The Dead State Kickstarter Thing

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 14, 2012

I’ve talked about Dead State several times here on this blog.  I’m pretty sick of the whole zombie thing, but I’m very excited about this RPG – which is billed as more of a post-holocaust survival RPG  where zombies are the primary environmental threat, but not so much an ‘enemy’.

Anyway, I was excited for their upcoming Kickstarter in spite of starting to feel some ‘Kickstarter Fatigue’ myself. Sure enough, they launched it… while I was in the middle of a busy business trip. I was waiting to get home first before funding it and talking about it, but as several people have stridently suggested I make mention of it (or maybe it was just one person under several names and contact locations 🙂  ) I figured I’d use the last remaining minutes of my pathetic hotel Internet connection to bring it to your attention… if you didn’t know about it already.

Yes, I’m gonna be funding this puppy. How much, I don’t know yet (I shudder to look at my funds when this trip is concluded, but before I’ve been reimbursed by my Day Job). I may go part-way from Rampant Games funds (which is really supposed to be funding Frayed Knights 2) and my personal funds to get the T-shirt level, I dunno.

Whatever the case, let me give you my take on it: I have no extra insight into the game beyond following it over the last couple of years (since it was simply called the “Zombie RPG.”) But based on those details released to the public, it seems to me to be an experiment in RPGs to really push the boundaries – in a good way, this time – of what an RPG can be. Seriously, as excited as I am for Wasteland 2, this one has me a little more excited for the possibilities. If you are sick of the current trend in mainstream computer RPGs and would like to see them truly “evolve” or expand in new ways and encompass more potential for player-driven stories, consider supporting this game in one way or another. Even if it’s only telling others about it. It may not be your thing, but it’s at least exciting to see experienced RPG developers tackling the kinds of things we keep claiming that we crave.

Dead State – Kickstarter Campaign

Filed Under: Game Announcements, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment

IP Rights – Why Are They Are Important to Indie Game Developers? Part 3

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Okay, part three of my ramblings (I’m stressed out in a foreign country trying to post between 12-hour days, so forgive me) about IP. In this one I try to finally answer the question… “WTF?” Or, rather, “Why?”

Let’s dispense with the lightning-in-a-bottle examples like Minecraft for a minute. Your average indie, making a game like, say… Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, while fully deserving of selling a million copies (heh), probably ain’t. They don’t have the budgets to throw at marketing to make their game a household name. The world is not going to beat a path to their door trying to get a license for that lucrative franchise. Nobody’s offering them millions to sell plushies of your characters, and Michael Bay isn’t soliciting any struggling indies for the movie rights to their platform-puzzler. You can offer to sell your ‘soul’ – your entire IP lock, stock, and barrel – and may find there’s no buyers. Nobody cares.

So why the freak does it matter? What’s so great about being all indie and stuff? If nobody else cares about this stuff – at least not enough to write you a check – why should you?

Here are my two big reasons:

#1 – Retaining your IP Rights brings opportunities – and means not having to ask permission to take advantage of them (or not).

#2 – Your IP rights provide a way for other people to make you money.

The first one is probably more meaningful if you’ve worked on the other side a bit. If you’ve ever had to be really careful to avoid infringing on the rights of the owners, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Or when you are offered opportunities and all you can do is “pass that information along.” Or whatever.

Now, most of the time, people think of the “big” opportunities. Movie and comic book deals, your face on a box of Wheaties, invitations to speak at Comicon, stuff like that. I suppose that’s all possible. But I’ve been kinda fascinated by some smaller things.

Participating in promotions. Or creating your own. Making a webcomic about your characters. Making a sequel. Making an expansion. Changing your pricing, or your entire method of distribution. Giving it away for free. Giving away the source code for free. Using the name of your game to sell another one. Creating a remake. Distributing it through a new partner. Selling the whole thing so you can work on something else. It’s your call, for good or bad. Yeah, it may not feel like much when the whole enterprise is barely treading water (or worse), but you are the guy (or gal) who can call the shots or pull the plug.

Here are some personal examples. Let me tell you about Void War. I’m really not planning on a sequel, though it or a related product has crossed my mind a few times. It’s not exactly a lucrative franchise. Oh, it sells the occasional copy or two, for which I’m quite grateful, and I’m personally quite proud of it (and found myself sucked into playing it again for the first time in a long while a few months ago, and having a lot of fun with it). But no, it’s not exactly a revenue-generator. So what use is it to me?

Well, let’s see: I used it to establish some credibility for Rampant Games while I was developing Frayed Knights. For good reason, it’s tough to draw much attention to yourself as an indie if you have never released a game – for the simple reason that 95% of first-time indies never actually release their first game. I’ve used it to bring attention to the website, and this blog, selling other folk’s games as an affiliate. I had a bunch of little opportunities – some of which I took, some of which I didn’t –  that never really took off, but they could have. I mean, I have copies of a CD-ROM containing Void War that shipped with pairs of shoes, for crying out loud. Yeah, shoes. Gamer shoes. No, I don’t know, but I’m not a shoe expert.

The point is – while the game has never brought in anything resembling a real income, being “the Void War guy” opened a few doors for me, and made me a lot of contacts that I’d not have had otherwise. In the past, working for game studios, those calls got forwarded to somebody else.

Yeah, I know, these stories would be a lot cooler if they ended with me being some bazillionaire indie who gets invited to speak at game dev conferences to offer motivation and stuff. No, I’m still a struggling little indie who’s doing a little bit better now than he was a few years ago, but I’m no rags-to-riches story. Maybe someday I can point to something like that and say, “Oh, hey, look, here’s where this stuff happened that wasn’t awesome, but it put me on the path to success.” Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, I’m not there yet.

But what I can say is these experiences – being the guy with the rights and the freedom to make decisions with them – exposed me to a lot of opportunities that I had no idea even existed.

Okay – about #2 – the right to have other people make you money. If you are like me, the first thing you think of is people lining up to pay you cash for licenses to make movies or action figures for your game, or offering to make a sequel and giving you a big, fat royalty. Yeah, technically that could happen. But usually it’s a bit smaller than that.

Let’s talk ports. Someone offers (or you manage to convince them) to port your game to the Android for you. You agree on …. I dunno… let’s say splitting the revenue 50/50. Your game has sold enough to make it worth their time. It’s not entirely “free money” or anything, but it could be a significant revenue increase for very little extra work on your part. Somebody else makes you money. For your partner’s part, they’ve taken a known entity (your game with sales that Didn’t Suck), applied their known skillset, and cranked out a revenue-generator of their own. Win/win, right?

And then there’s affiliate sales, like I do at RampantGames.com.  These old-school style affiliate programs don’t, as a rule, generate a ton of sales. But I love ’em from both sides of the equation. Affiliates have added to Frayed Knights‘ sales for me (getting their cut, of course), and I try to do the same for other developers (sometimes not doing much, but in some cases moving over a hundred units).

Again – these are little ideas. And they are far from exhaustive. None are slam-dunk, retire-early things. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with indies taking some contract work or (I hope!) even working a day job to balance things out to trade off “potential” for some positive values in the bank account.  I look at what Zeboyd Games is doing now, after the success of Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII, about to release the next Penny Arcade RPG – working with somebody else’s indie property. It looks like a great opportunity for both parties. It’s all good.

One of my favorite articles I ever read about being an indie was by “Joe Indie,” called “Write Yourself a Mini-Van.” The indie world has changed a bit since the article was written, but the basic principles remain. Little base-hits all add up, and if you keep at it, you may get some home runs in there, too.

Having control over your games – even if it’s only to sell ’em off the rights later after you are sick of ’em – gives you options, opportunities, and yes, responsibilities. But for too many years, the only guys who had access to that were the big publishers, the giant middlemen. The digital age has made it possible for the little guys to take advantage of the little – to – medium sized opportunities that would have gotten ignored before. Yes, there are big opportunities and big success potential too. And while success may not always be measured in millions of dollars per year or millions of copies sold, I do believe that success is out there for the folks willing to keep at it.

At least I hope so. I plan to at least go down trying.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment

IP Rights – Why Are They Are Important to Indie Game Developers? Part 2

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 13, 2012

So yesterday I prefaced the whole “IP rights” thing with a story about a non-indie publisher.

My feeling – echoed by most within the indie arena, but apparently not all – is that owning your own IP is a “necessary but not sufficient” aspect of your game being indie. But even within that, there’s a lot of fuzzy areas. Maybe a game is indie to somebody, but not to me, as I’m doing contract work for an indie or porting the game to another platform for a percentage. Does that make me non-indie?  Let’s just assume right now that it’s all a big fuzzy generalization with a lot of exceptions and nits that you could pick here and hairs you can split there. And IANAL, or even a good business-person, so feel free to take this all with a grain of salt. But maybe it’s something you’ve been thinking about, and these little essays will help.

Now here’s the thing. IP rights are simultaneously the most worthless and most valuable thing you can own as an indie.

On the worthless side: Ideas are a dime a dozen if we’re feeling generous. Sitting on my butt dreaming up “intellectual property” all day long is worth pretty much nothing. While some ideas and so-called properties may have some merit and more potential all on their own, the real value doesn’t exist until the property has an audience.

Plus, it has to have had some value pumped into it so its not something easily duplicated or replaced. For example, a webcomic that only has three strips drawn probably possesses no inherent superiority to any other webcomic that is also three strips long.  While three strips isn’t trivial, there’s still not a whole lot to it, yet. Now, fifty strips… that’s history. That’s an achievement.  That’s not something someone will be able to duplicate in a caffeine-fueled three-day weekend.

So I guess there’s three factors at work here that give an IP value: The inherent potential of the concept (which is more of a multiplier than an inherent value), execution, and audience. All three need to be kicking butt, and sadly… most concepts just don’t ever get there. Yeah, even our beloved indie games.

But what does that really mean? So how much is IP really worth?

Well, to put dollars and cents on it, it’s worth something along the lines of how much money you can make exploiting it vs. doing something else.

The trick is… it’s not the same value to everybody.

This was how the game studios got themselves pretty much boned by the publishers back in the early days.  For a studio with little means, expertise, or contacts, the value of the IP rights for their game to them wasn’t all that high. But to a publisher, especially one that eats, breathes, and sleeps these things, the potential value of a property could be huge. So it makes sense for the studios to trade those rights to the guys for whom its more valuable, right? That’s capitalism ‘n stuff.

That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they traded those rights for something much closer to their own value than that of the value to the publishers. This persisted until taking control of the IP rights was pretty much boilerplate stuff for publishing contracts.

It’s like… who needs a soul anyway? When was the last time you did anything with it? We’ll just throw that little thing in the contract too, as a minor clause…

So studios got into the habit of selling off their birthrights for a mess of pottage.

To be fair,  the publishers don’t even bat something like .500 when it comes to picking winners, either, and it’s an expensive biz. So it’s not like a fair price is exactly in the center of the value range or anything. And a lot of that value invested into the game that I mentioned – that can be measured in marketing dollars that get poured into it. You’d better believe a publisher doesn’t want to pour millions into promoting a game series that it doesn’t control… that someone else could leverage off of and make money on the sequel. Or on the ports. Or on the original game.

Anyway – I’ve done a lot of talkin’ about a subject. And I still haven’t arrived at a direct answer to the question posed in the title. I’m working up to it. Next time. Probably.

 

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism, Production - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

IP Rights – Why Are They Are Important to Indie Game Developers? Part 1

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 12, 2012

This is gonna be a multi-part article about a discussion we had last week (in comments) about Intellectual Property rights. Why are they such a big deal? Why should indies care (beyond the fact that, in the opinion of most, if you are working on someone else’s IP, you ain’t indie)?

Let’s talk about a former Big Publisher. I always feel bad talking negatively speaking ill of the dead, but this particular company has been pretty much dead-and-buried for a decade, in spite of being one of the BIG PUBLISHERS of the early-to-mid 90’s, so here goes. (I should note here that any relationship I might have had with said big company gave me very little insight into their actual workings, and much of this is based on the press of the time, plus some conjectures, rumors, and ruminations by former employees).

So once upon a time, this big publisher (A Certain Company, Loathed Am I to Mention… let’s just call ’em BP – not British Petroleum!) struck a deal with a struggling but up-and-coming wrestling franchise. “Hey,” said BP, “Your audience represents a segment of potential market we don’t normally appeal to. This could be a great opportunity for us to expand, and for you to start, you know, leveraging your franchise and get more money.”

Said wrestling league, probably hard-up for cash, took the deal: an extended exclusive deal with BP.

Well, the deal went far better than either of them could have imagined. The games were Really Popular and made BP a lot of money. It went really well for the wrestling league too… in fact, in many ways, it made their business. Instead of simply giving the BP access to their audience, it vastly increased their audience as people played the game and then started tuning into wrestling matches on TV.

At least, that was BP’s take. I think they were correct in that they had a hand in it.

But years went by, and as both companies prospered, the wrestling league started getting annoyed. That multi-year exclusive deal was for peanuts, they protested… it would be worth a lot more now! BP saw it differently. They were the kingmakers – if anything, the wrestlers owed THEM for their success.

Well, the time came that the exclusive license came to an end. As you’d expect, the now-big-and-famous wrestling league jacked up their price for future licenses by an almost punitive amount. “Now,” they said to BP, “You will pay us what you should have paid us all along for our piece of awesomeness.”

“Bite me,” said BP. “We made you. We can make someone else just like you. Good luck staying awesome without us to prop you up.”

I doubt the conversation went exactly like that. But from the rumors I heard that may have suffered a little from the telephone-game effect, that was the gist of it. In the end, BP and the wrestlers went their separate ways. BP found a new, struggling wrestling league just like their former partners had once been. And the wrestlers found game publishers willing to pay through the nose to sell games with the official franchise brand that were guaranteed to make lots of sales, because they always had before.

So who won that argument?

In my opinion, nobody.

The wrestling league pretty much peaked at about that time. The “fad,” I guess, faded. Though there are innumerable reasons for their decline, I don’t think changing game publishers made that big of a difference.

And the Big Publisher? As I stated earlier, dead-and-buried.  Again, many reasons for this, most of them having little to do with wrestling games, but a lot of them having to do with it not actually owning the IP rights for most of its games. I imagine they had a tough time without being able to anchor their business on a consistently franchise, and other stories often repeated this one: the more successful they were, the more difficult life became for them later.

And the new wrestling league? Also dead-and-buried, with bits and pieces of it purchased and absorbed into the original wrestling league of this story.

There is much more to this story, but let’s just treat it as an allegory for now.

BP used to brag in magazines about its core strategy of leveraging other people’s IP. It worked out pretty well for them when video game licenses were cheap, and they didn’t have to do much more than re-texture an existing game to match the license and push it out into the stores. But as games became bigger and bigger business, the licenses got pricier, and quick-and-dirty game development got less a lot less quick (or cheap).

In an industry built on ephemeral works of creativity given form only in the collection of information, Intellectual Property rights are the lifeblood. It doesn’t matter if the product is rented, sold, or given away freely and even permits others to share a joint ownership – the holders of the IP rights have the control over their own creations and are allowed to dictate how they they will be shared with the word, insofar as legally enforceable. It is very possible for symbiotes (and their nastier, leechier cousins, the parasites) to survive or even thrive in this world, but they are always dependent upon their hosts for life.

Note the word “dependent.” As in, opposite of “independent.”

Maybe it’s unfair, but maybe it was a victim of its own success. But as much of a beneficial symbiote as BP saw itself, without enough lifeblood from hosts, it curled up and died.

IP rights matter. And yeah, they should.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism, Mainstream Games - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

How to Tell a Story – Pixar Style

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 11, 2012

Just one o’ those links I feel compelled to share. Here are 22 “Rules” of storytelling according to Pixar – which hasn’t made a movie I haven’t liked yet (or that hasn’t made bajillions of dollars).  Via Pixar employee Emma Coats, here’s the little nuggets of wisdom she’s picked up from the studio:

The 22 Rules of Storytelling, According to Pixar

Most if not all of these are applicable to any medium. Including, obviously, games.

I thought they were valuable enough that, upon returning home from my trip, I intend to print them out and hang ’em on my wall over my desk.

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Indie Innovation Spotlight: AaaAaaaAaaaaaAAaaaaa!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 8, 2012

Today’s game is another (fairly) recent one, from Dejobaan Games. When I published the spotlight a few weeks ago on Corncob 3D, Ichiro Lambe – head of Dejobaan and a very cool-yet-crazy indie – sent me a message telling me how much he loved that game. Considering the kinds of off-the-wall stuff Dejobaan regularly comes up with, I found this to be unsurprising.

The first version subtitled, “A Reckless Disregard for Gravity,” AaaAaaaaaAaaaa (I never know how many A’s to put in there,  but then, neither does the developer) is one of my favorite indie games, which makes it easy to write a spotlight about it. There are some others that I don’t share quite as much love for in spite of their innovation. But this one’s easy. It’s off-the-wall crazy, but in a good way.

AaAAaaAaAaAAaa! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity by Dejobaan Games

What Is It?
A game that can never be spelled twice the same way, AaaAaaAAAaaaAa! is ostensibly a game about freefalling down impossibly high buildings and mountains, performing tricky maneuvers on the way down, and then coming to a safe landing in a designated spot without splattering yourself. The stylistic graphics are deliberately “gamey,” as is the rationale for cities arranged vertically in impossible configurations with gravity-resistant materials.

On your high-speed descent, you get points for skillful stupidity. You are awarded points for getting very close to obstacles (“Kisses”), staying close to walls on the way down (“hugs”), hitting targets (and birds), landing in your target zone, spray-painting graffiti on your way down, and interacting with audiences that stand on platforms along your descent path. For interacions, this means giving a “thumbs-up” sign to supporters or flipping off protestors (handled with the mouse buttons). Threading impossibly tight corridors of gaps between structures wins you the most points. But your route through your terminal-velocity course is completely up to you. Playing it safe may earn fewer points, but going after the really nasty spirals with moving and spinning obstacles may end up with an amusing message as your descent comes to an unexpected, messy stop.

You earn “teeth” based on your score for any given course, which can be spent to unlock new courses, tools, or bonuses (some of which are quite silly, like a “meditation” screen).

It’s all new-agey, silly, over-the-top, rebellious, and lots of fun.

What Makes It Cool?
I can’t imagine a “realistic” BASE (Building, Antenna, Span, and Earth) Jumping game that would be much fun. The thrill and skill involved would be pretty much lost in a simulation on a flat screen with the player safely sitting in a chair or couch with a controller in their hand. I don’t know if BASE jumping was the inspiration for AaaAaAaaAAA, or a context they added to the game later after coming up with the gameplay idea, but I really don’t care.

What the game really boils down to is a first-person obstacle course at high-speed. Anybody could have done it. Many have, actually. But what Dejobaan did was really give otherwise straightforward gameplay some twists and polish to make it a fun challenge, and then gave it style an attitude to make every session feel like a wild ride.

First, the gameplay. The game levels constantly encourage you to play with as much risk as you can handle. The higher the risk, the higher the score, which brings you closer to maximizing your “teeth” award for a level. While the obstacles are mostly fixed (though some do move or spin as you play), your choice of your route is completely up to you as you play. Little mistakes or miscalculations may cause you to constantly revise your plan as you twist and turn through the environment. You will be constantly asking yourself, “Can I make it? Can I make it?” and trying to devise escape plans and alternatives as you make your way down at high-speed. The more challenging courses do a great job of keeping you constantly on edge, both reacting and planning as you make delicate course corrections. The constant scoring based not only on hitting targets but on reaching and maintaining proximity to deadly obstacles makes a higher score always barely within reach.

The attitude and style – well, that’s just something that has to experienced. Dejobaan has a reputation for never taking themselves or their games seriously, and AaaAaaaaAa consequently always seems a little off-kilter almost to the point of absurdity. The whole thing about flipping off protestors on the way down, or being able to unlock a picture of a kitten to gaze on for relaxation, or the amusing random messages about how badly hurt you are when you smack a building – it all reinforces a message of just plain fun. It also suggests that the developers had as much fun making it as they hope you have playing it. It’s kinda like how dancers are supposed to smile as they perform, suggesting they are having a wonderful time, and infecting the audience with that same feeling. It works.

Other Notes
There’s a sequel (or revision, or “semi-sequel”) out now called AaaAaaaAAAA! For the Awesome!

There’s also a version for mobile devices, which I have not tried. Would help if I actually owned an Android or iSomething…

Filed Under: Indie Innovation Spotlight - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

A Bundle Less Humble?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 7, 2012

Craig Stern (Telepath RPG, etc.) takes the recent Humble Indie Bundle to task for its inclusion of  the excellent (but not really indie) game Psychonauts in a blog post at Gamasutra:

Humble? Sure. Indie? Not So Much.

I wasn’t gonna make a big deal about this one either, but Craig makes some pretty convincing arguments.

I’m pretty okay with “indie” being kind of a vague term. I’m even down with it being something of a marketing term. ‘Sall good. But that flexibility doesn’t mean “indie” is devoid of meaning, as I’ve stated before. And indie means much more than “cool” or “unique,” and those are really about the only things that Psychonauts has going for it that really seem indie. It’s very cool. Very different. Stylistically out on it’s own, taking chances that few mainstream titles dare to do (and for good reason, sadly – the game was a commercial flop).

But it’s a game that was publisher-financed to the order of $13 million or something. Not a record-breaking sum by any stretch, but it is still firmly standing in the big-budget mainstream development world.

Craig’s right. Are we not taking a stand because the Humble Indie Bundle is so really cool and we love it, or because Psychonauts is so really cool and we love it, or both? But “indie” isn’t a value judgment. Non-indie games can be awesome. Indie isn’t a brand. It’s not a genre. It’s not a style. It’s not a measure of creativity or quality. And it sure as hell doesn’t hold the monopoly on cool.

So that’s what indie isn’t. Now, what isn’t indie?

If Microsoft paid you to produce the game, it’s probably not indie. Ditto for Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sega, Activision, and pretty much any other publisher.

If you actually wrote out checks or otherwise transferred hard cash for more than a million dollars – let alone over $10 million – during development of your game, it’s probably isn’t indie.

If you NEED to sell over 100,000 copies of your game in order to break even, it’s probably not indie. If you need to sell a million copies or more just to break even… come on, seriously? So not indie.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 15 Comments to Read

Don’t Know Much About History…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 6, 2012

On the way to Le Havre from Paris, we stopped in the city of Rouen and visited a little Joan of Arc museum there. Rouen was where Joan was executed back in 1431, and this year marks her 600th birthday. I picked up some interesting tidbits about her and her era that I didn’t know, such as the use of seals on letters or decrees. The more important the person, for example, the larger their seal generally was. The church used more oval seals, while nobility and royalty used circular seals.

Not exactly something that I foresee making its way into a game anytime soon, but it was still something interesting to file away.

But this made me think a little bit about historic authenticity in games. In some games – albeit usually with a niche audience (like wargames, or simulators) – authenticity is pretty important.  Those little details can make or break a game. If you mess up the deployment or strength of this cavalry regiment, watch out! But those gamers are, sadly, on the decline, as they get ignored and starved out of the hobby in favor of the “mass market”

Then you have role-playing games.

Let me say up-front that I’ve never met historic or any other kind of  authenticity in an RPG that didn’t strike me as fascinating. I mean, I enjoy this stuff. I study it myself for fun.  Used well, it truly enhances the game. I’ll tell ya, as a game, Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption wasn’t really that great, but I was riveted from the get-go by the depiction of Medieval Prague. I have no idea how authentic it was, but it felt right.  No, not the city layout, but just the feel, the setting, the mood. The memory of the first city (and, to a lesser degree, the second – Vienna) kept me playing  when the game started otherwise lagging.

But in spite of having no memorable negative experience with “historic authenticity” or anything of the sort, any game advertising that as a feature leaves me cold. Yawnsville. I completely ignored Nethergate for the longest time for this reason. There are probably other reasons why I never gave Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader a second glance when it was new.

There’s something about advertising a historical background that makes me think of Junior High school history class.  It’s not even that these games would imply “low magic” – I’m okay with that in fantasy games. And I’m okay with it in non-fantasy RPGs. Maybe it’s that I really have studied too much medieval history, and the idea of living in anything resembling an “authentic” medieval world doesn’t sound like much fun.

Maybe it’s just me. But considering the poor sales of those games that have gone after that route, I don’t know that I’m totally alone here. What do you think? Would an RPG boasting “historical authenticity” for any era be a deal-maker for you, or would it actually be something of a turn-off?

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

An Epic Win Helps Repair a Big Huge Fail

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 5, 2012

38 Studios pretty much bit the dust a couple weeks back, which took Big Huge Studios – which by most accounts had a reasonable freshman success with their first (and, sadly, only) RPG, Kingdoms of Amalur. Maybe not enough success to pay for its initial development, and definitely not enough success to carry 38 Studio’s massive MMORPG-in-development on its back, but still a reasonable (to me) number sold that reportedly exceeded publisher EA’s expectations. This is especially sad for me, as I’ve enjoyed their games since Rise of Nations. Of course, this is only the bullet that they didn’t dodge – they’ve dodged at least a couple over the years, but it seems their time was up.

But wait! What’s this?

As Epic Games’ president explained yesterday, they had a problem of a different sort: “Epic’s directors had spent the morning discussing how we’d love to build even more successful projects with our growing team, but that we’d need a dramatic infusion of top talent to do so.  Which, we all knew, was impossible.”

Then some of the former principle folks from Big Huge Games called.

Need meets need. And happens to coincide with some good will. When people ask me what capitalism is good for in the future, I’ll have to cite this example. So now Epic Games is opening up a new studio where Big Huge Games used to be, and many of the former BHG folks may find a home not far from their old one. And in the meantime, many will be retained as contractors for Epic until things work out.

It’s not a perfect solution. The white knights are riding in to save the village after the looting but before the burning. But it’s just how it goes.  Still, while it’s not the happiest ending ever, it’s a pretty decent one in what was otherwise a big huge pile of suck.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Dinner With Swords & Sorcery: Underworld Creator Charles Clerc

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 4, 2012

Friday night, my wife and I had dinner with Charles Clerc, of OlderBytes (formerly Classic Games Remade), creator of the upcoming Swords & Sorcery: Underworld Gold. He treated us to a great dinner at Le Fumoir, literally across the street from The Louvre in downtown Paris.

Meeting fellow indies in other countries — that’s awesome.

We didn’t actually chat about our current projects all that much, but naturally the subject did come up now and then over the course of something like three hours.  We met about forty-five minutes before our reservation and just talked games. Charles spoke of his love of some of the early RPGs, which inspired him to make his own in that style many years later. Part of it came from having an underpowered, older computer for many years incapable of playing more modern games, so he was “stuck” playing some older titles, and really fell in love with them.

His brother showed up a little later and joined us. A good time seemed to be had by all.

So how did our plans for world domination of the RPG genre go?

Well, let’s just say… beware!

Actually, let’s just say that said plans aren’t super-detailed at this point. We did swap some tales about the difficulty of getting attention as an indie developer and getting the word out on your game, and shared a few suggestions with each other about who and when to contact, but I guess next time we should really invite a marketing genius to dinner. Neither of us claim to be one.

So okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly a power-meeting or anything like that. But we did have a great time, with great company and great food. And we managed to leave a little before the metro trains quit running, which was a good thing for all of us.

One of the many topics we did discuss was the challenge of making indie RPGs compared to most other genres. Not that they are inherently difficult to develop, though that can be an issue. But they are considerably more time consuming. You can spend 4x as much time developing an RPG as an action or casual title, yet sell only 1/4th as much. This used to be offset by the fact that the RPG was poorly represented by indies (and, at the time, by mainstream studios). But lately, with the quality and quantity of RPGs appearing lately of all budget levels, I don’t feel that’s a big issue anymore. There’s a lot more competition out there than when I started working on Frayed Knights.

If we were in it for the money, we wouldn’t be making indie games at all, let alone RPGs. But I guess we do what we love and hope that we can find enough of an audience out there to afford to keep doing so.

But in the meantime, I have a day job that sends me to places like France, and it’s great that I had a chance to meet a fellow indie in the process. Good times!

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

National Game Development Month

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 1, 2012

I think this should be “International Game Development Month.” But as it’s obviously riffing on “National Novel Writing Month” (or goofily abbreviated “NaNoWriMo”), I guess that’s the name that is (currently) sticking.

Anyway – the idea is to make June the month that you make your game. Or games. To start and finish that idea that you’ve been tinkering with in your head for a long time.  The point is to do the same kind of thing one might do in a game jam, but with enough time to actually make a quality (if simple) product. It’s just one of those things with setting a goal – do it, and get encouragement to get it done. This month!

National Game Development Month Registry (NagaDemo? Works better than NaNoWriMo, at least)

I can tell you that my “Game in 40 Hours” project a few years ago took me nearly 2 weeks of part-time effort, so it can’t be huge. I really approve of events like this – any sort of game jam, really, especially the ones that deviate from the norm and reflect different time periods and goals. This one is simple, but if it encourages some new indies to ‘break the ice’ and get started and learn what it takes to build a game to completion, I call it a success.

No, I will not be participating, exactly. In spite of spending half the month on the road for the day job, I’ve got my own goals for June. Mainly they involve a project that rhymes with “Flayed Bites Coo.” After many weeks of failed experiments and “learning experiences” things are finally coming together, and I’m riding the momentum…

 

Filed Under: Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Last Chance to Get Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon On Sale!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 31, 2012

The big “Because We May” sale on Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon ends in a few hours. Hopefully, all of you reading this have already picked up your copy. If not, and if you are reading this early enough, there’s still time. Grab it!

You can also get the game at Desura, if you prefer.

This sale has been a good experience for me. It seems like the game has gotten a lot of additional exposure through the sale that it would not have gotten otherwise, and a lot of people are encountering the game for the first time. Which basically means: I suck at marketing. Or something. I’ve received some fantastic, enthusiastic feedback from new players. If I needed some additional motivation while working on the sequel, that would do the trick.

There were two things that motivated me to make the game in the first place:

#1 – There was a dearth of these first-person, party-based, turn-based RPGs that I remembered so fondly from my childhood. These were the games that inspired me. They motivated me to learn to program. So yes, in many ways, in spite of several games that I’ve shipped over the years, this one is my biggest endeavor and the fulfillment of  a childhood fantasy. Being a game developer means never having to totally grow up. I’m okay with that.

#2 – I thought there was more that could be done with the game style. Everything kinda ground to a halt after the final Might & Magic and (western) Wizardry games, and it seemed to me that there were a whole lot of wilderness adjacent to these classic games still left to be explored. For starters, there was the idea of making the characters in your party actual characters, not just stats with a voice-over. And I went from there. And now, having kicked over a couple of low fences in exploring what I thought was a wide-open field of unexplored potential for this particular subgenre of role-playing games, I have discovered that it’s far more territory left to explore than I believed when I started. I look forward to poking around a bit more out there.

While the success of Frayed Knights hasn’t been enough for me to, say, quit the day job and go full time yet or anything, it’s been a positive experience for me. I am glad to see that a lot of people are finding the game itself a good experience as well. This is the biggest thrill of all as a game developer. A game unplayed is a failure. Having people share their stories, their enthusiasm, and enjoy the game – that’s an amazing experience all by itself. It makes all the long hours worthwhile.

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

CYBERPUNK!!!!!!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 30, 2012

R. Talsorean Games’ Cyberpunk has been one of my favorite pen-and-paper RPGs for years. I was still a fan of the game long after the genre was no longer “hot.” As a child of the 80’s, I was attracted to the flavor of the genre, which naturally changed over the years, but to me always felt to me a little like it was also a child of the 80’s – sort of a dystopian mixture of high-tech and the worst excesses of the era. It took the cultural shocks of the “microcomputer” era and projected it into the future with the visionary style of the movie Blade Runner, then packaged them into not-too-distant visions of individual authors. It was very cool, heady stuff in the early 1990s, and many of the aspects of those stories have actually come to pass – or been exceeded.

It was fun to weave these stories with my players, in  backdrop where corrupt, underpowered governments were at the mercy of rampant corporatism, where individual life was cheap, but technology was cheaper, giving the common man with guts and savvy the ability to resist and fight back in a way that had been impossible in the modern era. While everyone else was mixing their cyberpunk with fantasy via Shadowrun, I was taking it straight with the rules system by Mike Pondsmith of R. Talsorean Games.

Now CD Projekt Red has announced their newest big RPG project, following the success of The Witcher and The Witcher 2. It’s  based on the Cyberpunk rules system, and they are even collaborating with Mike Pondsmith on it. Pondsmith, the original creator of the rules system, is no stranger to making video games himself, as he formerly worked on several games with Microsoft Games Studio, including one of my favorites – also licensed from a game system – Crimson Skies.

This makes me so very, very happy. I hope that the rules and ‘style’ of the game more closely mirrors those of the original or 2.0.2.0 version of the game, rather than the “Cyberpunk 3.0” rules that came out a few years ago. I did feel like those were something of a misstep – not the rules themselves, but the world overhaul.

But no matter what, I can’t wait to see what they do with it. I have high hopes.  I don’t think I would trust any other developer to do the system “right” more than CD Projekt Red. This is Good News to me.

Filed Under: Game Announcements, Mainstream Games - Comments: Read the First Comment

Off to France

Posted by Rampant Coyote on

Hopefully, by the time you read this, I will already have safely arrived in Paris. It’s another business trip for yours truly. Yeah, I still have a day job to finance my habit of making niche games. 🙂  However, this time around I’m heading out to France a few days early, and bringing Mrs. Rampant Coyote with me for a few days of vacation first before I head to Le Havre to put my nose to the grindstone.

During this time, I’m planning on getting together with Charles Clerc, maker of Sword & Sorcery: Underworld, for a dinner and hopefully lively discussion about making indie RPGs. I’m really looking forward to this. This is my first trip to Europe, and between that and taking a few days at the beginning to play tourist, I’m actually kinda excited.

Anyway, blog posts will hopefully continue as usual during this time period, but it really depends on how spotty my Internet access is over the next three weeks, and how busy I am with day job stuff.  I’ve got a few posts that have been stored up and scheduled for release during this time, but we’ll see how things go. If I do end up missing a day here or there, please bear with me.

UPDATE: Made it here safe and sound.  The flight was long, and I got almost no sleep, so I’m pretty thrashed. But otherwise, it’s great to be here!

 

Filed Under: General - Comments: Read the First Comment

Why “Because We May” & Indie Pricing Is Important

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 29, 2012

The Because We May sale is entering its last few days (so don’t forget to pick up a copy of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon for all your friends while it’s still ultra-cheap! Sorry, that was Marketing Coyote talking… back to the other one!).

During this event, I’ve seen a few comments on twitter where people don’t quite get what the big deal is.

Yeah, indies have sales all the time. This one may be unusually large, sure. And it’s about indies being in control of their own destiny, which sounds cool. But exchanging my indie hat for a gamer hat, what’s the benefit? I mean, those other channels who aren’t so indie-friendly have sales all the time, too, so what’s the big deal to me as a consumer? Why should I care that indies are setting their own prices this time around?

Excellent question.

The short answer is, “Because it means you get the games you want to play at the prices you more-or-less want to pay.” But that requires some explanation, because it’s not direct and it’s not necessarily intuitive.

Half of the answer is this: It lets the developer and the consumers arrive (hopefully) at an agreeable price between them for buying and selling the product, without a middleman interposing barriers to distort the market or add confusion to the signals. Reciprocally,  it allows customers to inform developers what kinds of games (and at what price points) they want to buy.

An example: iPhone games. Let’s imagine what would have happened if Apple, looking at the typical prices for Mac games as they launched the App store, decided in their infinite wisdom to set the standard price for all games at $6.99, $9.99, or $19.99. While there are no doubt many game developers who would rejoice initially at this “price fixing,” I suspect they’d change their tune once they discovered that their games just didn’t sell at that price. In fact, a lot of games might not sell at that price, iPhone “apps” might never have caught on in general, and people would still be waiting for the “mobile games market” to “hit.”

Now imagine for a moment if Apple had clamped down a year into the iPhone’s success, prior to the release of the iPad, and said, “You know, almost all games that are selling are selling for less than $2.99. So we’re going to put a price cap on games at that price – so consumers will all know that they are always getting really cheap games at the App Store!” If they’d done that, there’d probably never have been Avadon: The Black Fortress for iPad. Nor would we have a lot of the games now out from indies and non-indies.

Instead, game developers continue to experiment with content and pricing, and consumers get to keep voting with their wallets, signalling their willingness to try something different.

That pricing freedom means developers can experiment with niche genres. Because its niche, it has a much smaller potential audience,  which means the price may have to be a bit more. That’s where you get titles like The Many Faces of Go or X-Plane (yeah, not really a game, but still…).  The price freedom allows these titles to be made and maintained.

Freedom of pricing allows a kind of a negotiation to take place. It allows games to be sold at multiple prices to meet multiple levels of consumers. A game you are really excited about might be a bargain at $20 or $30, but I have only a passing interest in it but would be willing to pay $15 for it.  Someone else may simply not be able to afford it for more than $10. That’s what sales and discounts  are all about. Offering a game at a “pay what you want” price is something of a novelty (and for many people may be more of a “pay as little as your conscience will let you get away with” price) is another option that comes with this freedom.

Now, if money grew on trees, I’d be more than happy to just give you the game for free, or you’d be more than happy to give me a million dollars for a copy. But in the real world, we both have bills to pay, and making a game takes a lot of time, effort, and cash, and likewise you have a lot of more important things to spend your money on and probably can’t spare a lot for my game. So between the two of us, we have to come up with something reasonable. Freedom of pricing allows this discovery of what’s ‘reasonable’ to take place much more easily. As developers fiddle around with sales and price changes, they might get the idea that there’s a ‘sweet spot’ for sales and scope that is not where they thought it would be.  Maybe their audience is willing to pay more for a game like X but which is of bigger scope and higher quality.  Or maybe they’re more willing to buy it if it is broken up into bite-sized chunks. It’s a tricky dance and the steps keep changing on us, but it allows games and their prices to evolve over time to fit the expectations and demands of the players based on a very simple feedback mechanism.

And we all know how “one size fits all” usually means “one size fits poorly.”

So while a big game sale may be a big, direct, tangible benefit of indies being able to set their own prices, hopefully this little meandering rant will help illustrate how it’s something that really does pay less obvious dividends over time to the players.

 

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Tips For Getting Your Game Accepted By Steam

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 28, 2012

Not like *I* would know, ‘cuz Valve turned me down and stuff, but hey… maybe next time:

Tips For Getting Your Game on Steam (from Valve, no less!)

There are others, of course, which are not quite so much within an indie’s control. Like: Win an award from the IGF. Or my favorite: Make gobs of money with your game without Steam.

The important take-away here is not just about getting your game on a single service. These are important things to remember for all indie games. Yeah, some of it doesn’t apply quite so much to all genres and styles.  But all of these things are useful across the board for reviews, previews, sales, or any other kinds of publishing agreements. Some of the same things that will cause the overworked reviewers at Steam to dismiss your game without a second thought may do the same thing to potential customers.

 

Filed Under: Biz, Links & Tidbits - Comments: 2 Comments to Read



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