The Cabin In the Woods

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 14, 2012

I’m really seeing some pretty good movies in the theater this year. I loved the indie movie Unicorn City (coming out on DVD and digital download in July). John Carter and Hunger Games were both a lot of fun.

And last night, I went to see The Cabin in the Woods. At my wife’s request. I hadn’t even heard of it, but when she said it was made by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, I was instantly sold.

It’s a horror movie. Or more of a horror-comedy, I guess. It’s kind of a subversion of the horror genre. It’s one of those things that is very hard to describe without going into spoiler territory. The ads all say things like, “You think you know the story… Think again.” That sums things up. The core plot is – quite deliberately – a stereotype: Five college-age friends get together to spend a weekend of partying at a cousin’s cabin  by a lake out in the middle of nowhere.  What could possibly go wrong?

Anyway, if you watch the trailer, or read this, you are going to see / read some stuff that sounds like a massive spoiler, but it’s really not much of one. The movie gives away a lot of this stuff right at the beginning, letting you know that All Is Not As It Seems. This typical horror movie has a big ol’ global-scale meta-plot going on, with it’s own characters and dark humor. But while you know there’s much more going on with the meta-plot, it doesn’t explain everything. It’s the how and why of it all that drives the movie.  However, as the movie makes clear before the title first appears on the screen, it’s not intended to be a completely serious ride.

All I can figure is that these Whedon and Goddard got together and said, “Let’s make a horror movie that will beat up all the other horror movies and take their lunch money.” Seriously. I don’t know if they succeeded, but they definitely managed to subvert the genre while simultaneously adhering (and paying homage) to as many of its tropes as possible. Maybe the reason I liked it so much is that it takes a similar approach to horror as I took to fantasy RPGs with Frayed Knights. In fairness, I am a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so I’ve no doubt it was an influence on me as well.

It takes the darkly humorous romp through the slasher-flick formula with the assumption that the audience has a brain and at least a passing familiarity with the horror genre. It takes great pleasure in explaining why these kids do the stupid things that they always do in horror movies, like splitting up when they are in trouble, leaving a weapon behind, or … hiding in FRONT of a window. That kinda thing. But even as it lets the audience in on the joke, it still stays true to its roots. It’s a comedy and a self-referential commentary and take-down of the horror genre, but it does this without becoming a parody. Or betraying its genre – it’s still a splatter-fest. Blood, boobs, guts, drugs, screams, dismemberments, beheadings – it’s all here in full-on Rated R horror-movie glory.

But just where other horror movies end (literally), you’ve still got nearly a third of the movie left. Things twist around and then escalate, raising the stakes still further. All hell breaks loose. I cannot explain it further without descending too far into spoiler territory, so I guess I’ll leave it at that.

I’d describe it as having a bit of a mix of a Evil Dead, Scream, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Matrix, and H.P. Lovecraft. With bits and pieces of hundreds of other horror movies tastefully woven in for good measure.

I cannot recommend if you can’t stomach a full-on R-rated horror movie.  Or if you’ve never even seen one.  But if you have, and even kind-of enjoyed it while wincing at its stupidity, this is a movie made for you.

And… the trailer…

Filed Under: General - Comments: Read the First Comment

The Crowdsourcing Revolution?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 13, 2012

It seems that with DoubleFine’s big adventure (to the tune of over $3.3 million), the floodgates were opened for another source of funding for “niche” games. The old-school style Wasteland 2 has now been funded to over $2.4 million (More, if you include out-of-band pledges) with three more days to go.  And there’s more. MUCH more. This month, it feels like a new RPG or adventure game is going up on Kickstarter daily. Actually, there probably is more than that, but I’m only counting the ones that are “interesting.” By interesting, I mean that have either a team with a track record, or a known license. Or both. Jane Jensen is doing it. Dead State is doing it. The Banner Saga – done by some ex-Bioware folks – is doing it.

It’s becoming a venue for frustrated developers who are tired of johnny-one-note publishers refusing anything that isn’t likely to sell 2 million+, or for aspiring indies who may never understand why they don’t get funded.

So is this a fad or a trend?

A little of both, maybe. This seems to me to be just an evolution of sponsorships or commissions, a funding method that has existed as long as written history.  And with the U.S. Congress having passed a bill to allow small investors to actually contribute to crowd-funded businesses for profit (actual investment purposes), things may get even more interesting.

I think the sudden ‘craze’ may die down a bit, but probably not before it becomes even bigger. Eventually, this will probably settle into just another of many sources of funding for smaller developers. While I won’t deny it’s a Big Deal, it ain’t as big as some of the other developments over the last decade or so.

Should publishers be worried? Short version: Yes. Long version: Yes, and if I were them I’d be scrambling to redefine myself in the new paradigm.

Longer version:  In my mind, publishers provide three (or more) distinct roles.

First, they provide funding. Much of the time that I’ve been in the business, this has often equated to little more than the publisher contracting out to developers on a work-for-hire basis. But funding independent projects still happens. But when it does, the publisher typically takes ownership of the project in every sense of the word. It’s not like a hands-off investor relationship.

Secondly, they provide distribution. In the old days, this ruled all. A developer couldn’t afford to mass-produce cartridges for the Nintendo, and they weren’t going to get into the retailers without a publisher. And retail was king. Even Doom, the big “shareware” sensation that really (in my mind) heralded the true start of the digital distribution revolution, sold far better at retail.  But that’s all changing, especially for PC games.  I’m a little concerned about the near monopoly Steam is acquiring, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.  Maybe one day Steam will demand that all games they sell require a publisher, because they are tired of evaluating individual games.  If so, that’ll change things again.

Thirdly, publishers provide marketing for games. Newbie indies are frequently astonished how they can build it, but nobody will come.  Ever. I still have problems not regarding marketing as a dirty word, but it’s seriously critical. And for bigger titles, it usually requires deep pockets that individual developers simply don’t possess.

Another, lesser role that publishers provide is consultation. As much as we love to give ’em grief, at least within their mass-market domain, (successful) publishers really do generally know what they are doing. They know what it takes to get a game out, and they kinda-sorta know what sells, in their herd-mentality kinda way. They can be invaluable resources to a development studio in helping make the game better and better-selling.  They can provide testing, leadership, design help, etc.

Okay, so here’s the thing: In the past, all of these roles had some level of interdependency which made a ‘one-stop shop’ make a lot of sense. That also gave them an incredible amount of power and leverage in any deal, making them gatekeepers and middlemen capable of demanding the lion’s share of revenues.

That’s becoming less of the case now. Publishers can still dominate on the mass-market front… that’s what they are built for. But these other aspects of their business, especially on smaller scales, are no longer so easy to dominate.

Distribution is obviously the big one. While that leg is not completely kicked out of the way yet, it’s definitely getting wobbly. And if I may mix my metaphors a little bit, this was the keystone of the rest of the business. It’s why the music studios have been screaming doom and gloom for a decade.

Funding is probably the second biggest aspect of their dominance. You have to have money to make money, as the saying goes. It’s generally true. But alternative sources of funding have always existed, from small business loans to friends-and-family investment, to the development team taking out second mortgages and working night jobs and selling merchandise to help fund their activities. And now crowdfunding is just one more alternative – and an increasingly attractive one.

Then you have things like the indie fund, and other successful indies (like Notch) offering funding for projects as kind of proto-publishers… but without taking on the traditional publisher role. Yet. Maybe never. We’ll see. But again

What’s next? Marketing? That’s a long-established business in other fields, and fledgling services for indies and the games biz have been around for years. It hasn’t really caught fire yet, but I see it coming. Ditto for consulting services. As more and more small to mid-sized studios exert their independence, this sector will grow.

I see all this as sort of a critical mass that’s about to explode. The era of the indie is here, folks, and Kickstarter, 8-Bit Funding, and other forms of crowdsourcing are just more logs on the fire. Holy crap, I’m really mixing my metaphors, aren’t I? Right now, it’s not big enough to really challenge the big publishers on the AAA front. Yet. I suspect that’s coming, however, and publishers should be preparing for that day. And in the meantime, they have to decide — do they concede the ground on mid-tier games, or do they start redefining themselves now to make themselves an attractive partner for smaller developers?

To me, this looks a little like a new golden age for niche and mid-tier titles. It’s been happening for a while. Crowdsourcing is just the latest of many great opportunities opening up for game developers. It’s a good time to be a game developer.

And it’s an even better time to be a gamer.

 

 

Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Legend of Grimrock: Exactly What It Says on the Tin

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 12, 2012

The indie RPG Legend of Grimrock was released yesterday, and I pretty much took night off to play it. I don’t really do reviews here, but I do like to offer my “quick take,” especially when it has to do with indie adventure games and RPGs that I get a chance to play. And after the evening’s adventuring, I really don’t know how I could talk about anything else. This probably comes off a little more review-ish than my usual takes, but I do want to stress that I’m nowhere near done with the game. I’m still poking around on level three, and having a blast. It’s a good thing I died, or I would probably have forgotten to quit playing.

Legend of Grimrock was advertised as a modern-day return to the classic gameplay of a particular style of RPG – namely, that of the Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder series. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what Legend of Grimrock brings us.  Expect little more, demand nothing less, and you’ll be quite happy. Plain and simple. Short of firing up DOSBOX and  some abandonware, you aren’t going to find anything closer to that old-school experience. But it is a much, much prettier experience now.

The big question is – how does that old-school flavah hold up in a modern indie title?

The short answer: Extremely well.

The longer answer: If this was 1993, reviewers would be bitching about it. “It’s just a Dungeon Master Clone,” they’d complain. “Didn’t we just play this game last year? And the year before?” They’d further lament, “Legend of Grimrock offers little in the way innovation on a tired game mechanic. It’s a competent and entertaining entry but if offers few innovations to help it stand out from the crowd.”

Actually, if this was 1993, they’d take one look at the graphics, and their heads would explode. But in a good way. Even if the gameplay was total crap and they’d all have thrown their backs out heaping praise upon the game. But with solid gameplay behind it, there’d be little to stem the gush.

But regardless, this is not 1993. It’s nearly twenty years later.  The “Dungeon Master” subgenre is long gone.  Or it was, until this week. There’s no ‘crowd’ to stand out from. The graphics are still quite pretty, but unremarkable when compared to AAA games. Compared to other indie games, yes, the graphics are gush-worthy. And while you are limited to turning and moving only in the four cardinal directions, as usual with the game type, you can hold down the right mouse button to get something of a ‘freelook’ to admire the environment.

For me, the game felt like a time machine back to 1989 or something, when I first played Dungeon Master on a neighbor’s Amiga. It adheres to the classic style and  gameplay tightly enough to feel incredibly familiar and awaken plenty of nostalgia, but it’s fresh enough to feel like I’m playing these games for the first time. This is an amazing feat. It really speaks of the polish and creativity that was put into this game to make it more than a modern remake of an old game.

As far as what’s really new here for the old-timers from a mechanics standpoint: Not much. There is a little bit of crafting potions that I don’t recall seeing in games from two decades ago. The leveling up / skill system is really pretty cool and worthy of mention on its own – more on that in a few paragraphs. But for standard gameplay, it’s the good ol’ fashioned puzzle-solving, secret-finding, pressure-plate triggering, monster-dancing gameplay that we came to expect during the brief reign of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. For newcomers to the game style, or folks like me who have forgotten their old skills, Grimrock does an able job of steadily ramping up the challenge and letting you build up your skillset gradually. And it does this without falling back on the crutch over-employed by modern games: the tutorial. While Grimrock has a simple tutorial accessible from the menu, this is a game you learn by playing, not by hitting your marks in a long-winded tutorial script. HUZZAH!

Maybe there will be new surprises for me later in the game, but so far, I’ve encountered no NPCs to talk to, and no merchants to sell to. The story is threadbare but serviceable. But these are not really negatives! Like its spiritual predecessors, Grimrock has scoped down the RPG experience to the bare essentials that define this category of games, and has focused on making these few things work perfectly. If you love exploration, solving puzzles, and simple but tactical real-time combat, this is a game you are going to really enjoy.

Combat is very much like what Scorpia called, many years ago, the “Beholder Two-Step” (based on the Eye of the Beholder series). Yes, you can stand toe-to-toe against enemies and mash the attack and spellcasting buttons whenever they cycle.  If you do that, you will probably have to re-load your saved games a lot, because they hit hard, and they also deliberately yield you a tactical advantage that you are not exploiting.  This kind of combat is all about real-time maneuvering. It’s not rocket science. Your party can move and turn faster than the monsters. It’s best to attack quickly as soon as the enemy moves to the square in front of you, and then quickly backpedal or sidestep to avoid its own attack. Much of the time, you can lead the monster to an area where you can do this indefinitely.

The trick to combat is a combination of timing, precision, memory (avoiding accidentally backing yourself into a dead-end), and of course fighting multiple monsters at once.  Getting yourself cornered can be extra harsh, as the flanking monster will be able to attack one of your (generally weakly protected) rear characters.

There are lots of levers to pull, pressure plates to step on (or weight down with a discarded item), buttons and secret loose rocks to push, items to manipulate, keys to find, riddles to solve, teleporters to manipulate and step through, secret areas (and treasures) to discover, and so forth. Puzzles may incorporate monsters – either as traps or penalties for failure, or as part of the puzzle you manipulate.  This is bread-and-butter gameplay for this style of RPG, and Legend of Grimrock absolutely nails it. They keep throwing more variety to keep things from ever getting stale. There are frequently clues to help you figure out what you are supposed to do, which gives the game a dash of riddle-solving to round things out.  While tricky, none of the (mandatory) puzzles have really stumped me for more than a few minutes.

Time is a consideration, as there is limited food in the dungeon, and torches get used up quickly once you remove them from the wall sconces. Conveniently, you can trade an almost-dead (but not completely burned out) torch for a fresh one in a sconce, and the almost-dead torch will once again burn at full brightness forever – as long as you leave it alone.

You can start with the default party (for people who want to jump straight into gameplay), or you can make your own party from scratch. There are three classes – Fighter, Rogue, and Mage – and four races (Human, Minotaur, Lizardman, and Insectoid). You can also choose your starting attributes (Strength, Vitality, Dexterity, and Willpower), and choose two starting traits. A couple of the traits are limited by race, but they give your character an additional advantage in the game.  Finally, each class offers a set of six skills unique to the class, and you can assign starting points in those skills.

In a game where you play a whole party, it is best if the characters are easy to customize and level up. This is the case in Grimrock – you choices are limited to which skills you increase with skill points. While the skill list is small, the skills all carry extra bonuses at various tiers. This may take the form of something like a bonus to one of your primary attributes, or additional fire resistance, or an armor proficiency. This is a lot more interesting than simply raising your attack bonus from +5 to +7. It’s simple but interesting. And then of course, there’s the equipment. There seems to be a decent variety of stuff and some of it has some very amusing descriptions. I like the loincloth.

Just like its single, deep dungeon, Legend of Grimrock succeeds by keeping it simple and going for depth instead of breadth. For me, it has proven to be exactly the kind of RPG experience I was expecting and craving.  Maybe in 1993, the formula was getting a little stale, and maybe a future sequel may have to expand the concept a little bit more to keep things interesting. But for 2012, Almost Human Games has done an amazing job of taking a dilapidated old game style and giving it a long-overdo renovation for the modern era. It feels fresh again.  It’s focused, tight, polished, and quite simply a joy to play. In this way, Grimrock is better than a time machine to the early 90’s – it’s letting me re-experience what gaming used to feel like back then without requiring me to take off the rose-tinted glasses.

Filed Under: Game Announcements, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Bugging Out

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 11, 2012

I have a book that was (or still is) used as a textbook for air-to-air combat for fighter pilots. Parts of the book talk about how to exit combat. It’s not an easy thing, actually. In general, if you wait until you really need to escape, it’s too late.

I’ve also been reading about the surprisingly (to me, at least) common occurrences of Defensive Gun Uses (or DGUs) in the United States. Most of the time they go unreported (or barely reported) because they are pretty boring and don’t end in violence. Defender pulls a gun, attacker runs off. Conflict concluded.

And in nature, of course, animals for which life-or-death conflicts are a way of life have the flight thing down pretty well. Not perfectly, or the predators would starve, but there’s some very interesting dynamics when it comes to conflict like this. When to strike, when to hold ground, when to back off, when to flee. The “Battle at Kruger” video gets particularly interesting at about the 4:30 mark, when the water buffalo decide to launch a counter-offensive (and what looks like a successful rescue).

We don’t get that very much in RPGs. It can feel somewhat unsatisfying when enemies flee rather than allowing themselves be slaughtered. Particularly if it deprives you of loot and XP. But dealing with fleeing (and regrouping) enemies can be a pretty interesting dynamic. Do you give chase? This is a common ambush tactic, and rarely advisable if in unknown territory. But if you don’t, will said enemy alert others and tell them where to find you? Also bad news.  RPGs rarely have that level of coordination between enemies, though it can be easily simulated.

And for players – well, it really depends on the death penalty in the game. In games with permadeath or relatively steep consequences for ‘death’ (like in older MMORPGs), players flee far more readily than they do in games where restoration is merely one reload away (or not even that, with some titles).

Another thing that makes fleeing less likely for players is the difficulty of evaluating the threat. Between the need to keep combat encounters fresh and interesting by regularly varying opponents and situations, and the tendency to keep the player’s power level growing at a pretty reasonable pace, it’s hard for a player to really know how dangerous a situation may be until it’s already time to reload.  From what I have heard, in 1970s-era tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, fleeing was far more common (as was character death), but it had very shallow level scaling and a relatively short (and memorizable) list of enemies.

So are fights more fun if they are always to the death? Or can you envision systems where bugging out (both for players and for enemies) can be more entertaining? How?

 

 

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Ultima Underworld is Twenty?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 10, 2012

Ultima Underworld was released in March, 1992. Twenty years ago last month. I missed the landmark, somehow. But now I feel freakin’ old.

By comparison, at least, Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t turn the big two-oh (that’s big, for video games) until next month. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, the much-lauded precursor to the entire 3D First Person Shooter genre came out after the 3D first-person role-player. (Okay, so Wolf3D was predated by Catacombs 3D which was basically the same game but not nearly as good, but that’s besides the point…)

It was the kind of game I had dreamed about when I was playing on the Commodore 64 in the 1980s. It captured the feel and first-person perspective of a big, D&D-style dungeon. It felt like what I’d always imagined when playing D&D. While it was far from perfect, it was another one of those mind-blowing gaming experiences that forever spoiled future games because I’d hold them to such high expectations.

Sure, the free-form 3D movement was a big deal. That’s what most people talk about when they talk about what a breakthrough game Ultima Underworld was. And yeah, there’s no denying that the first-person perspective, 3D world and action-oriented gameplay was landmark.  But there’s more to it than that:

* Ultima Underworld was one of the first games to use recorded voices for full cut-scenes. It wasn’t really breaking new ground here, but it was still a novelty back then. Unfortunately, the voice acting sucked and added some unintended humor to the game (“Treachery and DOOooooom!”). But it didn’t matter, it was still kinda cool back then.

* Ultima Underworld had what is still one of the best auto-maps of all time. While the features stood out, the walls and parchment background looked like it belonged.  And your ability to write (and erase) directly on the map, anywhere, was a big deal. Actually, it still is.  It’s fortunately more commonly matched in the modern era than it once was, but I don’t think it has been surpassed. I’m not sure what you’d do to surpass it, to be honest.

* A dynamic music system. Many games at the time would switch between combat and exploration music, but the music in Ultima Underworld was even more situational, and was designed to (almost) seamlessly transition between themes as you transitioned between states. The UU music remains on my inspirational music playlist.

* Barter. Very few games have let you trade as freely with other characters as Ultima Underworld. (Fallout comes to mind.) I think more could be done with this.

* The simulated dungeon. This was reflected in the game’s economy, the need for food, the passage of time, the physics, the AI, the interactions with the world, secret doors requiring manual searching, and just the feel & mood of the game. In retrospect, some folks have called this a mistake, and that the sales of the game were hindered by their efforts to try and make the dungeon as realistic of an environment as possible.  But I absolutely loved it, and would love to see more games not only take this approach, but take it further. (I’ll once again point out Din’s Curse as an example of an indie game that does just that, although its style is quite different. And of course Arx Fatalis and the entire Elder Scrolls series were directly inspired by Ultima Underworld.)

* A wide variety of puzzles, problem solving, and flavor. From combat, negotiation, careful jumping, use of spells, learning a language, etc. – there was a lot to do in the dungeon.  I may never forgive them for the anti-magic level, but the Pac-Man level had me almost falling out of my chair laughing when I “got it.” But I loved how, for example, you could break down a door or smash open a chest if you couldn’t be bothered to find a key for it. There was an open-endedness to the solutions to many (but not all) challenges that were pretty common in the Ultima series but fairly rare until several years later.

* While people complained around Ultima Underworld 2 of the claustrophobic  environment of both games, I really liked it. The oppressive feel of being locked in a dungeon, with no escape but to probe deeper into the more dangerous areas – that was frickin’ fantastic stuff. It captured the feel of a massive dungeon perfectly.

* While it was technically an action-RPG – the success of your character depended heavily upon your own timing and real-time actions – Ultima Underworld played at a much more thoughtful, exploratory pace than many later ARPGs like Diablo.

Graphically, the game isn’t so pretty to look at today, and the mouse-based interface (the first of its kind, so cut ’em some slack) is pretty tricky to get used to today. But it remains a landmark title, one of the best CRPGs of all time, and definitely a major influence on me as a gamer and game developer.

Happy (belated) twentieth, Ultima Underworld!

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

The Game Jam Survival Guide

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 9, 2012

I suck at game jams. Yes, I know, I even wrote an article about a game-in-a-week experience once upon a time, and I have found I need to review my own article and take my own advice. I think a lot of my failings in the game jam setting are the same failings I have in actual game development – especially as (but not limited to) being a self-directed indie. What failings? What could I do better? How might I learn to suck less?

Christer Kaitila (AKA “Breakdance McFunkypants”) is an experienced “Game Jammer,” and Ludum Dare administrator. He has gotten together with a fewer other seasoned Game Jam veterans from that community and put together a “how-to” guide to surviving (and really, succeeding in) a 48-hour game jam environment. Called The Game Jam Survival Guide, it’s available in both physical and digital formats.

I don’t often participate in game jams because I feel they cut into time I could be devoting to whatever my main project is. But really, I believe those exercises would be good for me as a developer. In my experience, I have found that while there are some obvious differences between a 48-hour game jam style project and an actual commercial release, the process is remarkably similar. I keep trying to get better at both, but I think the game jam experience – given whatever constraints (game-in-a-day, game-in-a-week, 48-hour, commercial-game-in-a-month, even game-in-an-hour) is full of valuable lessons for anybody in game development – seasoned vet or total newbie. I know a few very veteran full-time game developers who agree, so I’m in good company.

Would the advice be scalable to larger projects? Based on the short excerpt I’ve read so far, some of it would be.

More Info: The Game Jam Survival Guide

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

Fallout – Free!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 6, 2012

You’ve got just over 24 hours left to get the original Fallout game for free from GOG.COM

If you don’t have it already, you have no excuse. Get it now, play it when you have time. Get a free copy to send to friends. Whatever.  Snag it.  It’s a classic.  Not perfect by any means, but that’s part of its charm.  And … hey, unsurprisingly, still fun to play, a decade-and-a-half later. Go figger.

 

Fallout 1 Giveaway at GOG.COM

 

And for your viewing pleasure… the intro to the game

Filed Under: Free Games, Retro - Comments: 9 Comments to Read

Mysteriously, Teenagers Prefer Friends Over Games…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 5, 2012

I really have a tough time feeling alarmed about this latest survey. I guess my biggest point of alarm would be seeing publishers panic and rush to the “social gaming” side of thing and abandoning traditional gaming. Like they always do whenever they detect the hint of a breeze in the marketing winds. I guess I couldn’t blame them too much if they do… if my livelihood still depended on it, I’d perhaps be a bit more worried.

But first of all – is this a real Thing? 2.4% more teens are saying they are losing interest in playing video games compared to last year.  I guess that’s just outside the margin of error with the survey size. But considering that in the course of a year, the same survey had High School students go from 25.9% who play social games down to 18.3% in the fall, and now back up to 25.3%.  With those kinds of fluctuations… well, I don’t yet see a reason to raise alarms. A seasonal drop can also be easily explained by a lackluster crop of games as anything else. Can teenagers get sick of the endless parade of clones of games when they’ve never played the original?

But hey, let’s say it’s all real… fewer teenagers playing “traditional,” more solo-oriented video games. Will this trend continue? I’ll tell ya, it’s still a heck of a lot better than it was when I was a teen. While a lot of teenagers played video games, only the geeks admitted to really liking them. Hopefully that social stigma isn’t coming back. Now THAT is something I’d worry about and want to combat.

But I also see this survey suggesting, as my title indicates, that teenagers really prefer socializing with friends over playing (console) games. My two responses would be, “DUH!” and “WHEW!”  I obviously love games and gaming, but they certainly shouldn’t replace social interaction with friends. I don’t know that social networks and games make a good replacement for face-to-face interaction, but it’s a good supplement. Besides, I played “The Sims,” and I remember how great it was to have activities that combined “fun” and “social” stats at the same time… 🙂

I personally think it’s a mistake to break the world of gaming up into ‘social’ games and… well, ‘non-social.’  I mean, as a younger geek, I think I spent about as much time talking about games with friends as actually playing them. A trend I’ve continued with this blog.  While I did my time doing the MMO thing, I find I also love a good game that I can get lost in all by myself, without distractions, and then maybe talk about it later with friends. I think one thing that the social games figured out (which those of us who played BBS “Door” games back in the day already knew) is that sometimes it’s better to play a game in asynchronous mode – by your own schedule – than requiring players get together to enjoy a game.  The important part is broadening the ability of games to serve a social purpose.

(Sadly, most Facebook social games that I have seen have turned this principle inside-out – instead of gaming serving social needs, they use and abuse the social side to sell the game. But as customers become more jaded to this, I expect to see less of it.)

Anyway – the point of my ramblings: Social’s important. Games can and should serve social needs. This is a Good Thing. Based on the trends we’re seeing even in traditional games and gaming services (I guess as ‘traditional’ as these relatively new services can be), I don’t think that’s surprising news to anybody by now. But don’t force it on me, ‘k? ‘Cuz sometimes I really do feel like being a cave-troll.

 

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

Legend of Grimrock Previews / Reviews

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 4, 2012

The Legend of Grimrock is certainly one of the more exciting indie RPGs of this year (and that’s actually saying something! It’s a good time to be an RPG fan…),  releasing next week via GOG.COM, Steam, and the developer’s own website. I’ve not played it yet – I’m here with the rest of you having paid for the pre-order and waiting for the public release. But some folks have, and here’s what they have to say:

Rock Paper Shotgun has a “Wot I Think” about the game… and John Walker evidently thinks highly of it. This particular excerpt really excites me: “They’re again inspired by Dungeon Master’s nature, most often involving teleporters. But this where the game really gets into its own, going far further with this concept, creating puzzles reminiscent more of Portal than Eye Of The Beholder. You’ll have to start thinking with teleporters if you’re going to figure a lot of them out. They’re inventive, and they’re often tough.”

This is what I keep talking about, dagnabbit! It’s not just dressing up an old game design with pretty new normal maps and shaders. Though after more than fifteen years since we’ve seen a game like this, they could probably get away with that. But as I keep contending, there’s more that can be built upon the foundation of these older designs, especially since they’ve been left fallow for a decade-and-a-half. I’m relieved and delighted to hear that developer Almost Human is experimenting with this.

GameBanshee’s Eric Schwarz has a positive take on LoG as well.  My favorite excerpt sorta echoes my above point: “Legend of Grimrock proves without a shadow of a doubt that old-school game designs are more than capable and enjoyable in this day and age. It’s a common myth thrown around that older titles died out because they were surpassed by more technically competent and “sophisticated” titles, but Grimrock demonstrates just how much of a fallacy that appeal to technological superiority is. ”

Preach on!

Both reviews suggest 15+ hours to complete the game, which sounds about perfect for me.

Finally, here’s a video review of the game from Elder Geek, showing a bit of it in action. They call the puzzles “nothing short of diabolical, and we love it!”

Mmm… yeah. Maybe I just shouldn’t plan on getting any work done near the end of next week…

UPDATE: And one more preview from Gamers Dissent, which I confess I haven’t watched to the end (but he confesses he hasn’t played it to the end, either…)

Filed Under: General - Comments: 3 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part IX: King of the World

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 3, 2012

(You can catch up on the whole story here.)

So the last time I left off, we were knee-deep in the development of Twisted Metal and Warhawk. While massive crunch-mode hours and stuff sounds cool and everything, and I was still thrilled at having the kind of job I’d dreamed about since my first confused steps into the realm of programming over a decade earlier, it was pretty brutal. And, to be honest, it was often boring and frustrating. It’s nothing like those late-night TV ads (not that those were running at the time).

Most of the time, programming a game is not too much unlike any other kind of programming. There’s a lot of long hours spent chasing down bugs and performance issues. And playing a game in-development to test functionality is nothing like playing a finished game. There are times when it is fun, sure, but most of the time it is tedious. But every once in a while, you can take a step back and look at what is slowly taking form on the screen, and you can say to yourself, “Cool!”

And then something magical happens towards the end of development. Somehow some magical combination of features, polish, and functionality comes together and the game actually resembles a game. Hopefully a good game.  This happens practically overnight, and usually not all at once. But it’s cool when it does.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Two events stood out during that year prior to release. First of all, I attended the winter CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Up until that point, C.E.S. was *the* show for videogames. I remember reading about the shows in the magazines while in college. It was about to be supplanted that summer by the very first E3, and apparently was not in its fullest glory when I attended. It didn’t matter. For me, it felt like I had arrived. This was the semi-annual Mecca of gaming, and it happened while our relationship with Sony (and indeed, Sony’s U.S. plans for the Playstation release) were still on the quiet side. So we had nothing to do but troll the booths and check out the competition. It was an amazing assault upon the senses. Sega and Nintendo were of course showing off their latest offerings with full light and sound, pushing games like Donkey Kong Country for the SNES and Star Wars Arcade for the Sega CD-ROM. Booth babes were everywhere.  I remember seeing Blizzard’s booth, where a couple of guys sat next to their box of “Warcraft: Orcs Versus Humans,” looking bored and hoping that anybody would pay any attention to them. Maybe Bill Roper was one of the guys. I don’t know. The game that excited me the most was Mechwarrior II, which I’d been waiting for for … well, years. I got the chance to play a working build several months before release. We also got to go to a private Sony appointment and see a production Playstation and the Japanese launch titles, and talk a little about the U.S. launch plans.

CES gave me a chance to see “the industry” as it wanted to be portrayed: The lights, the glamor, the sex, the rock-and-roll. All turned up to eleven.  THIS had been what I’d been reading about in the magazines for all those years.  It was overwhelming but incredible.

A few months (weeks?) later, I was able to go to the Computer Game Developer’s Conference (CGDC) – now called just the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). While the expo floor shared a tiny bit in common with the CES and upcoming E3 show, it was far more low-key… and far, far cooler. This was a conference of the actual game developers (and businessmen), not just a show for the press. While the press drooled over the booth babes and P.R. people demoing the upcoming titles, this was where – in my mind – the true ‘rock stars’ of the industry could be found. And the others who – like me – were just plain developers in the trenches of the industry, earning very little public acclaim but creating these awesome games.

Because Singletrac wanted to economize, and because I was in the critical path for both of our games that were deep in development – I only got to attend the first half of the conference, while some co-workers used my badge for the final (half-) day of lectures, and Microsoft’s renting out the Great America Amusement Park for game developers to push gaming on their upcoming Windows 95 platform. While I missed out on free roller-coaster rides, I didn’t feel like I missed very much. The first two days of lectures, roundtables, the expo floor, and the ‘hospitality night’ the first night of the conference was enough to blow my mind. I met Richard Garriott, said hi to Warren Spector, spoke for a few minutes with Sandy Peterson, sat a few seats away from Sid Meier, and passed Chris Roberts in the hallway. I sat in roundtables and partied in hotel suites with guys I didn’t know who had built some of the coolest games of the last five years. I learned a ton about the rest of the industry outside my one little piece of it, particularly in the realm of PC game development.

I was very lucky to have hit this CGDC, as it felt like it – or the next one – were something of a last hurrah as it transitioned to a different form: much larger, much less personal, much more anonymous.  As the games industry was transitioning from a hobby industry to Big Business, so did the Game Developer’s Conference. I returned home with a ton of business cards and swag, feeling like I was the king of the world. I realized I was now a part of this growing industry I’d only read about for so many years.  But then I had to return to reality, just like the rest of ’em, with milestones to hit and gold masters to complete. Sigh.

The final weeks of making Twisted Metal and Warhawk were as long, painful, stressful, and overwhelming as you can imagine. Our producer, Scott Campbell, gained the nickname “Sergeant Scrub,” for his ruthless removal of unfinished or low-quality features and levels to make milestones. I think of all the lessons I learned the first year about game development, this was perhaps the most valuable. While at times it felt like we were dropping or breaking up levels that would have served the games pretty well if we’d had enough time, the bottom line was that most of the time the games were improved by what we decided to leave out.

At this point, Sony had finally begun promoting the games. We began to see previews in the magazines, and were cautiously optimistic. Finally, after many 70+ hour work-weeks, we finally sent the gold masters of the games off to Sony. Then there was little to do but wait… well, wait, and do some preliminary work on the next games in our queue – a sequel to Twisted Metal, and a racing game involving hovering sci-fi versions of motocross bikes which was to be called “Jet Moto.”

Incidentally, during testing with the rest of the company, I was almost unbeatable playing Spectre in every level except the Arena – where Darkside or Warthog had a huge advantage due to their ramming power. Yeah, we did what we could to balance the game out, but some vehicles just had an advantage in certain locations. Some locations called for speed, others for ramming power, others for maneuverability. We did the best we could, and most of the time it came down to player skill and preference. I was also pretty dangerous driving Road Kill or Outlaw.

After a few more weeks, the games were released – shortly after the Playstation itself was unleashed upon the North American public. The impossible happened, and Sony managed to unseat both of the top dogs in the console space – Sega and Nintendo – a blow from which Sega never fully recovered, eventually giving up on the console hardware business. And our two little games – released close enough to the platform’s release to be considered ‘launch’ titles – did quite well.  The reviews were generally extremely positive for both games, and Twisted Metal became not only a full-fledged hit, but a hit franchise.

It is definitely a weird thing to go from laboring in obscurity on a relatively unknown project on a platform that almost nobody has heard of yet to having it become practically a household name. Within months, gamers had all heard of Twisted Metal.  A lot of people had played Warhawk as well. I was lucky enough to have worked on both hit games, right out of the starting gate. A lot of game developers go their entire careers without working on a single hit like that, but thanks to a great team and Sony’s incredible marketing muscle, I worked on three (including Jet Moto) in my first two years.  No, I wasn’t the brains behind it, just a member of a comparatively small team… and a relatively junior member at that. But it was an awesome experience, and in a lot of ways a dream come true for me.

For a while, at least, I felt like the king of the world.

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story, Game Development, Retro - Comments: 11 Comments to Read

Complexity Trade-Offs and RPGs

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 2, 2012

I was showing a friend the GOG.COM trailer for Legend of Grimrock over the weekend, and I found myself trying to explain the appeal of the title in a world full of games like Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, the recent Fallout games, etc.  Since he isn’t much of a gamer, appealing to the nostalgia factor wasn’t an option.  I ended up deferring on account of the lack of time, but as a retrogamer and a defender of old-school style gaming, I figured I should probably take some time to make sure I have good answers.

A common complaint against old-school RPGs concerns their complexity. I don’t think that’s necessarily correct. Most of them were no more complex than today’s RPGs, though the cumbersome interfaces of the era (especially when mice were considered optional controls) and the necessity of reading the manual probably enhanced that perception.

And in the games styled after Dungeon Master, with real-time gameplay, the movement is tightly constrained (Scorpia, I believed, referred to the attack-dodge style as the “Beholder Two-Step”), I’d suggest the overall complexity is pretty light. Oftentimes, it felt pretty “gamey” (especially if you go back to the RPGs of the 1980s). And, unlike a game like Skyrim, what complexity there is is often right there on the screen for you to see.  Whereas in more modern games, so much has to be done at a lower level to deal with issues like depth complexity of the scene, animation, pathfinding in more open-ended environments, AI, etc.

As players, we see the removal of a constraint or the addition of a generalized feature as simple addition, and assume the implementation effort scaled linearly with the perceived improvement. In other words, we think, “Oh, you can do X now, which makes the game 20% more interesting and complex. Therefore it must have taken 20% extra effort to put that into the game.”

But the truth is that the complexity behind the scenes can increase geometrically rather than linearly. Going from 2D (or pseudo-3D) to full-on 3D gameplay was a vast increase in development complexity for RPGs. Some aspects of the art, I suspect, had to get completely reinvented in order to “keep up” – particularly game interfaces. But other aspects of the genre were actually simplified or constrained further to compensate – both from a desire to simplify design and development, and to benefit the player who might feel task overload with the more complex environments.  So we often end up with tighter scripting, more linear environments, simpler puzzles, and yet still have combat that too often feels very chaotic, random, and button-mashy.

So it really comes down to a trade-off. You can have a game that tries to do it all (but will be unlikely to be appreciated for all that effort), or you make your trade-offs on one side or the other.  Older CRPGs made one trade-off, mainly out of necessity. Newer RPGs, no longer constrained by technical necessity, have gone in other directions but have had to make trade-offs in other areas of complexity.

But it is nice to go back and re-evaluate some of those trade-offs. I think the Grimrock guys have recognized that while the old “Dungeon Master” game style was less realistic and more ‘gamey’ than, say, Dragon Age: Origins, it was still a lot of fun. And maybe there are some new things to be done with the game style today that weren’t (or couldn’t be) done twenty years ago.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Utah Indie Night – March 2012

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 30, 2012

The Utah Indie Night went bi-monthly instead of quarterly a few months ago. On top of that, the venues have changed considerably. It’s kept things interesting, but it’s also brought us new members each time. This month’s Utah Indie Night took place in the Entertainment Arts & Engineering lab in the Film and Media Arts building at the University of Utah. It was a new venue for us, and worked pretty well.

Lately, the formal presentation side of things – which was always supposed to be short (20 – 30 minutes) – has been going way into overtime. Way, way into overtime. To the point where people just assume it will be an hour long and pray it doesn’t go longer. Some of the regulars got together (well, via email) and decided we’d start clamping down on that and really enforcing the time limits. Greg Squire, founder and organizer of the event, decided he’d lead by example and became the first presenter to be subject to the hard time limits. In all honesty, I wish he’d taken more time, but that’s just me. His presentation was on building an arcade cabinet system (for a MAME machine or whatnot). Not exactly game development related, but it’s one of those things that’s just cool. And besides, indies are finding opportunities to be available in arcade-style machines nowadays, too, and it doesn’t hurt to make one’s game – if appropriate – compatible with this kind of set-up.

But mostly it was just fun. He brought in his control panel, and people had a lot of fun during the evening playing games via the arcade-style controls.

There weren’t a ton of games on display, but the ones available seemed to be pretty dang cool. We’ve got a lot of talent in our local area, apparently.

First off, Califer Games’ March to the Moon. I’ve talked about this one before. It’s almost done.  Curtis is readying it for release. It’s a silly, goofy shooter with RPG elements that is just straight-up fun.

Heroes of Hat is a student project at the U of U – a cooperative 4-player platformer where your bird-like characters acquire skills by acquiring hats. You can switch the hat you wear at any time, which changes your actions. The idea seems to be that you will need to work together, using your different special abilities, to navigate the mushroom-filled environment.

Curse of Shadows, by indie team One Block East, had another intriguing concept. It’s a 2D side-scrolling stealth-based platformer. Your character can stun guards or other enemies from behind, but only from behind. Besides jumping, when your character is inside a pool of light and can cast a shadow, you can go into ‘shadow mode’ – entering the world of shadows – which allows you to bypass some obstacles or interact with the shadow world in different ways. In one early example, there’s a rope or bridge that cannot support your weight. But by entering the shadow world, your shadow can walk across the shadow of the rope just fine, as shadows weigh nothing. When your shadow exits a light pool, you automatically return to the real world. There are bull-like monsters that only exist in the shadow world as well, which will kill you on contact when you are in shadow mode. In the ‘real world,’ these creatures are barely visible as a disturbance in the air, and are completely harmless.

Tower Game, by Jordan Tower, is an interesting twist on the side-scroller platform game. It’s a port of a game he originally did in Java, now ported to Unity.  It is still a work in progress, but he’s basically mapped a 2D platformer on a 3D cylinder… so instead of just going left and right, you are actually going around a spiral. He plans some interesting additional mechanics based on this context, such as being able to go inside the tower.

Ruins of Bufana, by John Moore, is a fun work-in-progress. The name of the game,too, is a stand-in: Bufana stands for “BUll***t FAntasy NAme.” It is a platform-style puzzle game, taking place on a non-scrolling screen. And it’s nasty-hard.  It’s one of those games that allows you to reset the screen by committing suicide. You have throwing stars and a sword to use against (some) giant slugs, but a lot of the game involves very precise jumping and air-control as you navigate walls and floors covered with spikes, triggering moving panels and doors, etc. It’s a cool game. He kept assuring players, after multiple deadly failures, “It CAN be done, I promise!”

Tank Raige, by Pheenix Game Studios, is actually a port-in-process of a 3D networked tank combat game from Game Maker (where the creator assured us that he was hitting the top end of the capabilities of that system).  I didn’t play the game, so I can’t tell you much more about it.

Bullet Train Hell, by Chris Tart –  Running on both PC and mobile, this is a brilliant polished little indie gem that has improved significantly from it’s previous version seen at the last indie night.  It’s another single-screen puzzle platformer. It’s also very challenging (I repeatedly told Chris that he was an evil game designer), but from what I played it felt pretty ‘fair,’ not cheap, in its challenge. You are riding a bullet train (ostensibly), which means that you are constantly being ‘pushed’ to the left of the screen due to the wind. This means movement speed to the right – running or jumping – is slow, while moving to the left is much faster (and you can jump much further).  There are only three controls – a deliberate choice, as Tart’s claim is that four-position ‘virtual d-pads’ on the touch-screens of smartphones tend to be crap to control. So the controls (aside from the menu) are simply left, right, and jump. But then the environment is full of triggers, and you can apparently do things like have boxes bounce off you (once they land on the floor, they are stationary) and so forth. Anyway, it’s a challenging little game, but way cool and polished at this point. Watch for it!

As usual, the discussions were fun, with indies and aspiring indies talking about their mutual love of games, networking, and shared information about the latest goings-on in game development. I always leave these meetings inspired, and this was no exception.

 

(Update: Changed the date to reflect the fact that we experienced a new year quite a few weeks ago)

Filed Under: Utah Indie Game Night - Comments: Read the First Comment

Turning Down Zynga

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 29, 2012

Going indie isn’t easy. Staying indie isn’t, either. This article at Gamasutra brought a tear to my eye. Well, almost.  Okay, maybe not, but it was still pretty cool.

So this dude’s company hits the big time, and gets bought out by a fabulously wealthy game publisher known for… well, known for being kinda nasty.  But with it comes a contract requirement to give up on all things indie, and working for a company that he personally considers… well, kinda ‘evil,’  Shay Pierce had to make a hard decision:

Turning Down Zynga: Why I Left After the $210M Omgpop Buy

An excerpt:

“It’s not easy to pass up a lucrative salary and solid benefits, of course. But I realized that ultimately I was letting myself be guided by simple inertia. I was part of a herd, and that herd was all going in one direction (and doing so with great urgency). I would really only be doing it for the sake of going with the flow, and responding to pressure to either conform to corporate expectations, or be left behind.

“These are not good reasons to join a company whose values are the opposite of your own, or to compromise your ideals, or to give up control of something you rightfully own. “

It’s easy to be an idealist when you’ve got nothing to loose. But when it’s a good, steady job with a well-heeled company with nice benefits versus unemployment in a down economy with a little game that has already proven incapable of earning much money… well, that’s a bit tougher. Shay explains that he is not an idealist. Not only has he accepted money from Zynga in the past, he would have been willing to compromise if Zynga had been willing to budge on the indie game thing. But he chose to be unemployed, the sole member of the team to turn down the lucrative offer. I doubt Zynga will notice his absence. And he was doing it with his eyes open. He’d done the indie games thing and knew quite well that the road wasn’t paved with gold. But it was the principle of the thing.

Unlike the movies, in real life you don’t usually get a celebratory montage, parade, or win the girl for sticking with your principles. You get sleepless nights wondering if you made the right decision, and sometimes economic or other forms of hardship.

Being an indie takes sacrifice.  You don’t do something like this without giving up something – principally time and money.  Whether it’s a sixteen-year-old giving up a few hours of television each week to crank out an Angry Birds clone for the iPhone in her bedroom, or it’s a small team of believers mortgaging their homes and professional reputations to work full-time on a dream … I have a lot of respect for these folks. And doing that AND sticking up for one’s principles? Very commendable.

I hope this isn’t the last we hear from this guy.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

A Game Dev’s Story, Part VIII: Learning the Ropes

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 28, 2012

My first day at SingleTrac was chaotic. They had not received a shipment of computers for the expected new hires, yet. So I had no computer. The main development “bullpen” was a bunch of folding tables and thrift-store chairs, with some developers using their own computers brought from home. My first day was a lot of orientation.

The Playstation Development Kit was a big beige box with no sound capabilities. I don’t think it could even access files from a CD-ROM, or do any file reading… everything had to be loaded into memory when it ran.  But I don’t recall much about it, because I did work on it very long before they were replaced by cards that were simply plugged straight into the motherboard (with an external CD-ROM drive).

Originally, for the first month or so I was there, I was also kinda-sorta the default PC Port guy, as well. I was hired at the tail-end of the DOS era, and we had no idea that the upcoming version of Windows 95 would work at all for high-end games. So on my first day,  I asked my new boss what sort of hardware we were targeting, video resolutions, sound card requirements, etc. He gave me a half-grin and said, “Actually, we were hoping you’d tell US that.”

Gulp! First day on the job, and I’m supposed to be the guy in charge of making decisions like that?!?!? Actually, in the end, I was not. We hired a couple more guys who ended up being in charge of the PC port. By that time, I was pretty knee-deep into development for the Playstation, mainly working on weapons code and special effects.

But for the first couple of days, I didn’t even have a computer. Besides the usual orientation-stuff, they handed me a couple of massive three-ring binders containing design documents for the two games under development. They were named (at the time), “Red Mercury” and “Firestorm.” Scott Campbell, the producer for both titles, explained that the titles were temporary and intended to be generic.  I spent most of the morning reading through the documents. I was pretty excited about the possibilities. “Red Mercury” (which later became “Warhawk: The Red Mercury Missions“, although all but the first word was usually dropped) to me sounded like a 3D version of the classic 80’s shooters like R-Type. And “Firestorm,” soon re-titled “Urban Assault” and then later (after a trademark search found potential conflicts) re-titled “Twisted Metal,” sounded like a major winner. While I personally envisioned something closer to Car Wars by Steve Jackson games, the design document was really more like a racing game mashed with a fighting game – which was at the time a genre king. The binders were full of level descriptions, spreadsheets, and explanations.

Next, they had me study the Playstation documentation. They had to have me do something until our computer arrived at the end of the week. They were reasonably “hot” machines for the era – Pentium 90s.  Yes, running at the smoking fast speed of 90 mhz.

Our first “game” at SingleTrac was actually a dumb little demo I wrote to experiment with the weapons code & sprite libraries. You’d move a targeting crosshair on the screen at a bunch of spinning frog-like things (I took the sprite and animation directly from some of Sony’s demos), and shoot a visible bullet at them to make them explode. It wasn’t exactly rocket science – nor was it all that much fun. But a buzz got going around the office, as nobody there had actually worked in the ‘games business’ before, and here I was dinking around with something that vaguely resembled a game. Someone called the president of the company over to look at what I’d done, and he jokingly said, “Ship it!”

I think it might have been that little demo program I’d thrown together that helped make me “the gameplay guy” at SingleTrac for the first couple of years.  I’d thrown together something that had incorporated input, game logic, and graphics (no sound, yet, on that early target box) into something that was kind of amusing to play (I won’t go so far as to call it “fun”). So I apparently had a head for pulling all those things together into a “game.” After the first year, most everyone in the office (including myself) had a lot more experience with doing that under their belt. But for some reason a lot of people still treated me as “the gameplay guy,” which got me into most of the design meetings. Programming was my main job, but I really loved participating in the design process.

It was there that I discovered how little I actually knew about game design.  It took me a little longer to figure it out than I should have, because at the time the only people with any more experience than me at it were the producers from Sony or another investing local company that would pay us periodic visits. But I was able to point out some pretty obvious flaws. I noted that the design document for Warhawk had bullets firing at something like 2 shots per second, doing a single point of damage each, but the towers on the first level would take 800 points of damage to destroy. That would mean over six and a half minutes of sustained fire from the cannons to blow up the tower — not including the ‘cool down’ period. Even though the cannon was supposed to be underpowered, that seemed pretty much ridiculous and boring to me (as I was the one implementing it). I was told those values were not intended to be definitive, and that I should feel free to change those values to get us closer to the ‘ballpark’ for future gameplay balance.

Incidentally, the manual and in-game instructions for Warhawk refers to weapon damage as “JDUs,” for comparison between the weaponry. They guy who was doing the technical documentation invented the term, and said they stand for “Jay’s Damage Units.” My legacy!

We were all learning how to make games together. SingleTrac offered stock options and a profit-sharing plan, which we naively assumed would make us all rich if our games were huge successes. So (almost) everyone was heavily invested in making our first games the best we could possibly make them. And we were acutely aware that while we had some people with a lot of love of games and experience in high-end simulators, none of us really knew how to make a commercial game.  It was intimidating. It was breathtaking. It strained marriages at times. I’ve repeated the story several times of walking into the large ‘bullpen’ style office from a bathroom break and seeing almost everybody huddled in front of their monitor, separated by low-walled cubicles (if that), and then looking up at the clock and realizing that it was after midnight.

We were all working as hard as we could, knowing that there was nobody to ‘pick up the slack’ if we didn’t. Most of the time, it was a quiet, professional environment. Sometimes, when we’d been working 12+ hours, patience would wear thin and tempers would flare. But we had no wild parties (or if we did, I somehow missed ’em). We’d occasionally end up with our lunch breaks taking a little longer than usual as we’d do ‘competitive analysis’ on a new multiplayer game that had just been released, or a new game down in the arcade in the nearby mall (yes, the arcades were dying, but they weren’t quite dead yet…)

The teams were pretty small, and the game designs were pretty flexible. Things were always in flux. We learned as we went, learning what worked and what didn’t as we went, with some helpful guidance from Sony along the way (which wasn’t always useful, but in retrospect I recognize they were right more often than they weren’t.)  A whole lot of things that sounded great on paper proved to either be infeasible or un-fun on the screen.  Those giant three-ring binders full of spreadsheets and descriptions proved to be a useful foundation and outline for the games – a necessary stage – but were hardly blueprints. I really wish I still had a copy of them now. I remember looking back over the documents after we’d shipped and seeing how little of the original design actually made it into the game. But again – as useless as they were in the latter stages of development, they were crucial to getting started.

Another thing about that first year at SingleTrac was that it was a company full of very, very sharp and talented people. I really had to stretch myself. Many of them didn’t know much about games – though there were a few who were still pretty hardcore fans, and were console game fans to boot – but they were experts within their field. I’d come out of college thinking I knew how to program in C and C++. And when it came to optimizing code for games, I’d known a lot more than most of my peers. But these guys really knew their stuff, and I quickly learned how much more I needed to learn.

Next time, we’ll talk about my first trade show, my first GDC (back when it was still the Computer Game Developer’s Conference or CGDC), and how our little company went from laboring in obscurity to releasing one of the biggest hit series of the Playstation era.

Filed Under: A Game Dev's Story - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

Movie: John Carter

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 27, 2012

Evidently, the original books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (more famous for his “Tarzan” stories) about John Carter and Mars were a source of inspiration for James Cameron for his movie Avatar. Avatar had stunning and beautiful 3D graphics (and IMO not much else going for it), and the movie went and sold a gajillion tickets.

Disney’s movie John Carter, directly taken from original stories (primarily the first, A Princess of Mars) is in my opinion far more deserving of massive ticket sales than Cameron’s movie. Sadly, I think the marketing budget for John Carter must have went up the noses of the marketing department, as they did a terrible job selling it. I waited for a couple of weeks to see it, hesitant after seeing pretty mixed reviews. But then many of my fellow-geek friends saw it, and almost every one reported loving the movie, so I gave it a chance. I’m glad I did. It was well worth seeing on the big screen.

Yeah. It gets cheesy. Maybe it even revels in its cheesiness at times. But while it doesn’t take itself too seriously,  it doesn’t make that an excuse not to play things straight. Most of the time, at least.  It’s a swords-and-sandals (and airships and laser guns) movie, pulp-fantasy action with classic old-school flavor. In my opinion, this is what George Lucas wanted the Star Wars prequel to be like, but he failed to achieve. Star Wars lost something between the trilogies. John Carter found it.

No, it’s not Lord of the Rings or anything like that. But it’s a solid four-out-of-five kind of action movie that makes up for many of its weaknesses with audaciousness. Though I enjoyed it from the get-go, it truly won me over about two-thirds of the way through a movie, in a tremendous battle between Carter and an advancing horde. Near the end of the battle, a particular image evoked a couple of Frank Frazetta paintings, specifically Conan the Destroyer.  Most likely, this was deliberate. I freakin’ grew up on this stuff.  That was my fantasy, back in the day before they actually drew the line between fantasy and science fiction.  Howard and Lovecraft were as much my foundation in fantasy as Tolkien.  And who inspired them? Oh, yeah, Edgar Rice Burroughs…

So yeah, this movie struck a chord with me.  Mighty-thewed warriors. Arena battles with giant four-armed apes. Naval warfare in the sky.  Sexy women with swords.  Mysteries of ancient ruins. Swords, six-guns, and disintegrator rays all mixed together.  Maybe some people will balk at all this, but it resonated pretty well for me. And while there were times that the dialog got a little mired and repetitive, and the characters weren’t quite portraits of complex motivations, it was all “good enough.” It delivered exactly the kind of experience I was expecting.

In fact, it motivated me to finally read A Princess of Mars, downloaded from Project Gutenburg, over the weekend. While I’d read about John Carter since I was a kid, I’d never actually read any of the books. My exposure to Burroughs – with the exception of a single Tarzan book I’d read back in the sixth grade or something – was always secondhand or through some other media. And you know what? I enjoyed the book just as much. It was originally pulp fantasy doled out in monthly installments in a magazine, and had that kind of cliff-hanger-y pacing to it. Like the movie, it was pretty dead-on what I was expecting.  The movie had some pretty significant deviations, but overall it was pretty faithful to the source material.

Unfortunately, it looks like the movie’s story likely ends here. The word coming out of Hollywood is that the movie is a flop. I blame marketing rather than the movie itself, but maybe I’m just too much of a niche audience. I guess the only hope of a sequel (originally it was planned to be a trilogy) is if word-of-mouth gets out there and the movie proves to have legs. It ain’t much to go on, but I figured I’d share my own recommendation.

 

Filed Under: Books, Movies - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Age of Decadence – Public Beta Demo Available

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 26, 2012

Iron Tower’s upcoming ancient-rome flavored turn-based RPG, Age of Decadence, has had a lot said about it over the years.

Now you can check it out yourself and see if it’s been worth the wait, and if it should be on your shopping list in the (hopefully) near future.

Here are several places to download the public beta demo and check out the beginning of the game.

I’m particularly interested in how avoiding combat seems to be the preferable option in many cases. My one battle wasn’t too difficult, but I was playing a thiefly sort who is better off not being around when violence ensues.

So what are your on the demo? What do you think? Does it live up to the hype so far?

UPDATE: I could swear that link work last night! 🙂 Link fixed.

Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: 17 Comments to Read



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