in “real life,” bizarre as a concept as it is to terrestrial experience, was already pretty cool.

I was born only scant weeks before man walked on the moon. A sci-fi geek at a young age, I was still a little too young to really hear or understand about the Viking landings on Mars when they happened – but when I finally saw the pictures a year or two later in a magazine (around the same time Star Wars was released), they blew my mind. Real pictures from another world! Not just the moon, but a full-on planet in our solar system! And not just any planet – MARS! Again, I was a sci-fi geek at a young age, and grew up with the lore about Martian canals, invaders from mars, etc. Not that I expected the Viking landers to find any signs of any kind of life or civilization on our neighbor, but it was still amazing to see photos from such a storied planet, so long considered unreachable.

Then came the Spirit and Opportunity missions, which went into amazing levels of overtime. The Opportunity, I understand, is still chugging along.

So I tried to think of the Curiosity landing as… routine. No big deal, we’re just landing yet another rover on Mars.  Unfortunately, that set a paradox of some kind going in my brain – the very idea of attempting to pass off a Mars landing as routine was in itself staggering and firing all kinds of geek-triggers in my programming.  If Mars landings actually did become routine, that would be AWESOME, right?  Particularly when I learned of all the incredible maneuvers that had to be made to drop something the size of a frickin’ Smart Car (actually, slightly larger) on the surface of a planet that’s so far away it would be humming along for a quarter of an hour before we discovered its fate due to the slowness of the speed of light.

Talk about a programming job to get the AI right…

Watching the tense control room and the reports as it made its way down to the planet surface, chute deploying, heat shield separating, rockets firing, a SKY HOOK lowering the mobile laboratory down from a rocket-ship before it separated and rocketed off a safe distance away … it was amazing. I’ll admit, part of my fascination was concerned that this project was going to end badly. There were so many opportunities for things to go wrong with such a complex sequence.

And then the first pictures came through. They weren’t particularly remarkable by themselves: the landscape isn’t very different from what the Viking landers sent back to us in 1976. But dang if these didn’t seize my imagination. Close-up views of another part of alien world…

Sometimes it just takes something like that to remind me that in spite of the fact that we’ve got plenty of problems and don’t get along to well much of the time, we live in a really cool age, and that humanity can do some pretty awesome things sometimes.

The universe can be a really cool place. We need to keep on dreaming.

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Want Players to Finish the Game? Let Them Quit!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 3, 2012

There are a lot of important features to an RPG that make the experience really stand out for me. But these days, with my “grown up” schedule, the two most important features for any video game (not just RPG, but I’m focusing on RPGs here) are the following:

1. Make it easy for me to play a short session (~20 minutes. Or less).

2. Make it easy for me to get back to the game after taking a (possibly extended) break.

In other words, make it painless to quit and encouraging to come back to later.

I’m not saying I’ll only play an RPG for 20 minutes at a time – but I have problems starting a game these days that I think I’ll have to commit more time than that in order to get anything out of the play session. Once I get going, sure, I may end up playing for a whole hour or two, but that’s inertia. And taking a hiatus from a game is nothing new to me. I tend to play a lot of games, and even as a kid, I’d often take a break from some of my favorite RPGs to play with something new and shiny, only to come back after a few days / weeks / months and finish the game.

And that’s what it’s really about. I keep hearing game company CEOs talking about how players rarely finish the games, and they really only play for something like 8-15 hours, so why not make 8-15 hour games? The truth is that a lot of gamers – especially RPG fans – love the big ol’ marathon games, too, but we can’t play them like a marathon (anymore) to the exclusion of all other games.  But I, for one, am happy to play a larger game in shorter segments over the course of weeks or months, maybe coming back to it after a long break or two. I want games that fit my life, not the other way around, but I do not think that should relegate me to some casual-gaming ghetto.

I don’t think I’m completely alone in this. Assuming people with similar adult-life schedules represent enough of an audience to worry about, here are some features of RPGs that meet the above demands well enough that I’m likely to play a game to completion:

* Save anywhere. Or save automatically on exit. This is historically why I haven’t been much of a console gamer… when I have to quit, they won’t let me quit without penalizing me.

* Short quests, or quests that have short stages that can be completed in a few minutes.

* I love deep, tactical, turn-based combat, but either allow me to save in mid-combat (best), or keep the fights relatively quick (<5 minutes).

* Keep a nice log of quests and story information so I can remember where I was and what I was doing when I come back to the game after a hiatus of a few days (or a few weeks).

* Being able to review past interactions / dialogs / story expositions can be extremely handy! While the latter isn’t too uncommon in many games, the ability to find information easily through good indexing or navigation is a little more rare.

* A quick summary of the story up to that point would really help – maybe showing a summary of the currently “active” quest when you first load the game.

* This one is going to take some explanation: Don’t unduly penalize me for forgetting how the controls work.  I play a *lot* of games: I treat my gaming library as a giant arcade sometimes, where I just kinda “graze” a bunch of games. One of my problems with action-RPGs – except the very simple ones (Diablo-style) is that they demand control skills that may have gotten rusty during a hiatus, or confused with control schemes of other games I’ve played in the interim. It’s very frustrating to jump back into a game after a three-week hiatus and find myself hitting a wall because I’ve lost my button-combo-mashing edge.  And yes, this is one of my primary issues with the “consolization” of modern RPGs. And while I am not unhappy with the trend towards purely auto-saving, the old school approach of restoring from multiple saved games does help you “take a mulligan” after your first combat or two after a hiatus, when you are remembering how to play and likely to make some serious mistakes.

* Allow grinding. I’m not a big fan of games that require a lot of grinding (all filler, no meat). But if a 15-minute excursion into a moderately challenging zone can serve to get me a level or two and some new equipment, then I always have “something to do” for a quick fix.

* Display the time stamp information on the load game screen so I can see which save game was really the latest.

* Don’t depend exclusively on cut-scenes (especially non-repeatable ones) for exposition and goals.

* Automaps: Automaps that only show areas where you have already been are not only more “realistic”, but they provide an intermittent player with useful information about where they still need to explore.

* Likewise, leaving visual game-state cues about what has transpired (opened chests and doors, and yes… dead bodies and blood splats) not only helps the player remember exactly what had transpired in his last game session, but makes the game world feel more interactive.

* Provide hints and reminders to get a player ‘on track,’ especially if they happen to be short of quests at the moment and may not remember where they should go to regain the thread of the adventure.

Granted, this is mainly a laundry list of features that aren’t uncommon these days. There are probably a lot of great ideas I haven’t thought of yet.  I’d urge CRPG designers to think of their games more like a TV series and less like a long movie; as something that must always beckon the player to keep “coming back to it” rather than staying in their seat.  Chances are that more players may actually enjoy the experience all the way to the end that way.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Why Game Development Can Be Like Fight Club

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 2, 2012

Kotaku blasts the games biz for what it thinks is its “biggest problem” – not telling customers (and the press) everything they want to know about everything going on inside a game development studio.

Gaming’s Biggest Problem is that Nobody Wants to Talk

The author chalks this up to some kind of incredibly secrecy that pervades the industry, and judges that this is a crime that is hurting the industry.

Before I attack the article – which I fear may be simply a disgruntled and naive journalist who is tired of having to beg for scraps of information and see other publications and journalists get those “exclusives” – I will admit that he makes a couple of good points.

Is there something of a “culture of secrecy” in the game dev business? Yeah, I think so. It’s been hard-earned, unfortunately. Game developers are so shackled with Non-Disclosure Agreements and threats about legal repercussions (not to mention threats of dismissal) if they breathe a WORD about what they are working on that it becomes a habit. And if you work in the games biz and you HAVE NOT seen someone fired because they were too free with information and your publisher caught wind of it and got pissed, consider yourself lucky. This is how the mainstream industry works – the publishers are the lords, the studios are the serfs, and the serfs must suffer the whims and tempers of their lords, or they starve. So they err on the side of caution on a constant basis, including a secrecy about their games no matter what. After all, even if you are legally allowed to talk about it now, if you take any glory for yourself, even if it is now legal (or no longer contractually prohibited), your lords and masters will get pissed and won’t send any more contracts your way.

Sucks, doannit? Yes, I do consider this a problem. But it’s a problem with the publisher-studio relationship that is already riddled with other problems. And this is exactly why I’m so in love with the indie game movement.

So yeah, nobody talks because talking will get you fired, and possibly land you in court. Don’t like it? Talk to the CEOs of the big publishers. I’m sure they’ll be happy to answer your questions, Kotaku.

Okay. Now that’s out of the way…

Fact #1 – The suggestion that gamers don’t mind hearing information that is subject to change is, sadly, B.S. Maybe author Jason Schreier is really an understanding sort who is fine hearing about games that will be canceled and features that will get the axe. That’s cool. And I honestly think the majority of gamers probably feel the same way. They live in the real world, and know how these things work. Maybe over time, with lots of this communication happening – even more of them will get the message. As an indie, I try to be more free with information because I serve an audience that I think is pretty well-informed and understands how things work, too.

But within gaming-at-large … few things are as difficult to deal with as some major fanboy “opinion leaders” who feel personally betrayed because a certain feature or element was cut. And it happens. Oh, boy, does it happen. And the gaming journalists can be the worst of ’em all. Once again, this culture derived from lessons that were hard-earned: Talking about things that are not 100% certain are almost a sure way to get your game savaged in certain corners, which today would put a hard cap on your overly important Metacritic score.

So yeah, sometimes gamers (and journalists) can be the enemy. It only takes a few bad ones to make you treat everyone cautiously. A hundred times bitten, a hundred and first time shy, I guess.

Fact #2 – A “Triple-A” game’s press coverage is almost entirely determined by exclusives. There’s no getting around this. Want to get on the cover of a gaming mag? Give them some juicy exclusives that they can tout to help them sell their rag. Otherwise, you’ll be buried in a sidebar somewhere. It may be stupid or unfair, but this is how the games journalism business works, and so that’s how the game publishers have learned to respond. This means that the publishers have to keep a tight control over tidbits of information that they can dole out among all the major press sites, or they watch their publicity shrivel up and die. Period.

Fact #3 – Hollywood ain’t a model of transparency. I mean, SERIOUSLY? He uses this as an example? The industry that often buys T-shirts and hats with false movie titles on them to throw off the press? You think all that security is just for the safety of the cast and crew? Sorry, dude… you’ve been played for a sucker.

Fact #4 – Much of what goes on behind the scenes is, frankly, boring. When I started this blog, I named it what I did with some expectation that I would tell all kinds of juicy and lurid tales of my days in the sausage factory of game development. But when it came down to it – either my memory is failing me too much, or really – there isn’t much to tell. Sure, there can be some day-to-day amusements that seem interesting at the time (“Shot Frank with a nerf dart from behind. He didn’t see who shot him, thought it was Jared. LOL.”), but most of the day-to-day work of making a game is really not that exciting. You get to work, you sit down and start working on your task list, answer emails, go to meetings, coordinate and communicate with coworkers as needed, swap a few jokes, maybe talk about new games that you are excited about, work on more tasks. It’s a cool job, but it’s still a job. And even the most interesting stuff can get pretty boring if it was reported on constantly.

When I was doing weekly updates on the development of Frayed Knights, I often had to strain to find something interesting to talk about. Hours spent debugging inventory system code do not make for exciting drama.

And – SHOCK – when we do try and reveal the interesting bits, just ‘cuz… it’s often dismissed by journalists or their editors for not being newsworthy. If you are generous with your information, it will be treated as worthless. See fact #2. The only thing that makes the information worth anything is that it’s protected.

Fact #5 – Sometimes it’s not secret, it’s just too much of a pain in the butt to look it up. And sometimes a simple-sounding question (“How many people worked on this game”) is really pretty complicated.  And considering how often journalists completely misinterpret the clearest-sounding answer you can humanly phrase, sometimes it’s safer (especially when your job is on the line, see fact #1) to just defer an answer. One of my favorites is “how many copies of this game did you sell?” Do you mean sell-in, or sell-through (a much harder number to estimate)? Are you including OEM bundles?

Fact #6 – Journalists aren’t entitled to know any of this, and it’s information that can seriously affect the performance of a game.  At the AAA levels of game development, competition is… kinda scary. There’s information that maybe shouldn’t be trade secret stuff, but it is, and a competitor knowing your budget would give them an advantage. The AAA field (which is really all this guy is interested in… very few journalists, in my experience, give a crap about any amount of information the unknown indies are happy to provide them) is very much a winner-take-all business, where the difference between first and second place is big enough to potentially mean the difference between a studio prospering or going bankrupt, so publishers are loathe to concede those advantages to their competitors. It sucks, but again – it is what it is. Even things like how many copies of a game you sold — that’s something that is treated as an indicator of quality by the game-buying public. If I say a big-name game has “only sold” about 30,000 copies, what do you assume? That it must have totally sucked, right? But if I say it’s sold almost 10 million copies, what do you assume? That it’s a giant hit, and that you ought to see what all the fuss is about, maybe?

Sadly, Frayed Knights hasn’t sold close to 30,000 copies yet, BTW.  I certainly don’t think it sucks. But I’m not in the AAA biz anymore, so hey – you guys can print that.

Anyway, is the games biz too secret? Is it a problem? I think so, sure, but I think it’s a symptom, not the cause.  And until I start making bajillions of dollars as an indie doing it differently, I can’t argue that it’s really hurting the biz any.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Epic Game Recruitment Ad

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 1, 2012

Okay, yeah, two days in a row linking to videos. But this one is worthy of note, if you haven’t seen it already. I’ve never heard of this game company before, but their recruiting video is pretty hysterical. Two words of caution: The language (and logo for one company) is not exactly family friendly and may not be safe for work, and I really hope nobody takes it too seriously.

Juvenile? Yeah. But fun? Yeah, and that’s the point, right?

But really, there’s a part of me that really looks at the video and says, “None of the above, please…” I guess that’s why I’m indie now.  I came to this profession / hobby / industry because I loved video games. My favorites were not necessarily the games that were the monster mind-blowing hits, either. Sure, it was fun being a part of some big, hit games back in the day – back when selling a million copies was a “hit” and it could be done with a team of a dozen people. Nowadays… well, let’s just say I think all that passion is usually wasted when a team grows much larger than that.

But hey, at least they can make really cool recruiting videos…

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

PC Game Evolution in Two and a Half Minutes

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 31, 2012

Just for fun – a little musical video of PC games, complete with music created entirely of remixed sound effects from said games:

I liked how many of the games at the end were… INDIE GAMES!

Enjoy.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 4 Comments to Read



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