Irony (Or: Same Industry, Different Worlds)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 25, 2012

I feel a little morbid about this juxtaposition, but these happened on the same day:

A major “mainstream” development house with a huge budget fails spectacularly, potentially dragging taxpayers (and, by reputation, the games industry) down with it. In spite of a recently launched game that’s reportedly exceeded publisher expectations and sold over a million units.

Tiny little indie studios with minimal budgets launch a big event celebrating their independence and market flexibility. And, from all I can see and hear – meeting with great success.

I feel really bad for the 38 Studios employees that just got gut-punched and are now looking for jobs. That’s a LOT of developers.  I don’t know the details, but it sounds to me like Big Huge Games was reasonably successful with Kingdoms of Amalur, but 38 Studios was somehow depending on that to subsidize their development of their MMO.  The MMO sank the company. I’m hearing lots of conflicting statements about sales and expectations, but I don’t see how any company can reasonably base a business around the necessity of a new game – a new property – requiring 3 million sales to break even. Maybe I’m just too far out from the big AAA business side of things anymore, but to me that’s just inviting disaster. And disaster strikes often enough without sending it a formal invitation.

Then we’ve got the indies. The Because We May sale now has about 550 titles (with some duplicates) and counting, which really makes it an unheard-of huge sale. And from most reports I’m hearing (and the very nice, substantial bump in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon sales, both here and on Desura), it’s turning into a very nice success story for most parties involved. Probably not home-run, retire-to-our-own-private-island success, but more like Yay-We-Made-Rent-Two-Weeks-Early success. Base hits. Nice, sustainable business success that doesn’t require a blockbuster hit to avoid shuttering the company.

I know this isn’t the way the entertainment industry works. I’d love to see the above as an analogy for the entire games biz, but that’s too much wishful thinking. It has always been (and always will be) hit-driven.  The #2 game doesn’t sell half as much as the #1 game, and the #3 game is hardly in the same league #1, but it still towers over all of the other contenders, and so forth. It’s how it works.  But while the titans all slug it out – and often die messily, there’s still somehow room for these little guys to do their thing. And I think that space is growing, as the battlefield at the top becomes ever more extreme.

Quite frankly, while I appreciate pretty graphics as much as the next gamer, I find my entertainment desire isn’t served a thousand times better by a game that cost a thousand times as much to make.

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

Huge Indie Sale. Frayed Knights Over Half Off!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 24, 2012

“Because We May.”  It’s now live. For one week (the last week of May) – a whole slew of indie games are at deep discounts.

This is quite possibly the largest indie game sale ever. Nearly 400 games are participating, though in many cases these aren’t all unique games, but games on multiple platforms and multiple sales channels. Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, for example, is on sale both through this website and on Desura.

But yeah – the sale thing! This week! $9.95 if you buy direct, only a few pennies more on Desura (because their sale price tool only allows a whole-number percentage discount…). The sale ends on the first of June.

So what is this sale? Well, you can check out at the above link, but it’s basically indies promoting those sales channels that let us set our own price, and set our own sales. So some bright minds decided to go ahead and just make it a big deal, make a splash, and have a huge sale. This is the first time Frayed Knights has had a real sale (I’m not including the very limited October coupons), so I’m interested in seeing how it does.

Okay – so those of you who are new here, I’ve probably not been beating on the Frayed Knights drum as much as I should be as a ‘real’ indie guy in charge of my own marketing, so I’ll refer you to the above links. And all these blog posts about it.  Here’s the short form:

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is an indie computer role-playing game that draws heavy inspiration from “old-school” RPGs, especially the first-person variety, as well as dice-and-paper gaming. However, it takes things in its own direction. It’s character-heavy, story-heavy, and refuses to take the genre all that seriously. The dialog can get silly, the story can be quirky, the items and spells can get downright goofy, but underneath it’s a hard-core RPG with lots of character development options, stats, challenging combat, puzzles, and choices. But first and foremost, it’s about fun.  It won the Indie RPG of the Year award from both Game Banshee and RPGWatch, against some really excellent competition.

Give it a try!

Now, a lot of you already have Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, so there are a couple other computer RPGs I could recommend that are also on sale via direct sales. Telepath RPG: Servants of God is a tactical-combat-heavy RPG with a flavorful, unusual setting.  Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten is a pretty cool RPG / Tower Defense hybrid that’s worth checking out (and is ridiculously cheap through this sale, too). Jeff Vogel’s premier game in his newest RPG series, Avadon: The Black Fortress, is also available for peanuts. Well, okay, a big bag of peanuts, but still.

Some other RPG/Adventure games that I’m not so familiar with are also involved in this sale. Shepherd Slaughter is a twisted-looking roguelike.  Curse of Rock-Slate Manor is more of an “Visual Novel” adventure game, but looks cool. Speaking of which, Winter Wolves’ Spirited Heart – another “visual novel” game is also discounted – including the expansion and deluxe edition. Dark Scavenger is an RPG that has been mentioned here before. Squids is an “action strategy RPG” – parse that one! (Or better yet, play it). The arcade-style dungeon-crawler Cardinal Quest is also on sale directly.

Through Steam, there are some other indie RPG / RPG-likes on sale, like DeathSpank: The Baconing, Dungeons of Dredmor, the Cthulhu Saves the World / Breath of Death VII bundle, both Penny Arcade: The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness episodes currently available, and Dungeon Defenders. Plus there are a bunch of Mac, iOS, and Android games besides those listed here. And Kudos to Steam for coordinating with the devs to make this happen.

GOOD TIMES! That’s just focusing on the Visual Novels and RPG-like games. There are tons more in plenty of genres. I’ll be buying a bunch during this sale, myself. I won’t get bored on my upcoming business trip, that’s for sure. Be sure and check ’em out, and tell your friends about it. The biggest problem indies have isn’t publishers (or lack thereof), it isn’t budget, it isn’t experience, it isn’t access (anymore) to most platforms: It’s quite simply a lack of exposure. This is a great chance see what’s out there and enjoy some great games on the cheap.

Filed Under: Deals, Frayed Knights - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Indie Innovation Spotlight: Depths of Peril

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 23, 2012

Sooner or later, I’m bound to do one of these spotlights about a game I’ve already talked a ton about before. I figured I might as well get it over with and spotlight a favorite of mine that I’ve already spilled plenty of virtual ink over in the past. But hey, it’s been a while. And with the news that last week Diablo III broke all PC sales records and became the fastest-selling PC game in history (and here all the games websites have been telling me that the PC as a gaming platform was on the decline…), I figured today would be a good day to talk about one of the more innovative indie games that have emerged from Diablo‘s legacy.

Depths of Peril, by Soldak Entertainment

What Is It?

Depths of Peril was the freshman effort by Soldak Entertainment (which is, like many indie studios, pretty much a one-man-shop plus contractors, run by mainstream biz vet and overall cool guy Steven Peeler).  Released in 2007, it’s an action-RPG strongly rooted in the Diablo style. There are four standard classes (Warrior, Priest, Rogue, and Wizard), dynamically generated outdoors and dungeon areas, a decent number of monsters for an indie title, and of course the monsters can scale up in level as you increase power. As you advance, you also get the ability to choose some special difficulty options – like hardcore mode, loner mode, or several levels of world difficulty.

And items. Depths of Peril has plenty of items, as a Diablo-style action-RPG should.  Common items, rare items, unique items, the usual suspects.  Every time you level, you can increase your stats and buy (if you have enough money and earned skill points) increases in various skills and powers in several categories. They aren’t really a skill “tree,” but rather collections of abilities related by theme, of varying costs.

Quest-givers and merchants abound (even occasionally found in the wilderness and dungeons), with a never-ending supply of quests to accomplish and items to purchase – though of course, most of the time you’ll be selling tons of picked-up treasures to them rather than buying their wares.

All-in-all, as Diablo-style games are concerned, Depths of Peril hits all the marks. While it lacks the polish of its bigger-budget kin, it’s still a decent-looking, very fun-playing indie action-RPG title. If this was all there was to the game, I’d not hesitate to recommend it to fans of the sub-genre. But I wouldn’t be overly enthusiastic either. This is all very competently done, but we’ve seen it all before. And to be honest, if you just wanted to play Depths of Peril as a straight-up Diablo-like, you can do that and have a pretty good time playing it.

Where other games (including much bigger-budget titles) leave off, Depths of Peril is really only getting started.

What Makes It Stand Out?

The ARPG formula is really just a foundation for Depths of Peril. While other games might layer a storyline with expensive cinematics on this and call it a complete game, Depths of Peril layers on a massive dynamic world system, and then a whole ‘nother strategy game on top of that.

We’ll start with the dynamic world thing, as that’s kinda become Soldak’s focus in subsequent titles. In most RPGs, you might get a quest to defeat a boss monster. Maybe the boss monster has been dynamically generated.  Cool enough, but that’s it. The quests are conventional, but mostly meaningless. In many games, you can’t even fail the quest – though you may be able to drop them. The quest just gives you an activity to do, but is otherwise static.

In Depths of Peril, the quests may impact the world in some way, and can progress and escalate. A quest to quell an uprising of enemies, if left idle long enough, can escalate to a boss taking leadership of the uprising, to a boss creating some powerful minions, to an attack on the town of Jorvik that you are supposed to be defending. A poisoned water supply can lead to venders and quest-givers dying and being unavailable. A thief in town may deplete the town of its merchandise for sale. And so on.  And even if the quest hasn’t had a chance to escalate, you may be beaten to its conclusion by your rivals. More on this in a bit.

You can also build a “covenant” – a guilt – of additional NPC recruits who can join you on your quests. Your covenant may have one member (including yourself) of each character class. You can have one of these members join you on your quests, and your NPC assistant will also gain levels alongside you. They are much more limited in the gear they can equip than you are, so only certain items may be traded to them for any benefit. Your covenant house also sports some shrines and bookcases where you can accumulate artifacts and books that gives your covenant or members certain bonuses. Your covenant house also sports a couple of teleporters there for easy travel to and from teleport nodes (or created portals) throughout the world. There’s also a giant gem in the house that will heal your party and restore their spell points. The gem is also critically important to the success of your covenant. Oh, and you can hire guards to help you protect your covenant house from attack (along with your covenant members). Because yes, it can be attacked.

Sounds a lot more interesting, doesn’t it? Well, like they’d say in the TV direct-marketing commercials, “But wait! There’s more!”

Your covenant isn’t the only one in the city. There are other rival organizations doing the same thing you are doing. The one that gathers the most influence over the city wins.  So while you are all cooperating to assist the city, you are also competing for the end-game of ruling the city. Alliances can be formed, wars started between the guilds – er, covenants – trade shared / tribute extracted. You may compete for recruits, and will frequently be competing with them for successful completion of quests (as winning quests gets your covenant more influence over the city). You may even team up with allied covenant members as a partner for adventures rather than your own NPC henchmen.

And of course, you can destroy them. It’s a very tough thing to do, because of various home-field advantages, but you can invade their covenant house and destroy that big ol’ gem they all have, and if you do, it’s game over for your rival. And they can do the same to you.

The interplay with the other covenants can be difficult to deal with, but the game thoughtfully offered the ability to set your rival covenants’ power level when you create a new world. At low level, they don’t present much threat to you, and can often be ignored. At higher levels, it’s a frantic juggling act that requires careful diplomacy and entering into alliances to have a prayer of making it to the end-game. If things ever get too dismal, however, you are always welcome to start a new world. Your character carries over, with all his or her gear intact, but otherwise you are starting fresh with a clean slate.

Other Notes

While the dynamic world – with all of its causality and progression – carried over into later Soldak titles, the whole Covenant strategy-game layer has not (so far). I think for a lot of players, it ended up being a little “too much” – overwhelming the rest of the game. Fortunately, this was configurable, and I still hope to see a sequel with a refined version of this meta-game.

If I were to make a recommendation today, I’d probably have to point to the spiritual sequel Din’s Curse, also by Soldak. I also have high hopes for the upcoming Drox Operative, a sci-fi spacefaring game that sounds like it borrows from some of the concepts of its predecessors, including Depths of Peril. Din’s Curse dropped the idea of the covenants, and focuses on a single dungeon at a time, but it really expanded on the dynamic quest and event concept.  But while Depths of Peril is a little ‘busy’ both in terms of art and gameplay – keeping you constantly hopping – it’s both a very fun game in its own right and a stand-out example of taking a basic concept and really building upon it with more great ideas to make something brand new.

Depths of Peril, along with its siblings – is an example of what the other Diablo clones can be when they grow up.

Interested? You can pick up Depths of Peril here at Rampant Games!

 

Filed Under: Indie Innovation Spotlight - Comments: Read the First Comment

Six Ways to Avoid “Development Paralysis”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 22, 2012

There’s a term called “Analysis Paralysis” where the final decision is long-delayed while an analysis and deliberation of options goes far beyond a reasonable amount of time. While there’s a lot of discussion about it, what it really comes down to is fear – fear of making the wrong decision. By putting off a decision, people can delay the consequences of making a possibly bad decision.

In game development – and sometimes other forms of software development – there’s a similar phenomenon that I guess we could call “Development Paralysis.” I’ve referred to it before as the “Local Maxima Problem,” and I think it’s a reason most first-time indie developers fail. I still struggle with it from time to time, and I’ve been doing this for … uh, a while. Yeah, I still procrastinate, especially when big changes are necessary.

What generally happens is this: With games, in particular, development is an iterative process. While design and technical documentation up-front can help lay the foundation, ultimately making a game is an artistic process as much as a technical one. Things change. Prototype “proof of concept” code must give way to more robust development code, aspects of gameplay must be ripped out or replaced, and there will be plenty of times where serious overhauls (or less serious refactoring) will have to be done on the code as the game goes from its early stages to a finished product. Many times during production, this means that the game will have to break in order to get better.  You have to descend from the current ridge to make your way up to the summit.

This is most commonly a programming thing, but it’s not entirely restricted to that. As a writer, if you have to make a major change to a character that has ramifications through the entire script, it’s a similar feeling. As an artist, having a technical change that requires you to go back and tweak all of your old models would be a similar challenge.

This can be frustrating for many people – myself included.  As an indie, at least, you don’t have to explain to your boss why the AI that seemed to be working “90% correctly” last week is now completely non-functional, but it can still cause the kind of “paralysis” and avoidance that can really stall a project. Hobby projects – where the external motivation of being able to pay the rent is not a factor – are particularly vulnerable. I have seen countless indie game “alphas” (or “pre-alphas”) that have disappeared  forever after showing a promising demo that was “70% complete” or somewhere thereabouts. The problem being that the last 30% was going to take three times as long as the previous 70%, the developers realized it, and it can be very hard to bite the psychological bullet and spend a month re-writing a system that only took a week to write the first time around – just to see a small improvement.

As a result, motivation drops, other aspects of the game get “gold-plated” while the fundamental changes are avoided, frustration mounts as the game is in a “broken state” for a long time (particularly among other team members), and so forth.

So here are some of my suggestions for getting over that particular hump.  I’m sure there are others:

#1 – Recognize the problem. I’ve said it before, and it’s still true: Recognizing the problem is the first step to dealing with it. Sometimes it’s the only step really necessary. But for those who need a psychological boost, here are some others:

#2 – Focus on the end goal. It’s why you are making games, right? Pysch yourself up by thinking of how cool / easier to work with / faster things will be once you’ve finished this particularly cumbersome task. Yeah, so the entire data structure needs to be changed and all the existing data needs to be run through a converter, but when you are done you and your team will finally be able to do X, Y, and Z. Focus on that.

#3 – Use source control / make backups. You should be doing this anyway. It’s a lot easier to start slashing and burning when you know that your previous hard work isn’t going away, and can still be there for reference. No acrobat practices without a safety net, and your development acrobatics shouldn’t be exercised without one, either.

#4 – Work from a checklist. Getting in the habit of being checklist-driven will help in innumerable ways, but in this case can help you recognize when there are some tasks that you have been procrastinating for too long. One thing that works for me is making a habit of tackling a set of tasks as a group, one of which must be a really bitter-tasting, ugly, pain-in-the-butt task that I’m otherwise prone to procrastinate.

#5 – Break the ugly task into smaller pieces. If a serious overhaul is slowing you down because it’s daunting, take some time to figure out if there is any way of staging to re-write in smaller steps. Sometimes this isn’t possible, but I find that for myself, it’s often easier to take a series of shorter sprints than a marathon.  Or in these cases, a number of medium-length jumps is easier than trying to hop the Grand Canyon in a single bound.

#6 – Make an internal team build “snapshot” of the currently running code. Again, this should be a no-brainer, but in tiny indie teams it can be forgotten.  Where possible, other team members can still work against this old reference, and you still have something to show while waiting for the new version – your massive overhaul – to get up to speed. In a week, you can happily delete that version because it’s embarrassingly bad, but while you are making your changes it can feel like you are losing stuff forever.

Yeah, this sounds like a dumb problem, and maybe my tricks to avoid the problem sound dumb, too. Except for the source control part, as that’s pretty much standard procedure for most experienced developers (but hey, maybe the newbs don’t know about it yet). But we’re all human. Even the crazy indie developers with their crazy work hours and stuff.  Maybe this will help.

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

Because We May

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 21, 2012

Power to the Indies, Brothahs and Sistahs!

Because certain services (and, of course, direct sales) allow indies to set their own prices, the indies are getting together for a special sale this week. The last week of May. The sale is called “Because We May.”

From May 24th to June 1st, steep discounts on lots of popular indie games will be offered on certain services and direct sales.

It is listed yet (but hopefully will be very soon), but Rampant Games will be participating. While I’m certainly not opposed to receiving more money, I’d recommend to anybody thinking about picking up Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon in the near future to hold off until Thursday.

I’d also recommend browsing the selections of games available and applying the savings towards another game or three that you might be interested in.

Any other indie developers wanting to get in on this – tomorrow’s the last day to register. Go for it!

 

Filed Under: Deals, Frayed Knights - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

RPG Design: Capturing More of the Tabletop Experience

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 18, 2012

Computer RPGs began, in part, as a way for D&D players to enjoy a taste of their game without the difficulty of getting a bunch of people together at the same place and time to game. Been there, done that. If it weren’t for our regular Saturday-night games, It’d be only the occasional Thanksgiving or something where I’d actually have a chance to sling a real D20.

For a (very short) while, there, I wondered if it was worth continuing in light of MUDS and MMORPGs. I was getting online with some of the same friends I was gaming with, and we were having grand adventures – well, at first – just like our dice-and-paper nights. But now we were doing it with cool graphics and sound, and everything! It was a lot closer to what we were imagining when we were slinging the dice next to our rulebooks and character sheets.

I wondered the same thing when we started playing Neverwinter Nights or Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption online. Same deal, only now we had an actual GM / Storyteller designing the adventures and stuff.  Could this replace the Saturday Night gaming sessions for us? I mean, it was the same thing, only our miniatures looked a lot cooler, right?

They definitely scratched some of the same itches. I have some pretty fond memories from all of these games – even going through a Gary Gygax-narrated dungeon in Dungeons & Dragons Online. I mean, beat that! Seriously, that was cool stuff for an RPG geek like me.

But some stuff still doesn’t translate all that well.  And in some ways, I’m glad, because I don’t really want the tabletop experience to ever be completely emulated or surpassed by the console or computer. I mean, in my younger days, I ran around in armor with a padded sword doing battle against fantasy enemies in an experience that was far more ‘realistic’ than anything that will ever get from a monitor, and it still wasn’t a replacement for sitting around a table with friends and playing D&D.  So I’m not really worried about that.

But as an RPG designer, I’m constantly trying to mine my past experiences for ideas for making games better. With the Frayed Knights series, in particular, that’s been a focus.  But Frayed Knights is still a single-player game. In that or in a multiplayer game, what are some of the advantages of the tabletop experience that may still apply? What are some things that we do (or can do) in the tabletop setting that are still pretty uncommon in CRPGs?

The turn-based nature of tabletop gaming leads to an interestingly flexible concept of time. Waiting for another player to complete their turn in a multiplayer game can be frustrating and annoying. It can be in dice-and-paper games, too, but usually there’s a gamemaster putting pressure to keep things moving, and you can usually socialize, kibbitz, comment, and plan with your fellow players while waiting for your turn. It’s slower-paced, but more social. I’m pleased that there are some indie online RPGs taking that approach (like Conclave, which I’ve only played a little of), but it’s still a rare thing.

The open-endedness of the tabletop game is something that CRPGs will forever have a difficult time emulating. I’m not talking about big, open worlds or about branching plotlines – I’m talking a freedom of choice of actions. In a human-controlled world, everything is interactive. Some of our coolest adventuring sessions involved a discussion with the DM and an unusual choice of action based upon the setting and situation that really twist things around. This is where players do things to trick the bad guys, or decide to use DISINTEGRATE on the wall to bypass a trap rather than using it to destroy enemies, or create illusions of something that forces an enemy’s hand.

Then of course, there’s the role-playing. No, we’re not going for a Tony award or trying to emulate Shakespeare with our efforts. And some players (and games) are less likely to do anything more than ‘play themselves.’ But some games and groups do encourage it. Often, it’s nothing more elaborate than arguing with the party paladin or cleric over whether or not to undertake a questionable course of action.  Or just adding a little bit of personality to your actions by your description. In a computer or console RPG, there may be nothing more to an action than pressing a button or clicking the mouse. But in the tabletop RPG, you can say something like, “My barbarian is infuriated by the goblin’s attack on Lady Tyra. He bellows a war-cry and puts all his might into a two-handed blow to squash the goblin like a bug.” It’s functionally the same as clicking the attack button, but it’s a lot more colorful.

The permanency of decisions is something else that adds to the drama of tabletop games, but is almost non-existent in single-player games (except those with permadeath, I guess), and is still pretty weakly employed in MMOs. In dice-and-paper games, there’s no restoring from a saved game.  Not without powerful magics or GM intervention, that is.  In MMOs, there is likewise no saved game, but consequences tend to be pretty flexible. “Grinding faction” and “respecs” (re-building your character) are common.  This is no doubt necessary in a computer-moderated game that doesn’t have the ability to change its story or path to allow players to redeem themselves from unfortunate decisions, but it can rob a game of some of its drama.

Truly interactive storytelling – personalizing the story around the player characters – is another biggie that may never be solved. In tabletop gaming, a good game master will customize the story around the players’ characters. They’ll respond to whatever reasonable crap the players make up, whether it’s a deep background item in their character history, or simply the way they acted goofy in the presence of the king.  Sure, games can (and frequently do) allow for certain ‘meaningful choices’ from time to time, but those are canned options.

Finally, there are some more social elements of these games that aren’t necessarily big  features, but interesting. Things like having friends play your character on an evening when you are going to have to miss or be late to the game. The silly weirdness that players get about their dice, especially when they find themselves on a lucky or unlucky streak. Having characters move back and forth between campaigns by different GMs (a rare thing these days, much more common way back when).  And then dealing with the eventual demise of a character – including the question of divvying up their gear among the survivors…

These are just some of the things that stand out about dice-and-paper gaming that translate poorly (if at all) to their computer-moderated counterparts – even when one player is able to act as a game-master.  But I think there are things that can be done to borrow at least some of that flavor for CRPGs. I wouldn’t recommend any indies out there trying to tackle all of them at once. And some people have spent their entire careers trying to achieve true ‘interactive storytelling.’ But I do believe there’s plenty of room in there for small victories for indies willing to innovate.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

“Always On” DRM

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 17, 2012

Everybody knew it would be a problem.

The publisher and developer knew it would be a problem.

The publisher / developer took enormous steps to prevent it from being a problem.

It was still a problem. A big problem.

I’m sure things settled down nicely and the developer / publisher is probably correct in assuming that in a few weeks nobody will really care about the nerdrage-inducing launch problems which have existed for every almost every popular mainstream game with online activation or other connection requirements to be able to play.

I’m not talking about any specific game here. You can fill in the blank with any number of popular mainstream games here that have “always on” DRM or require online activation servers to play what is primarily a single-player game. This week we had another high-profile failure. One of a long list.

Servers are going to get clobbered. Day 1, and the first few days thereafter, are going to suffer from combined problems of a new release, probably a lifetime peak of users, and inexperience dealing with “live” issues. It’s just gonna happen. And someday, in the not-too-distant future, the servers are gonna be shut off entirely. And while it’s easy to say, when the game is new and generating revenue, that you will patch it eventually so that it will be able to function after than eventuality, it’s not going to be a priority several years later when the original team has gone and the company staff is receiving a pink slip.  These are all just real world problems. They happen. Deal.

So the least a game should do is make the experience as painless as possible for the customer. Instead, we have this ugly breed of DRM that denies the customer the right to actually, you know, USE the thing they just paid a lot of money for until the publisher can get their act together. WHY do people in the games biz keep insisting that this is not a bad idea?

Probably because they think their audience will eventually accept it as “the new normal.” Sadly, they are probably right.  But I’m a retro-gamer, and I still dust off older games and play them from time to time. Every time I do, I think, “If these games had modern DRM protections on them, I could not do this. This game would be completely lost to me, and lost to history.” Oh, I’m sure somebody would crack it. But do you really want to rely upon shady third parties operating in a gray area to make your product functional over the long term?

Not being able to play your game at all is not “painless.” Having your gameplay interrupted frequently for downtimes is not “painless.” Yeah, it happens in MMOs all the time. If I’m playing an MMO – or another game that is clearly ‘server based’ – I come in with those expectations. Not a big deal. But when I am playing a game that to me feels like a personal, single-player experience running on my own system, I expect it to run. I don’t expect to have to keep asking permission from somewhere to keep playing the game I spent good money for.

It’s the “guilty until proven innocent” model of assuming your players are thieves until they can validate their identity as real customers.  I recognize the need to fight piracy. Believe me. My games – both mainstream and indie – have been pirated to hell and back. I’m way anti-piracy. I piss off readers by going on rants about what douche bags the pirates are.

But do you want to know the best form  of anti-piracy?

Being pro-customer.

Just my opinion.

But then, they sell a million copies at launch, and I … uh, don’t. So maybe I’m the idiot here.

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 27 Comments to Read

Indie Innovation Spotlight: Corncob 3D

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 16, 2012

For this week’s installment of the Indie Innovation Spotlight, I reached for the back ‘o the rack, to grab a game that is now about twenty years old.  Twenty years old, and still largely unmatched. Predating the term “indie” by almost a decade, and even predating the real surge in ‘shareware,’ it remains one of the few indie flight simulators and is chock full of some of the most bizarre yet cool ideas found in its genre. I should add that I think some of those cool ideas derived straight from the game’s limitations.

I’m talking Corncob 3D.

Corncob 3D, by Pie in the Sky Software

What Is It?

Taking place in an alternate history where Adolf Hitler died as a youth* and World War II never happened, Corncob 3D is a flight simulator (yes, an honest-to-goodness flight sim, not an action game taking place in a plane) of a souped-up Corsair Fighter (nicknamed the ‘Corncob Corsair’, thus the game name). In lieu of human enemies in the 1940s, you are fighting entrenched alien invaders.  That’s right, aliens from outer space.  You must do battle with alien invaders in what is otherwise a … well, close to what passed for a hard-core flight sim in 1992. Or, rather, what would have passed for one a few years earlier.

The game offered several missions, training missions, flight rosters of pilots, awards and ribbons for your pilots, multiple campaigns (well, theaters of operations), and “realism” toggles. Pretty standard fare for a flight sim of the era, albeit lower on the frills. The graphics were a few years behind the time, as would be expected, resembling more of a late-1980s flight simulator with flat terrain. Objects were made of of 3D spheres, lines, and untextured polygons. Yes, it was abstract. But it worked.  Those spheres, lines,  and spinning polygons became flying saucers, enemy homing drones (“Deathballs”), alien bases, and more.  A rear view out of the cockpit was essential, especially when dodging the aforementioned homing drones.

Your plane was equipped with guns and rockets to accomplish your mission. I understand some of the missions in the full (‘deluxe’) version took place in other worlds. Prototype prop-driven Corsairs in space? Yeah. It totally went there. Way cool.

What Makes It Stand Out?

Okay, just the idea of fighting bizarre sci-fi battles in a somewhat realistic flight sim (as opposed to just “an action game”) is a pretty cool idea right there.  But the game was filled with even more goodness. Corncob 3D‘s primitive 3D graphics were abstract even in 1992, but from the abstraction the developers managed to pull off some cool, if bizarre, concepts.

Like the alien bases having a reality distortion / warp field around them that caused your 3D viewport to pulse and distort as you got closer to it.

Like being able to eject from your plane and run around armed with a pistol. And remote-control your plane from the ground.

Like having one airfield located in the sky, rather than the ground.

Like having a rescue van come out and pick you up after you ejected if you were a long way from base.

Like having a persistent battlefield with the aliens actually attacking your airfield.

Like having a failure screen telling you that you were captured by the aliens and forced to clean alien toilets for the rest of your dreary life.

Yeah, this is some pretty wacked-out stuff.  I guess the feeling was that if they were going to be weird and crazy, they may as well crank it up to eleven and get really weird and crazy. They succeeded.  This all reinforced the fun factor of the game. Yeah, this was a flight simulator. Yeah, landing your plane even without battle-damage could be a challenge. Especially 10,000 feet in the air.  But hey, it’s all challenge in the name of goofy fun, right?

Yeah.  Not all that beautiful of a flight sim, even in 1992.  But this was EGA graphics, and most of the game was written in friggin’ assembly. Physics in assembly. Crazy stuff.

The rampant, goofy premise was what struck me – then and now – about the game. As much as I caution about “kitchen sink design” (you know, where you throw in every feature but the kitchen sink), this game proves that an appropriate grab-bag of ‘cool stuff’ can really make a game stand out and come alive. A “serious” flight sim at this time wouldn’t have been noticed in the popularity of the genre back then if it hadn’t been for their willingness to just do all kinds of weird, fun stuff with it.  I mean, I can’t name one other flight sim that would allow you to complete your mission on foot – with a pistol.  The creators just threw in tons of neat (and silly) ideas because they were cool. And it worked.

Other Notes:

This game amazed me when it came out. Indie wasn’t “a thing” then, but that was perhaps my first (or second, after Commander Keen) glimpse into the possibility that the shareware scene could be more than just “me too” Arkanoid clones.  It was the creative goofiness when combined with the traditionally straight-man flight sim genre that really won me over. The indies have been doing some amazing things for a long time.

It was a pretty decent success in its time – not to Commander Keen or Wolfenstein 3D levels, but as shareware games generally went, it was a hit. It even made it to retail stores.  Most people that I knew hadn’t heard of it, or knew about shareware at all. But the shareware fans (there were a few of us… poor, starving college kids tended to seek out cheap games), would often eagerly talk about Corncob 3D.

You can read about the development of the game, and check out some of the assembly code source, right here.

A little more from the same site about the history of the game (and the company).

 

* At age 19, he suffered a fatal hit on the head from a beer bottle.  Musta been one of those time travelers gone back to kill him as a child. Er, youth.

Filed Under: Indie Innovation Spotlight - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

Diablo. Or How To Quit Talking About It and Actually Do It.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 15, 2012

So I hear there’s some kind of action-RPG that was just released today? Kind of a niche action-roguelike or something? I hope their budget was small, because those kinds of games just don’t sell…

Seriously, though, I’m a big fan of the first two Diablo games. The reasons I’m holding off on picking up the long-anticipated third game are: #1 – I’m waiting until after my trip to France (dunno what my bandwidth will be in the hotels, friggin’ online-in-single-player mode thingy…), #2 – I promised myself I wouldn’t pick it up until I finished Grimrock, and #3 – I promised myself I wouldn’t pick it up until I got this dungeon rendering system for Frayed Knights 2 completely functional, and it’s just received yet another major overhaul (New engine, new way of handling dungeons).

I’m also kinda waiting to hear the reviews, but, you know, DUH. Like they aren’t going to gush about the awesomeness of the game?

But setting the wayback machine just a little… well, okay, something like 16 years ago (sheesh!), I wanted to comment a little on the importance of the original. Yes, I know, many of us blame Diablo for turning the RPG genre into a click-fest, but on the plus side it probably deserves a good share of credit for making the pronouncements of the death of the genre sound foolish.

But there were a few more interesting tidbits.

First of all, as some of you know, Diablo was originally planned as a turn-based game. The guys at the original Blizzard shop managed to convince the developers that it was a bad idea – and in retrospect, if selling a couple of million copies is your goal, they were probably right.

But there were two discussions that were going around in some of the magazines and Usenet groups for a few years before Diablo‘s release. (Wow, magazines and Usenet… it really has been a long time, hasn’t it?). I remember this because both topics really fascinated me. One was the commercial viability of roguelikes. Fans of roguelikes – particularly Nethack – wondered out loud (or at least in print, or digitally) what would happen if a quality RL had nice graphics and a mouse-driven, pretty user interface built onto the system. Granted, they already had their answer, as Rogue had long ago had a commercial release, and 1993’s Dungeon Hack was a roguelike using the Eye of the Beholder engine and D&D rules. But the discussion continued.

The second discussion, generating far more arguments over the years, is how one might implement a peer-to-peer RPG. MUDs and the like were already common, but the question was how a company could implement a system that did not require a server to store the characters and the game state. A lot of the ideas that found their way into Diablo were discussed. I don’t know if the original design team was ever a party to any of these discussions prior to beginning development. I wouldn’t expect so, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to hear that that anybody there was.

When Diablo was released, I won’t say it put an end to these discussions, but it certainly pounded a big ol’ gold-plated stake in the ground that forever changed the argument. My attitude when I played the game – especially playing multiplayer for the first time, was “Holy Crap! They did it! These guys finally did it.” These discussions and arguments had been going on for years, in the vacuum of the Internet and bulletin board systems. It had all been theory, and the talk had felt endless. Finally, it seemed to me, somebody had quit talking and done something about it. It was far from perfect. In fact, its imperfections were pretty glaring. But now, instead of talking in circles about nebulous ideas, we could talk about how things should be done better to “get it right.” But someone had to get in there and put a stake in the ground. It was a big step.

They took the idea and ran with it. And in this case, they were very successful at it.

Nowadays, while that’s not exclusively in the realm of indies, it seems like the larger studios and publishers are more focused on refining and polishing tried-and-true ideas than running with new ones. But we still need guys who will take ideas and run with them, proving (or disproving, as the case may be) some weird ideas. Someone needs to be first. Or second with a new twist. It’s where we’re getting games like Braid (experimenting with time-control mechanics), or Canabalt (experimenting with a single, simple control), Depths of Peril (adding dynamic worlds and competing factions on a Diabl0-style foundation).  Minecraft, Gratuitous Space Battles, and – yeah, I’ll crow even about Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon here and note how it was created on the idea of having that first-person party do the comic-book style dialog with each other.

We need the indies doing just that. Quit talking about it and do it.

Filed Under: Game Development, Retro - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part XII – Putting It All Together and Going Indie!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 14, 2012

While it’s tempting to end this series on the thirteenth installment, we’re really at the point where the story is “more of the same.” The story is far from over, but things really come to enough of a conclusion here to end things. So here goes.

As excited as I was to find work at Acclaim after the massive SingleTrac layoff, it didn’t end so well. The big “dot-com” recession – which impacted the entire high-tech industry sector, not just the “dot-coms” – was going to claim Acclaim soon. Sorry for the alliteration. Not that Acclaim was really just a victim of the recession – but IMO the economic conditions made it very difficult for it to weather the storm. I was assigned to doing the Dreamcast port of Acclaim’s latest wrestling game. I learned more about pro wrestling than I ever wanted to know. It marked the first time I found myself developing a game that I really couldn’t play.

In six months, Acclaim had two major rounds of layoffs. I wasn’t hit by either one, but the second one disgusted me. An entire team was lied to, told they’d been given an extra month to hit a milestone, everything was A-OK, and that management was pleased with their effort. This was all a lie, as the team was (mostly) laid off one by one as they came into work the next morning, their project canceled. Between that, and the “mandatory” sixty-hour work-weeks one team had been on for six months straight, I decided that this must be what the rest (non-SingleTrac) games industry must be like, and all those horror stories I’d been told about at GDC and so forth were really true.

I’d decided I’d had enough, and started looking for a new job – preferably outside the games industry. Making the switch to or from the games industry as a programmer isn’t easy (but I imagine it’s easier than it is for an artist or especially a game designer), but I found another opportunity – which was itself another victim of the “dot-com crash” a little over a year later.

My idea when I left was to maybe figure out a way to make my own studio or something to that effect. I really wanted to make my own games, instead of other people’s games. I wanted to make the kinds of games I wanted to play – especially the kind that the games industry wasn’t really making anymore. Like RPGs! I puttered around with a homemade game engine, first experimenting with a massively multiplayer RPG. Yes, in spite of years of experience, I was a newb when it came to scoping out my game.  It didn’t take long before I realized that I was in far over my head if I wanted to make a product that was in any way competitive in the market, and decided to backtrack and do something simple – REALLY simple. I went back to the idea I’d fiddled with during the Christmas holiday – a space combat game. I went all the way back to the original Space War game for my inspiration.  Throw in a little bit of Star Control (which was also based on Space War), some classic arcade game ideas, and the first-person cockpit perspective like the Wing Commander series I loved so much, and I was in business.  I had no plan other than to see how far I could go with this game concept. It just sounded like a fun game to make.

Mid-way through development, when I started realizing that yes, I was going to be able to finish this game, and no, I had no idea what to do next, I started doing some research into selling games online. About the only experience I’d had was the old shareware model from the mid-90’s, so I used that as a starting point when I did my research. Through that, I discovered “indie games” – what shareware games had kinda evolved into.  I discovered that there were a LOT of developers out there making games, and an unreal number of games out there that I’d never heard of. I was astonished, overwhelmed, and pretty excited about the possibilities. It was like this entire underground gaming business had been thriving in the years I’d been stuck in the mainstream industry.

Void War was the result. While never a big success, I have a great deal of pride in that game. Warts and all, it was entirely mine.  And it is a dang fun game.

Through Void War and my research into the indie games field – and some mutual friends – I became associated with three guys from Wahoo Studios. They had a game that was nearly done that they’d put a lot of time and effort into, and had been shopping it out to publishers without any success. Finally, in exasperation, they decided to release it on their own, but had no idea how to do it. I was able to act as an “indie consultant” with them, basically just giving them a brain dump of the things I’d learned. They created a new “indie” brand for their company – NinjaBee – and released Outpost Kaloki for the PC. It struggled on the PC, which did not feel like a resounding success for going indie. But with the upcoming XBox 360 and “Live Arcade,” there was another opportunity for an independent release of the game. The XBox version, Outpost Kaloki X, did quite well for NinjaBee, as have many of their later self-published titles.

I eventually ended up working with these guys for a while, which was a lot of fun. Later, having let the camel’s nose into the tent, I found myself working back in the “mainstream” games biz (kinda) working for a place called Sensory Sweep. The latter experience once again met too many of the stereotypes of working in the games biz, including the point where the entire studio melted down. I was lucky enough to catch the warning signs early and get out before I was owed a lot of money, unlike some of my coworkers. Fortunately, while working at both companies, I was given leave to continue working on indie games so long as I maintained separation between that my employment.

With Sensory Sweep’s meltdown, I once again exited the full-time games biz, and found another full-time job to finance my part-time game-making habit. And here we are.

My take-away from these experiences is something that I think many (most?) game developers will commonly express: I love making games. I hate the games industry.

That pretty much says, “Indie Rules!” to me.

With about ten years of experience as a game development employee for various studios, and several years of varying levels of activity as a part-time indie developer, and a decade before that of being a game fan who tinkered with making games since the early days, I also wonder when I’m actually going to get good at it. I wasn’t born as a John Carmack or a Wil Wright. I’ve been very lucky and learned a lot in my career and experiences, but magic doesn’t come out of my fingertips when I touch the keyboard. I’m a working-class game developer with big ideas but little time, who really just loves making (and playing) games. My reach often exceeds my grasp, but I don’t harbor many illusions about becoming the next indie darling.

But I’m still doing what I love.  And I guess that’s what really matters.

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story - Comments: 4 Comments to Read

Dang I Feel Old. More 20th Anniversary Goodies…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 11, 2012

Dang. First it was Ultima VII and Ultima Underworld celebrating 20th anniversaries. Coupled with the 30th anniversary of the Commodore 64, I’m really starting to feel old. It can’t have been all that long ago, could it? Sheesh. I need to get off the dime and finally finish some of the games I’ve been meaning to go back to for the last 20 years…

Anyway, at the dawn of the “boom” in the shareware industry, we had Epic Megagames appear. Which later evolved into just Epic, and is now a pretty mainstream studio producing some of the biggest-budget titles out there. How things have changed, right? I blame Unreal. I’m still waiting for a new Jazz Jackrabbit and Jill of the Jungle.  And my wife and I bought every one of their Epic Pinball games in the complete … what, $60 package? Something like that. That’s a purchase I still don’t regret, and thanks to DOSBox I find myself still loading up those tables and playing a quick round now and again. Good stuff. And I compete against my own high scores from… uh… a long time ago. Good gravy…

Anyway, to celebrate, Epic has released a free music album of music from many of their games over the last 20 years. There are tracks from Bulletstorm, Unreal Tournament, Jill of the Jungle, Epic Pinball, Gears of War, you name it. Good audio fun!

Epic 20th Anniversary Soundtrack

Next up… Wolfie.

Yes, it’s been twenty freaking years for Wolfenstein 3D. Twenty years since that summer when I opened up the door on that last level and nearly fell out of my chair when I was greated by a giant Nazi saying “GUTEN TAG!” before opening up with his twin chain-guns. Man. That was an awesome summer.

And now – you can play Wolfenstein 3D in your browser.  Back then we didn’t really have browsers. I think we had Gopher. But I didn’t know about it then, and was just using FTP and TELNET. Anyway, I ramble. Amusingly enough, id Software was a young shareware (today we’d call them “indie”) studio back then, and Bethesda was a scrappy young … publisher? Were they publishing back then or just a development studio? Anyway – times change.

Twenty frickin’ years. Sheesh. Okay, and to spice up things even more, we’ve got a video commentary of John Carmack discussing the development of Wolfenstein 3D as he plays.  I’ll just embed this puppy. For me, as a developer, it’s ridiculously cool to listen to, full of nostalgia and familiar development tidbits. For others, it may be a big pile of meh.  But here you go…

Twenty frickin’ years.

Where has the time gone?

Oh, yeah. I had family, graduated from school, and have had a pretty eventful career. Okay, I guess it was a while ago. But some things still feel like they were just last summer.

BTW, if you ever get the chance to read the book Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, do so. It’s a fascinating look at the early days of id Software, and into the 1990s game development / shareware era in general. Things are at their absolute coolest, IMO, during the Wolfenstein 3D development period.

This was all stuff that inspired me to try to make games for a living in the first place. My course-load was very light over the summer, my knees had disqualified me from the Air Force, and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I was playing a lot of games, and was getting a degree in Computer Science. It still seemed like a pipe dream at the time, but … hey. It all happened. It probably would have happened without Epic Pinball and Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld. But when I look back at the games that inspired me and pointed me in the direction I’ve been going, those are some of the main ones that I can point to as an influence.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part XI: The End of an Era

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 10, 2012

So at this point, you probably have a pretty good idea of how I got to be a game developer. Normally, at this point, the most interesting parts would be behind us. But the story is about to take a twist.

But first, there’s the death of Singletrac.

The first two years of SingleTrac’s existence were pretty amazing. But in spite of (or maybe because of) with the success of all of our games the first two years, things began going downhill. I won’t pretend that I understand why. While I was given some raises and bonuses and promoted up to a “senior” software developer, I was still just one of the foot soldiers doing my job while the brass did their thing. This is a game dev’s story, not the story of a studio, so in spite of being in the middle of it, I really don’t know what happened. Mine was a mouse-eye view. But here’s my perspective, and what I learned.

The big rumbling was that in spite of our perceived success with all four of our titles thus far (Warhawk, Twisted Metal, Twisted Metal 2, and Jet Moto), SingleTrac didn’t receive huge gobs of money. That’s kinda how the mainstream business works. As an unknown studio, the publisher took the risk with us, and the publisher consequently reaped the lion’s share of the profit.  While I might quibble over the percentages (and yeah, I do…), I cannot argue that the premise is unfair. As an unknown with zero track record, Sony took a big risk on us initially to fund the company, and it was a gamble that I assume paid off handsomely. But the terms of that initial deal were apparently (again, I’m not privy to the details, just the scuttlebutt) not in our favor should the games do much better than expected. So while SingleTrac was able to afford to not only stay in business but to modestly grow, and at least give me a pretty decent raise to something that approached “industry standard wages,” it wasn’t like we were all able to go out and buy fly yellow Hummers.

I think this led our company president to tell us in one company meeting that we were now an “intellectual property” company. Which was weird for me, because I thought we were a game company. But he evidently saw where the value really was. The guys who owned the IP rights – like Disney – were at the top of the heat. The lowly developers? Pretty much the bottom of the food chain.

So we decided to branch out. We eventually made a deal with Microsoft for a couple of games, though that ended up coming down to a single game: Outwars. We continued to work with Sony on a sequel to Jet Moto. And, a year or so later, we were trying to find a buyer. We were eventually bought by GT Interactive, which then was bought by Infogrammes, which then bought Atari and started migrating to that brand name.

I’ve chronicled the development (and problems) involved in making Outwars already. I just linked to that rather than rehash it here.

After Outwars, or more specifically after we discovered that Outwars was not a hit game (and neither was any of SingleTrac’s other non-Sony offerings, for that matter, in spite of their quality IMO – Streak remains  a personal favorite), I found myself moved to working on a budget title (Snowmobile Racing, and its sequel, Snowmobile Championship 2000), which I later understood was a developed in order to fulfill a contractual obligation with GT Interactive / Infogrammes for a productivity level in terms of number of games in order to receive extra money from our buy-out agreement.

To be fair, I got a nice bonus from it, which was nice. But I also hurt myself on those projects. In order to hit the deadline, I killed myself on the Snowmobile projects. I was working in excess of 90-hour weeks in order to get the game finished on time. My family suffered.  When it was done, and it was… well, not great, but serviceable (I think it sold something like 20,000 copies… which would be awesome if I were an indie!), I found I’d died a little inside. One the one hand, my love of just making games had diminished. On the other, however, I came to appreciate the idea of ‘budget’ games, a growing market.

I did get a couple of high-points from this. In-between games, our team got to take a snowmobiling vacation research trip to Yellowstone Park. It was awesome, especially after the stress of getting an entire game completed and out the door in just over 90 days. And later, I was invited to our first (and, as it turned out, last) “GT Technical Summit” with some of the top developers of several of GTs studios in Las Vegas. It was only something like fifty people at the two-day event. I got to hang out with legends like Ron Gilbert and Bob Bates. There was a brand new studio (which didn’t last long, much to GT’s embarrassment) made up of Origin alumni called “Bootprint Interactive.” A lot of the guys from Cavedog were there, showing us the technology for their newest games (as well as explaining the technical hurdles they overcame making Total Annihilation and TA: Kingdoms).  This was even cooler than the Game Developer’s Conference for me, mainly for to the more intimate setting. I learned a lot about how the other guys did it.

But all of these companies there weren’t long for the world. You can see what happened to Cavedog shortly thereafter about this same time period by reading its Wiki.  It’s parent didn’t last a lot longer. Bootprint never got off the ground. Legend lasted quite a bit longer, but troubles were hitting. And Singletrac? SingleTrac hadn’t had a hit game in a while, and we were clearly in the midst of painful political strife both internally, and between us and our parent company. We had a couple rounds of layoffs. A lot of the “key people” from the early days had left the company to start a new one. The writing should have been on the wall for me, but I was too inexperienced to see it.  I’d been moved over to the Animorphs team to help that team with the licensed game that was having all kinds of problems of its own. I was again working rough hours (though not as bad as they’d been while I was doing Snowmobile Racing). On Valentine’s Day 2000, I got up extra early to go in to work so I could get home at a reasonable hour to celebrate the holiday with my wife and family. My wife and I argued that morning, as we had a bit over the last year over my hours. It was harder to make excuses because my heart wasn’t really into making the games anymore, after five-and-a-half years at the company. I was tired. I promised I’d work something out, but I didn’t know what.

A little after lunchtime someone came by my cubicle and asked why half the company was gone. I said I didn’t know, but I was sure it was nothing. Fifteen minutes later, those of us who had not been quietly invited to the ‘meeting upstairs’ were rounded up and rather rudely laid off. Singletrac was completely shuttered a few months later (after releasing Animorphs), and that was that.

I was terrified. This had been my only job since college, and I had a family to feed. What would I do? I had five weeks of severance pay to figure something out! Would I stay in games? It was, I had heard, very difficult to make the switch between the games business and ‘serious’ software development.

I heard a rumor, as I was moving my box of stuff out to my car along with the half of the company that had been let go, that the local branch of Acclaim (formerly “Sculptured Software”) was hiring. That have me a glimmer of hope as we gave each other – ‘survivors’ and refugees both – somber but heartfelt goodbyes.

To end this on a much happier note… by the end of the day, I’d been contacted by Acclaim. A lot of us were. They were desperate for experienced game programmers, and hearing of the layoffs at SingleTrac was a blessing for them. They had a group interview for us the next morning, and shortly thereafter gave us an offer that I’ve never had before and probably never will again: They couldn’t use us for two weeks, but they were desperate and would begin our salary immediately after we accepted the offer.

I said yes. The offer was a raise over what I’d been getting at Singletrac. And I’d be able to stay local, and still work in games. Sweetheart deal right? So there I was, with more than double my salary and two weeks with nothing to do.

I told my wife, “Grab the kids and pack the bags. We’re going to Disneyland.” And we did.

What I learned:

The ‘warning signs’ I saw and ignored at SingleTrac helped me know when it was time to jump ship from my last gig in the games biz. Once bitten, twice shy.

I also burned myself out during the last year or so at SingleTrac in a way that I don’t know I ever fully recovered from. I’d made myself physically ill, and put my family – the most important thing in my life – in jeopardy.  Why? The bonus wasn’t worth it. The stock options were definitely not worth it.  I am forever indebted to my team at SingleTrac and have no regrets about the choice I made to be there – I learned a lot, and grew a lot professionally. But when it was all over – I still have my family, while the company is long gone.  That was an important lesson in priorities.

That doesn’t mean that pulling the crunch mode hours and the occasional all-nighter is off-limits. Things gotta get done – especially when it’s a sprint to make a milestone or to get that bonus. It’s the extendo-crunch-time thing, though, that really chews up developers and spits them out.

Another thing I learned was the power of strong marketing. After Sony, nothing we did really performed well. I don’t think these were exclusively the problem of the games. Yeah, I think we erred on Outwars (and some of that was probably my fault, though I technically didn’t have any authority over the game) and made it more of a niche title than we should have.  And we made some bad decisions (which were not my fault, as it was actually over my objections) to stick with older technology during development which we had to reverse late in development – but too late to change art most art assets to take advantage of the better technology.

I think I did get a feel for the danger of a studio growing too big. On the one hand, it feels safer – you don’t put all your eggs in one basket anymore. You can have several “bets” going at one time, in the hopes that one hit will carry the rest of the company through. But a larger studio (I think at its peak SingleTrac – all by itself – was around 80 or 90 employees) has a ferocious burn-rate. And more (and longer) meetings. And less flexibility. And much, much more politics. And less feeling of a personal ‘stake’ in the games.

And while I disagree (still) with the direction of focusing out company on being an “IP company,” I have learned that the core idea was correct: It’s all about owning the rights. The rights to your games (hey, indies, I’m talking to you) are critical. You may not be able to exploit them yourself – we certainly didn’t do a good job of it without Sony’s help. But that doesn’t mean they should be treated as valueless. Owning the I.P. rights means owning the right to have other people make money for you. It means being in control of your own destiny.

Next time, I’m going to talk about my brief stint at Acclaim – which unbeknownst to me wasn’t too far behind all these other companies for its own collapse – and my path to GOING INDIE!

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story - Comments: Read the First Comment

Indie Innovation Spotlight – Inside a Star-Filled Sky

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 9, 2012

Okay, it’s time for another installment of the “Indie Innovation Spotlight.” After our inaugural edition, pretty much any other game highlighted here would be more obscure, which works for me. Not all of these games are necessarily recommended by me, personally, as I don’t guarantee that they are good. I just wanted to highlight the indies that break out of the norm and do something really cool and innovative with their craft.

Inside a Star-Filled Sky, by Jason Rohrer

What is it:

Inside a Star-Filled Sky is kind of an experiment in procedural content creation built around a theme of “infinity” and polished up for public consumption.  It’s … weird, man. In a cool way. Okay – on the face of it, it’s a 2D, top-down shooter. It’s got kind of a blocky 8-bit look to it with 16-bit color and sound. You shoot things while looking for an exit. Things shoot back. And there are pick-ups that can change how many hits you can take, and how your bullets fire.

And there can be bullets. Lots of bullets. At higher levels, it can be a little like a “bullet hell” shooter, but often in tight corridors with you dodging around corners.

What Makes It Stand Out:

Okay, so far, so boring, right? Well, that’s just the foundation of the game. After that, things get really weird. See, the game is infinitely recursive. When you exit a level via one of the “up arrow” exits, you actually become a creature that incorporates whatever you obtained on the way “out” into its being. So the pick-ups that you grab are not actually useful right away – they are useful for the creature that you become. And then a combination of those abilities plus whatever IT picks up becomes the foundation for the next creature, and so forth.

But it goes both ways. If you get “killed,” you get knocked back inside yourself.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Your next time through “your” level, you can choose different pick-ups and make yourself a better-adapted creature on your next iteration. Cool, huh? You can even go backwards beyond your starting form into infinitely decreasing negative levels, where your on-screen avatars gain a more ghostly appearance.  You don’t have to die to do this, either: by shift-clicking, you can go back inside yourself to ‘reinvent’ yourself at any time.

But you can also go laterally, which is what makes the game really interesting.  You can shift-click on pick-ups or on enemies to re-write THEM as well.  Then the changes that you make do not apply to your own form, but to what they will become when you exit. So if a level doesn’t have the right pick-ups that you want, or if a particular enemy has a bullet pattern that you just don’t know how to defeat, you can shift-click on them to change them to something more your liking.

You can also iteratively go backwards (and laterally) inside them, as well. Once inside a pick-up, you can go inside “yourself”, then inside an enemy, then… well, let’s just say it gets really hard to keep track of who “you” are after a while.

While it’s a single-player game, but there is some limited interaction between players. There are permanent and temporary flags which you can place in a level that can be seen by others. The first person to place a permanent flag gets it installed forever. The most recent person to place a temporary flag in place gets to have it… until the next person replaces it. I don’t really know how it works, but I do know that your custom flag pattern that you design in the game also gets a custom musical theme created based on its pattern and color, and the themes of nearby flags weave themselves into the music of the game. The levels are procedurally generated – not random- so people do go to the same levels.  There are infinite potential levels out there, but they are all predetermined. The pick-up in location X,Y inside monster Z on level 19 is always the same for everybody.

How’s that for funky?

But is it fun? Well, yeah, it was for me. But it’s inescapably one of those things that really depends on tastes.

It’s fun for me in a weird, mind-bendy way. Because I can always go backwards and sideways, I never really have to worry about getting ‘stuck’ in a level for too long. It’s not the kind of game I’d devote long stretches of time to play (which probably adds to my confusion about ‘who / where am I?’).

So as a game, it’s okay. But as a thought-provoking experiment and a toy to play with, it’s definitely pretty cool.  I think that as a designer, it’s particularly fascinating, particularly with the kinds of ideas it opens up for dealing with death or interactions with other entities in a game. And the theme of infinity – and constant progression / improvement – is both subtle and power. While its innovations don’t show very well in a video montage of “cool indie games,” if someone were to ask me why I thought indie games were so significant and have so much potential, Inside a Star-Filled Sky is one of the titles I’d like to put in front of them to play for themselves and find out.

Filed Under: Indie Innovation Spotlight - Comments: Read the First Comment

Lotsa RPG Interviews…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 8, 2012

… Not all of ’em indie, but enjoyable enough.

First off – Leonard Boyarsky, former CEO of Troika, former designer / artist for the original Fallout games, now a designer for Diablo III. RPG Codex has a retrospective interview that, considering Diablo III‘s imminent release, isn’t all that much retro. You can read it here. 

Random Tower of Games has an interview with Steven Peeler of Soldak Entertainment about his upcoming starfaring indie RPG, Drox Operative, which you can read here.

Vince D. Weller gave an interview with RPG France about Age of Decadence. The French version comes first, but the English version is below that.

The Legends of Eisenwald, which is more of a strategy game with RPG trappings a la Heroes of Might & Magic and King’s Bounty, gets some attention from PC Games Hardware as they interview Aterdux Entertainment CEO Alexander Dergay about the game and their Kickstarter efforts.

Brian Fargo of inXile has an interview with Gamestar about Wasteland 2.

And the Intel Software Network interviewed Thomas Rawlings of Red Wasp Design about Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land.

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

Old Ideas, New Blood

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 7, 2012

I will reluctantly admit that I’m as much a sucker for licenses as anybody else. While I probably would have contributed to the Kickstarter anyway, I got a little more glee contributing to  “Wasteland 2” than the same game by any other name. I’m more inclined to buy a game that is named after a beloved franchise than otherwise. I probably would have played Ultima Underworld even if it wasn’t called “Ultima,” but I completely ignored Arx Fatalis when it was first released, which was created as a spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld series.

So I may be a little hypocritical when I say this, but screw licenses.

I saw an article in Kotaku last week about a guy who created some new bike concepts for a Jet Moto remake. If anybody is working on a new / remake Jet Moto, I’ve not heard about it. I may have been on the original team to develop it once upon a time, but now I’m “just some guy” as far as any of that is concerned. So my thought is, “Dang it, forget Jet Moto – getting the license would be too much of a pain. You should just get together with some like-minded folks and make a totally new game inspired by Jet Moto. That ought to be good enough.”

I feel the same way about Legend of Grimrock. I’m just as happy that it is its own game, and not carrying around any of the old baggage from one of the games that inspired it. They were able to borrow what they wanted to use, and discard the rest. As a result, Grimrock may not overshadow its predecessors, but I think it can at least stand proudly equal with those classics.

What licenses bring to the table is marketing. Wasteland isn’t a multi-million dollar franchise or anything, but a Wasteland 2 still brings a number of fans and press to the table that “A Generic Post-Apocalyptic RPG” would not.  Again, I would have bought Arx Fatalis on the day it was released if it had been named “Ultima Underworld III.”  With so many games (and bad games) out there, players will gravitate towards those that they already have a familiarity with and feel they can have some measure of trust. Without the name, there’s very little to draw attention to a game and make it stand out from the flood of competition.

That’s a big deal. Probably too big of a deal for anybody to ignore. But hey, I’m dreaming here, so I might as well dream big. I wish that we could get away from the licenses, from the sequels, and instead somehow – magically, I guess – pay more attention to new properties, especially those that are inspired by classics and manage to recapture that feel, but are still their own game. Borrow the essence, but create an experience that is refreshingly new but still resonates with some familiar echoes.

Yeah, I know. That describes a great number of indie games already. Many are perhaps too slavishly following the footsteps of their predecessors, and most aren’t nearly of the quality of the classics that inspired them.

So what am I really saying? I guess I’m saying that I would love, LOVE, to see what’s been happening with Legend of Grimrock repeated for many other classic games. To heck with the licenses. We’ve got some great games in development right now that are inspired by the old classics, and I’d love to see them get the kind of attention they deserve without having to have a licensed property to hitch onto for attention. I know this is swimming upstream against very human nature, so there may not be much that can be done about it, especially when there are legal implications that come with citing your inspirations with too much detail. But I hope to see this story repeated. A lot.

Filed Under: Biz, Retro - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Why Indie Matters

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 4, 2012

Indie.

That label has been part of my life for about a decade now, since a little after it started replacing “shareware” as the term for those of us who made games without the benefit of publishers. Or, all too often, real budgets. But that isn’t to say it was a hobbyist movement. No, at the time, you had the Dexterity forums and all kinds of voices from the Association for Shareware Professionals explaining what it takes to “make it” as an independent software developer. The spectacular shareware success of games like Doom weren’t such ancient history at the time, either.

Who Are the Indies?

I’d left the mainstream games biz (at least the first time) with this funky idea that I could maybe make my own games and sell them, rather than being told, “No, we don’t believe there’s a substantial market for RPGs anymore.” (Yeah, those are the actual words from an exec from our parent company, Infogrammes / Atari. They did come around, didn’t they?) I had no idea how to do it. I had no idea there were other people really doing it, other than memories of the “shareware scene” and my brief glances at what was happening at the IGF whenever I attended the Game Developer’s Conference. But I did my research, found some forums, met some people, and learned that yes, indeed, there was an “indie” movement happening.  And – surprisingly enough – some of the games were really freakin’ cool. I became a convert, and as much a cheerleader for indie games as a developer. Here were these cool games that nobody else knew about! Someone should do something about that!

Really, the indie “scene” (as if there was any unified scene) really only had one thing in common: Freedom. They were going at it on their own, in spite of the industry and the press acting like Baghdad Bob and proclaiming that the industry was owned by the big publishers now, that everything was under (their) control, and that was as it should be. Their one unifying factor was a big one: They inverted the established relationship between the developer and the middlemen.

Traditionally the middlemen (publishers) bring in the money and the demands on what kind of game would be made, acting as a barrier to reaching the customers. The developers have to beg for contracts – or, if they have a game in development, have to beg for a publishing agreement from somebody or their game will never be released. Instead, with the indies, the developer makes the game on their own, oftentimes sell it directly to the customers, and any middlemen who think they can offer an interesting deal to reach a wider audience are welcome to participate. So while some indies had genuine antipathy for the “big boys” – or perhaps were seeking attention and contracts from them by doing what they were doing – for the most part the indies were exactly that: independent of whatever was happening on the “big business” side of the industry. They were using and building an entire underground network for making, distributing, selling, and acquiring games.

In other words, the overwhelming rule of the industry was that you needed permission to make games. Indies neither needed nor sought permission. They just made games.

Especially for those of us who saw the big money rise to power in the 1990s and do their best to turn a wonderful, creative new medium that we loved into a factory that merely cranked out product, this was a Really Big Deal to a developer (both good and bad). But as important this might be to the folks making the games, by itself it doesn’t mean much to those who play them. Yeah, you got your games a different way, but otherwise a game is a game. There were some other potential benefits that you might notice – such as direct contact with a developer who had a small enough customer base that he actually paid attention to you.  But those were indirect. Thus the complaint about “indie” not carrying too much meaning for you.

“What Does It Mean?”

As the players themselves discovered indie games, their impressions were much like those in the story of the blind men describing the elephant based on the part of it that they felt. Players saw a subset of indie games, and assumed that this was what “indie” meant. At one point, “indie” became synonymous with “casual games.” They were the “hot” category, which meant more indies made casual games, making a pretty substantial subset of indie games. The mainstream companies weren’t making them (yet). So to the guy on the outside, “indie” meant “casual.” Those of us who weren’t working on casual games found ourselves fighting a weird perception about what “indie” meant.

For some, “indie” meant “low-budget.” Which was again descriptive of a (large) subset of indies, but hardly the whole group. I mean, yeah, a “big-budget” indie game would make a AAA producer laugh, but not every game produced by the moderate-to-big publishers had a AAA budget associated with it, either. Barbie ain’t indie. But it ain’t AAA either.

For some, “indie” meant the opposite of “commercial.” Which caused a perception that Indie should mean “Free.” Again, pure B.S., but as Flash caught on among indies, it again described the bulk of “indie” games that many people saw, so thus the perception.

For many folks now, “Indie” is supposed to mean “hip.” Or something. It’s the realm of poor, starving artists who do cool artistic stuff. Oh, and if you actually make enough money at it to live on better than rice & beans and a tiny studio apartment, you aren’t indie anymore. Yeah. We totally kicked Notch out of the club, man. You gotta know pain to be an indie. Or some other silliness like that.

People keep assigning additional meaning to “indie” that doesn’t really exist. And yeah, in some cases we indies have deliberately fostered that perception. We sometimes get into arguments over it. But in the end, it must be about the games. Once again, what indie really means is that nobody has to give you permission to make your game. Some argue. Some create. The rest… play. That is still the important part.

“I knew Indie. Indie was my friend. And you, sir, are no Indie!”

Now indie gaming has “made it.” We’ve at least won some significant battles. The publishers no longer have the stranglehold on distribution – or upon the minds of the consumers – that they once did. And then this week, the very company that declared indies dead, beaten and irrelevent, the one that proclaimed that the indies were now powerless before the full might of the gaming empire, that “it is now impossible to ‘Blair Witch’ this business,” has branded a pack of games on Steam the “EA Indie Bundle.”

Yeah. My head about exploded when I saw that, too. The words “EA” and “Indie” just don’t belong that close to each other.  EA is such an incredible polar opposite of indie it’s an oxymoron. Or worse, like matter and anti-matter, destruction must result if they come together. If EA was trying to undermine and invalidate the indies by completely obliterating the term, that was a pretty good way to do it. Now even Rock Paper Shotgun is declaring the very term “indie” to be worse than useless and dead. I mean, if EA is using it, it’s totally jumped the shark now, right?

What people aren’t getting is that it has nothing to do with EA distributing indie games. That sort of thing has been happening for years, actually. Indies have been working publishing deals with bigger companies for longer than I’ve been associated with them. It’s not at all uncommon. Those casual games didn’t appear on the shelf at Wal*Mart by magic. But the people on the outside – the people new to this “indie” thing, who still have weird definitions of “indie” in their heads – the contradiction may seem more mind-boggling.

No, the ugly part is really about the branding. EA making money off the indies? Okay, yeah, weird, but not mind blowing in and of itself. But EA becoming a representative through branding of the “indie scene?” Okay, yeah, there’s something scandalous and ugly about that picture. While EA is welcome to work with the indies and cash in on indie gaming if it can figure out a way how, EA ain’t indie, and everybody knows it.  They can call themselves a chicken, too, if they want. But they still can’t squat and lay eggs.

But this is sort of the big culmination of some head-scratching from the industry over the “indie” thing – causing yet more head-scratching, which I think is exactly what EA would want. We have people who didn’t even know the word “indie” five years ago proclaiming that, “Oh, the word has lost its meaning!” My response is: “Yeah, it never had much meaning, so what?”

Not to the gamers, anyway. For the developers, indie has meant freedom and its accompanying responsibility. There’s nothing undermined by that with EA releasing a bunch of indie games under its label. Indie is still indie. The games existed before EA sold the bundle. The games will be around even if EA never does something like that again. No big deal. “Freedom” is not a category. It’s not a style of game. It’s not a brand. It’s not a genre, a budget, a marketing strategy, a life philosophy, a lifestyle choice, a political party, an industry, a business plan, or anything other than an approach to making and distributing games that bypasses (or ignores) the mainstream industry machinery. That’s it.

Why “Indie” Matters

So what’s in a name? What’s the value of labeling something “indie?”

To be honest, it has been kind of a useful label. For years we had that mainstream games biz machinery going on full tilt with a marketing message telling people that BIGGER IS BETTER. Yes, all caps, just like that. Bigger, more realistic, higher production values, more celebrity voices, bigger resolution, more light blooms per square inch, more more MOAR! So you had two generations of gamers who couldn’t look past the things the marketing folks told them was important.  If a game didn’t look as good as Halo, you were to immediately dismiss it from your mind, because if they failed to achieve that quality in graphics, what other qualities did they obviously skimp on, huh?

“Indie” has been a convenient term to reset customer expectations. So when you show a gamer a game, and they say, “What? It’s using 2D sprites, not 3D? What is this crap?” you can simply say, “It’s indie.” Then they might grudgingly give it a chance. Or not. And if they play it, they may still not like it. That’s fine. But then there’s a certain number who play it, and then like it, or maybe even love it. These are the people who find joy in something that they would never have discovered if it hadn’t been for the word, “indie.”

But we indies have been trying, for many years, to get people to respond that way to the word. It was our one weapon against a well-funded marketing machine that was telling the world that it was no longer possible to “Blair Witch” the industry ever again. It was our +5 Sword which we used it to carve out an exception to the BIGGER IS BETTER rule.

We succeeded – to a point. Now the industry is maturing, and the rank-and-file gamers are starting to pay attention to Things Indie. To look beyond the cover, to accept a game for reasons other than mind-blowingly realistic screenshots or celebrity voices and edgy television ads. Gamers are more and more willing to take a chance on an indie game. It’s progress. And maybe one day in a gaming utopia,  gamers of all stripes are willing to check out games based not on those superficial elements dictated by budget, but rather by what’s really important (which admittedly, for some folks, might be those superficial elements dictated by budget). There will be only Games. And we can retire the indie term.

But I’m not holding my breath. There’s always going to be a struggle between the big money guys who are trying (quite naturally) to dominate and monopolize the industry, and everybody else.  There will be times when the struggle is fierce. There are times when the sides will cooperate. There are times when they’ll try to co-opt each other. It’s the way the biz works. It’s always dynamic. It’s cyclical. The guys without the big marketing budgets and the teams of lawyers will have to keep coming up with guerrilla tactics to win gamers away from their far-better financed competition, and we’ll use whatever tools we have available. Including the term, “Indie,”  as fuzzy and hard-to-define and limited its meaning may be.

The Return of “What Does It Mean?”

Indie means games don’t need permission to be made. Indie means more games. Indie means more kinds of games. Indie means lots of crappy games.  Indie means weird artistic games. Indie means cheap clones. Indie means games on new platforms and markets that are too risky for traditional publishers. Indie means games on old platforms that are no longer supported. Indie means some incredible gems that would have never been released under the traditional model. Indie means new games in old genres. Indie means experimental games. Indie means games you never want to play. Indie means games you never could play. Indie is games with meaning, making you think about your life and your relationships with others. Indie is pure entertainment value. Indie is a domain of new developers making their first games. Indie is a sanctuary for experienced game developers fleeing the constraints of the traditional industry so they can make the games they always wanted to make. Indie is 2D games. Indie is 3D games. Indie is 4D or 1D games if they can figure that out. Indie is the primordial, chaotic mass of ideas bubbling, living, dying, and growing until emerging without boundaries upon the world in the form of games.

Indie means games.

Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 16 Comments to Read



« previous top next »