Indie RPG News Round-Up – May 2012
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 3, 2012
As usual, I’m far overdue for talkin’ up what’s going down in the indie RPG realm. I don’t pretend to have exhaustive knowledge of this ever-more-impressive domain, but in my regular delves into the labyrinth of indie games I’ve come up with a few treasures I’d love to share knowledge about:
Legend of Grimrock was released a couple of weeks ago. I’m still a fan, and I’m still playing. I haven’t had too much time the last couple of weeks, but taking an hour here and there has always been very satisfying. The reviews I have seen for this old-school style RPG patterned after Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, and similar titles have seemed universally positive – often glowing. Anyway, Matt Barton has an amusing look at the game in his latest Matt Chat Video. Be warned – it does contain some smallish spoilers.
Italian indie developer Winter Wolves have really put more into their newest story-heavy RPG, Loren the Amazon Princess, than any of their previous RPG or “visual novel” games before. Similar in style to their sci-fi RPG Planet Stronghold, Loren features a bigger world, more position-oriented tactical turn-based combat, a dozen different “romantic options,” lots of branches on the storyline, and all the expected trappings of a JRPG with some strong western RPG and visual novel influences. I’m personally not sure I’m a fan of the custom soundtrack based on the video, which seems to borrow from the J-Pop that often makes the title music for anime. Your mileage may vary. But the game itself looks like a lot of fun, and an expansion is already promised. You can grab the free demo at the above link and give it a try.
Swords & Sorcery: Underworld Gold
The massive update to Classic Games Remade’s Swords & Sorcery: Underworld sounds like it is very close to release. Charles Clerc was kind enough to send me a beta of gold version, and I can attest that while the changes are definitely far more than skin-deep, there’s something to be said for the improved graphics truly improving the entire experience. They don’t need to be cutting edge – just nice – and the new graphics are very nice. The game has a lot of great improvements, and truly feels like a new game. If you have fond memories of the first half of the Might & Magic series, you should check this one out upon its release.
After Aveyond 3 was broken up into several chapters (combining to make the largest Aveyond yet), it’s been a while since the last one one was released. Work is beginning on a new Aveyond, and it may use a brand-new engine, rather than RPG Maker, which will allow it to be available for Windows, Mac, and Android on release.
Referred to as “an adventure game that combines strategic turn-based combat with unique point-and-click mechanics,” I’m really not sure what the difference would be yet between this game and an RPG. So while I’m taking their word on it being an adventure game, it looks like it has some cross-over mechanics that would appeal to RPG fans. Dark Scavenger was just released on both Windows and Mac, so you can click the link above to take a look and try out the demo.
Forge of Legends is a little earlier in development than I usually report on, but the developer got into contact with me to tell me more about it, and I gotta admit I’ve got my hopes up. For one thing, it’s another RPG where you guide a party in a first-person perspective through the world. It promises turn-based, tactical-style combat, which immediately excites me. Just a little. Click the link above for more info.
A free expansion pack (okay, DLC) is coming out for this popular tongue-in-cheek graphic roguelike, entitled “Dungeons of Dredmor: You Have To Name The Expansion Pack.” It features new content for massively-eyebrowed heroes: more skills, new monsters, and new tilesets. You can grab more information here.
This is a browser-based fantasy RPG that pays some homage to old-school western RPG styles. While it clearly possesses some MMO-like aspects, including being able to see other players in-game, it sounds more like a browser-based asynchronous multiplayer game. You do your own thing and have some limited interaction with other players. Besides building up your party (or “cohort”), the focus is also on building up your home village and collecting ‘companions.’ The game just entered open Beta, so you can try it out yourself at the above link.
A new public beta demo for Age of Decadence has been released, addressing several of the issues that people complained about with the first demo release. You can check out the new public demo at several links available in this thread.
The remake of Avernum: Escape from the Pit (which was itself a remake of Exile) has now been released for the PC. It’s much better-looking than its earlier incarnation, and I understand its makeover is far more than skin-deep.
This horror-strategy-RPG based on the Call of Cthulhu dice-and-paper RPG has now been released for the PC! For those bold enough to try Intel’s App-Up, let me know how it is. The PC download is available here.
I can’t wait for this game. As much as I still pine for a true sequel to Depths of Peril, this spacefaring RPG looks like it has just about everything I loved from DoP and a whole heck of a lot more. The game is now in alpha, and I’m expecting it to vie with Legend of Grimrock for being my favorite indie RPG of the year. The latest update doles out some information on more of the races of the galaxy.
Styg has posted some more updates on this sci-fi indie RPG in the forums, including some of the latest and greatest gameplay developments, like the inclusion of stealth. This is really shaping up to be a pretty exciting project, and I look forward to its release (any chance of it being before the years’ end, Styg?). You can check out more information in this forum thread.
I haven’t finished this one yet, either. I interrupted my game of Darklight Dungeon Eternity to play this one, which I then interrupted to play Underworld Gold, which I then interrupted to play Grimrock. They are all great games, dang it! Anyway, there’s a patch, which I don’t believe messes with your saved game (I hope not!) – details available here.
Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3
This is an interesting story. At one point, this series was pronounced dead, ending at the second game. The games just didn’t do well enough – in spite of the mighty Penny Arcade pushing “their” game. Bummer. Tycho even posted the story of the third chapter online so that fans could at least read how the story concludes.
But now they’ve contracted with Robert Boyd of Zeboyd Games, creator of Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII, to come up with a decidedly different-looking game in the series. Going from 3D to the 2D, 16-bit look, it’s a departure, but promises a continuation of the style and storyline of the original games. While I wasn’t a huge fan of the humor of the original games, I was amused and entertained. I am looking forward to checking this one out when it releases this summer. On top of this, there’s a spot on the page for yet another sequel – R-SPoD #4. Interesting stuff!
Update – I was reminded of this one shortly after I posted this, so I thought I’d sneak it in here rather than waiting until the next round-up. The demo is already available at the above link. This is a Steampunk turn-based RPG with a heavy combat focus. Already out for iOS, they are now working on finishing up the Mac and PC versions.
Various Kickstarter Projects
I have not even tried to keep track of all the RPGs attempting funding through Kickstarter. I think it’s awesome, and I see some very worthy titles being funded, and some other worthy-looking titles not making it. Wasteland 2 and The Banner Saga are two very notable RPGs by proven teams which have been funded far in excess of their original plans. Shadowrun, based on the popular dice-and-paper RPG which has already seen a couple of video-game incarnations, was extremely successful in their campaign as well, hitting nearly $2 million in funding of their $400,000 goal. While not focusing on RPGs, Jane Jenson (of Gabriel Knight and King’s Quest fame) has Moebius and Pinkerton Road Studio as a rather unusual project for making 3D third-person adventure games… with an eye towards making future Gabriel Knight games! That one has fifteen days to go, and the Kickstarter-backed Legends of Eisenwald has 18 days left to cover the last bit of their funding – which is more to help their launch, as the fantasy-strategy game is already deep into development. Crate’s Grim Dawn open-world action-RPG set in a fantasy Victorian era is looking pretty good, and are really close to their goal. Boot Hill Heroes, a single-and-multiplayer retro JRPG-style in the style of American Westerns (how’s that for a mix?) has more than doubled its modest funding goal with more than two weeks left to go. Echoes of Eternia is almost out of its funding phase, having hit nearly 4x their own modest goals. Legend of the Time Star is a retro 2D side-scrolling style RPG made by an indie team with some industry experience, and is still early in its campaign (but not very far along on its goal). The Storybricks campaign just started, which is not so much a “straight” RPG by itself as a really cool MMORPG toolset focused on shared storytelling with some pretty significant talent behind it. Sadly, Lenore Hoehl’s Tortured Hearts was unsuccessful in its funding campaign, but they’ve pledged to keep working on the game regardless.
And Kickstarter has already had one fraud game project which was fortunately shut down when word started getting out.
Please feel free to contact me if you have some more tidbits and news about indie RPGs (especially the ones I’ve not heard about!) to share in the next installment!
As for me… holy crap, how am I gonna find time to play all of these? I mean, good gravy! I’m not done with Grimrock yet, and that’s one of the less time-consuming titles listed here! Then I’ve got some serious back-tracking to do. But you know, this is the right kind of problem to have. A few years ago, the “indie RPG” was a rare creature indeed. Then for a while there, it was all games in the 16-bit JRPG style. It feels like the floodgates have opened with a good mix of styles and approaches to the genre. It’s a good thing.
Filed Under: News - Comments: 17 Comments to Read
Want a job with some legendary game-makers? Try this!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 2, 2012
Note: You may need to be a Monkey Island fan to truly get all the humor of the following. But I think everyone can appreciate it on at least one level:
Okay, so the company with some legendary ex-LucasArts game-makers are funded to make an actual honest-to-goodness graphic adventure game. You’d love to get the experience working with them. But how do you get noticed and even get an interview with them, let alone something like a summer internship?
Well, it would be hard to ignore an application like this:
And did it work?
Well, let’s see…
(For some context on the last one, you can watch the first couple of minutes of this – the dancing monkeys were always my wife’s favorite part.)
Filed Under: Adventure Games, Biz - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Indie Innovation Spotlight – Introduction & Minecraft
Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 1, 2012
I talk a lot about indie innovation: How they are doing the stuff that the mainstream publishers don’t dare. And how sometimes it’s awesome, sometimes it’s lame, but at least it’s friggin’ different. So I thought I’d take some time – maybe once a week – and formally recognize some indie games that have really broken the norms, broken some boundaries, defied categorization, or simply threw an amazing twist on an existing formula that made all the difference.
I won’t necessarily be talking about new games here. In fact, considering my backlog of titles, a game less than four months old will probably be a rarity. I’ve got one game on the list that is literally two decades old. But these are indie games – the actual age of the indie game has little to do with its quality, technology, or whether or not you’ve heard about it. Kinda like going back and discovering some awesome music that is years or decades old.
I’m not saying all the games I’m going to spotlight here will be unknown titles, either. While I prefer giving attention to the games that don’t get much attention, I’m not going to slight a game simply because it has become an ‘indie darling.’ Credit where credit is due. And I’m not even going to guarantee that these games are always going to be good. Once again, that’ll be my preference, but there are a couple of weird ones in my library that I’d like to talk about that I don’t particularly enjoy, but they at least took a chance even if they didn’t quite hit escape velocity.
Finally, I want to acknowledge Albert Einstein. No, not for his excellent but frustrating work on the special theory of relativity that made science fiction have to hand-wave in order to make interstellar travel work. I’m talking about his quote, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” In most cases, the innovations (or at least the genre, if they have one) exhibited by games here were built upon a foundation established by other games, stretching back years if not decades. Everything I label “cool and fresh” here will have predecessors that did something similar, earlier, and maybe even better. Unless the game is an out-and-out lame-oid copy of a previous game that I somehow missed, I won’t make any apologies for that. But if you want me to point out a predecessor, I’ll give ’em their own spotlight.
And if any of you feel like doing a spotlight write-up yourself on an indie game that struck you as being cool and unique, let me know. This is a ripe category for guest posts. 🙂
So with all that being said… today’s inaugural spotlight is a game you’d have to have been living in a cave (or a mine) not to have heard of already. But I figured that would allow me to keep it short and to the point with all the introductory stuff:
Minecraft, by Mojang
What Is It:
Minecraft is a game about mining. And crafting. And a whole lot more. It’s basically a super-interactive 3D world-simulator for a world made out of blocks. Anybody who grew up playing with Legos will immediately grasp not only the game, but what makes it fun. The randomly generated worlds of Minecraft aren’t simply there for looks and passive exploration – it’s all there for you to exploit or reshape. But in spite of your near godlike powers of creation, construction, and destruction, you are not invulnerable – at least in Survival mode. At night, or in the darkness of the worlds cavernous layers that you discover or create – nasty creatures come out that can and will destroy you – and potentially your creations as well. And on top of all of this, Minecraft is multiplayer, allowing these tasks and experiences to be shared.
Minecraft is basically a virtual playground, packed with hidden treasures and predators. While there are some ‘goals’ and achievements suggested by the game, the true goals are dictated by the player.
What Makes It Stand Out:
Besides the fact that Minecraft continues to make enough money to have even EA execs salivating over it, what really kicks in Minecraft is the whole-world interactivity, the thrill of discovery coupled with constant (or at least regular) threats, and the very blocky look of the world.
As was noted by Daniel Cook a few weeks ago, what makes the ‘thrill of discovery’ work in Minecraft is the fact that the entire world is usable on multiple levels of game mechanics. You aren’t just browsing through a museum of some designer’s fantasy. The world is literally your playground, and every location invites you to check it out not just for aesthetics sake, but to see what you can do with it. Our greed, our inner architect, our explorer, our fear of the night monsters, the inventor in all of us – these all get teased with the possibilities. And Minecraft keeps teasing us with constant development and new changes to our worlds – from physical locations like an alternate “Netherworld” dimension that can be reached via a manufactured portal or special “dungeon” rooms – to more elaborate world-rules that inspire more possibilities for creation and play.
The virtual world with its sometimes weird physics have inspired all kinds of wonderful and bizarre creations, from giant scale models of the Starship Enterprise to working arithmetic logic units, to incredible roller-coasters made from creative landscaping and mine car tracks. The world and AI exhibit some wonderfully interesting emergent behavior, and the same applies to the players themselves. Minecraft is a generator of worlds to play with, and with literally millions of players, that’s a lot of worlds…
Other Notes:
Minecraft was inspired by a short-lived game with a similar 3D look called Infiniminer. But the basis of Minecraft came about before that, with an incomplete project called RubyDung that was inspired in part by Dwarf Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Dungeon Keeper, and even a little bit of GTA: Chinatown Wars.
To date, Minecraft has sold approximately 5.75 million copies, and is still selling more copies in a day than most indie games sell in their lifetime. By comparison, the second-best-selling videogame of all time, Super Mario Brothers, sold less than 7x as many copies, and achieved that mainly by being a standard pack-in with the NES console. The original Doom is suspected to have sold over 4 million copies.
Original author and founder of Mojang Markus “Notch” Persson has noted that he doesn’t do design documents, and relies on agile development and experimentation for development. While this may have changed now that he has a team working on the game, in the past he did make occasional lists of bugs and features he wanted to address to make sure things didn’t slip through the cracks. But for him, the key was simply iterating on ideas and playing his own game a lot.
Filed Under: Indie Innovation Spotlight - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Arianna Makes a Guest Appearance
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
This is just cool. Thanks to Craig Stern of Sinister Design for pointing this one out to me at the end of last week:
Indie Action – Some Additional Characters
It’s an action platformer in development. There are tons of characters from popular indie games (wait, is that an oxymoron?) in this thing, and I’m very pleased to see Arianna take some time off between gigs with the Frayed Knights to round out her skills as an action heroine.
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Indie Commercialization: Selling Out?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 30, 2012
At the A MAZE Indie Connect festival, Jonaten “Cactus” Soderstrom offered a keynote address commenting on the state of the industry – in particular, the ‘commercialization’ of the ‘indie game scene.’ It sounds like he dished out positives and negatives about how money has effected this side of the industry, particularly with its effect of ‘raising the bar’ on quality standards, based on this recap:
Indie Connect Keynote – Commercialization Raised the Bar for Indies
There’s another commentary on his speech here in German, with a google-translated version here in English. Sounds like he might have been drunk-keynoting it as well.
It sounds like he countered some of his own arguments in the speech, and since I’ve only got the recap to go from I can’t comment directly on it. So I’m just going to go off on the topic a little bit.
I think, like Cactus, I’m a little bit of two minds on the subject. On the one hand, I love the raw creativity of the indie scene, and the removal of the barriers to entry – not to mention a flood of available platforms now – have really allowed amazing things to happen. I love how indies have gotten back to the roots of gaming – the love of games and of making games – and how this has allowed indies to do some really weird labors of love with little heed to commercial potential. This rocks, and is a big part of why I love indie games in general.
Indie gaming has surged. Actually, it’s surged more than once. There have been lots of surges, usually accompanying some major commercial successes. We saw it way back when it was called “shareware” with the generation of games that brought us the classic id games, Duke Nukem, Jazz Jackrabbit, and more. We saw massive commercialization of the shareware games side of things, and the heaviest hitters really went on to be mainstream studios. We saw another surge in the ‘casual’ games side of the fence, which was followed by — wait for it — massive commercialization of that sector. Funny, that. And now, a few years later, we’re seeing a surge across all sides of indie-dom. And – surprise! – commercialization.
I’m more worried about the ‘bust’ that inevitably follows these booms.
The thing is – the ‘indie game scene’ is a myth. It’s a massive collections of (occasionally intersecting) groups and communities and lone wolves all doing their things. Yeah, the press tends to follow one or two of these specific communities, but while some of them are – or used to be – more tightly knit, it’s pretty localized. And if one ‘scene’ is transforming to become more commercialized- well, the other ‘scenes’ have never been that way, or always been that way. Some have a mix. For me personally, I’m associated with a Utah indie ‘scene’ that is a pretty wild mix of full-time professionals, curious wannabes, game-jammers, students, and part-timers. I am also part of more professionally-oriented ‘scene’ that is actually more UK-based if anything. All these different scenes, communities, and loose affiliations is a Good Thing, in my opinion. I worry about monoculture.
But amidst this flood of indie games, we’re seeing more of everything. More crap, more freeware stuff… and more (and much higher-budget) high-end stuff. We’re now in times where a niche game like Legend of Grimrock can support a full-time team of four for quite a while. This is pretty dang cool, as well. It’s definitely changing the gaming landscape, and like Cactus I’m not really sure where I personally stand with it anymore. I do not want to see indie gaming go the way of the mainstream publishers – and I don’t think it will, though individual companies and studios may make that transition. I think “indie” has always been too broad of a category to really define gaming, and with the huge increase in number of games getting released each year it is going to have to be broken up into smaller categories just to retain any meaning at all.
But this is nothing new. I remember the arguments around 2004 when Savage: The Battle for Newerth won at the IGF, in no small part because its budget dwarfed everything else. In the casual game boom, bigger companies would clone the gameplay of other indie titles, throw much more production budget at it to make it prettier, and then make twenty times as much money as the original (and often hurting the sales of the original in the process). We’ve got Zynga and others doing the same thing today.
I don’t like it. It’s not that I don’t like the bar being raised – or rather, I am happy to see higher production values in many indie games. But I don’t like having the comparisons so dictated by budget and commercial interests. And I do worry about ideas and concepts taking a second seat to commercial potential. But it’s change, and you have to take the bad with the good. I see even more energy and creativity coming out of the ‘indie’ side of things than ever before, and I can’t help but think the good outweighs the bad.
Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Interview with Wizardry Developer Robert “Trebor” Woodhead
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 28, 2012
Man, RPG Codex is doing some good stuff these days. Scoring great interviews, getting a monument built for themselves in the upcoming Wasteland 2… it’s awesome stuff.
This weekend’s interview is with one half of the original Wizardry development team – Robert Woodhead. He’s moved on to other things in life, but he does share some great information on the development of the original game. My favorite quote is about the groupies…
“When the industry first got started, all the programmers thought we’d be the rock stars of the ’80s, complete with groupies.
“Well, it turned out we were right about the groupies. Unfortunately, they all looked just like us — nerdy guys. : (“
Yeah. Fourteen-year-old boys, in my case, when I made the mistake of telling someone in a game store that I was one of the Twisted Metal developers when it was the hot game back in the mid ’90s. Not what I was hoping for. Though my wife was pretty amused by that part.
Read the whole thing:
RPG Codex Retrospective Interview: Robert Woodhead
Keep up the great interviews! Maybe Andrew “Werdna” Greenberg next?
Filed Under: Interviews - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
One More Eulogy for the Arcades…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 27, 2012
Now, let’s say this up front: Life is better for gamers now than it was in the 1980s, by almost every conceivable measure. We have far more options, we can play or download games on the Internet without leaving the comfort of our chair (or toilet seat, if that’s your fancy…). The platforms are amazingly more powerful than we could even conceive of back then – even the tiny handhelds now would have seemed impossible then. And yeah, the games are better. I’m not saying every game released today is better than every game published over twenty years ago – that’s crazy-talk. But the awesome games of yesteryear are (mostly) still with us today, in one form or another – and are more available to us today on modern systems than they were just a few years ago. And the cream of the crop of the modern era are the things dreams were made of back in the days when Mario finally got his name (and a brother).
But there was still something about the arcades and game rooms that dotted the landscape of every mall and busy streetcorner back then. The technology – and the gameplay concepts – were so new and changing so rapidly that there was (for me) always a sense of wonder, excitement, and the thrill of discovery that came with walking into the arcade, especially a new one or one that I hadn’t been to for a while. What games would they have? What was new? What machine was surrounded by players with quarters or tokens lining the base of the marquee?
Then there was the social aspect. Not that we arcade-delvers were extremely social folks much of the time. But it was great being able to watch other players play a game, see the different approaches, maybe ask them questions or cheer them on. It was also a lot of fun to compete against them in either a direct head-to-head competition, or to swap turns and compare scores. It was even cooler to play in a cooperative mode, although that was kind of a rare thing. Or, in a game like Joust, the game encouraged both competition and cooperation as you progressed from level to level. While your opponents were usually strangers – like a match-up game online – at least they had a face. And since I usually prefer cooperative or indirect competition, it was a lot more fun for me than my typical online matches in the FPS du jour.
But the real driving thrill was that sense of discovery. I guess that’s a big thing with me, hence my preference for role-playing games. Every time I ducked in through the glass doors under the lit sign into a darkened room full of electronic sounds and music and poorly-digitized voices, I had a feeling of anticipation. Would there be some unknown gem of a game lurking here, something I’d never seen before which would become a new favorite? Every one of my favorite games began that way, with that experience. “Defender Stargate? What the heck is that?” I’d ask. “Let me drop in a quarter and find out.” Bam! I lived for that.
That’s a feeling I do miss, and to a large degree I don’t see ever returning. A lot of that was simply the newness of the medium.
Thanks to indie games, I get a little taste of it now and then. Each month brings a small crop of titles that deviate substantially from the established game styles (or add very new, odd twists to older conventions) that they bring a sense of newness and discovery back – if only to a lesser degree. Sadly, like their arcade counterparts, the newness and innovation isn’t quite enough to demand a lot of attention (or quarters). But it’s great that people are out there and experimenting and exploring new territory in design again.
It’s not the same. It couldn’t possibly be the same. I’m okay with that. I miss the old arcades and that experience, but I would never trade what we’ve got now for ’em. I’m just glad we’ve got the indie game scene going on with the promise of the new and unusual to keep a tiny bit of that spirit alive.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, Retro - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Frayed Knights, Crunch Mode, Research, and Development
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 26, 2012
There are a few advantages to being a part-time indie. You have considerably more freedom to make any kind of game you want, as your livelihood doesn’t depend upon sales. Your “day job” can finance your game development habit. The disadvantages are pretty obvious, however, and a big one is that the indie thing has to take a secondary priority to the job that pays the bills.
Most of the time – at least with the current job – it’s not been too big of a problem. My previous job as a game developer at Sensory Sweep was a lot more challenging, and my indie work suffered as a result. Since December, it’s been a little challenging at my current position as well. Frayed Knights 2 has been off to a little bit of a slow start, especially with me working on an engine change, as the day job has kept me hopping. They sent me to Thailand in December, I was in crunch mode through most of January and February (and a good part of April), and I’m heading to France at the end of May through the middle of June.
The guy doing the Mac port of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon also got hit by crunch mode pretty bad with his day job, too, which stalled progress there for a bit. I’ve not been bugging him like I should have been, but between a far worse-than-anticipated porting effort (I thought the multi-platform game engine was supposed to make that EASY!!!!) and his schedule getting hammered, that’s been delayed a bit. The last I heard was that it was partially playable but buggy, with serious problems in animation and sound.
So there’s the bad news. The good news is that except for the France trip, things may be lightening up for at least a little bit. And while progress has been slow on the Frayed Knights 2 front, there has been progress. A lot of it has been experimentation, as the new engine does demand a different way of doing things. I’m taking advantage of hindsight to create a bunch of tools from the very beginning that I wished I’d had during the latter stages of Frayed Knights‘ development. What tools I had made proved to be either inadequate for the task or, in some cases, way too over-designed and complicated to do something that turned out to be pretty straightforward – meaning a lot of wasted effort on a tool I hardly ever used.
The biggest tool (I apologize for being vague) is approaching the end of its “black triangle” stage. It still may not be completely practical for a few weeks, but its showing promise. It’s pretty much a whole pipeline process for content generation – not something fit for general consumption, but stuff that should allow me to rapidly generate, edit, and debug content for the game. There are a couple more tools I’ll be working on as well which will also really solve some time-consuming problems I faced in Frayed Knights’ development.
From a code perspective, we’re treating it as a port from one platform to another (which it really is, when you look at it). It’s funny, looking back on it, discovering just how much code was generated for Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. I think the inventory system alone was more lines of code than some entire games that FK was modeled after! This opportunity will allow us (and I do mean “us” – I’ve hopefully lined up a little bit of help on this front) to do some overdue refactoring, clean-up, or out-and-out overhaul of some of the systems.
So in a nutshell, we’ve been in a slow R&D mode with an emphasis on the “R” so far, shifting soon (I think!) to “D”.
So what will the sequel be like / about? With a new engine, it will have a somewhat different (improved) appearance and UI, but it won’t be a radical departure from the original. It should work better on modern machines, and a major bonus (considering the aforementioned problems) will be that the Mac version should be almost trivial. The game picks up shortly after the first game left off, and you will be able to import your party from FK1 to the new game… but it’s not necessary, and there will be some rules changes that may necessitate some tweaking an imported party. While it picks up from the loose threads of the first game, it will be a completely stand-alone adventure, and should take the party from around level 10 to around level 20.
There will be rats.
And giants.
And a dragon.
You know, the classic fantasy RPG stuff. But done in a way that you probably haven’t seen before. And done with the same irreverent, character-based humor of the first game.
So – will Frayed Knights 2 make it out in 2012? I won’t say it’s impossible, but the probability is extremely low. But I think things will be in a much better place for both Frayed Knights sequels to be released in a timely manner *if* I don’t face a whole lot more day-job crunch time. Now, if I could only figure out how to sell tons more of the game so I could afford to go full-time… 😉
Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Geek Life - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
A Game Dev’s Story, Part X: Racing Along
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 25, 2012
We were all pretty exhausted by the time Twisted Metal and Warhawk shipped. Singletrac had a pretty liberal vacation policy, but few had been able to take advantage of it because we were all working 70 hour work-weeks. But we had two more games scheduled for release in less than a year, so we couldn’t rest for too long. But November and December saw people taking vacations and working shorter weeks. It was a good chance to rejuvenate.
Early design work on Twisted Metal II and Jet Moto had already begun. I had been involved in both meetings, but as we went from design to production, I found myself assigned mostly full-time to Jet Moto. The weapon and AI code I’d developed stayed in the Twisted Metal sequel (except for the hover-cops… we’d decided to get rid of those for future games. I don’t know if many people missed ’em), and I felt I’d written a pretty good general foundation for others to build on.
For Jet Moto, we had some early troubles. I was assigned to do AI coding, and some general game logic for the race. The lead art guy had a very different vision of the game from the designers, however, and our ‘test track’ that we were using as the basis for developing the game (the all-important prototype) was radically different in style from what was expected. The rest of the team raised the red flag, wondering if we were making a game about how-speed hover-bike racing – more like Wipeout – or more like Motocross racing. Or both. I guess with both “Jet” and “Moto” in the name, it implied both. After a short but highly heated debate, the art team was re-directed to making the more technical tracks than the high-speed arena-style tracks.
Another issue we were running into was the floating point performance on the Playstation – or rather, the lack thereof. The lead programmer had done some work for his PhD (? I think?) on particle systems for physics. Not the same as visual particles you see in games, these were spring systems simulating the ‘mass’ and composition of an object with a system of heavy particles. Anyway, the calculations were intense, but it was a decent way to get some very believable physics out of low-end machines. And that’s what went into making the bikes. But that was a very intensive project, and during the first couple of months there wasn’t much to show for it or any way of really knowing how the bikes would behave when completed.
We watched a lot of videos of motocross racing, bike stunts, and the team even went to a supercross competition in Salt Lake (I missed that one, though). I learned to appreciate the sport a bit. Even though the game was obviously pure fantasy, we felt it was important that we did the research and captured the feel and as many real-world details of actual related sports as possible. And of course, we played racing games – everything from the hard-core simulators by Papyrus, to arcade and console classics like Ridge Racer, Mario Cart, Daytona USA, Wipeout, ExciteBike, Super Off-Road, and anything else we could get our hands on. From those we tried to capture the conventions of racing games as best as possible, and also understand what they did to really make their games fun. And a couple of the people on the time actually did race motorcycles, which helped a lot.
As an aside, during the Christmas break, I threw together a little 3D space combat game. Just for grins. It was in DOS, using my own custom rasterization and 3D engine. I got the very basics of the game put together, with a planet and space-station, and three ships that would chase you and try to shoot you (although they’d mostly try to ram you). It didn’t look like much, and the program was lost a year or so later in a hard drive crash. But the experience – how much I was able to do in a week – was the seed of the idea that eventually became Void War, many years later.
After the Christmas break, it was back to full-on crunch mode. For me, it was just as rough as with the first games. I pretty much had a Mission Impossible thing going on. Besides doing the AI, I also had to write my own – vastly simplified – physics and collision system that somehow mirrored the work-in-progress for the player bikes. Because of the horrible floating-point performance on the Playstation, the processor simply could not handle more than about three of these physically accurate bikes in the game. We were supposed to have twenty.
So basically, I had to get nineteen bikes all doing full physics, collision detection, and AI working in fewer milliseconds than two of the full player bikes with physics. And I was trying to simulate a moving target, as the behavior of the player bike was still a little bit in flux for several weeks. And my preliminary stab at it had been on a wide-open track that had been originally made for the game, not the more intense, bumpy, obstacle-and-tight-turn filled tracks that eventually made it into the game.
So if you ever played Jet Moto 1 and thought that the AI bikes weren’t playing quite by the same rules as the player – well, you were right. They weren’t. I spent a lot of time trying to get the bikes approximating player performance and movement in less than 1/10th of the time (including collision detection *and* AI calculations). And they all had to mimic the characteristics of not just a generic bike, but their specific bikes – and come in at times more or less equivalent to what a human player of appropriate skill could achieve. For the sequel, they dropped the total number of bikes down to 10, and vastly improved the performance of the bike physics, which allowed the AI to play exactly as the player. But in the first game, we didn’t have that luxury.
There are some other bits of trivia about Jet Moto that I’ve written about before. And I wrote recently about an AI experiment I performed with genetic algorithms.
We worked on deals to get ‘real’ product advertisements appearing on the billboards in the game. I guess we all thought that real-world products would make the the game more realistic. The best deal we got, IMO, was with Nestle – which used a cross-promotion with their Butterfinger bars to promote Jet Moto. I think it worked out pretty good. Personally, I got a free candy bar out of the deal. So that was cool.
Since we had departed so far from traditional racing game “style” – in the direction more of a science-fiction ‘simulation’ of a racing game with a really weird way of controlling the vehicles – the initial reviews were a seriously mixed bag. Some were glowing, others savaged it. But over time, the game proved to have legs and it really grew on people, and turned into a slow-burn hit game. One magazine that totally ripped it to pieces later wrote a glowing review of the sequel, saying that it “manages to capture the magic of the original.” I always thought, “What, the magic that was worth 1.5 out of 5?”
The bottom line was – we did something really different, and focused on over-the-top fun. It paid off in the long run, though it met with some definite “WTF?” resistance at first. That’s the problem when you innovate – especially when you try to innovate and shake things up in a well-established genre. But our emphasis on fun was what saved the title and eventually made it a hit. There were a whole lot of ideas that ended up getting dropped in the game because we just couldn’t make them fun, or figure out how to make them controllable, or they didn’t serve the core ‘fun factors’ of the game. There were lots of ideas for things like weapons a la Wipeout and Mario Cart, and a bunch of ideas for using the magnetic grapple as a weapon. But in the end, it was about over-the-top environments, high speed, big air, and a massive concentration of AI bikes. And that feeling of being just barely in control, but always able to do just a little bit better and shave another second off your time.
Some things I learned from that experience:
#1 – The importance of research – not only for the designers, but also for the entire team, so they know a bit about what they are making. The research should include competitive games, but absolutely must not be limited to games. There are a lot of fascinating details in real life and history that can not only make a game come alive or provide good backgrounds or level ideas, but can be the source of really inspiring game mechanics.
#2 – You need a “keeper of the vision” – usually the lead designer – to really keep an eye on everything that’s going on and make sure that the development isn’t deviating (or deviating badly… some deviations are great) from the core concept. This is especially important in the early stages of development, when whatever is being done will probably end up being foundational.
#3 – Innovation by itself isn’t often immediately appreciated. It generally has to grow on people. The initial reaction is often, “WTF? Why did you screw with this?”
#4 – Always focus on your core ‘fun factor.’ A lot of ideas may very well enhance that core or add some variety to keep the core gameplay interesting, but a lot of ideas – in fact most of them – may pull attention away from it or undermine it. In Jet Moto, we were either lucky or smart enough to cut out most of the ideas we had that sounded cool but ultimately would have detracted from that core.
Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
Older RPGs: Not That Hard To Play After All?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 24, 2012
Hat tip to GameBanshee for linking this article from Joystiq:
“The Surprising Accessibility of Older RPGs”
The author (Rowan Kaiser) isn’t really giving a pass for all older RPGs. Specifically, he’s referring to Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra. This was actually my (brief) introduction to the Might & Magic series, many years ago. I only played it at a friend’s house, and didn’t play too much of it, but he felt he had to show it off. He told me it was the best computer role-playing game he’d ever played. I took his opinion with a grain of salt, and never quite warmed up to the series until recently, in spite of hearing rave reviews.
Kaiser cites the games simple rules, the silly but inviting world, and the cartoony graphics as reasons why the game remains accessible (read: still easy & fun to play) for a modern audience. Is it? Maybe it’s just him. And me. And Charles Clerc. One thing is certain, though – these games still require you (or maybe that’s just me, again) to RTFM. While the gameplay may be relatively simple (and as I recall, it’s simpler than it was in the first two games), there are still a lot of little “gotchas” that can be pretty confusing without the manual.
But overall, I’d tend to agree that the reputation older RPGs had for being complicated are almost entirely interface issues. Once you have figure out what all the keyboard commands are and how they are supposed to be used (big hint: In Might & Magic 1, you want to search after every combat encounter! Important!), the gameplay is actually pretty simple. Modern games generally do a much better job of adding interesting gameplay choices than their older siblings. There are undoubtedly exceptions (Wizard’s Crown comes to mind, which I never played but enjoy hearing about other people playing it).
There’s one more thing Kaiser mentions that is really worth a blog post or two of its own – (oh, hey, here’s one of mine – and he’s got one too) – an “anything goes” philosophy. What this really boils down to is that modern (single-player) RPGs are too concerned with balance, chokepoints, and maintaining what Kaiser calls “thematic consistency.” These aren’t bad things – and if you are working with a licensed product, much of that may be required. But sometimes I feel like it’s being done deliberately to retard and control progress so the player neither finishes the game too quickly, nor gets frustrated by getting in over his head.
But sometimes, that’s exactly what’s fun. I didn’t exactly make it a speed-run, but a few months ago I blitzed through Ultima III pretty quickly. I depended a bit on online maps ‘n stuff – I’d done it the hard way once, no need to go through that again. And I did some distinctly “non-roleplaying,” gamey kinds of things like leveling up quickly off of the guards in towns (something Ultima IV inhibits by adding consequences). You know what? It was a lot of fun! I had a blast. And then in Skyrim, when I was first starting out and only level six or so, I took a pot-shot at a wooly mammoth from a long distance away, not realizing they came with giant protectors. When the giant finally spotted me, he killed me with one shot. I can’t remember the last time I was so entertained by getting my butt kicked like that. Occasionally getting in over your head is fun, too.
And thematic consistency? Well, it’s generally a good thing, but it’s often fun to just cut loose on that front, too. But then I come from an era where my friends all had D&D characters with science fiction blasters from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks where the DM had politely ignored or allowed them to bypass the limitation of the weapons not working outside the area. Intolerably off-genre! But also fun!
And that’s what it all boils down to. Some days I think those old-school designers really did pack a lot of “fun” into their games that modern designers have forgotten all about, lost amidst memories of confusing interfaces and key commands.
Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
New Voices of Indie Evangelism
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 23, 2012
I used to call myself an “indie evangelist,” back when nobody knew what “indie” was (or assumed that indie meant casual games). For me, as a refugee from the mainstream game development industry, the promise of a market for games free from the domination by big publishers was irresistible. You mean game developers could make EXACTLY the kind of game they wanted to make? And players could buy the games directly from the developers, instead of fattening the publisher’s wallets while virtually nothing went to the actual developers? Wow.
It was challenging back then. One thing I discovered early on was that while “fun” was not really a factor that could be purchased by any amount of development dollars, production quality definitely was (and still is). Indie games looked crude in comparison to their bigger, multi-million-dev-dollar bretheren, and that crudeness made them easy to overlook or dismiss. So I spent a lot of time explaining how wonderful these games were, and how people ought to give them a shot anyway.
And now – well, the indie revolution happened. I don’t think the war is entirely won, nor will it ever, but some major territory has been captured and the games industry will never be the same again. That’s a good thing. Indie games are becoming “mainstream” in a lot of ways – which is also a good thing, although it makes me feel a little wistful. But in an era that is now post-Minecraft, post-Grimrock, post-Kickstarter-funded-games, post-Angry Birds, post-Humble Indie Bundle, when Indie Game the Movie is showing (and winning) at Sundance and Journey is drawing such incredible responses from the mainstream press, when indie games are common on the big consoles and a pretty significant chunk of Steam’s revenue, and Zynga has managed to usurp EA as the evil gaming empire, I think it’s safe to say that indie games are no longer flying below the radar.
And for me, I no longer feel much a need to rationalize their existence. Oh, I still do, and probably always will. Some folks – especially kids – have a tough time distinguishing between hyper-realistic graphic excellence and gameplay excellence. The big-budget games will always retain a monopoly on the former, but nobody owns one on the latter. This is no longer a secret to most gamers, I don’t think. That, or I’m so myopic that I can’t even understand the “average gamer” anymore – a possibility I confess could be a problem.
While I’m no longer feeling the need to push the ‘concept’ of indie gaming, there’s still a problem that will ever be with us: Many specific titles still fly under the radar (including my own). There’s more games (even just RPGs) than I have time to keep track of. So I will continue to do my best to offer commentary on the games I have a chance to play – including (I hope) some strange and relatively unknown ones that you might not hear about elsewhere. This isn’t limited to indie role-playing, adventure, or strategy games, though these are my favorite and will continue to be a focus around these parts.
I don’t do reviews (usually), since I feel weird about doing them when I sell many of these games from my website. But I do offer commentary. I plan to continue to do so, as I have time. This means “quick takes” on new (or old) games, but I’d like to spend more time doing more in-depth discussions about these games – or even little nitpicky aspects of these games. Indie games have long been worthy of this kind of analysis, and the indie ‘industry’ as it is has matured well enough to offer ripe territory for discussion.
As full-fledged production mode looms large for me in the near future, which means even more restrictions on my gaming time, I’d like to open up this opportunity for others to participate if they feel so inclined. Do you have a favorite indie game you want to offer commentary on? Feel like offering three or four paragraphs comparing Fez with… uh… M.U.L.E.? (I was looking for something bizarre there.) Or comparing iPad indie gaming to that of the PC and big consoles? Or do you have deep insights into the nature of lever-puzzles that you’d like to share? Or maybe you are (or know) a game developer and want to talk shop or spout off a little bit.
Please consider this blog a potential venue for your views. I can’t offer fortune, but hey, whatever fame you get writing here is yours to keep. 🙂
You can contact me as “jayb” or “feedback.” Hopefully you won’t get eaten by the spam filters. PMing me on the forums is also an option.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Ludum Dare #23 Game Dev Competition Starts Off With a Bang!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 20, 2012
Ludum Dare has been going on for ten years. In a few hours, the latest game-in-48-hours competition will begin.
The keynote for this competition – #23 – is exceptional. Chevy Ray doesn’t just give a ra-ra speech… he leads by example. Kind of. It’s just funny and cool.
For another amusing note… PyGame is offering A BILLION free licenses for LD participants! Yeah. A BILLION. Free. They even invented a time-machine to make it retroactive from the very beginning with the LGPL. Okay, yes, I’m easily amused.
For yet another possible tool – Stencyl 2.0 has been released. Just in time for the competition. While one can argue that a 48-hour competition is NOT a time to be learning new tools, I’d also argue that if you are just squirreling around and making it an opportunity to learn and grow as a game developer, it’s a perfect opportunity.
And for an actual discount… Christer Kaitila’s book, The Game Jam Survival Guide, is 40% off right now for the game jam. You can read it while waiting for the competition to begin. Or to get ready for the next one. Or to do your own thing in a short time horizon.
I find it endlessly amusing that such a craft which has such a (deserved) reputation for being brutally challenging – game development – has been turned into a sport. This makes me happy. No, none of the games made this weekend are going to be Citizen Kane or anything. That’s not the point. As I’ve said before… while there’s a big difference between a Game Jam game and an actual commercially-released game, in my limited experience the process is actually very similar. These are excellent learning experiences. They are a great chance to experiment. And it’s kinda fun doing it with several other people as part of ‘a thing’.
Filed Under: Game Development, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land Coming to PC
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 19, 2012
I’ve been looking forward to “Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land” coming to the PC for a while, as I still have a “dumb phone.” And I’ve been a fan of Lovecraft for a long time. I’m also a long-time player of Call of Cthulhu, the dice-and-paper RPG that this game is (at least loosely) based on. Interestingly, it was originally created by some returned LDS missionaries right here in Utah. As it was explained to me, it was originally designed a little bit as a joke – sort of a “what would happen if you applied the D&D rules to Lovecraftian monsters? Your party would all go insane and the be devoured by the monsters, that’s what!” So the game is pretty exciting to me, and will be available soon (May 5th) on the PC. That’s the good news.
The bad news? Intel AppUp. Yet another app program.
I mean, I’m glad to see Steam face some competition. I’m a little worried about that. But what I really want is … well, more things like GOG.COM, where the games are stand-alone and the distribution mechanism is optional and really only used for downloading. I seriously do not need a dozen gaming apps running simultaneously on my machine.
So as much as I’m looking forward to this one, the AppUp thing may be a deal-killer for me. We’ll see. But hopefully it will find its way to other “services” – or no service at all, which would be preferable for me. I’d just as soon buy direct.
Here’s the press release:
‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land’ Summoned to PC via the Intel AppUpSM center:
Whispers in the darkness today confirmed that the critically acclaimed ‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land’ today announced their hit game is coming to PC. The developers, Red Wasp Design, revealed the existence of a Cyclopean pact with the Intel AppUpSM program to spread the insanity onto laptops, Ultrabooks and desktops worldwide. The Intel AppUpSM center is a service that aggregates, curates and distributes validated digital content delivering a fuller, richer experience on the PC.
The game will launch on the AppUpSM center on 5th May 2012 at the RPC Germany international RPG event. The games developers will also be at the event demoing the PC version of the game to fans and fellow gamers. The price point will be confirmed on the release date. AppUpSM is free to install and has lots of games and applications on it for Windows PCs. The PC version of the game runs in widescreen and has been optimised to run on laptops, Ultrabooks™ and desktops including support for Windows 7 touchscreen powered PCs.
Supported by the Intel AppUpSM developer program, the PC version of the game will also feature language support for German, French, Italian and Spanish gamers. The game’s designer, Tomas Rawlings said, “We’ve had lots of requests from fellow gamers and fans of Lovecraftian horror to bring the game to PC, and thanks to Intel’s support that will now happen. It’s also great to be able to get the game translated into more languages, as Lovecraft’s work has a universal appeal.”
Intel’s support also means the game will also be localised into German, French, Italian and Spanish.
Stefan Englet, Director AppUp Content EMEA said, “Intel is pleased to help Red Wasp Design fulfill the many requests from worldwide gamers to launch a PC version of ‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land’. We hope you enjoy playing the game and browsing the other great PC content in the Intel AppUp center.”
For those new to the cult title, the indie game is a turn-based strategy RPG inspired by the works of cult horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The game was developed in co-operation with Chaosium, the publishers of the cult horror role playing game, Call of Cthulhu. The game features nine 3D levels set in the trenches of World War One. In ‘The Wasted Land’ the player controls a team of up to six investigators charged with uncovering a deadly inhuman conspiracy underlying the clash of empires of the Great War. Barbed wire, mustard gas and machines guns will prove to be the least dangerous thing that the investigators will encounter as they venture out into No-man’s land to solve the mystery of the Wasted Land. As the game progresses, the player can build up the skills, weapons and equipment of the team to suit their playing style. As well as the physical danger, the investigators must guard their sanity against the myriad horrors that threaten to destroy it.
To stay in touch with the developers and get updates on the game, help and strategy guides and more, you may want to connect to Red Wasp Design on Facebook, Twitter (@redwaspdesign) and on their site at redwaspdesign.com
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
Using Genetic Algorithms In Games
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 18, 2012
Because my upcoming post on my experiences developing Jet Moto is getting kinda long, I thought I’d break out this story for your entertainment. Programmers will especially get a kick out of it.
An interesting aspect of the development of Jet Moto was that we did not do anything like the traditional racing game approach. Our tracks were not on a spline. The AI were not simply moving obstacles acting as multiple pacers. Our AI was running a real race. It was possible to win just by having the AI do poorly. Our tracks could be extremely open-ended, only requiring that the bikes hit the checkpoints in order – like a rally race – rather than confining them to the track. We made it hard for ourselves in the short term, but it was also what made us stand out from most of the other racing games at the time that did things the “right” way.
I was not looking forward to figuring out optimal paths for the various bikes (because they all had different physical characteristics, so an optimal path for one would not resemble the optimal path for another). And I’d read up on some experiments with genetic algorithms (GAs). GAs are sort of an evolutionary approach to creating AI – you start out with several sets of characteristics or instructions, plus a ‘fitness algorithm’ to score them on their level of success on completing a task. You treat the characteristics / instructions as DNA, and you create a means of ‘mutating’ these values from generation to generation.
So what you do (the simple version) is this: You create the first generation of AI pretty much randomly. Dump them in their environment. Have them do their thing. When they are done, score them. Have the best scorers of the generation ‘mate’ – creating children that are some mix of the two parent attributes. While this mixture is random, you’ll also want to introduce some random mutations into the next generation, so they get some attributes that come from neither parent. Then have the face-off between the new generation (and possibly their parents as well). Keep doing that for as many generations as it takes, and see what kind of ‘optimal’ results you get at the end.
I did this for Jet Moto one day, when it was still fairly early in development. The first generation of bikes didn’t even come close to completing the race. I think I’d run them for a maximum of three minutes. Scoring was easy for a racing game – the bikes with the biggest lead won out. Once I was satisfied the test was working properly, I went home for the night. I came home the next day, excited to see what happened. So were my coworkers.
Much to our amusement, the AI bikes had found – and exploited – a collision hole in our track. So they were breaking through the wall, cutting across the middle, going a little bit backwards to hit the checkpoint, turning around, and then finishing the race and going on to the next lap – with a few weird quirks or unnecessary movements still in evidence.
The team thought I’d come up with an amazing way to automatically test for bugs. I explained to them that this was no brute-force way of exhaustively finding problems… a future test might never find that hole … but it had proved a fun little experiment.
Eventually, I dumped the idea, and used a more traditional approach to calculate paths through the game. But I still like the concept. Here are some thoughts here if you want to experiment with the idea.
Genetic Algorithms are generally best for solving a single problem. As is true in real life, ‘fitness’ is very dependent upon situation. When the situation changes, the optimal approach does, too. Games are often pretty dynamic, frustrating the AI’s best efforts at following the optimal path and leaving them unable to adapt. That’s a weakness of GAs. It’s something that makes GAs – as far as I can tell – pretty useless for a game like Chess.
But for some other kinds of games, GAs may still be useful. Standard heuristic code can be made to help the AI get ‘back on track’ as best as possible in these situations. I also believe that adaptation strategies can also be included in the “DNA Code” to make them more robust. This is actually an area I would be really interested in exploring in the future.
Another interesting experiment is in how the ‘fitness algorithm’ scores the AI. In a game, you don’t necessarily want the AI to be really good at its job – you want it to be entertaining to the player. But can a fitness algorithm incorporate this factor into its logic? Can you identify the features in advance that makes an AI more fun? Can you write a fitness algorithm that rates an actor higher if they display a critical weakness in their otherwise challenging strategy?
Could this idea be extended to automatically create not just active AI characters, but to construct environments as well? Can you create a requirement that a game level will challenge skill X and skill Y of a player and exhibit feature A and B, and then set it loose overnight to create an optimally-interesting level?
Naturally, in all of these cases, it may be best if the results are considered a ‘rough draft’ for a human developer to them come along and polish up. And you may have to construct your gameplay deliberately to take advantage of the use of GAs (and I’m typically wary of building gameplay around a gimmick like that… but sometimes it does work pretty well).
Yet another twist is possible thanks to online gaming, with an existing base of players: The fitness algorithm could take player feedback into consideration. You could have self-modifying game elements based on feedback metrics that tweak the gameplay daily based on player response.
Fun stuff to noodle on, doncha think?
Filed Under: Design, Game Development, Programming - Comments: 6 Comments to Read
Sinister Design’s New Tactics Game
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 17, 2012
Sinister Design has announced their newest game – a multiplayer tactics game that’s something of an advanced version of the combat rules in Telepath RPG: Servants of God.
Entitled “Telepath Tactics,” it uses oblique projection instead of top-down characters, deeper mechanics, better AI, lots of different unit types, and can be played single-player or multi-player (via hotseat or email so far).
Here’s a demonstration video of the game-in-progress. Bear in mind that it’s still very, but look to see the game released by the end of the year:
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Writing What You Game
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 16, 2012
I picked up Fez on Friday, and enjoyed about an hour or so enjoying the game. It’s a nice twist on the 2D platformer genre. I don’t have enough experience in that genre to say if it’s unique, but it’s certainly new to me, and quite impressive how the game depends on warping a 3D world into 2D perspectives to do the impossible. I like it.
I was thinking about writing an article about why I don’t make side-scrolling platform games, though that seems to be the most popular indie genre. It certainly would be a lot easier. Not that something of the complexity of Fez was simple. But as a general rule, action games are a lot easier to make than most other genres. There’s a reason id Software started out with Commander Keen. Well, okay, that reason was that Carmack had figured out a way to do side-scrolling on crappy EGA-based PCs. But besides that: It was simple.
So why don’t I do platformers? Well, for one thing, I’ve always been a little allergic doing what everybody else does. I tend to gravitate towards interesting niches. I was going to say that for another, I don’t really play platformers. But that’s not really true. They aren’t my favorite genre, although I do have a pretty good history with ’em. I tend to “graze” games more often than really playing them in-depth, and rarely got very good at any action game. One major exception in my past was the side-scroller arcade game Shinobi. I can’t say I regret all the quarters I put into that machine, but I did get to the point where I could play the entire game on a single quarter – usually a single life.
I learned to really love the patterns, the rhythm. Usually I’d play a section mostly by rote, but on a few levels I’d inevitably get my timing off, or I’d intentionally try a different approach, and that’s when it would get the most fun. My attention would be riveted as I’d respond to a four or five enemies all shooting, leaping, and blocking, trying to come up with the best sequence of moves to survive. I’d done it so many times in similar situations that it was almost zen-like.
So I get the appeal. And while I was never a major Super Mario Brothers fan, or ever that good at it, I still enjoyed the game. Maybe one day I’ll create a 2D-style platformer. I won’t rule it out. I guess technically, I already have, as one of the programmers on Animorphs: Shattered Reality for the Playstation many years ago. But I was brought onto the project late, and we were all laid off during the course of that one, so I don’t exactly consider that one a highlight of my career.
But the truth is, I don’t really have anything to say. Braid, which I haven’t managed to get into in spite of my best efforts, did have something interesting to say and do with the genre. That’s cool. I do enjoy VVVVVV a good deal, and while it’s twist on the genre may be a little more gimmicky, it’s still a solidly entertaining little game. And yeah, I’m enjoying Fez.
I Wanna Be the Guy? Not so much. My masochism really only extends to old-school CRPGs, thanks.
Now deep down I’d love to see love of gaming transcend genre categories and conventions, with the boundaries completely destroyed as presentation and gameplay become truly divorced from each other and yadda yadda. But the truth of the matter is that these definitions are convenient, especially for gamers who would like to not spend the first half-hour of their play time learning to crawl all over again. So we’ll use it as a very broad category that’s a nice island for us to anchor near for the purpose of discussion.
For me, as an indie – I haven’t immersed myself enough in the genre to feel like I’ve got anything useful or interesting to say there yet. I’m a lurker of the category. Nor do I have any game idea screaming to be unleashed that really demands being done as a platformer. I write what I game. Not all of that is ridiculously complex old-school style RPGs, but it stands to reason that after all this time I’ve got a lot of ideas I’d like to explore in that space.
Maybe I’ll make one as a Game Jam concept one weekend. If I find myself smacked around with an idea I just can’t wait to get onto the screen.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
Copyright © 2025 Rampant Games | Privacy Policy
Powered by WordPress.
